Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church

Question: Why the calendar went from Old to New?

Answer: Indeed, why? To begin with, let us first see where the New Calendar comes from, who inspired its creation and whether it is ‘more correct’ than the Old, or Julian, or Church Calendar. For some answers to these questions we shall turn to A Scientific Examination of the Orthodox Church Calendar, a book by Hieromonk Cassian. We are not going to publish here the whole book, but rather offer it to you in a best-seller form. So, let us begin.

A Concise Account Of The Origin Of The Modern Calendar
Or Why The Orthodox Feast Days
Do Not Coincide With Holidays Of Other Christian Communities

Introduction

    Orthodox Church lives by Julian Calendar, that is by the calendar that was the Church Calendar since the time of Christ. Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches live by Gregorian Calendar which was introduced in 1582. Today the difference between the two calendars amounts to thirteen days. For example, the day which is January 1 on the Julian Calendar is January 14 according to the Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar reform has nothing to do with the Orthodox Church, for the reason that when the Gregorian Calendar was introduced into practice by the Pope of Rome the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches lived different lives and moved into spiritually different directions for 600 – 700 years. Still, since the Gregorian Calendar is not only the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches but also a civil calendar throughout most of the world, it would not be void of interest to look back and see how the Gregorian Calendar came about and why.

Glossary

Jews, Jewish — here, these words are used to signify not people of the Jewish nationality, but those practicing Judaism as a religion.
Pascha — Feast of the Resurrection of Christ. The word Pascha was used in the times of the Apostles, and as such, it has been preserved in the practice of the Orthodox Church. The word Easter that the Western Christianity uses is of pagan origin as it is the name of a pagan goddess.
Paschalion — tables that calculate the day for the celebration of Pascha, as it varies from year to year.
Vernal Equinox — a day in the spring when the duration of the day equals that of the night.

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   The Church Calendar (and we must talk about the Church Calendar, since we are concerned with the Christian Holy Days) was designed to suit the need and requirements of the One Holy and Apostolic Church, and, as such, is subject only to the Church. Yet, it was not drafted as something abstract, as something isolated from either life in general or science in particular. The Church Calendar has never contradicted scientific developments, but has in every way, served as an invaluable aid to those seeking God. The Church Calendar functions as a spiritual chronometer set to the rhythm of Scriptural events, especially those of the New Testament.
    When Julius Cæsar inaugurated his eponymous calendar in 46 B. C., it was intended for general use in the Roman Empire, and so it remained until the First Ecumenical Council (325 A. D.). In the immediate centuries after Christ, Christianity quickly spread throughout the Empire and beyond. The impediments to communication at the time allowed local traditions to develop an undue strength. So it was that the early Christians did not necessarily celebrate Pascha at the same time. It thus became imperative to formalize the Apostolic teaching concerning the celebration of this Feast of Feasts as an inviolable rule. The Seventh Apostolic Canon proclaims: “A Bishop, a Presbyter, or a Deacon who celebrates the Holy Day of Pascha before the vernal equinox, together with the Jews, shall be deposed from his holy rank”. It stipulates that the Pascha be celebrated after Jewish Passover and after the vernal equinox. The Passover is always celebrated on the fourteenth of the month of Nisan (March/April), which is the date of the first full moon of spring in the Jewish Calendar. Therefore, the Paschal full moon is determined by the lunar calendar, while the vernal equinox is determined by the solar calendar.
   Summoned in Nicæa, a town of Asia Minor, the First Ecumenical Council not only defended some of the most important dogmatic principles of Christianity, but also appropriated the Julian Calendar for the ecclesiological use by conjoining it to the Jewish Calendar in the establishment of a uniform calculation of Pascha — the Paschalion —, a calculation that was to supersede the various local practices which up to that time had caused liturgical confusion within the Church.
It was the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council of 325 A. D. who synchronized the lunar calendar and the solar calendar in compliance with the Seventh Apostolic Canon, cited above. It did so by introducing a universal time-reckoning scheme, which remains to this day as the basis of all of the service books of the Orthodox Church.

History of the Calendar Reform of Pope Gregory XIII

Keep that which is committed to thy trust,
avoiding profane and vain babblings,
and oppositions of science falsely so called:
which some professing have erred concerning the Faith.
1 Timothy 6:20 –21

   In 1411, the French theologian and future Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly presented a project for a new calendar to Pope John XXIII. However, it was tabled in the face of a much more immediate issue — the necessity of quashing an uprising in Czech lands led by the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, who was agitating against the Latin practice of denying the laity communion from the Eucharistic cup. Hus was burned at the stake, becoming a national hero to the Czechs and igniting the Hussite Wars (1419 – 1436).
   During the sixteenth century, two councils of the Roman Catholic Church discussed matters relating to the reformation of the calendar: the Fifth Lateran Council (1512 – 1517) and the Council of Trent (1545 – 1563). When the Lateran Council appointed a commission for the reformation of the calendar, the Roman Curia invited Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer famed throughout Europe, and his colleagues to Rome. Copernicus, however, declined, because he considered the calendar reform an exercise in futility. During the reign of Pope Pius V (1504 – 1572) a new service book, the Breviarium Romanum, was published containing a new liturgical calendar. However, this provoked disquiet and general commotion among both the clergy and the laity, compelling the Pope to invalidate the calendar.

     During this time, Protestantism began to spread. In the fluctuating circumstances of the ongoing Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Ugo Buoncompagnia came to the Papal throne as Gregory XIII. Ambitious and power-hungry, he was willing to pay any price to strengthen the authority of the Roman see. Endeavoring to satisfy the rationalistic bent of Protestants, Gregory disregarded both the Apostolic Canons and the Canons of the First Ecumenical Council of 325 A. D. The keynote of his calendar reform was the idea that the vernal equinox should be invariably fixed to the date of March 21, (which, that is the fixed date for the vernal equinox, was never a concern of the Fathers of the early Church) and the Pascha was to be celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon after March 21. This entails a violation of a crucial stipulation of the Fathers of the early Church, that the Holy Day of Pascha should never coincide with the Jewish Passover.
The physician Luigi Lilio, a Calabrian instructor in medicine at the University of Peruggia, was the actual architect of the Gregorian Calendar. Lilio’s working premise, the belief that the seasons and all events related to them were the result of planetary motion around the earth, stemmed from the notion of geocentrism, i.e. of the planet Earth being the center of the universe! Thus, the earth — or, to be more precise, Rome or Italy, since Lilio only observed the vernal equinox in his corner of the world — served as the point of the reference in this new calendar. From a scientific perspective, the geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemæus, upon which Lilio based himself, are hopelessly naïve. But the Roman Catholic Church was, at the time, theologically committed to geocentrism, and, accordingly, in 1616, it decried as false and erroneous the Copernican theory of heliocentrism, i.e. the view that the earth, along with other planets, revolved around the sun. (From the historical point of view, heliocentric cosmology was, in fact, nothing more than a revival of an ancient idea.) In 1543, on his deathbed, Copernicus published his classic statement of heliocentric theory, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Despite the earlier positive repute in which the Roman Catholicism had held Copernicus (recall that in 1514 he had been invited to Rome to contribute to the calendar reform, but had declined the offer), in 1616, Pope Paul V placed this treatise on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Copernicus’ Revolutions had started a scientific revolution against the sacred cow of Scholasticism and its obsession with Aristotle as the philosopher. Heliocentrism unmasked the pretended “scientific character” of the Gregorian Calendar.

   The key figure in this revolution was Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642). The inventor of the telescope could see by the means of his invention that it is not the sun that revolves around the earth, but vice versa. He went to Rome to defend Copernicus and argued that both the Holy Scripture and nature speak the Word of God, yet do so in different languages. His arguments, however, fell on deaf ears. At the time, the Latin Church was little concerned with the scientific truth, instead, its attention was wholly focused on gaining the upper hand in its struggle with Protestantism. Thus, Rome declared Copernicanism to be a heresy “more scandalous, more detestable, more pernicious to Catholicism than any contained in the books of Calvin, of Luther, and all other heretics put together.” It seemed that dreadful of a theory because it undermined the idea of Papal supremacy: Pope of Rome being the earth, and the rest of the planets and stars being his subjects whose existence depends solely on his person.
   Galileo Galilei, already being a frail old man, was hauled before the Inquisition on “grave suspicion of heresy,” that is of the earth revolving around the sun. Given the opportunity to contemplate “burning faggots, the wheel, the rack, the gallows, and other ingenious refinements of torture,” the aged astronomer quickly realized his errors. Having uttered the forced abjuration of his previous beliefs, he subsequently muttered the famous words, “Eppur si muove!” (Nevertheless, it [the earth] does move!)”

 
Part II

   Once the work on the new calendar was underway, the famous French scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540 – 1609) — recognized as the father of modern chronology — was invited to contribute. But like Copernicus before him, Scaliger energetically opposed the idea of reforming the calendar, even writing a major treatise, proving the superiority of the chronological system of the Julian/Old Calendar over that of the Gregorian. He demonstrated the practical convenience inherent in the Julian Calendar’s ability to provide an invariable continuity of the reckoning of events. In fact, the modern disciplines of astronomy and chronology continue to utilize Scaliger’s “Julian Period”, a 7,980-year cycle, with Julian day 1 beginning at noon, January 1, 4713 BC.

   The commission established to reform the calendar was headed by a Jesuit, the German mathematician Christopher Clavius (1537 – 1612). Despite his ardent Roman Catholic beliefs and his sincere desire to help in the task at hand, Clavius’ conscience as a scholar compelled him to confess several deficiencies of the Gregorian Calendar. The most serious of these was that the data upon which the reform was based — the Prutenic Tables — were grounded on uncertain, even preposterous hypotheses. Clavius admitted four deficiencies, two of which are of highly technical nature and therefore are not discussed here, but other two are the following:

   1. The vernal equinox is unstable and thus incapable of being fixed to a given date, contrary to the stated goal of the reform. For instance, in 2005, the vernal equinox falls not on March 21, but on March 17.

   2. The reform allowed the Pascha to be celebrated before or together with the Jews. Again, taking the current 2005 (the synopsis was comprised in that year), we can see that the Easter, calculated according to the Gregorian Calendar falls on Sunday, March 27; Jews celebrate the Passover on Saturday, April 23; the Orthodox celebrate the Feast of Feasts, the Holy Pascha, on Sunday, May 1, in accordance with the Holy Apostolic Tradition.

   Other scientists, whom the Papal throne came in contact with seeking their support to the new calendar, either expressed no interest in the scheme or gave responses close to the one that came from the Sorbonne: “Since this reform is not in accordance with the Œcumenical Councils, its acceptance will place us in the same category as the Quartodecimans (the heretics who celebrated Pascha on the 14th of Nisan, i.e. together with the Jews), and we will be in contradiction to the whole ecclesiastical and historical past.”

    In carrying out his calendar reform, Pope Gregory XIII wished to stay abreast of the latest astronomical advances and to create a work that was on the cutting edge of scientific achievement. But the suffering inflicted by the Inquisition upon a host of famous scientists — Galileo Galilei, Joseph Scaliger, Andreas Vesalius, Giordano Bruno, Molilio Vaniny, etc. — showed that the Papal commitment to “scientific precision” was mere window-dressing.

    Despite this largely negative reception from the scholarly world, on February 24, 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a special Papal bull entitled “Inter Gravissimas”, declaring that the dates of the Julian Calendar were to be moved ten days ahead. The day after Thursday, October 4, 1582, was to be considered not October 5, but Friday, October 15, 1582.

The Spread of the New Calendar

    The acceptance of this Papal calendar reform has steadily grown over the centuries since its introduction. In the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nations of Italy, Portugal, Spain and Luxembourg, the Gregorian Calendar took effect as scheduled, on October 4, 1582. Other Roman Catholic countries soon followed suit: France — December 9, 1583; Catholic states of Germany eradicated the last ten days of 1583; Austria, Poland, Belgium and Switzerland enacted the reform in 1584; and Hungary adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1587.

   But in the countries where the Reformation had made greater inroads, the Gregorian Calendar met with strong initial resistance. Protestants organized processions openly protesting and ridiculing the Gregorian Calendar. Nevertheless, flexing his temporal muscle, Gregory forced his reform on Protestant Germany by compelling the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, Rudolf II, to proclaim the ecclesiastical and civil usage of the Papal Calendar throughout his realm. The Bavarian Duke Wilhelm advised the bishops of Salzburg to accept the reform, but, despite their assent, popular opposition obstructed their efforts, including an uprising centered in Staemark that was eventually quenched by bloodshed. Another similar uprising was incited in Augsburg. The old town of Speyer refused to accept the Gregorian innovation, expressing its intentions of living in peace with its neighbors. Archduke Ernst requested that the Emperor rescind his decree, but Rudolf disregarded his sound advice. The Gregorian Calendar thus further aggravated the rivalry between Roman Catholics and Protestants, a rivalry that ultimately erupted in the destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618 – 1648). This protracted conflict rapidly disintegrated Germany into city-states, retarding its political unification for centuries to come. Germany partially adopted the new calendar in 1700, followed by its full acceptance in 1778, by order of King Frederick II of Prussia. We must also note the so-called “Calendar Riot”, which burst out in Riga in 1584. The struggle lasted several years and ended in 1589, when its leaders were arrested, tortured and executed.

   Yet the old adage, “Time heals all wounds” proved true in the case of Catholic-Protestant hostilities. Protestant resistance to the Gregorian Calendar grew weaker. This is not surprising, since the initial protests were in no way dogmatically or canonically motivated by the ancient teaching and traditions of Christianity. Slowly but surely one Protestant country after another acquiesced. Denmark accepted the Papal Calendar in 1700. In Great Britain and Ireland (as well as in the British colonies in North America) September 2, 1752, was followed by September 14, furthermore, in accordance with the reform the New Year’s Day was transferred from March 25 to January 1. Thus, in English history, the year 1751 has only 282 days. Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, who introduced this reform, could not show himself in public, for the people viewed him as a traitor; crowds derided him with the cry: “Give us back our eleven days!” Finland and Sweden were next, in 1753, the Netherlands — in 1775, while some cantons of Switzerland held out until 1811.

 Answer of the Orthodox

   Thus, through patience, persistence, and pressure, the Papacy effectively imposed its New Calendar on the West. The East, however, proved much more difficult for the reformers. Pope Gregory XIII sent envoys bearing lavish gifts to Constantinople, hoping to entice Patriarch Jeremiah II (1536 – 1595) to embrace the Papal Calendar. The Patriarch convened three councils in Constantinople, in 1583, 1587, and 1593, which condemned the New Calendar. Patriarch Sylvester of Alexandria attended the first of these, and, at the same time, wrote an encyclical to the Christians of the Western Europe, wherein he states: “The Orthodox Church has determined once and for all never to accept any innovation and never to abandon anything traditional.” The proclamation of the 1593 council read: “Whosoever does not follow the Tradition of the Church and all that the Seven Œcumenical Councils have ordained concerning the Holy Pascha and the Menaion (calendar of the festal days), wishing instead to follow the new Paschalion and Menaion of the Papal astronomers, opposes all the ordinances of the Holy Councils. Let such a one be anathema, excommunicated from the Church of Christ and from the assembly of the Faithful. And you, pious and Orthodox Christians, live long with what you have learned and, if necessary, shed your very blood to defend the Faith of your Fathers and your religion.” This decision was conveyed to all of the holy local Orthodox Churches, to the Doge of Venice, to Pope Gregory XIII, and to others. In the subsequent three centuries, the Orthodox Church produced several crucial documents illustrating the irreconcibility of the Orthodox Faith with the Gregorian Calendar. In the eighteenth century, the Roman Pontiff’s unrelenting policy of Drang hach Osten provoked Patriarch Cyril V to issue an encyclical that declared: “Whosoever does not follow the words of the partaker of the heavenly mysteries, Paul, who in his Epistle to the Galatians said, ‘But though we, or an Angel from Heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed,’ that man — be he a priest or a layman — will be excommunicated from God, damned…”

   In the nineteenth century, Patriarch Anthimos VI addressed all Orthodox Christians in defense of the Faith of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. His encyclical of 1848 states: “In Our Church, neither Patriarch nor Councils can introduce anything new, because the guardian of piety is the very Body of the Church herself… Let us cling to the confession which we have received from such men — the Holy Fathers; let us avoid every innovation as a demonic suggestion… And even if they be Popes, Patriarchs, clergy, laymen, or an Angel from Heaven, let them be accursed.” There are numerous other examples of the Orthodox condemnation of the Papal calendar reform: 1672, Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem proclaimed: “Wrongly have the contemporary astronomers of the Old Rome removed ten days from the month of October”; in 1827, Ecumenical Patriarch Agathangelos forbade any correction of the Church Calendar; in 1895, Patriarch Anthimos VII forbade even so much as a discussion of the calendar issue; and in 1903, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Church of Russia, and the Church of Greece each concluded that the acceptance of the Gregorian Calendar would be deleterious to the Orthodox Faith.

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      Centuries after the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar, an unexpected vindication of the Church Calendar came in the XIX century in the works of the mathematical genius Carl Friedrich Gauss. Director of the Göttingen Observatory and a professor at Göttingen University, Gauss derived the mathematical formulæ for the calculation of the Orthodox Paschalion. By this time, in the West, Easter was celebrated according to the Gregorian Calendar. Yet the Western Paschalion was of no scientific interest to him. (In fact, it is by relying on the calculations of the Orthodox Pascha that the Gregorian Paschalists recalculate and make corrections to their own Paschalion). Although Gauss was not Orthodox, he was obviously impressed by the antiquity and cyclicity of the Julian Calendar, clearly recognizing its scientific worth.

     In 1905 Albert Einstein developed his famous theory of relativity, which radicaly transformed our concept of time. Once thought of as something absolute, static, and fixed, time is now thought of as something relative, dynamic, and flexible. Ironically, the “New” Gregorian Calendar is only compatible with the older view of temporality, while the “Old” Julian Calendar is wholly compatible with the newer view. Adopted from A Scientific Examination of the Orthodox Church Calendar, by Hieromonk Cassian

Question: Why the Orthodox practice infant baptism, whereas Protestants do not? .

Answer: The New Testament does not directly call for baptism of children? Well, it does not directly call for baptism of women and old people either. The Lord said: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them…” (Matt. 28:19). Here no one is excluded either because of his nationality, gender or age. The Holy Scripture always specifies if the women and children are not included among those mentioned (for example, in Matt. 14:21). When talking about baptism, such specifications are not given.

On the contrary. The New Testament describes events that presuppose that children were baptised together with their parents: Lydia was baptised with “her household” (Acts 16:15); to the keeper of the prison who wanted to commit suicide, Holy Apostle Paul said: “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31); Saint Paul writes to the community in Corinth: “I baptized also the household of Stephanas” (1 Cor. 1:16). The Apostles baptized an entire community in Samaria (Acts 8:14-17) and it is possible that there were children in it.

Apostle Peter says to those who have received faith: “The promise is to you and to your children” ( Acts 2:39). He also says that children can be “believers” (he explains who can be a spiritual leader of the community: “If any man is blameless, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers” (Titus 1:6)). Here, the Scripture uses word pistoV which in the New Testament signifies a Christian, a baptized person, a partaker of the inheritance of Christ. For example: “When she was baptized with her household, she besought us, saying: ’If you judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay’” (Acts 16:15; compare: Eph. 1:1, Acts 10:15, Rev. 17:14, I Tim. 4:10, 1 Cor. 7:14).

Here is another significant passage: “The unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is they are holy” (1 Cor. 7:14). Can the people who are outside of the Covenant, that is not baptized children, be referred to as “holy”? Can be holy those who are not grafted to the only root of holiness there is — Christ (Rom. 11:16)?

When expounding on this passage, the Protestants say that those children were ’holy’ with the holiness they received by birth from their believing mother, and, therefore, they do not need to be baptized. In this case, they should say the same about the husband of a believing wife: if he, when yet a pagan, was sanctified through his believing wife, shouldn’t he be accepted into Christianity without baptism, too?

If it were so, then we have two doors for entrance into the Church: those who do not have Christian relatives will have to be baptized; whereas those who have Christians among their relatives would only have to bring a notarized affidavit from them. If this is absurd, then the suggestion that the mother’s faith on its own sanctifies her children, without the Mystery of the regenerating grace of Christ, is no less absurd.

Therefore, we are compelled to admit that the children have become ’holy’ through their own personal sanctification, that is through baptism.

Protestants insist on the most literal understanding of the Gospel words: “He who believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16:16). No faith — no baptism. Children cannot have faith, therefore, they may not be brought to the baptismal font. However, if one is to apply this text to everyone, not only the adults, then we have a monstrous teaching. Why? Because this text is continued with the following words of Christ: “But he who does not believe will be condemned”. If the children cannot believe and this formula is to applied to them, then, consequently, they are already condemned. If the child dies — he cannot be saved (or your child lives in the state of condemnation till he is baptized).

Hence, this baptismal formula, stipulating baptism after confession of faith, is applied only to adults and in no way to children.

What is the age when the Baptists consider baptism a possibility? When is the age of the childish lack of intellect over? Dealing with this problem, the Baptists usually follow the civil law, i.e. when the young person is considered ’of age’, or responsible for his actions.

Here is a story for us to reconsider the age limits of the spiritual maturity. I was in a place called Noiabrsk in Siberia, with no Orthodox priest in town. It was December of 1996. I was invited to visit a family who had recently entered the Orthodox Church; I was introduced to their youngest child Maksim, a six-year-old boy. And here is what his father told me: “Last week I was in bed with osteochondrosis and for 24 hours I just couldn’t get up. Next morning, Maksim warily peeped into my room and asked: ‘Dad, do you feel any better?’ —’Well’, I said, ‘a little bit better, I think I can almost get up’. Then Maksim turned around and, running from the room, dropped: ‘Alright, Dad, then I am going to pray for you a little bit longer!’” Here is a question for the Protestants: here is little Maksim, here is his faith, here is water. What prevents him from being baptized?

Metropolitan Benjamin (Fedchenkov) used to recall how a girl from a Protestant family who died without baptism appeared in a vision to a priest and asked him to pray for her. Such a testimony cannot just be brushed off — Christianity is a sphere of action.

In the same manner one cannot fit into the narrow frame of the Protestant theology the spiritual progress of thousands of Orthodox ascetics, who had been baptized as infants and later in their lives achieved unquestionable holiness. Who will say that Elder Amvrosii of Optina was not a Christian at all, that he was not a member of the Church only because he was baptized in infancy, instead of after having had arrived at the full legal age, and not according to the Protestant practice?

 Saint Irenæus of Lyons

The Church has always considered admissible baptism of children of the Christian parents. Hieromartyr Irenæus of Lyons (†202) testifies to this when he says: “Christ has come to save everyone through Himself; I say everyone, who are regenerated through Him for God: infants, children, adolescents, youths and elderly” (Against Heresies).

Origen

Origen (†254) speaks about baptism of children as about Apostolic tradition: “The Church has received from the Apostles the tradition to minister baptism to infants, too” (On the Romans).

In 252 the local council of Carthage decreed: “We have no right to keep anyone away from baptism and from the grace of God, Who is merciful to everyone; Who is good and compassionate. If this is faithfully to be applied to everyone, then especially, so we think, this must be applied to the newly-born infants who have an advantage in deserving our help and God’s mercy only because, right from the moment of their birth, all their existence is supplication expressed by their crying and tears”.

Even Martin Luther himself, the instigator of the Protestant movement, in 1522 condemned the Anabaptists who denied validity of children’s baptism. Luther was baptized as a child and refused to be re-baptized, using himself as an example proving the grace-filling power of the children’s baptism: “That the children’s baptism is pleasing to God is abundantly proved by His own activity, namely, that God makes many of them saints and gives them the Holy Spirit… If God did not accept children’s baptism, then at all times up to this day there has never been a single Christian on earth…” (For it were Anabaptists in the 16th century who invented to withhold baptism from children).

For Luther, as well as for the Orthodox Christians, baptism is a washing with water, which is permeated by Christ’s grace, and, therefore, it is a Mystery.

Protestants are convinced that in their baptism the Holy Spirit is not imparted to them. Hence, what they’ve got is empty ritualism; dead form; rather pointless imitation of the ancient tradition of the Church. They also have their children from whom Christ is hiding behind the pages of their “dogmatic theology”.

THE END

Question: (cont.) Why the Orthodox practice infant baptism, whereas Protestants do not? .

Answer: We are told that children may not be baptised because they cannot pledge allegiance to God, since, according to Apostle Peter, baptism is “the answer of a good conscience toward God” (1 Peter 3:21 (King James Version)). This Protestant argument is founded on an incorrect translation of the Scripture. The Church Slavonic translation, as well as Revised Standard Version, is closer to the original text: “Baptism… an appeal to God for a clear conscience” (RSV), or “beseeching of God for a good conscience” (Church Slavonic translation). Here, baptism is not an offering, not a promise, but a plea…

Could there be a mistake in the traditional Orthodox reading and understanding of the passage? Holy Hierarch Gregory the Theologian (4th century) confirms that Holy Apostle Paul talks about a gift of a good conscience that the newly-illumined receives in baptism (Holy Hierarch Gregory the Theologian, Fortieth Word on Baptism). What Saint Gregory is saying excludes any possibility that the passage can be understood otherwise, for he, alluding to Ecclesiastes 5:4, writes: “Do not promise anything to God, not even anything insignificant, because everything belongs to God even before it was received by Him from you”.

The verb eperwtao, in classical Greek, can mean ‘promise’. But the New Testament is written not in classical Greek but in Koine, that is, a version of Greek which used in court, literature and commerce, where the word means ‘request’, ‘plea’. For instance, in Matthew 16:1, Pharisees ‘‘ephrwthsan’’ — ‘asked’ Christ. This verb is also used in Matt. 22:46, Mark 9:32, 11:29, Luke 2:46, 6:9, Rom. 10:20, 1 Cor. 14:35. And it is the verbal noun of this verb that is used in the 21st verse of the 3rd chapter of Apostle Peter’s First Epistle. More than that, in the entire New Testament this Greek verb is never used in the meaning of ‘promise’, ‘offering’, or ‘vow’.

So we see that baptism is a request. But request of what? Continuation of this passage of Saint Peter explains: “Baptism… saves you… through resurrection of Jesus Christ”. Which means that baptism delivers a gift from God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We do not offer a gift to God, but we hope to receive help from Him. Baptism saves us not because in it we promise something to God, but because in it the Saviour offers us the fruit of His resurrection. In baptism we ask God to give us a good, renewed conscience. The gift of conscience, which distinguishes good from evil, is renewed through the resurrection of Christ. Heathens are judged by the law of conscience, as well as every person is judged by it, but the conscience of a Christian is illumined by the gift of salvation. Holy Apostle Peter says that we have to live in good conscience.

But if I, without Christ, already possess a good conscience (which I am called upon to offer to Christ) — then why do I need Him? If I am good and righteous (so good that I can give some of this goodness to Christ at my baptism) — why do I need the Cross of Christ?

Here we see that we need a “renewal of mind”, we must beseech God for the gift of discernment of spirits — and this is a radical change which cannot happen in the person without God entering him, cannot happen just by our exercise of will or intelligence. Therefore, baptism is not a pledge, not a vow, not a legally binding commitment, as the Protestants understand it, but the inward change which makes us the people “who have their faculties trained by practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb. 5:14).

Is this plea for a clear conscience untimely for children? Yes, the child cannot promise anything, but can’t he ask? Isn’t all his life a continuous plea? “God is greater than our hearts” (1 John 3:20) and, nevertheless, He gives us this greatness, He puts it into us.

Do children need Christ or they don’t? — this is the ultimate question when talking about baptism of children. How to place them under the protection of Christ? How to instill in them the full-of-grace gift of Christ’s sacrifice?

Are the Baptist parents’ children in Christ? If yes, then how did they come into the fold of Christ? Sometimes, the Baptists say that their children outside of Christ, since they are not yet baptised. (“We sternly affirm that children, both ours who are without baptism or any other’s even if baptised, cannot follow the adults into the Church and they shall never be in the Church, as they cannot repent and do not have personal faith”. From Baptist, #2, 1912). So, if the children are not with Christ, if they are outside of the Body of the Head of the Church, they must be in the hold of the “prince of this world”, i.e. Satan. Could a Protestant parent say looking in his child’s eyes: “You are not of the Church. You are not of Christ. In this I cannot help you. The teaching of our Church forces me to think that the only way to enter the Church is off limits for you”?..

 Since not every Baptist can substitute his heart with a book of Protestant theology, there appear in the Protestant literature strange things explaining possibility of salvation without baptism and possibility of purification without entering the Covenant with Christ. Thus, to justify their conviction that their unbaptized children are pure, Baptists appeal to the words of the apostles that “sin is abolished by the sacrifice of Christ”. But this sacrifice was offered for the whole world. Therefore, if this sacrifice makes it unnecessary for children to be baptised, then they shouldn’t baptize adults also. If the Evangelical Christians believe that the gifts of the sacrifice of Christ are transmitted without baptism only to children and that only to them it makes baptism unnecessary, then let the Protestants offer us any biblical proof of their teaching.

And they’d better not cite Christ’s words about children: “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven” (KJV), for the Gospel text uses not the demonstrative pronoun ‘theirs’, as it is sometimes translated, but ‘of such’,  which means that Christ is saying that people who are like children in some of their traits will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. This passage should not be understood as a promise of the Heavenly Kingdom based on age. Besides, Christ said: “Whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mark 10:15).

If they, in the sects, receive the children into the Kingdom of God without baptism, let them also receive adults like children, that is, without baptism. To Be Continued...

Questions:  Why do some people get baptized as babies and some as adults? What is the difference?   Why do some religions believe in infant baptism and some believe in young adult baptism? Could you please explain? .

Answer: The divergence that exits in views of Orthodox and Protestants concerning baptism of children is not merely a problem of the baptismal rite. Fundamental differences between the Eastern and Western Christianity are behind the issue.

Protestantism understands salvation as forgiveness which Christ proclaims to those who believe in Him.

Orthodoxy understands salvation as life of God within us, as healing.

Protestants say that since infants are legally incapable and unintelligent, they cannot profess the Gospel doctrine and, therefore, cannot be members of the people of God.

Orthodoxy, on the other hand, proceeds from the notion that to know what the air is is one thing, but to breathe this air is something different. Infant does not know characteristics and origin of milk but he cannot live without it. What kind of mother can say to her sick child: “First you have to grow up, finish the course of medical studies and only when you know what the medicine you need now does to you, and when you promise to never eat snow again — then I shall give you the medicine!”?

We understand that a criminal who has not wholeheartedly repented of his misdeeds cannot be pardoned. But does the doctor have a right to deny help to the patient only because the patient doesn’t know why he got sick?

Yes, child does not know what is the Church. However, the Church is not a lodge of philosophers, not a gathering of people who share the same views. Church is life in God.

Are the children denied union with God? Are they strangers to Christ? Isn’t it absurd to leave children outside of the Christ (universally, baptism is understood as the door opening into the Church of Christ) only because the statutes of the Roman legal codex do not recognize the child as a legal entity? True, human being cannot be coerced. But why should we consider infants to be demons? What grounds do we have to conclude that infants object to their union with Christ?

The Protestants disagree with Tertullian’s thoughts that the human soul is Christian by nature?

 It is only normal for a person to long to Christ, not to oppose Him. Therefore, only person’s evil will can divert him from striving for Christ. Obviously, we cannot believe that the infants are so evil that there is no place for them in the Church, as we cannot believe that infant baptism should be considered only a violation of their will.

Now let us turn to the Bible.

Anyone who read the Bible knows that the Old Testament shows several prototypes of baptism. All of these events include children.

 First prototype is the passage through the Red Sea. All Israel, including infants, crossed the Red Sea and Holy Apostle Paul recognizes it as a symbol of baptism: “I want you to know, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Cor. 10:1-2). If the infants took part in the Old Testament baptism, on what grounds can we deny them a right to receive baptism of the New Testament?

Second prototype of baptism was circumcision. Circumcision was a sign of one’s entry into the Holy Nation of God, a sign of the Covenant and it was performed on the eighth day of boy’s birth (Genesis 17:9-14).

So what are to think now: before Christ, an infant could be a member of the Church, of the God’s people, but after His coming and His sacrifice it becomes impossible? Has Christ come to make our path to God easier or to make it more difficult? — To make it easier. Has He come only for adults or for children also? — For children too He makes it easier to come into the House of the Father… Circumcision was replaced by that which prototype it was — by baptism (Col. 2:11). Are we to believe that as a result of the change of the Covenants the children are refused the opportunity to become member of the Church?

Protestants’ understanding of baptism is too primitive: there they see only a negative aspect — washing off of the stain of sin, but since children do not sin (?) they do not need baptism.

But baptism does have a positive aspect and it transcends man. Baptism is not merely an outward expression one’s convictions (“promise of good conscience to God”). Baptism is an event which changes the world where the person lives. Baptism is entry into the God’s people, not a legal “acquisition of the rights of a citizen” but joining to the Body of Christ, receiving of the protection from above, Divine help.

To understand the connection of the prototypes of the Old Testament with the practice of baptism of the New Testament, first we should see who was the recipient of the Covenant. Covenant is an agreement, and as any agreement it presupposes two sides which establish certain relationships with one another. In the Covenant of the Bible, one side is God. But who is another side? Who He enters into the Covenant with? In the Old Testament, is it Moses? Or maybe Aaron? — No, with the entire nation of Israel. In the New Testament, we see that Christ establishes His Covenant not with Peter, nor with John, but with the new people of God; to the Cup of the New Testament, “shed for you and for many”, He invites “everyone”.

God bestows His grace and protection not upon an individual, but upon a community — the Church. Christ is not only a bearer of the eternal Good News which He repeats to one astonished person after another, but He speaks to the Church. Therefore, it is important to understand that both circumcision and baptism are not private rites, they are not just some private or family events, — they are the events that encompass the entire God’s people. To enter the Covenant is to receive the rights of a citizen in the God’s people, to begin living the life which beside me and before me thrived in other people through whom I meet the Creator.

Christ came not to separate us one from another but to unite us, therefore we should not be surprised that the word Church is used 110 times in the New Testament. To acquire salvation the person has to enter the ’holy land’, that community of the faithful through which the light of grace is spread all over the world. Church is the God’s people, His holy nation. Can there be a nation without children?

The Law of God, the fact of being chosen, the rights and promises of the Old Testament extended to children. To enter the Covenant meant, first of all, to become a member of the people of God. People would entered the nation of God when they were children. And to enter, it was not enough to simply be born in the Jewish family — one had to go through the mystery of circumcision. The same we see today: it is not enough to be born into a Christian family — one has to go through the mystery of baptism. With this mystery the parents include their children into the Covenant, into the fold of God’s people, so that the full-of-grace protection of God that covers the entire people would overshadow the child also.

Just as on the night of the most dreadful Egyptian Plague the Jewish children were saved from death when their houses’ doorposts were marked with the blood of a sacrificed lamb, so also in the Christian epoch the children are protected from the angel of death by the Blood of the True Lamb and by His seal — baptism (Saint Gregory the Theologian).

Protestants say that the person cannot have any deeds that would help him to be saved. However, this formula of the Protestant theology is in a drastic contradiction to their own understanding of baptism.

Is baptism simply a human action or, beside man, God also acts in it? Is baptism only what I want to testify before the face of God, or there is also an act of the Creator in it, His response, His hand filling me with grace?

If the former is true, then baptism is no more than a strange, purely human ceremony, human act void of grace, and the Christ’s command to baptize appears rather strange: “Whoever believes and accomplishes this strange ceremony will be saved, whereas whoever doesn’t accomplish exactly this form of the ceremony will be condemned even if he has faith”.

But if we acknowledge that God Himself acts in baptism, which makes baptism a Mystery of the Church, that is, such a human activity which summons the grace of God into our world. If what the most important there is in baptism is accomplished by the Holy Spirit, then how the Protestants dare to restrict the sphere of action of Him Who breathes where He pleases? Why are they so sure that the Holy Spirit does not want to act in children?

In the text of the New Testament there is a direct command of Christ : “Let the children come to Me, and do not hinder them” (Matt. 19:14). However, there is only one door to Christ — “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God” (John 3:5). Christ “took them in His arms and blessed them, laying His hands upon them” (Mark 10:16). You see, the Lord blesses the children, He can bless them, therefore the Orthodox hope that the Lord blesses their own children.

God sanctifies the children even before they are born, and John the Baptist (Luke 1:15) is an example of it. One could also remember Prophet Jeremiah (“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you” (Jer. 1:5) and Apostle Paul: “He Who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through His grace” (Gal. 1:15). As we see, Divine Grace can touch the children even regardless of their inability to reason.

Why should we deny our children the grace given in baptism and communion? In the Old Testament we see that forty-day-old first-born children were dedicated to God. Could they on their own at this age give a vow to God, promise that they would serve Him relentlessly all their lives (Ex. 13:2, I Sam. 1:28)? Parents made vows for their children even before the children were born, and God blessed their intentions (1 Sam. 1:11, Judges 13:7). In the New Testament we also see that God saves children according to the faith of their parents: demon-possessed boy is healed according to the faith of his father (Mark 9:17-27); through the prayer of the Canaanite woman her daughter was saved (Matt. 15:22-28); by the faith of an official from Capernaum his son was healed (John 4:46-53); through the blessing of God parents regained their children who had been dead (Luke 7, Mark 5, Luke 8).

(We could remember other instances when one person was saved on a request and because of the faith of another person: according to the Centurion’s faith his servant was healed (Matt. 8); Christ healed the paralytic in Capernaum “seeing their faith”, i.e. the faith of the men who carried the paralytic on his bed, for He said to him seeing their faith: “Your sins are forgiven you” (Mark 2:5)).

 It should be noted that we all have much closer and more mysterious ties to one another than it appears to positivism and individualism. Protestantism has forgotten these ties, but it is being reminded of them by those who, having followed the path of Protestantism to the end, arrived at witchcraft, occult and oriental religious practices where these interpersonal connections are introduced as newly-repackaged anti-Christian, diabolical revelation. To Be Continued.....

Question: If you can, could you elaborate of some people’s belief that the current Pope is the Antichrist.

Answer: In the Holy Scripture and the teaching of the Holy Church, antichrist is sued in two ways:

 • In a general way when this word describes any opponent of Jesus Christ, anyone who denies His Divinity, His teaching, and who attacks His Holy Church. Holy Evangelist John writes: “Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come… Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:18, 22). “Every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already” (1 John 4:3). “Many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh; such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 John 7).

• In a special way when it defines the ultimate opponent of Christ, him who will come before the end of the world to pose as a savior of the world and the final enemy of the Holy Church of Christ. “I have come in My Father’s Name, and you do not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive” (John 5:43). Again: “Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming” (1 John 2:18). “That day will come… and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who … takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God… and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of His mouth and destroy him by His appearing and His Coming. The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deceptions for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thess. 2:3-12).

If someone says that the current Pope of Rome is the Antichrist he implies that we live in the ‘last hour’. But the last hour will be revealed by subjugation of the whole world (with the exception of the few faithful Christians) to the benevolent ruler who will feed the hungry and shelter the homeless as long as they deny Christ and acknowledge him. Apparently, this hour has not yet come, therefore the current Pope of Rome is not the ultimate Antichrist. However, the history of Christianity shows innumerable examples of papacy waging bloody wars against the nations professing the Orthodox Faith and slaughtering people only because they would not renounce the Faith of the Church. One of the most renown Roman Catholic Saints — Bernard of Clairvaux — encouraged crusaders to ‘kill the Orthodox like dogs’. In the modern times the infamous Ustashi regime in Croatia during the WW2 not only received a wholehearted support of Vatican, but the Roman Catholic clerics were instigators of the massacres of the Orthodox population who refused to abandon the Faith, and, more than that, they took hands-on part in those atrocities when hundreds of thousands of Orthodox were slaughtered. But this was in the past and the world did not end then. If anyone who opposes the Church is antichrist in a general sense (which includes us when we stubbornly refuse to follow the salvific path of the Church with its fasting, prayer, tithing, love for everyone, etc), so the Pope is to be counted in for what he does, what he says and what he professes to be — the substitute of Christ on earth (for this is what the word Vicar means). But the Antichrist is not come yet for we are still given time for repentance.

Question: When is it proper to stand up in the beginning of the Liturgy: when the priest starts censing in the Altar or when he comes out to cense on the Amvon?

Answer: By standing in the church we acknowledge that we are in a holy place, the place dedicated to prayer and mystical communing with God. If we are not late to church on Sunday morning we are aware that the Liturgy begins with the service of the Hours which is read by the reader. The service of the Third Hour, which is supposed to be read at that time of the day, is a Divine Service and a part of the daily prayer rule of a Christian. The Divine Service of the Third Hour introduces to and prepares us for the Divine Liturgy. And the temple is censed during this short Divine Service. So we see, that when the priest starts censing in the Altar he prepares the temple and us, the faithful, for the unique experience of the Divine Liturgy, plus another Divine Service, that of the Hours, is still in progress. Therefore, weighing all these factors we should decide for ourselves whether to stand or to sit when the priest is censing and is still in the Altar.

Question: Since Jesus Christ was the Son of God, what's that make the Antichrist?

Answer: Saying that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, we somehow are drawn to make comparisons between relationship within the Holy Trinity and the human relationships of father and son, that is, that father and son are two different people, no matter how deep their affection for one another might be. This comparison does not work when we speak about Persons of the Holy Trinity. God is one, and the Persons of the Holy Trinity are not three distinct beings, but one. How is it possible? No human knows. It is a mystery. Yes, Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Who became Man for the sake of our salvation. We must always keep in mind that Jesus Christ is God and Creator of all visible and invisible forms of existence.

       To discourage any parallels between Christ and the Antichrist, it should be known that whereas Christ is uncreated God, Antichrist will be a creature, a man, a son of human mother and father. Antichrist is not going to be Satan’s son, although definitely he will be filled with his foul spirit. Antichrist will be a person who will bring about the abomination of desolation, the reign of iniquity, worldly prosperity to all who would renounce Christ and persecute the Holy Orthodox Church. Under the reign of the Antichrist in the last years of the existence of the world as we know it, the people will ultimately choose whether they are with Christ or with Antichrist. To be with the Antichrist would mean to abandon the holiness of the Church for the prosperity and security of the world; it would also mean to abandon saving fasting and asceticism of the Church for the abundance of food, entertainment and various pleasures. For many the choice is very difficult already; at the end times the decision will be made any easier.

Question: When is it proper to stand up in the beginning of the Liturgy: when the priest starts censing in the Altar or when he comes out to cense on the Amvon?

Answer: By standing in the church we acknowledge that we are in a holy place, the place dedicated to prayer and mystical communing with God. If we are not late to church on Sunday morning we are aware that the Liturgy begins with the service of the Hours which is read by the reader. The service of the Third Hour, which is supposed to be read at that time of the day, is a Divine Service and a part of the daily prayer rule of a Christian. The Divine Service of the Third Hour introduces to and prepares us for the Divine Liturgy. And the temple is censed during this short Divine Service. So we see, that when the priest starts censing in the Altar he prepares the temple and us, the faithful, for the unique experience of the Divine Liturgy, plus another Divine Service, that of the Hours, is still in progress. Therefore, weighing all these factors we should decide for ourselves whether to stand or to sit when the priest is censing and is still in the Altar.

Question: Could you please explain the difference between Saint Nick, Santa Claus, and Saint Nicholas?

Answer: Probably we all agree that the image of Santa Claus has its source, or at least one of its sources, in the historical person of Holy Hierarch Nicholas Archbishop of Myra in Lycia the Wonderworker. Saint Nicholas was a severe ascetic who for his faith suffered for many years in prison and yet he was a loving hierarch of the Christian community in Myra and is remembered among other virtues for his generosity practiced in secret. We try to be generous during the Nativity season which is marked by gift-giving, especially to children. In the Life of Saint Nicholas we read that he saved one man’s daughters from disgrace by providing them with money so that they could get married. As the saint’s memory is celebrated in the pre-Nativity season, a connection is made between Saint Nicholas bringing gifts and the second Pascha — Nativity of the Lord. We all know what goes into making of the image of our western Santa Claus — this image has very little in common with the austere image of the giant of prayer and fasting, who Saint Nicholas was. Other than the name, there is very little in Santa that reminds one of Saint Nicholas. Indeed, he is but a fairy tale character with all what it implies. And it is unfortunate, that his name resembles the name of a saint. A parallel can be drawn with Saint Patrick’s Day with its rowdy festivities and the image of the real Saint Patrick — an Irish ascetic of great renown. Let us also say that it is improper to refer to Saint Nicholas as Saint Nick, for by doing so we bring harm not to the great saint of the Church but to our souls which we should nourish with piety and keeping everything pertaining to the Lord, His saints and His Holy Church in greatest honor.

Question: The prayer for deceased parents in the prayer book contains the line “...in according to Thy just judgment they are detained in Mytarstvo, …”. What or where is Mytarstvo? It almost sounds like purgatory but I thought that the concept of purgatory wasn’t part of Orthodox belief.

Michael Coffman

 Answer: Indeed, the concept of Mytarstvo, or aerial toll-houses, as it is referred to in the patristic English literature, may seem close to the Roman Catholic teaching of purgatory. However, the two are very different. To see the difference, we must consider the Roman Catholic and Orthodox teachings on spiritual life and life of soul after death.  

Roman Catholic teaching: there are basically two sorts of people: saints and the rest of us. After death, the saints pass on to Heaven because by their good deeds they have satisfied God’s justice fully. The rest of us fail to satisfy the Divine justice, therefore, God, as a Just God, demands satisfaction. After death, our souls go to purgatory where by undergoing sufferings we please/satisfy God, for by being tormented our souls make up for what we failed to accomplish while living on earth. Here is an image which perfectly explains the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory: God is a just judge and we are tried for, let’s say, breaking someone’s very expensive thing. The judge understands that we didn’t break the thing on purpose, but what can he do? Law is law, after all, he is a just judge. Since we do not have enough money to have the broken thing fixed, we are sentenced to working in mines for as long as our work and suffering can be measured against the value of the thing. Once we are through with our sentence, the judge welcomes us into the free life as if nothing have happened. The same is in the spiritual life: there is a law that sinners must purge their sins through undergoing suffering. God is loving, but more so He is just and is faithful to the law He has given. Our souls will suffer in purgatory till God satisfies His righteous wrath stirred up by our sins. The cornerstone of the Roman Catholic theology Thomas Aquinas writes that among the pleasures the righteous will enjoy in paradise will be beholding the suffering of the sinners in the Hades. One of the reasons for this is that the righteous will see the Divine justice being rendered, and the God’s activities are blissful to behold.

Orthodox teaching: We are called to cleanse ourselves of passions, and some of us succeed in this exploit, some don’t. On passing away, both the righteous and the sinners go through the aerial toll-houses. Toll-houses is the image of the trial which we come through as we head for the place where we shall be awaiting the Second Coming of Christ. At death, our soul sheds the protective shield of the body and all the qualities of the soul become out-rightly exposed and manifest. The evil thoughts that we developed into passions were suggested to us by demons. As our soul is taken up from the body, all what the souls is filled with come forth, for it is now exposed. On its ascent to Heaven, the passions that the soul is afflicted with are recognized by the demons as the work of their hands. Since we indulge in various passions and sins, there are different stages, or level, or toll-houses at which various passions are checked, or at which this or that passions we have made our own is made manifest. God is ever looking for the ways to save us, even if our sins outbalance our virtues. But if we whole-heartedly yielded ourselves to sins and passions, God honors our decision and lets us go to where the passions ultimately gravitate to — Hades. Therefore, the mytarstvo, or the aerial toll-houses, is the reality check for our passionate souls. So we see that purgatory and toll-houses are two different concepts and their differences reflect the differences in the understanding of Who God is and how we are save in Roman Catholicism and in the Orthodox Church.

 Question: What are the official steps one would go about to convert to Orthodoxy?

 Answer: The first step is an unofficial one — the inquirer must have no doubt that by entering the Orthodox Church, he or she enters not some kind of denomination, but the True, One, Holy and Apostolic Church whose sole foundation is Christ. The inquirer should have clear notion that by becoming an Orthodox Christian, he or she is stepping from darkness into light, from death into life in Christ, the life that no faith and no religion outside of Orthodoxy can give. If the inquirer has not been baptized in any way, he is baptized and chrismated. If he was baptized but not specifically ‘In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, he is baptized and chrismated. If the non-Orthodox inquirer was baptized in the Name of the Holy Trinity (which is a practice of the Roman Catholic and ‘liturgical’ Protestant Churches), he can still be baptized. However, the Church, in her condescension to our weaknesses, recognizes baptisms performed in the Name of the Holy Trinity outside of the Church and allows such catechumens to enter the Church only through chrismation. If the catechumen is to be received into the Church through chrismation, the parish priest asks the ruling bishop of the diocese for a permission to do so. Although most of the converts come into the Faith from the Roman Catholic and major Protestant Churches with their baptisms accepted, it is still an exception (deviation from the proper way of reception of catechumens), therefore the bishop’s approval is solicited. Once the inquirer is ready and permission is granted, the person can be accepted into the Church. The Divine Mystery of the reception of a catechumen into the Church is outlined in the Book of Needs. We do not need to discuss here the Mystery of Chrismation itself. What needs to be mentioned, though, is that in the beginning of the Mystery, the catechumen is asked to renounce the erroneous teachings/heresies he or she espoused before, i.e. the teachings which are contrary to the teaching of Christ’s Holy Church and which are beyond the scope of this particular answer. Having positively answered those questions, the catechumen is led into the Church and the Mystery of Chrismation begins. After the Mystery is accomplished the person is no longer a catechumen but a son or daughter of the Holy Orthodox Church.

 Question: Was the infamous disagreement between Arius and Saint Nicholas about one letter of one word? I had read the discrepancy was over one letter which changed the meaning of the word from ‘same’ to ‘similar’, with Arius believing the word was ‘similar’, therefore claiming Christ was only ‘similar’ to God, as opposed to ‘same’?

 Kevin Coffman

Answer: Yes, but some remarks are in order. Arius was a learned priest and famous preacher in Alexandria, Egypt. He preached that the Son of God was one of God’s creations, and, therefore, must have been created at some point in time and there was time when He did not exist, which makes Him something other than and inferior to God. For Arius, the Son of God is the greatest of God’s creations, but still a creature. Arius’ teaching was discussed throughout the empire not only by the men of learning but also by the common folk. Those disputes led to a division in the Church. Holy Emperor Constantine the Great, having united the Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empire, desired to see the same unity in the Church. In A.D. 325, he convened in Nicæa an assembly of the bishops from all the ends of the Christian world (later on, this assembly was recognized as the First Ecumenical Council) which upheld the Orthodoxy. The Council expressed the Orthodox Faith in the Symbol of Faith, or Creed, in which the Son of God is referred to as ‘consubstantial’, or ‘of one essence with the Father’, and, therefore, equal to the Father in divinity and truly God. ‘Consubstantial’ in Greek is ‘homoousion’, meaning ‘of the same nature’. Although the Fathers of the Council agreed with the term ‘homoousion’, not everyone could understand this word. The Life of Holy Hierarch Nicholas, Archbishop of Myra in Lycia, preserved the fact of Saint Nicholas striking Arius on the face for his blasphemies. The saint was one of many at the Council who opposed the heretic. Emperor Constantine died on the Feast of Pentecost in A.D. 337. His son Constantius sided with the defeated Arian party and, acting on their advice, banished most of the Orthodox bishops. One of the persecuted was Holy Hierarch Athanasius the Great of Alexandria who wrote in his Encyclical Letter: “What has passed among us exceeds all the persecution in bitterness… The whole Church has been raped, the priesthood profaned, and still worse, piety is persecuted by impiety… Let every man help us, as if each were affected out of fear of seeing the Church canons and the Faith of the Church held in scorn.”

Saint Athanasius the Great

The Arian party did not remain stagnant nor homogeneous. There were bishop who felt that they were departing farther and farther from the most basic precepts of Christianity (indeed, if Christ is not God, then what is the use of being a Christian?!) Seeking to return, even if on their terms, to Orthodoxy, the Arian bishops came up with the word ‘homoiousion’, meaning that the Son is ‘of like nature’ with the Father. ‘Of one nature with the Father’ (homoousion) is not the same as ‘of the like nature with the Father’ (homoiousion) (here is that one letter ‘i’ which makes the difference), but it was a step in the right direction. The greatest role in the restoration of the Orthodoxy was played by three bishop from Cappadocia: Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and Gregory of Nyssa, and their success and the Church’s triumph over the Arian heresy was finally sealed at the Second Ecumenical Council in A.D. 381. 

 Question: Obviously, there have been splits off of the Catholic Church since the Great Schism in 1054, but have there been any splits off of the Orthodox Church? And if so, how differently do they believe?

Kevin Coffman

Answer: There have never been major splits-off from the Orthodox Church since 1054. The split-off group which now is known as the Roman Catholic Church was the last massive separation from the Holy Orthodox Church. This schism was echoed in 16th and 17th centuries by creation of Uniate Churches (known as Byzantine/Ukrainian/Greek Catholic Churches) led by renegade hierarchy in Poland and Austria-Hungary in their desire to have the same privileges as their Roman counterparts. There have been and are cases when a near-schism situations exist. Mostly, they happen not over dogmatic issues but over the issue of canonical territory of the local Orthodox Churches, or over nationalistic issues. Here we talk about cessation of communion between certain local Orthodox Churches, as, for instance, was the case between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 19th century. The fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 caused a whole avalanche of un-canonical behavior when false shepherds of souls initiated new autocephalous Churches without blessing of the Mother Church, that is the Church they were separating from, and thus tore at the garment of Christ, tore at the Body of the Church. The nations that appeared on the world map in the aftermath of the WW1 tried to have their own national Churches, but they did so in violation of not only the canons of the Church but the nature of the Church, that is as thieves and not as obedient children. Examples of that was Churches of Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Estonia. Ukraine is still an arena of canonical scandals. The so-called “Ukrainian Autocephalous Church”, an ultra-nationalistic group, has been in existence since the early 1920s, and since then at least three Bishops, as well as many priests’ families and faithful were murdered by or with the blessing of the “Church’s” self-ordained “bishops” and “priests”. One of the murderers, whose name bears a street in the Ukrainian Village in Chicago, “patriarch” Mstislav Skrypnik was a most sinister character. This is what his collaborator, “metropolitan” of the same pseudo-Church Theophil Buldovsky had to say about the “patriarch” Mstislav: “O, it is a dreadful man. It is a thieve in bishop’s klobuk. He is one of those who can kill, strangle a person if he stands in his way”. However, the Church history knows another kind of splits off from the Orthodox Church. One of them is the Old Believer Schism, which is also referred as a Great Schism. It took place in Russia in 17th century. Tsar Aleksei Mihailovich and Patriarch Nikon desired to bring the practices of the Russian Church in sync with those of Greek Churches. They undertook new translations of the liturgical books from Greek into Church Slavonic. There seems to be nothing wrong with that. But they failed to see that the Greek liturgical practices had changed since the 10th century, when Russia received Christianity. Since the 10th century the Greek liturgical books had changed, even if slightly, especially in the way they described how the services were to be conducted. Back then, people did pay attention to details of the worship and they saw those differences right away. Another issue which started the Old Believer Schism was the new way of making the sign of the cross. At that time, the Russians made the sign of the cross over themselves with two fingers (index and middle). Most of the Orthodox world outside of Russia did so with three fingers, as we do it now. One on hand, throughout the history of the Church people made the sign of the cross differently. Perhaps, when Russia was baptized, the Christian world did make the sign of the cross with two fingers, but by the 17th century the Greek blessed themselves already with three fingers. The Greek way of making the sign of the cross was imposed on the people who could rightly say: “We have always done it with two fingers!” Indeed, it was and is a Great Schism for the Russian Church, for at times over 30% of Russian population were Old Believers. Since then, the Old Believers themselves have split off into hundreds of groups and sects, Orthodox character of some of them are barely recognizable. Old Believers have parishes in the U.S. and Canada. Another split which is still not healed is the Greek Old Calendarist movement. Also known as Church in Resistance, this grassroots movement was a reaction to the introduction of the New, or Papal Calendar by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Church of Greece in 1923. The struggle was fueled by the atrocities which the government of Greece used to force the faithful to adopt the New Calendar. To give you some idea of what was going on, let us just mention that the violence involved torture, profanation of sacraments of the Church, imprisonment and military actions by Greek Navy against the monastic republic of Mount Athos, which is still on the Old Calendar. Those countries whose Churches accepted the New Calendar were split in two, for there are always Christians who do not want to abandon the traditional way of worship and way of life. There is a number of Old Calendarist groups, or jurisdictions, in the U.S. Therefore, you see, that these two splits-off (Old Believers’ and Old Calendarists’) from the Orthodox Church in the second millennium are not of dogmatic nature. Nevertheless, those bodies of the faithful are not in communion with the rest of the Orthodox world.

Question: Should Orthodox Christians have hobbies? How should we view leisure time?

Answer: For everything we do there is only one measure — Christ. Therefore, the importance we attribute to various activities and occupations of ours should depend directly on the activity’s contribution to the work of our salvation. It is obvious that destructive activities should have no place in the life of a Christian. “Then what about hobbies?”— we ask. Let us try to answer this question ourselves: Does our hobby benefit anyone other than us? Does our hobby make happy and bring joy to anyone other than us? With this hobby of ours, do we manifest our love for Christ? We know that Saint Innocent, Apostle to America, had a hobby — he constructed clocks, thermometers and other various devices for the Alaskan natives. Some monastics carve crosses out of wood and give them to the pilgrims as blessings. Manual work is good and benefits our salvation. The activities which we occupy ourselves with in our free/leisure time should be spiritually profitable and should enrich not only our own lives but the lives of the people around us. Then what about leisure time? Leisure time is supposedly the time not occupied by work, chores and sleep. For most of us, this time is very limited. Our leisure time, as well as our work, chores and sleep (yes, even sleep) should be what we call ‘quality time’. We cannot afford ‘killing time’. Everything should be done for one purpose — Christ. If He gave us our lifetime so that we would purify ourselves from the filth of sin, so that His light could illumine our whole being, then we must, at all times, be conscious of this ‘one thing needful’. All our life, including our leisure time, has to be us reaching for the ‘one thing needful’, for the Desired One, for the Saviour. For everything else will end with the end of our earthly life, but Christ lives forever and that within us which we have sanctified in His Name will pass on over death into life eternal.

Question: Once I heard you say that the Jesus prayer is dangerous. Why is that and why do I read in so many books that the practice is recommended as being the best prayer rule to keep if it is difficult to keep any other?

Answer: Indeed, silence should be practiced by priests more often. Nevertheless, let us clarify our statement with an example: is a car dangerous? Yes and no, for it would be dangerous to let a 7 year old child drive it, but it is different for an adult who has to use the car to get to work or to church. For in the first case the car will ultimately lead to tragedy, whereas in the second case it is a useful means of transportation, although one still has to be careful. Saint Ignatii (Brianchaninov) in one accord with all Fathers of the Church says: “Prayer is the mother of virtues and a door to all spiritual gifts”. But there are conditions under which prayer becomes the means of partaking of Divine Nature. If one disregards these conditions, his prayer becomes fruitless, or even outright dangerous for his spiritual and physical wellbeing. Venerable Dorotheos writes: “He who prays with his lips but neglects his soul and is not attentive to his heart is praying to air and not to God; such a person labors in vain, because God regards our mind and our perseverance, not abundance of words”. Holy Hierarch Ignatii draws a great attention to how the Jesus Prayer is performed. “In our praying the Jesus Prayer there is a beginning, as there is a middle part and there is an infinite goal. One has to approach the Jesus Prayer from the beginning, not from the middle or end of it… A novice approaches the prayer from the middle: having read what the Fathers (who were immersed in mystical silence) wrote about the prayer, he thoughtlessly applies their counsels full of divine wisdom to his ignorant self. It is those beginning from the middle who — without any preliminary preparation — try to lower their mind into the temple of their heart and thence send up prayers. Those who start from the end seek to immediately open for themselves the God-sent sweetness of prayer and other wondrous gifts from on-high. One has to begin from the beginning, that is to utter the words of prayer with care and fear of God; this must be done for the sake of repentance and one has to make sure that these three qualities always accompany his prayer. Special care should be given to the acquisition of a righteous life according to the Gospel teaching. It is only on moral principles structured in accordance with Christ’s commandments that we can build the immaterial temple of God-pleasing prayer. As structures built on sand are erected in vain, so also is the temple of our prayer if it has as its sandy foundation an immoral and shaky life”.

Holy Hierarch Ignatii (Brianchaninov)

From this we see how carefully and reverently one should approach the Jesus Prayer. It must be done not haphazardly but correctly. Otherwise, this prayer stops being a prayer and can ruin a Christian soul. Saint Ignatii wrote: “Today I read a saying of Sysoi the Great, which I always liked. A monk said to him: ‘I have mastered an uninterrupted remembrance of God.’ Venerable Sysoi answered to him: ‘This is not great. Great is that when you shall consider yourself worse than any creature.’ It is a lofty occupation — continuous remembrance of God. But this loftiness is a very dangerous one when the ladder for its ascent does not have its foundation on the firm rock of humility.”

Question: In different parishes and districts I've noticed that some ladies cover their heads upon walking into church and leave the scarf on through all of the service, some put one on just before taking communion and then take it right off once they sit down, others do not cover their head at all. Some wear a scarf, some a small doily or kerchief and others wear a hat. Where does this practice come from and why/when it is proper to cover one's head in church? i.e. upon entering, always or just when communion will be served?

Answer: Women’s covering of head when in church is an ancient Christian custom based on Apostle Paul’s words: “Every woman who is praying or prophesying with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for it is the same as if she was shaven. For if the woman is not covered, let her also be shorn; but if it is a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered. For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, for as much he is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man. For this cause ought the woman to have on her head covered as a sign of power over her because of the Angels” (1 Cor. 11:5-10). The Holy Apostle means that a woman who prays with her head uncovers puts herself to shame, as she would do if her head was shaved. He says that head covering for a woman is a sign of her obedience to her husband. Instructed thus by the New Testament, it has always been a custom in the Christian Church for married as well as for unmarried women and young girls to cover their heads, following the example of the Most Holy Mother of God who, remaining a virgin, always, as a sign of humility, covered her head. She covered her head from a very young age as a sign of her submission to the will of God, a submission which she later manifested so perfectly on the day of Annunciation. Imitating the Mother of God in this small way, women should feel honored, not humiliated or irritated, and should be thankful for the opportunity which the Church gives them to curb their self-will and to promote a modest disposition. When the woman, in obedience to the Holy Tradition of the Church, covers her head when entering the House of the Living God, or even when praying at home, she is rewarded by God for her humility and obedience to the Church. From what is written above we see that the pious custom for women to cover their heads when in church comes to us from the Christian antiquity. In the past three – four centuries, as women’s hairstyles got rather elaborate, so did their head dresses. So the custom of wearing hats comes to us from that epoch and hats are still an accepted part of church dress code. However, the principle remains the same — modesty and humility. As far as putting the scarf on and then taking it off, the two thousand year practice of the Church teaches us for the woman to have her head covered at all times while in the temple. † † †

Some women, who cannot fathom themselves in the church without their heads covered, consider it an honor — to cover their heads. They say: “Look at the icons of women Saints! All of them have kerchiefs on their head, with the exception of Saint Mary of Egypt who lived in the desert and wore no clothes at all”.

Question: Can you make a list for fasting regulations for all the fasts during the year so we may have a copy.

Mary Ann Nagy

Answer: The following is taken from “The Traditional Fasting Rules Of The Orthodox Church”, St. Moses Pamphlets, 1998.

THE CHURCH'S TRADITIONAL TEACHING ON FASTING is not widely known or followed in our day. Though the rules may appear quite strict to those who have not seen them before, they have always been intended for all Orthodox Christians, not just for monastics. There are many exceptions to the broad rules given here, usually when a major feast day falls during a fasting period. Consult your priest and your parish calendar for details. The Saint Herman Calendar, published annually by St. Herman of Alaska Press, is a good day-by-day guide.

WEEKLY FAST. Unless a fast-free period has been declared, Orthodox Christians are to keep a strict fast every Wednesday and Friday. The following foods are avoided:

. Meat, including poultry, and any meat products such as lard.

. Fish (meaning fish with backbones: shellfish are permitted).

. Eggs and dairy products (milk, butter, cheese, etc.).

. Olive oil. A literal interpretation of the rule forbids only olive oil. Some interpret it to include all vegetable oils, as well as vegetable oil products such as margarine.

. Wine and other alcoholic drink.

On strict fast days, we eat only one meal, traditionally after the ninth hour (about three o'clock in the afternoon). The meal should be simple and modest. Non-alcoholic drinks are permitted throughout the day.

EXCEPTIONS: The church has always exempted small children, the sick and pregnant and nursing mothers from strict fasting. While people in these groups should not seriously restrict the amount that they eat, no harm will come from doing without some foods on two days out of the week - simply eat enough of the permitted foods. Exceptions to the fast based on medical need are always allowed.

COMMUNION FAST. So that the Body and Blood of Our Lord will be the first thing to pass our lips on the day of communion, we abstain from all food and drink from the time that we retire the night before. Married couples should abstain from sexual relations the night before communion. Many people avoid brushing their teeth on the morning of communion. When communion is in the evening, as with Presanctified Liturgies during Lent, this fast should be extended throughout the day until after communion. For those who cannot keep this discipline, a total fast beginning three hours before the Liturgy is sometimes prescribed.

LENTEN FAST. Great Lent is the longest and strictest fasting season of the year.

Week before Lent ("Cheesefare Week"): Meat is prohibited, but eggs and dairy products are permitted, even on Wednesday and Friday.

First Week of Lent: Only two meals are eaten during the first five days, on Wednesday and Friday after the Presanctified Liturgy. Nothing is eaten from Monday morning until Wednesday evening, the longest time without food in the Church year. For the Wednesday and Friday meals, as for all weekdays in Lent, meat and animal products, fish, eggs, dairy products, wine and oil are avoided. On Saturday of the first week, the usual rule for Lenten Saturdays begins (see below).

Weekdays in the Second through Sixth Weeks: The strict fasting rule is kept every day: avoidance of meat products, fish, eggs, dairy, wine and oil; one meal per day following vespers.

Saturdays and Sundays in the Second through Sixth Weeks: Two meals may be taken, and wine and oil are permitted.

Holy Week: The Thursday evening meal is ideally the last meal taken until Pascha. At this meal, wine and oil are permitted. The Fast of Great and Holy Friday is the strictest fast day of the year: even those who have not kept a strict fast are strongly urged not to eat on this day. This fast is sometimes broken after St. Basil's Liturgy on Holy Saturday and, at the latest, after the Divine Liturgy on Pascha. If it is broken following St. Basil's Liturgy on Saturday, wine but not oil is permitted. Wine and oil are permitted on several feast days if they fall on a weekday during Lent. Consult your parish calendar. On Annunciation and Palm Sunday, fish is also permitted.

APOSTLES' FAST. The rule for this variable-length fast is more lenient than for Great Lent.

. Monday, Wednesday, Friday: Strict fast; one meal per day.

. Tuesday, Thursday: Oil and wine are permitted; two meals per day.

. Saturday, Sunday: Fish, oil and wine are permitted; two meals per day.

This is the rule kept by many monasteries during non-fasting seasons.

DORMITION FAST. Fasting during the two-week Dormition fast is like that during most of Great Lent:

. Monday-Friday: Strict fast; one meal per day.

. Saturday and Sunday: Wine and oil are permitted; two meals per day.

NATIVITY FAST. During the early part of the fast, the rule is identical to that of the Apostles' fast. During the latter part of the fast, fish is no longer permitted on Saturdays and Sundays. In different jurisdictions, this heightening of the fast may be for either the last week or the last two weeks.

OTHER FASTS. The eve of Theophany, the Exaltation of the Cross and the Beheading of John the Baptist are fast days, with wine and oil are allowed.

FAST-FREE PERIODS. Complementing the four fasting seasons of the Church are four fast-free weeks:

. Afterfeast of Nativity to Eve of Theophany

. Week following the Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee

. Bright Week - the week after Pascha

. Trinity Week - the week after Pentecost, ending with All Saints Sunday.

MARITAL FASTING. Married couples are expected to abstain from sexual relations throughout the Church's four fasting seasons, as well as on the weekly Wednesday and Friday fasts.

HEALTH CONCERNS: During long fasts, avoiding prohibited foods poses no health risk as long as adequate amounts of other foods are consumed. Calcium intake and adequate calories may be a concern for growing children and pregnant and nursing mothers. Calcium-fortified orange juice is an easy way to guarantee plentiful calcium intake while avoiding dairy products. Nuts and nut butters are a good source of fat and calories for those who need to maintain weight on a Lenten diet.

MISCELLANEOUS SUGGESTIONS.

. Obviously, many Orthodox do not keep the traditional rule. If you adopt it, beware of pride, and pay no attention to anyone's fast but your own.

. If you are new to fasting, you may find the onset of hunger pangs distressing. Hunger pangs are not harmful. They are simply part of the fast.

. The first few days of a long fasting period are often the most difficult. Do not be

discouraged by headaches, fatigue, etc. at the beginning of a fasting season – they will disappear or reduce in intensity.

. Drink plenty of water. Food contains a great deal of water, so as you eat less of it your water intake decreases, and you can become dehydrated. During a long fast, your body is ridding itself of accumulated toxins, and water helps to flush them away.

. Read the ingredients lists on processed and packaged foods. Butter, whey, meat broth and lard are common "hidden" additives.

. If you are troubled by lethargy, try moderate exercise. A morning walk can make a surprising difference in your energy throughout the day.

. If you are baffled by what to cook during the fast, consult any of the many vegetarian cookbooks now available. There are several "Lenten cookbooks" on the market, but these have no particular advantage over the vegetarian cookbooks available at most libraries.

The rules given here are of course only one part of a true fast, which will include increased prayer and other spiritual disciplines, and may include resolutions to set aside other aspects of our day-to-day life (such as caffeine or television), or to take up practices such as visiting the sick.

You may find from experience that you cannot keep the strict fasting rule and will need to modify it. But do not assume beforehand that the rule is too strict for you. The Lord is our strength, and can uphold us in marvelous and unforeseen ways. Those who attempt to keep the Church's traditional fast will find that, though the temptations to pride and legalism are real, the spiritual benefits are great. A return to more diligent fasting could play a large part in the spiritual renewal of the Orthodox world.

Question: I have noticed that one of the differences between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches is the use of statues instead of icons. Does the Orthodox Church view this as worshipping false idols?

Stephanie Coffman

Answer: Statues became widespread in the Roman Catholic church after the Great Schism of 1054, which means that this form of liturgical art was pretty much unknown in the Early Church. Saint John of Damascus (†780), a theologian, iconographer and defender of Christian liturgical art of the united pre-Schism Church, wrote in his Exact Explanation of the Orthodox Faith: “Divine Scripture rebukes those who bow before the things cut out of metal or stone, as well as those who offer sacrifices to the demons…” We see that the in Christian antiquity statues were understood as part of pagan idol worship and, as such, condemned. It doesn’t mean that in the Roman Church the statues are used for worshipping demons, but we see that the care and caution that the Early Church exercised when talking about the holy things is unknown in modern Catholicism. The Church views the use of statues as spiritually dangerous, misleading and expressing incorrect vision of God and men.

The liturgical art always reflects what the particular Christian Church teaches and believes. Here, we shall quote Leonid Ouspensky’s book Theology of the Icon: Orthodox iconography “represents the human person, the bearer of the nature which has been deified and restored in its primitive [original] purity. In other words, art portrays the communion of this person with the divinity, his deification. But according to the doctrine of the late Thomism generally taught

by the Roman Church, human nature as such was not changed by the fall of Adam. Man remained as God has created him. He was only deprived of the supernatural gifts of grace. The divine incarnation restores to human nature the gift which had been taken away from it. But this grace is a created effect, just like that which Adam possessed before the fall: it is an effect created by God in the human soul and superimposed, so to speak, on human nature. Being created [as the Roman Church teaches], grace does not transform saints into truly deified men, into partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), into god’s through grace. This is why deification in the West is not understood literally, but as a metaphor. God [in Roman Catholic teaching] is present in the human soul but is not united with man’s entire nature. Deification, for the Roman Church, does not mean an ontological change in the life of the creature; it is only a change of its actions. The very nature of man remains unchanged. There is no penetration of created being by the uncreated. According to the Orthodox teaching, it is human nature itself that is tainted by Adam’s sin. There is not the loss of the supernatural gifts of grace but rather a corruption of human nature. God is life, and this is why sin is a fall of man out of divine eternal life, an inner defect in human nature at its very source. Orthodox theology insists on the uncreated character of grace and defines it as the energy characteristic of the common nature of the three Divine Persons. By these energies, man surpasses the limits of the creature and becomes a partaker of the divine nature. This is why, in the Orthodox Church, human nature enlightened by grace is often compared to iron reddened by fire, to air entirely penetrated with light, etc. Thus, as we see, the difference between Orthodox sacred art and Western religious art corresponds to a difference between the Orthodox and Western concepts of holiness, and is not simply a result of a decadence of faith and of Western theology. Two different dogmatic concepts are involved, corresponding to two experiences, to ways of sanctification which hardly resemble one another”.

When we find ourselves in front of a religious statue, we are struck by the thought of how “real” it looks. This concept is called imitation of life. But , as Leonid Ouspensky writes: “Imitation of life would mean a reversal of the effort of the saint who precisely liberates himself from the shackles of this life and of corruptible beauty. The beauty in the icon is spiritual purity, inner beauty and, in the words of St Peter, let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable jewel of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious (1 Peter 3:4).

So we have seen that, whereas the Orthodox iconography depicts a person transformed by the uncreated Divine Grace and, thus, beyond the logic of this fallen world, statues portray the fallen man as he is, for even the Roman Catholic theology does not allow for the transfiguration of the whole human being. By this teaching, by denying the uncreated grace which is God’s direct communion with us, the Roman Church walls herself off from the Heavenly realm and directs her attention not to the spiritual building up of the new man in person, but to catering to him not on the spiritual but sensual level, level of feelings and emotions.

Question: Do the Catholics believe all the things the Orthodox still do?

Answer: Contemporary Roman Catholic Church believes most things that the Orthodox Church professes, but most similarities are tainted by differences. For example, Roman Church, as well as the Orthodox Church, believes that saints intercede before God on our behalf. However, we have already seen that the two Churches have different understanding of sainthood, of what it means for a person to be a saint. And there is a multitude of differences like that. Let us take another example. God is merciful. The Orthodox believe that He is merciful unconditionally. The Roman Church believes God is merciful but we have to satisfy Him in order to win His mercy.

Question: Father, what is the proper method to dispose of old Holy Water and church newspapers.

Robert Hamady

Answer: The Theophany Holy Water is blessed every year on the Eve of the Feast. We take it home, we have our homes blessed with it, we drink the holy water in time of spiritual or bodily infirmity. It is good to use the water up as the Feast of Theophany comes up again the following year. However, if we still have some of it left, you can either drink it up, or sprinkle your home with it, or pour it carefully alongside of your house — not on the pavement, but some place we people do not walk.

Regarding the papers that have icons and representations of the Holy Cross, Our God or His Saints on them. There are two ways to put them to rest: burying them or burning them. You may bury them in your yard or you may burn them. The best place to burn them is outside, but if you burn them in your fireplace, you must be careful in gathering the ashes and putting them outside where no people would trample over them. These are the only right ways of disposing of the holy images. If you live in an apartment or a development and cannot burn the papers, please, ask your fellow believers who of them would do this important job. If no one come forward to do it, then bring the papers to the church and hand them over to the priest.

Question: Why do you go down on the ground 3 times?

Kaylee Voynovich

Answer: Dear Kaylee,

You might not know that but not so long ago people when they saw an older or respected person on the street they would not say ‘Hi’ to him, but ‘Good Morning’, ‘Good Afternoon’, ‘How are you?’, ‘How do you do?’, and they would also bow their heads, even if a little bit. They did so because they respected that person. When we pray in front of an icon and make the sign of the Cross over ourselves we also bow our heads or our whole bodies from the waist down, thus showing our adoration of God, His Most Pure Mother or the Saints. When we enter the church, we make the sign of the Cross over ourselves and bow very low, touching the ground with our right hand; and this we repeat three times. When we go farther into the church and come To the icon in the center of the church, we make the sign of the Cross over ourselves two times, each time bowing low and touching the ground; then we kiss the icon (never on the face of the image, but on the feet or the lower right corner) and repeat the low bow from the waist one more time. We bow when we approach something holy and worthy of veneration. Sometimes, as we make our bows, we “go down on the ground” — this is called prostration. In this manner, we show our unworthiness of being in the presence of the holiness and our obedience to God and love for His Saints.

When the priest, or an Altar server, enters the Altar, he also bows three times all the way to the ground. Why? Because “this place is holy”, as the Lord told Moses (Exodus 3:5). When priest serves the Holy Liturgy, he even puts on a special pair of shoes which he wears only in the Altar. And what is the holiest place in the church? Of course, the Holy Altar. It is before it that the priest prostrates many a time during the Divine Services, for it is holy, and no one is worthy to touch the Holy Altar Table, nor be near it. Exception is made only for the priest who offers the mystical sacrifice in this holiest of all places. The priest bows many times to the Lord who is invisibly, and sometimes visibly, present on the Holy Altar, for He is Our Lord and Our God.

Question: My question pertains to scripture that I just read in Matthew 23:9. This seems contrary to our tradition of calling Priest FATHER. Please, explain this verse. Thank You.

“Call no man your father upon the earth:

for one is Your Father Who is in heaven”

(Matthew 23:9).

Answer: To answer this question, we turn to Father Deacon Andrei Kuraev’s book “To Protestants About Orthodoxy” where Father Andrei writes:

If we are convinced that no one can be called father, then we should forbid children to call their male parent father. Are we to refrain from calling our fathers fathers, from saying things like “my father and I…”? Should we blot out from the Bibles the Divine commandment to “respect your father and your mother”? If we still use the word father in our families, do we have a right to blame the Orthodox for considering the Church their big family and for taking the warm and intimate names (“bat’ushka” [dear Father], “matushka”, “brother”) outside of the confines of their homes?

Such rigorism was unknown to Christ and His Apostles. The word father they applied not only to God. For instance, in Christ’s parable about the rich man and Lazarus the rich man begs Abraham: “Father Abraham! Have mercy on me and send Lazarus… But Abraham said: Son…” (Luke 16:24-25). As we see, Abraham accepts being called father and answers accordingly, regarding the relationships with his distant descendants in terms of “father — son”.

In the parable about the Prodigal Son, the son calls out to his earthly father: “Father! I have sinned against heaven and before you and I am no longer worthy to be called your son” (Luke 15:21).

We do not see in any of the two cases Christ accusing the children who address their ancestors as fathers. Yes, both of these children were sinners, but their sin was not that they called their fathers fathers.

Here are very important words of the Saviour: “Verily I say unto you, there is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or land for My sake and the Gospel’s, and would not receive in this time, amongst the persecutions, a hundred-fold of houses, and brethren, and sisters, and fathers, and mothers, and children, and lands, and, in the world to come — life eternal” (Mark 10:29-30) [curiously enough, in the most of the modern English translations the word father is omitted in Mark 10:30, although it is present in the original Greek text]. This passage tells us about the history of the first Christian communities, when the person who had left his house, his city and his family for the sake of Christ was welcomed as a family member in any Christian house and, as Christianity spread throughout the world, in any Christian city.

Any one, through whom the souls of many are born for the life in Christ, becomes the spiritual father for the newly-illumined. All Apostles were fathers for every Christian, whereas all Christians were brothers and sisters to each other.

Here is a question for our opponents: how are we supposed to fulfill Christ’s promise that a Christian shall have many fathers, if he cannot call anyone by this word?

Obviously, when Apostle John addresses his disciples as “beloved children”, he received the appropriate answer. Apostle Matthew, who wrote the words in question after he had heard Christ’s admonition not to call any one father and in whose Gospel this admonition appears, nevertheless, he writes that Christ met James and John “in a boat with Zebedee their father” (Matt. 4:21). Apostle Stephen, when he preached, addressed his listeners, saying: “Men, brethren and fathers, listen” (Acts 7:2). Exactly the same words uses Apostle Paul in Acts 22:1. And Apostle John also uses it: “And I write to you, fathers” (1 John 2:13). Apostle Peter knows other fathers, besides the Heavenly Father: “God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers” (Acts 3:13); “God of our fathers raised up Jesus” (Acts 5:30).

If we recall Apostle Paul’s admonition: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath” (Eph. 6:4), we see that our becoming the children of God, that was granted through the True Son, doesn’t abolish our worldly kinship, nor our spiritual kinship.

Abraham became “the father to all who believe”, writes Apostle Paul (Rom. 4:11), thus reminding us that one doesn’t have to belong to the Jewish people to become the heir of the spiritual covenant, once given to Abraham. Abraham is the father to “all who believe”, not only to the Jews, who descended from him according to the flesh, but to all those who came to God answering the call of the Holy Spirit.

If it is said that we must fear more those who can kill our souls than those who can kill our bodies (Matt. 10:28), wouldn’t it be proper to say that we must honor even more those who stood at the starting point of our spiritual life, than those who were instrumental in giving birth to our bodies? If we must respect, honor and call father him who gave us a lesser gift (temporary physical life on earth), why can’t we apply this word to our spiritual birth into life everlasting, to our birth in the Spirit which is also accomplished not without human participation, for “how shall they believe in Him of Whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without the one who would preach” (Rom. 10:14)?

Apostle Paul writes: “I have begotten you in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 4:15). And he explains that this is why he had become father for those who believe: “Though you have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet you have not many fathers”. (1 Cor. 4:15). He says the same about a particular person, Onesimus: “Whom I have begotten in my bonds” (Philemon 1:10). It is obvious that Apostle Paul’s disciples considered him nothing less than their Father. He writes that Timothy “as a son with the father he hath served me” (Philippians 2:22).

It is through certain people that person comes into the family of the faithful, the Church. Therefore, to see the Church is to see the people on whom abides the grace of God. Nobody would ever become a Saint unless he saw the radiance of life eternal on the face of another person. This is why Apostle Paul says: “My little children, in whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you” (Gal. 4:19). This rule has remained the same throughout the ages.

In their birth from one another the instructors in spiritual life retain the image of spiritual disposition that first was revealed by the founder of the tradition, even Apostle Paul. Here is a glimpse of such holiness that is found in spiritual Fathers: “When, having finished the prayer, Father blessed me and started to talk, I began listening, not to his words but that new and unusual that was being born in my soul in his presence, that which was renewing, resurrecting, and making me strong” (about Fr. Aleksii Mechev).

This birth cannot take place on its own. And very often in the Christian literature we see the following motif: “We travailed, we gave you birth in patience, great pain and daily tears, although you knew nothing about it. Come here, my child, and I will lead you to God”. These words Venerable Symeon the New Theologian wrote to his spiritual son. Would it be a blasphemy to say to such a spiritual teacher — “Father”?

Protestants forbid the shepherds of souls to be called by this name. What can we say? “They, perhaps, have never known the people whom we have known; nobody has shown them, in the breath of Life, what is the Holy Church; nobody has ever pressed their heads to his chest with the coolness of the old epitrachil on it; nobody has ever told them: “My beloved child” — those fiery words that melt all unbelief and, what is more wonderful, all sins” (Sergei Fudel).

Protestants do not have spiritual Fathers, they do not have priests. Maybe this is why they do not know that intense and gladsome unity that is established between the spiritual teacher and student, such a unity that cannot be describe with any other words, other than — “Son!” and “Father!”. They do not understand Saint-Exupery's words: “You see, it takes a long time for a person to be born”…

Apostle Paul talks about the spiritual fatherhood in the 1st century, whereas Venerable Symeon — in 10th. But in the 19th century we behold the same fruit of the spiritual love: “Be Mother, not father, to your brethren”, Venerable Seraphim of Sarov advised a young igumen (abbot).

So, there is no blasphemy in calling priest Father.

But how are we to understand the words of Christ not to call anyone father? Christ is not speaking about exterior, but interior. He condemns not the word, but an interior state of the soul that might be expressed with this word. Whom Christ is condemning? He condemns not him who says “father”, but him who demands to be called “Father”. Let us recall the context of Christ’s saying: “On Moses’ seat there sit Scribes and Pharisees… they do all their works so that the people would see them… they also love to recline at feasts, and to preside in synagogues, and to be called upon at assemblies, so that the people would be calling them “teacher, teacher!” But you do not call yourselves teachers, for you have One Teacher — Christ, whereas you all are brothers; call no man your father upon the earth: for one is Your Father Who is in heaven; and do not call yourselves superiors, for Our only superior is Christ. But he who is greatest among you shall be your servant: for whosoever shall exalt himself shall be humbled, but whosoever humbles himself shall be exalted” (Matt. 23:2, 5-12).

We see that Christ didn’t denounce every society that has teachers and students. Indeed, every meeting has to have someone who would preside over it, which means that other people would acknowledge his rights to be their leader. But Christ denounced the haughty drive for authority and power of those who desire to be called “superior”, “teacher”, “president”, “father”. Christ denounce the human strife for self-exaltation.

Nobody can be forced to address this or that person “Father”. In the Orthodox mind, addressing priest “Father” is not an imposed law, but something far beyond law, it is an intimate and family-like notion.

There are words that are used only among the people who love each other. If an outsider would start forcing such people to call each other Mister and Mistress, he will soon find himself in an uncomfortable position. One can’t forbid expressions of love and affection. One can’t forbid a brother to be called “brother”, or priest —”Father”.

By calling priest anything other than Father, we side with the KGB officers who, when interrogating clergy, called every one (from Deacon to Patriarch) only by their secular names. Therefore, if, when speaking with a priest, we use other forms of address than “Father”, we distance ourselves from him and show that we do not wish to take him for what he really is and what he considers most important in his ministry to us.

In other words, when addressing a priest, if we do not want to sound anti-Christian, we should avoid using the forms of address that have a secularized, and therefore profaning connotation. The question here is not so much a respect for the person, but to the clerical rank, to the ministry the person has dedicated all his life to. It is our right to call those whom we love and respect in the proper fashion.

Question: Why do newer religions, such as Pentecostalism in particular, seem to stray so much from Tradition and focus more on personal relations with Christ and putting very little importance on the traditions of the Church?

Kevin Coffman

Answer: To answer this question, we shall quote passages from Fr. Alexis Trader’s book In Peace Let Us Pray To The Lord (Regina Press, 2001). Fr Alexis, now a monk on Mount Athos, comes from a fervent Methodist family.

Part I

Whatever may be one’s evaluation of the Pentecostal movement, there is no denying the fact that as a phenomenon it is every bit American as Plymouth Rock, the Wild West, Hollywood, or McDonald’s. In fact, the remnant ideology of the Puritans, the rugged individualism of the Western frontier, the heightened sensationalism of the film industry, and the instant gratification of the fast-food business all find their _expression now in the American popular religious sphere. The first Pentecostals were usually very simple and rather uneducated Americans. It is not surprising that in their quest for the Holy Spirit, they would be shaped by or express themselves in the language of these currents in American culture. The moral aspects of these currents at their best express the noble virtues of courage and trust in Providence, but at their worst the age-old passions of the love of glory, the love of money, and the love of pleasure that have afflicted the human race since the fall of Adam.

The fact the this distinctive “American garb” of the Pentecostal is weaved from Protestant thread compels us to briefly outline the historical relationship between Protestantism and Orthodoxy.

It is a well known fact that for the first thousand years in ecclesiastical history in spite of the appearances of various heresies, there was one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church referred to as Catholic in the West and Orthodox in the East. Unfortunately, when the Franks [who conquered Rome] were converted to Christianity, they adopted some unfortunate doctrinal interpretations of the Blessed Augustine who developed his own peculiar theology. Since this theology was outside of the patristic consensus, its conclusions were often both destructive and antithetical to the teaching of Christ.

Tragic changes took place in the once Orthodox Patriarchate of the old Rome, its inward transformation from a [spiritually] medical to a legal institution, its loss of the understanding of the stages of the healing of the human heart, and the consequent doctrinal abnormalities that sprang therefrom. Time and space do not permit us to discuss the further devastation wrought by the perhaps well-meaning, but certainly ill-fated, attempts of the Protestant reformers to correct a sick institution on the basis of their own unillumined reason, resulting in the rejection of the priesthood, the Mysteries, the veneration of the Mother of God and the Saints, the Tradition of the Church, and the Church Herself as a concrete, historical, and theanthropic reality. These mutations would increasingly distance the Western Christian from the practice, life and belief of One Catholic and Apostolic Church.

What is perhaps insufficiently stressed is another alteration that took place in Protestantism when it immigrated from Western Europe to North America: the shift in emphasis from confessional dogma [that is, Christ’s teaching] to personal experience [personal relationship with Christ, often built on the foundation inconsistent with the Lord’s teaching]. In general, the Protestants who immigrated to America were weary of the bloody confessional wars that had plagued Western Europe. They viewed America as the Promised Land where they could freely worship God as they pleased. The Calvinist understanding of prosperity as a sign of election contributed to the rise of capitalism in the West. This prosperity gospel so contrary virtues of poverty and non-acquisitiveness is the result of incorrect theological opinions. It nevertheless still runs through most Pentecostal and charismatic ones. However, most Protestants could see the severe limitations of the “prosperity test” in practice. The only solution was experience, an experience of salvation. And with this “solution”, a new type of Protestantism was born that would father evangelical/fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements.

John Wesley, an Anglican priest, initiated his “holiness club” which would later coalesce into the Methodist church. Wesley taught his followers that holiness consists of an experience or “grace” separate from one’s initial conversion to Christ. From the late colonial period, traveling Methodist preachers (circuit riders) would tour the Eastern Coast of North America rousing their audiences with fiery sermons and emotionally charged worship services, experience would be placed at the center of the Christian life rather than a precise confession of faith. An emotionally charged conversion experience of accepting Christ as one’s personal Saviour would be equated with salvation in which both church and creed played a decisively secondary role. Significantly, with these revivals, a new type of enthusiastic emotionalism verging on the ecstatic enters into Christian worship. This enthusiasm would leave little room for any sense of the sacred. At the same time, an important shift in emphasis in their worship took place: the culmination of the worship is not the offering of praise and thanksgiving to God, nor man’s union with God through Holy Communion, but the altar call in which sinners come forward to confess their sinfulness, to accept Christ and to vow to lead a new life. Thus, the sinner aware of his need for God and his conversion experience become the new center of Protestant worship.

. . .

On reading Part I of the answer to this question, Matushka said it was rather unclear and confusing, that the matter should have been put simpler. Before we go into Part II, it would be useful to note that the core of the Pentecostal mindset is love for oneself, self-worship in that the person assumes himself to be equal with God (if not dogmatically then obviously by the way he expresses his belief): this notion of Christ being a friend, a close friend, and, God forbid, a buddy; of one calling to the Holy Spirit and He comes as if He is obliged to do so — God is forced into this relationship. Hence, the Pentecostal mindset: “I am a good person. God loves me. I am ready to teach everyone how to become the wonderful person I am” — total lack of humility, total lack of fear of God, total lack of notion of holiness. Very sad…

To understand where such notions come from and how they entered the American mindset we must look back at our history.

Part II

The American “founding fathers” forged the American Constitution on the basis of the humanist thought expressing French democratic ideas. Although such figures as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson would become the “saints” of the American civil religion, it must be said that their religion was far more Masonic than Christian. And although many would look back to the Puritans as their most noble forefathers, commemorating them yearly on the American feast of Thanksgiving, the god invoked would always remain nebulously un-named. Thus while American currency would be printed with the words “In God We Trust”, no identification would be made between that god and the Lord Jesus of the Christian faith [the one dollar bank note was designed by a Russian occultist Nikolai Roerich — who taught that Christ and Satan are two personifications of one and the same god. So what did Roerich mean when he wrote on our currency “In God We Trust”?]. Thus in another subtle way the importance of a concrete creed would be decreased in the consciousness of most Americans only to be replaced by the humanistic creed of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, in other words, the creed of human experience.

In this way, the very moorings of American society would shift from the moral severity of the Puritans to “an impassioned mindless friendship with the body” (Saint Maximus the Confessor). With the justification of such selfish relations with the world and one’s fellow man, a selfish relationship with God would not lag far behind.

Historically, the Pentecostal movement stands on palpably shaky ground. To justify their position, on the one hand, they would try to link their own enthusiastic experiences with the grace-filled experiences on the day of Pentecost. On the other hand, they would adopt a theory of the radical reformation asserting that the Church was in apostasy until their group was formed, even though this theory clearly contradicts the Holy Scripture’s witness that the Church exists throughout the ages and that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. [In the Pentecostal churches the accent is placed on the most external traits of holiness which they try to achieve, whereas the center of the spiritual life — warfare with the passions and acquisition of the Spirit of love and humility remains unknown to them. They are demanding a fruit without planing a tree. But they demand it so emotionally and convincingly that both themselves and the outsiders think that they are really achieving something. But even they know that there is no “meat” in their spiritual life and in their worship. Therefore, the non-denominational Christians make up their church services of long soothing, meditational or raging sermons, community talents shows, discussions, diverse social activities that essentially have nothing to do with spiritual life, or rather, they have a lot to do with it — they destroy it.]

Aimee Semple McPherson was among the original Pentecostals; she believed that religion should be entertaining, for “the world’s love for entertainment brought them encouragement, joy and laughter.” In her “Angelus Temple”, she resorted to everything from brass bands to animal acts while in private life she was married three times, in litigation 45 times, and died from an overdose of sedatives. Nevertheless, this woman, beloved of the KKK and founder of the four square Gospel Church, was according to one Pentecostal historian “the spiritual pioneer who paved the way for the rest of us and largely responsible for the way we demonstrate Christianity today” (Roberts Liardon, God’s Generals, p. 229). In a culture addicted to entertainment, a “religious show” entertains without placing any of the difficult demands of the Gospel on the believer.

[We live in the times of idolatry: every perversion and every folly is allowed, protected and is worth fighting for. Martin Luther proclaimed that the man is saved by Christ’s death on the Cross, therefore, we do not have to do anything, for He has done everything for us. The fear of falling away from the Lord disappeared, the notion of sin was blotted out, the notion of shame became conventional, rather flexible entity. The Pentecostals teach us that God will love us no matter what we are. And they are right, but they hide the other side of our relationship with God: it is a hard work and indeed a struggle to learn and to force ourselves to love God in return, to love Him truly, that is, as He loves us — even to death].

Question: Why do other such religions have next to no emphasis on receiving communion, when at the Last Supper, it was said that “as often as you eat My Flesh and drink My Blood, I abide in you and you in Me”? Why also is confession considered a personal thing between a person and Christ, when t he Apostles were given the power to forgive sins, and priests are considered the representatives of the Apostles?

Kevin Coffman

Answer: Protestant textbooks say: “We do not recognize the mystery of bread becoming the Body of Christ and of the grape juice becoming the Blood of the Savior”, and with this statement they draw the line that divides the Protestant world from the historical Church founded by Christ. In Protestantism, Holy Communion is not a receiving a gift of life from the Saviour, but a regular pledge in faithfulness to the Gospel teaching, something that the person declares before the face of God. In this fashion, communion is not a Divine act, but purely human. For the Protestant the Eucharist is a movement from within to without; whereas for the Orthodox, in the Eucharist, God through the transfigured bread and wine enters the person and enriches him. The centuries worth of the Christian life were rejected in favor of the Protestants’ own negative experience. The Baptists proclaimed throughout the world that they feel empty after having partaken of their liturgical cup: “Do not be misled and do not think“, they say, “that you can partake of the life immortal through communion. The words “eat”, “food”, “he who partakes” in the Gospel of Saint John signify merely the faith of receiving Christ as the personal Savior. Why partake of the Body and Blood of Christ? For salvation? No, we have already got it”. By this the Protestants mean the following: “We do not know why we are supposed to partake of the Eucharistic Cup. We also do not understand why did Christ instituted such a strange mystery of His Blood. However, since we are commanded to do it, we shall act out this rite. The rite, the meaning of which is unclear to and forgotten by us, we shall repeat only out of faithfulness to the Gospel and Tradition”…

The Protestants break the bread not believing that they accomplish anything. But “he who doubts is damned if he eats, because he eats not of faith: for whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). So in reality, the Protestants’ breaking of the bread is for their condemnation (Cor. 11:29).

Protestants reject all what they cannot believe. Instead of the Gospel words “I believe, help my unbelief”, they say: “I do not believe because it doesn’t make sense to me”. So their personal rationalistic outlook re-shaped the teaching of the Church and simplified it to the extent that it has very little in common with the original teaching of Christ and of His Bride, the Church.

Christ said that unless we are baptized in the Name of the Trinity, unless we partake of His Flesh and His Blood, unless we take up our cross — we shall not be saved. And all of that must be done with the fear of God and discernment, otherwise, according to Christ and His Apostles, we are damned. But Protestants have brushed all of it off and say that if they are already saved, then what can be achieved by following everything that Christ teaches us? For the “saved” neither Communion, nor baptism, nor confession are necessary, they are not instrumental, and, if they are performed, then it is done only out of obedience to the tradition which they still retain from their Roman Catholic forefathers.

The same goes for the Protestant rejection of the Mystery of Confession — they do not understand how it “works”, therefore they reject it; they do not believe it, therefore, in their mind, it cannot be true. We see that the Protestant Christian has made himself or herself the ultimate judge of the Mysteries of God. Today it is an average Protestant decides how to interpret the words of Christ, Who Christ is, Who is the Holy Trinity, and whether he is saved or not. For the Protestants the faith is a matter of an intellectual conviction and feeling one has when he thinks about him being saved. For the Protestant, his faith, life and death have nothing to do with God, for it is he himself who has a right to bear judgement on any spiritual, theological and Scriptural matters. He says: “I am saved, because God loves me, because I have said so”.

Question: Why are boys only allowed in the Altar?

Danny Coffman

Answer: We already know that no one is allowed in the Altar, for it is Holy of Holies. Exception is made only for those without whom the Mystery of the Eucharist cannot be accomplished, that is, for the Priest, Deacon and Altar-servers. In the Early Church the Altar-servers were those already tonsured as Readers or ordained Sub-deacons, who obviously were male. More than that, the Early Church HAS NEVER had female priestesses. Today’s Altar-servers are permitted in the Altar also because, if God allows, one day they may become Deacons and Priests, and girls, as we know, may not. However, in some very rare cases an old and pious woman are blessed to clean the Altar area, but still she may never touch the Holy Altar Table, for this privilege is reserved only for Priests and Deacons and only when they absolutely have to. Now, when people lost their zeal for holiness and their fear of God, one may often see a layman, who has no business in the Altar, barge through without indispensable prostrations or, at least, bows from the waist.

Question: Would killing in war count as a sin?

Adam Coffman

Answer: It is not so WHAT we do is important, but WHY we do this or that, our motifs are important. Let us take the last World War. Then the Germans believed all other nations to be sub-human and therefore their lives were considered of no value. As the result, over 50,000,000 of these “sub-humans” were killed. We understand that it was a sin. On the other hand, the people of the countries that were trampled under foot by the Nazis put up such a powerful resistance that they were able to defeat the strongest army at the time — the German Wehrmacht. So these people who were resisting but were defeated first, in the end of 1941 stopped the Nazi Army and successfully drove it out from their lands and brought the war to victory in May, 1945 (by the way, on the day of Orthodox Pascha, the Triumph of Triumphs, as we sing in the Paschal Canon). These people were defending their homes and their families. So when a gunman comes into your house and threatens to kill your family and, if we see that nothing else would work, you are permitted to use force. The Church always was with her people in such times. In the first thousand years of Christianity as well as in the most recent history, the Church have been giving her maternal blessing to those who were defending their homes. In the same WW2, on a number of occasions, German soldiers, fighting on the East Front, fled only because they saw the Heavenly Warriors charging at them, on other occasions they recalled seeing Saints Boris and Gleb and even the Mother of God Herself. So God and His Holy Church never abandons His people, as long they TRULY defend the innocent. Nevertheless, the Early Church had a rule for the soldiers, who return from the combat, to undergo the discipline of spiritual purification: repentance and abstinence from Communion for two - three years. Again, it is not a punishment but a medicine for their souls.

Question: Why are the lights left off before services? This was never done before?

Answer: The lights in the Christian Churches are used not so much as for people to see, but to correspond to this or that part in the given Church service. For instance, during the Vespers the choir sings the Lamp Lighting Psalm, Psalm 140, during which in the Orthodox Church the lampadas (oil lamps) are lighted. This tradition naturally came into the Christian worship from the Old Testament worship in the Temple of Jerusalem. In the center of the Orthodox temple is panikadilo — chandelier which is lighted not whenever people enter the church, but only when certain parts of the service take place. The most basic rule is this — the chandelier is lighted when the Royal Doors are open. The lighted chandelier represents the light of Christ that shines from the Holy of Holies — the Holy Altar of God.

Question: Since in the Bible it says that if you proclaim with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and accept Him in your heart as such, you are saved, why is this good enough to attain salvation for other religions? Do their Churches not prescribe laws and doctrines for others to follow to better their chances at mercy? Is it also not presumptuous to believe one is automatically saved?

Kevin Coffman

Answer: The faith which the Holy Scriptures talk about is not a conviction about certain things, it is not a mental assertion, or acceptance of certain information as being true. The faith that the Holy Scriptures talk about is life dedicated entirely and solely to God in the way He revealed Himself to us. Therefore, it is never enough to proclaim one’s faith with the mouth; the faith has to transfigure the whole human being, to its very core. The true conversion, accompanied by most profound repentance, may be either immediate or take one’s whole life. Nevertheless, in both cases, it is incredibly hard to preserve in one’s heart the continuous remembrance of God, which is the continuous remembrance of death and of one’s worthlessness. When somebody says that he is saved he is saying that he is solidly sure that he will never stop lamenting his sins and will never let any passion penetrate his heart. Yes, it is presumptuous to say that, for there has been only one Person Who could accomplish this and this Person is Christ. But even He, out of His Divine humility, never uttered any statements like this. Why do diverse Christian sects and denominations believe what they believe? It is because they abandoned the safety of the Church and set up their own altars. Abandoning the Church they relied on their own judgements and this has remained the mode of their theological thinking, of their spiritual life and self-perception.

Question: Could you please explain why the Church forbids cremation and is it O.K. to be placed in a mausoleum? Thank you.

Answer: For the first part, we turn to the relevant words of Archbishop John (Shahovskoi) of San Francisco: “Yes, the Church is against the burning of human bodies. That practice does not reflect the spirit of faith and the evangelical, biblical understanding of human worthiness. Junk, old rags and waste are burned; but a person's body is not an old rag! A believer's body has been anointed by the Holy Unction; it has received the Holy Spirit and has become God's temple, a vessel of Eternal Life. A temple can fall apart or ceased to be used for prayer, but it is not burned. Both the living and the dead body of a person who believes in the Resurrection, is a seed of the Resurrection. "It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body" (I Cor. 15:44). Having received the Holy Spirit, having communed with the Body and Blood of Christ, that body must reverently be placed in the ground as a seed of the future age. This body cannot be hung on a tree, it cannot be given for birds to eat, it cannot be dumped into a cesspool, or be given to dogs or beasts to be torn apart, or be subject to an artificial destruction. "You are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Gen. 3:19). This law must be fulfilled in all cases, simply and without craftiness, as a form of respect for the human body, returning it and the soul to God. The body's decomposition must not depend on man, but only on God, the Creator of life. Only He, the Master of the world, commands our life and our body.

“A person, regardless of his wishes, could of course drown, be consumed by fire, be torn to pieces by animals, or have his body destroyed completely by some explosion. All this takes place in spite of the believing deceased's will; in this he does not sin. The sin lies in the direction of the will. In an outrage against human bodies, Hitler burned millions of bodies in crematoria. This was not a sin on the part of the persons whose bodies were destroyed: this was a testimony to their suffering. That is the whole point. It is precisely the person's determination to direct the disposition of his body as if it was "his own property." This is where the sin of opposing God is generated, perhaps even unconsciously. A person is "God's property", in body and soul. Created by God, redeemed by Christ the Savior, the person does not belong to himself, but to God. The person is called to be a temple of the Living God in body and soul. In body, soul and spirit, the Christian is anointed by the Holy Spirit.

“Only a believing person can understand where the sin of cremation lies. The sin is not in the fact of physical burning of the body, but in the false direction of the person's will to rule over God's property, which his body is. A person sins when he looks upon his life as if it belonged only to him. A rather vivid manifestation of this sinful egocentric consciousness is suicide. The instruction to have one's body cremated is a sign of a similar Divine disobedience. This leads a person to rule over his earthly life and his earthly body. In suicide, a person rules over his earthly body, ignoring the will of God.

“Because of this, true Christians do not burn their bodies; believing Christians bury their bodies, which communed with the Holy Mysteries, bodies which became a part of Christ's Body, reverently and devoutly, as was the Savior's Body. Of course, the painting and decorating of the dead body, as practiced in America, does not reflect the Christian faith and human dignity, either. People do this from a pusillanimous desire to shield themselves and others from the reality of death.

“As the seed of the life to come, our body must reverently be placed in the ground. Moreover, the Church does this, proclaiming the Truth of the Resurrection.

“Those who are indifferent to God‘s will, or are consciously opposed to it, burn their bodies. Pagans in India do this, mistakenly believing in purification, which comes from the natural form of fire, ignorant of God's Grace and in the unique human personality. Symptomatic of this, the "League of Militant Godless" which was founded in Moscow shortly after the revolution, proclaimed as one of their basic aims in their cruel fight against God, the campaign for cremation of the dead. This alone shows how repulsive cremation is to the will of God.

“It is necessary for believing people to rid their conscience from every theoretical and practical unbelief. It is necessary for a person living in the image of God, to give his soul and body into God's hands for all time.”

Secondly, as far as mausoleums go, so long as our body is placed in the ground, it is O.K. But again, let us not make the mausoleum to resemble a pagan temple, erected for self-glorification, and, what is most important, there must be a Cross over it, for in the service of the Blessing of the Grave the ancient prayer speaks particularly about the Cross over the grave and nothing else.

Question: “WHO MADE GOD?” “THE FATHER!”

Answer: Well, first of all, nobody made God — God has life in Himself and He is Life. God was in the beginning and He is the beginning of all. Secondly, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have Their origin in God the Father, but They are the second and the third Persons of the Holy Trinity Who is one and indivisible. Thirdly, would the author of this note please explain what he or she meant. Thank you.

Question: Dear Fr. This question has to do with all young people that have been raised in the church and come from the families that have been very involved with the church but don’t stay in the church. We want to see more of the young people coming to church and getting involved because if something does not change we will be losing all the young Orthodox to other faiths which is already happened and is very common. How can we entice the young members to start coming back into the church and getting involved in church again? This problem is not just in our parish but all Orthodox churches. Have we lost touch with the youth of the church or our faith?

Answer: Young people stop coming to our churches because we stopped being shining examples of holiness. Our homes are supposed to be little family churchs or monasteries, little houses of prayer, piety and Christian love (not just being nice to each other but having love that transfigures the whole household). This vision of family life is gone from our extremely secular lives. (From OUR lives, but it would be wrong to speak in such terms about the rest of the Orthodox world). We have failed to nurture in our children the hunger for holiness, for prayer, only because we ourselves do not have this yearning in our own hearts. Mother of God, who is an image of the Church, is referred to in one of the verses of the Akathist as the “beautiful hand full of heavenly manna”. Church fills the hungry, but only those who are aware of the hunger that is not of the stomach but of the heart. Our young people are not starving for Christ, they are pleased with themselves and content without Christ. Why? Because we have almost extinguished this hunger for Christ in our own hearts. If we do not have it, how can we pass it on to our young ones? We are wrong thinking that watered-down Orthodoxy and shortened church services will attract people. Why would people come to us, if they have the same watered-down Christianity in their own Catholic/Protestant/Nothing churches. Church has the real food, so let us not swap it for junk food. People coming to Orthodox church expect to experience the authentic Christian worship and if we give them what they seek — our churches will be filled. If we ourselves do not want the “real thing”, let us not deny it to others.


Question: What were some of the main reasons for the Great Schism in 1054?


Answer: Some background information. There have always been groups within the Church that set themselves apart from the historical Church. First, there were small groups, known to us as Gnostic Christian sects, that taught that Jesus Christ was not the True God and perfect Man, but merely a righteous man (the wide spread of Freemasonry and the current interest in the books like “Da Vinci Code” testify to longevity of Gnostic version of Christianity). Then, in the 4th century there emerged Nestorian heresy which taught that Jesus Christ had two distinct personalities: Divine and human (remnants of this group still survive in insignificant numbers, mostly in Iran). The major group that left the save haven of the Church in the 5th century was, as they are known now, Coptic, Jacobite, or Oriental Orthodox. Their numbers are still very large as they constitute the majority of Christians in Egypt and Ethiopia; they are also well represented in Middle East and India. There are Coptic Churches in the U.S. The Coptic Christians separated from the Orthodox Church because they did not believe that in the person of Jesus Christ both Divine and human natures were present fully. They taught that just as God is so much greater than His creation, so in Christ His Divinity absorbed and therefore negated His humanity. Hence, the name of their Church — monophysite — “one nature”. When it all happened, although it was obviously painful, the monophysite heresy was spread mostly only in Egypt and Syria and did not afflict neither Northern nor Western confines of the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile, the Western part of the Roman Empire was overrun by the Vandals, mostly Franks, who wanted to cut it off from the rest of the Christian world. The Franks started their propaganda among both the nobility and clergy as to downplay the role of the Eastern Roman Empire, with the Emperor’s seat in Constantinople. They tried to present the Easterners as pagans and idol-worshippers. The Franks supported and upheld the separatist movement within the Western part of the Orthodox Church with its center in Rome. They supported the heretical idea of supremacy of Rome’s Patriarch and watched the Western Orthodox accept the new and erroneous teaching of the Holy Spirit preceding not from the Father, as is taught by the Holy Scripture and all the Holy Fathers, but from the Father and the Son. In order to cement the growing division among the East and West, frankish kings promoted the addition of the words “and from the Son” into the Nicene Creed. It all came to a head in the early 11th century, when the Roman legates came to the Patriarch of Constantinople and stated that he had to accept the Creed with the addition, which was introduced in Rome itself only 200 years before. This obviously shows how ignorant the Roman legates were regarding the teaching and history of their own Church. They also demanded for Patriarch of Constantinople to come to Rome and kiss the Pope’s shows in acknowledgement of his lordship over the whole Church.

So, what are the main reasons for the Great Schism of 1054?

1. The novel Roman teaching that it is not the Holy Spirit who guides the Church in all truth and it is not Christ Who is the Head of the Church but the Bishop of Rome.

2. The contrary-to-Scriptures assertion that God the Holy Spirit proceeds from both God the Father and God the Son, instead of solely God the Father, as we read in the Holy Gospel.

These were the main reasons that led the Holy Church to recognize that the Western Church had amassed grave heretical teachings and therefore was no longer a part of the Church of the Living God. More than that, in the last two centuries the Roman Catholic Church continued to introduce doctrines unknown to the Apostolic and historical Church of Christ. For instance, in the 19th century two new doctrines became the focal point of the life of the Roman Church: dogma of Papal infallibility and of Immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. We see that as soon as one departs from the safety of the Patristic teaching of the Church he inevitably will continue to move farther and farther away from the pure teaching of Christ and His Holy Apostles.

Question: Are we permitted to have panakhida for non-Orthodox deceased? And if not, a proper prayer for their souls? Suggest a prayer.

Answer: To answer the first part of the question, let us recall what are we praying for in panihida: “Rest, O Lord, their soul where the Saints and the righteous repose.” We also pray that their soul would find rest in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that is, in the glory of God. Yes, we all want this but do we have a right to come before the awesome throne of Gods in His Holy Temple and demand the priest to deliver such a request of ours and expect a positive answer? We will be asking Our Lord to unite to Himself in the realm of His Heavenly Triumphant Church those who had very little or, more likely, no intention of joining His Militant Church while they were alive here on earth. When we gather in the God’s temple for the Divine Service we stand together and, united by the Holy Spirit, manifest the Body of Christ and all our prayers are offered in the mode ‘Your Own of Your Own’ — we are His, Lord’s, and we offer Him that which is His Own. It is a complete and infinite union in Christ. It is like a marriage where only those who are united in this mystery participate. Continuing the analogy of marriage we can say that we obviously communicate with other people, other than our spouse, in public, never intimately which is reserved only for our ‘other half’. Divine Services are a marriage feast of the Church with Christ.

Here is what was written about this question by a Saint, Venerable Joseph of Optina: “In speaking of the strictness of our Orthodox Church concerning the commemoration of Christians who believe incorrectly, we do not mean to say that our Church commands us, her children, not to pray for them in any way at all. She only prohibits us from praying in a self-willed fashion, i.e., praying as we wish and in whatever manner might come into our heads. She teaches us that everything we do, even prayer itself, should be done "properly and according to order" (I Cor. 14:40). In all our church services, we do pray for all nations of diverse peoples and for the whole world. We pray exactly as our Lord Jesus Christ taught His Apostles to pray in the prayer He taught them, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!" This all-embracing petition gathers within itself all our needs and the needs of all our brothers, even though they be non-Orthodox. In it we entreat Him even for the souls of the departed non-Orthodox Christians, that He may accomplish with them that which is pleasing to His holy will. For the Lord knows immeasurably better than we to whom to show mercy and what mercy to show. If during some church service you wish to pray for someone close to you, then during the Lord's Prayer, sigh to the Lord on his behalf and say, "May Thy holy will be done in him, O Lord!" and limit yourself to this prayer. For thus have you been taught to pray by the Lord Himself. And believe that this prayer of yours made in such a way will be a thousand times more pleasing to the Lord and more profitable to your soul than all your self-willed commemorations in church.

In summary, what has been expressed above is founded on Sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Holy Fathers. It naturally leads to the conclusion that to pray with the common prayers of the Church for Orthodox and non-Orthodox on an equal basis is not in accord with the teaching and ordinances of our One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Ecumenical Church. Thus do we speak and thus do we act. And this is not out of hatred toward those Christians who believe wrongly, nor because we do not wish them well, but because our self-composed or self-willed prayer for them will not be pleasing to God, will be without benefit for their souls, and will be accounted as sin for those who pray thus for them”.

So we can and must pray for our non-Orthodox relatives and friends at home. The following is a model of a private prayer which might be said for a non-Orthodox person as suggested by the Elder Leonid of Optina, one who was experienced in the spiritual life:

Have mercy, O Lord, if it is possible, on the soul of Thy servant (name), departed to eternal life in separation from Thy Holy Orthodox Church! Unsearchable are Thy judgments. Do not count this my prayer as sin. But may Thy Holy Will be done!

Venerable Joseph of Optina concludes: “Let not our hearts be troubled, and let us not fear the austerity of the rules of our Holy Orthodox Church! Rather, let us all the more take courage. Let this not lead us to despair of our salvation. On the contrary, let it arouse our souls to contrite, humble repentance of our sins before the Lord, while the doors of His compassion are not yet shut upon us. For, according to the word of the Psalmist, "a heart that is broken and humbled God will not despise" (Ps. 50:17). And the more humble, the more self-abasing our prayer, the more hopeful and successful it will be”.

Venerable Joseph of Optina

Question: Since the Lord’s Prayer teaches us how and Whom to pray to it seems contradicting to pray to the saints. Is there another scripture that teaches us to pray to the saints?

Answer: We ask Saints to intercede for us before God in prayer. We believe that the reality of the Church encompasses both the living and those who have died and are now "with Christ" (Phil. 1:23). Those who have died in Christ do not care for us any less, nor do they cease to pray for us because they have passed into eternal life. We approach the Saints with veneration as we ask their prayers. In no way can this be compared to the worship we offer the Triune God and to Him only.

God has been pleased to grant many miracles and blessings by the intercessions of the Saints. The prayers of a righteous person are just as effective after death as they are before, if not even more so. God glorifies His saints in the Holy Spirit (cf. John 17:22). Venerable Silouan the Athonite explained it like this: "Once upon a time I did not understand how it was that the holy inhabitants of heaven could see our lives, but. . . I realized that they see us in the Holy Spirit and know our entire lives. . . . In the Kingdom of Heaven the Holy Saints look upon the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ; but through the Holy Spirit they see too the sufferings of men on earth." It is through their intimate union with God that the Saints see us, hear us, and know us. Jesus showed that the departed can be aware of events on earth when he asserted "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day. He saw it and was glad" (John 8:56).

Scripture makes it clear that some men were especially powerful intercessors with God (Jas. 5:16-18, Job 42:8). Yet this is not limited to this life only. In the second book of Maccabees, dropped by the Protestants from the Bible, the Prophet Jeremiah is represented as constantly praying before God for the people of Israel (2 Macc. 15:14). This doctrine was known and accepted in the Early Church as well; inscriptions on early Christian tombs ask the prayers of the departed, and documents such as "The Martyrdom of Polycarp," testify to it.

Jesus is the only Savior of mankind. Yet, is it true that because Christ has saved us we no longer need each other's prayers? Scripture and Christian tradition witness to the necessity and power of prayer for fellow Christians (cf. 2 Cor. 1:11). The departed Saints are intercessors, and their prayers are most powerful before the throne of God.

Question: What makes the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church so different?

Adam Coffman

Answer: If you take a set of identical twins whom you wouldn’t be able to tell apart, still you know that, despite of their similarities, they are two distinct persons, not one. When we talk about differences and similarities between Churches, we must keep in mind that Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ gave birth to one Church, not to two or many. Christ even prayed to His Heavenly Father to keep His Church one as They, God the Father and God the Son, are one. Therefore, even when the differences might seem to us minor, a religious seeker is either in the Church or outside of the Church.

There are many differences between the Orthodox Church and Roman Catholicism but the following three are the gravest:

1. The Roman Church teaches that the Pope of Rome is the Head of the Church, for he is the vicar, that is, a substitute of Christ on earth. This makes the Pope the head of the Church in stead of the Lord. What does it mean on practical level? The Orthodox Church teaches that to be saved we must be united with Christ. Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, teaches that a believer has be united with the Pope first, and then with Christ; and vice versa, without loyalty and submission to the Pope — there is no salvation. Further on, the Roman Church teaches that the Pope of Rome is the only Archpastor, i.e. bishop, who possesses the fullness of episcopal grace. Which means, the Pope is the only true Bishop of the Church in the full sense of the word. All other bishops are merely papal representatives. The Holy Orthodox Church has always believed, as did the Apostolic Fathers of the Early Church, that where a bishop is there is the Church. To paraphrase it — every city or region has its own bishop who is invested with the fullness of the Apostolic episcopal grace and there is no Bishop greater than him, for all the bishops are equal in abundance of grace.

2. Another Roman teaching which the Orthodox Church does not recognize is teaching of Papal infallibility. This doctrine reads that the Bishop of the city of Rome cannot err or make mistakes when speaking ex cathedra, i.e. when he makes statements on the moral and theological issues. Although this dogma was promulgated only in the 19th century, by virtue of being a dogma, it applies to the whole history of papacy. And that, the history of papacy, could make an interesting reading, for there were times when there were two competing Popes on the throne at the same time (so-called Pope and Anti-Pope), there were women elected as Popes of Rome, there was even a case of a dead Pope who was kept on the throne for a considerable length of time in order for his court to gain some political advantage. We know that there were Roman Bishops who did the things that are not fit to be described in a parish Bulletin. But the dogma of Papal infallibility says that the Pope becomes the mouthpiece of God whenever he, the Pope, teaches his Church. Thus, the Holy Spirit must enter the Pope, regardless of his sinfulness and unworthiness. Here, the Papacy is above God Whom it believes it can force to serve the needs of the Roman Church. The Orthodox Church, on the other hand, teaches the need for every Christian to purify himself and thus prepare himself for the cooperation with the Holy Spirit. This is called synergy when we move towards God and hope and pray that He answers our prayers. In the Roman Church, just by the virtue of being a Pope the person can magically “attract” the Holy Spirit and his personal holiness is of no importance here.

3. The last of the three major differences between the Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism is the Roman introduction into the Apostolic Creed a dogma that is changing the relationships of the Persons in the Holy Trinity. The Church has always believed and recited in the Creed that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father”, which means that the Person of God the Father is the source of both God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. By the 11th, century the Roman Church had adopted a new teaching and altered the Nicene Creed. From then on, the Western Church believed “in the Holy Spirit that proceeds from the Father and the Son”. By doing this, the Roman Church does two things. It, first, contradicts the Holy Scripture (for Christ said: “I will send you the Holy Spirit that proceeds from the Father”) and the Ecumenical Councils that forbid any change to the Creed. Secondly, the teaching of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Son presupposes that the Son is the source of procession as much as the Father is. If the Father and the Son are equal in their ability to give birth to Persons of the Holy Trinity, then the Son should give birth not only to the Holy Spirit, but to another God the Son, for this is what God the Father is doing. Which in turn means that God the Father and God the Son possess a characteristic that the Holy Spirit lacks. Hence we must conclude that the Holy Spirit is not con-substantial with the Father and the Son but is of an inferior nature. Recently, the Roman Church tried to sweep this problem “under the rug” allowing some parishes and local churches to adopt the Apostolic Creed without “and the Son“ addition, showing their indifference to dogmatic matters. However, the teaching on the Holy Trinity has always been regarded with the greatest attention by the Christian Church.

These three are only the major differences between the Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church. Besides, Roman Church has other teachings that have had a great impact on her theology and spiritual life of the Western Christians. Some people say that it doesn’t matter what we believe as far as the procession of the Holy Spirit or primacy of the Pope. Whereas in fact, it does matter what we believe, Whom we worship and how we conduct our spiritual and prayer life. For everything in the Church, as well as in our souls, must be in order, thus reflecting the order of the Heavenly Realm where there is no chaos but harmony founded on Love.

Question: While on vacation, which church would be closest in theology and style of worship to Orthodox Faith to visit, if no Orthodox church is local?

Answer: “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine... they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Tim. 4:3)

Do Orthodox and Non-Orthodox really share the same faith? Is being close, at the first sight, in theology and style mean that they are the same? Holy Apostle warns us that if even an Angel comes to us and teaches something contrary to the teaching of the Church — to reject him. Being “like” something doesn’t make it the “authentic” item. Roman Catholic Church, for instance, as well as the Byzantine Catholic, for they are the same thing, have always perceived God as an angry and capricious god who needs to be appeased, pleased and satisfied, in order to change his wrath to mercy. Hence, the Latin Church has the dogma of purgatory, where the sinners, by their enduring suffering, satisfy God Who is satisfied by things like that. Which means that the god of the Roman Catholics derives pleasure from our suffering. This explains why THE theologian of the Western Church, Thomas Aquinas, teaches that one of the joy the righteous will have in Paradise is beholding sufferings of the sinners in hell. Can we say that it is the same — going to the Roman or Byzantine/Ukrainian Catholic parish in order to unite in worship of the one who delights in sufferings, verses worshipping God of love and mercy Whose sole concern now is to save every soul. We must agree that there is a profound difference between a god who demands satisfaction and God Who sacrificed Himself for the salvation of us sinners. This is not a “bookish” theology but centuries-old mind of the Roman Church.

One might say that Byzantine Catholic Church is just like Orthodox. Then we must remind ourselves the Scripture words regarding the Angel who teaches heresy — he definitely looks like the real Angel, but his teaching reveals him as a counterfeit. Byzantine Catholic Church was created in 16th and 17th centuries and make the transition of the lukewarm and indifferent Orthodox to Roman Catholicism less painful and drastic.

Then what about the Protestant Churches? If the Roman/Byzantine Catholic Church has one teaching and mentality, the Protestant groups vary from Church to Church and from parish to parish. Is it safe to go and unite in worship with the people who believe not what the Church has been taught by Christ and believed for two millennia, but what the local Pastor wants them to believe right now? Yes, it might make sense to those who have never experienced the profound unity with the True Church of Christ, whom the Gospel calls “the Pillar and Ground of Truth”.

We recite in our Creed: “I believe… in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church”. So the Church is one and we believe in it as surely as into the Holy Trinity. Then why would we go to other Churches?

The final and only answer to the question asked would be the following: in most cases, there are Orthodox parishes in every locality. Yes, you might need to drive an hour to attend the worship in the Orthodox church. Do not some of our parishioners already doing it, driving for 30 minutes to an hour to attend the Sunday and Festal Services? If you do not know about Orthodox church in the area where you are going, please, ask your parish priest for this information. If, however, you happen to vacation on an uninhabited island, then stay in your room and pray your morning prayers and the hymns you remember from the Divine Liturgy. In this way, you will pray to the True God and you will do so in unity with the Holy Orthodox Church. If, in a rare case, there is really no Orthodox churches in the area, and if the family and friends whom you are visiting are getting ready to go to a non-Orthodox church, it would be good to decline their invitation to join them. Rather, stay at home and cook the after-church breakfast for them. Thus, you can manifest your love and care for them and, being alone, pray as you ought to.

However, if, for some reason, we happen to attend a worship service in a non-Orthodox church, we should behave merely as visitors, never receiving communion (in whatever form this particular congregation has it) nor participating in the service in any way.

Question: How does the Orthodox Faith feel about cremation?

Kathleen Djuric

Answer: A few months ago we already answered this question, but since it was brought up again, here is a short summery on the issue:

The Orthodox view of the body is quite different from the view of those who favor cremation (such as Hindus). We do not perceive of the body as a prison for the soul, so that at death we need to destroy the prison to set the soul free. Nor do we see the body as a "mere shell," which has no meaning after death. We believe that the whole person, created in the image and likeness of God, both soul and body. The tragedy of death is the separation of the person whom God created to be whole. We also believe that the body is affected by holiness: We venerate the holy relics — the bodies — of the Saints, and we "look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come," when our bodies will be glorified by Christ.

In the writings of the Apostles and the Holy Fathers we do not find anything written regarding cremation only because this problem did not exist then. The Church pronounces her words of guidance only when there is question or a problem. The problem of cremation is new to the post-Christian West, therefore it is only now that the answer is being given and it is: “Cremation is contradicts what we believe and if an Orthodox Christian chooses to be cremated he or she makes a conscious step away from the safe haven of the Church and from the saving hand of Christ, the person decides to live after death on his or her own, without Christ. Yes, it is sad when this things happen, but, as one poet said: ’For the right to destroy ourselves we fight till the end’.

It is lamentable that the issue of cremation has become "a problem" for some faithful. But more often than not, when these problems arise, it is because we have not put the Orthodox Faith before and above everything else. It is precisely because we allow erroneous or misleading man-made ordinances that we find ourselves at odds with the teachings of the Church.

Question: We read in the Bulletin that at one of the Bible Studies you talked about tattooing one’s body. Could you give an overview of the Orthodox teaching on tattooing?

Kevin Coffman

Answer: One can say a lot about the subject. To start with, we are offering you an article from the Nativity issue of Herald of Saint Elijah Orthodox Cathedral, Merrillville, IN:

TATTOOS & BODY PIERCING

It seems people of every age, background and faith are finding the allure of permanent, color images needled into their skin or the poking of metal rods and rings all over their bodies irresistible…

Word ‘tattoo’ is derived from the Tahitian word ‘tatay’, meaning ‘to inflict wounds’. Body piercing was popular as long as 5,000 years ago, until it was banned by the early Christians because it was believed to be ‘desecrating the body’.

Many young people claim to make fashion statements, personality statements, and statements of individuality by prodding, poking, piercing, and painting their bodies. Our society has become so desensitized that self-mutilation is looked upon as the norm and an individual's body is treated as an object of personal reverence and glorification rather than the temple of God to be offered back to Him.

What does our Orthodox Faith say about this? In I Corinthians 6:19-20, Saint Paul teaches: "Do you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit Who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s”.

If our body is not our own, then we should make every effort to protect it and maintain it undefiled and pure. We are vessels that carry the body and blood of Jesus Christ; we are His temple, His home. Knowing and understanding this, we must make every effort to treat our bodies as temples of God and dwelling places of His glory. Our most Holy Theotokos was the first to become God's temple. Her life of chastity, purity, obedience and self-sacrifice is an example for all of us to emulate.

Millions of people exist and live their earthly lives without ever understanding what their purpose in life is or why they were created. For Orthodox Christians, the goal of man is ''theosis,'' or union with God. Our purpose is not to attract attention of others by making radical statements with our bodies for our personal vanity, but rather to attract the grace of the Holy Spirit and to lead others to Christ through our Christian example.

We are called to be "ambassadors for Christ." Do we fulfill this purpose by adorning our bodies with tattoos or body piercing? In Romans 12:1-2, Saint Paul tells us, "Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.”

We are not to transform ourselves according to the latest whims and fads of society but rather conform and abide by the will of God.

The allure of body piercing is more than skin deep. It affects our soul, our mind, and our entire being. If we are to maintain a lifestyle of purity and attain union with God, then we must denounce all bodily abuses.

Rather than making "artistic expressions" with our bodies, let us make an _expression of faith by maintaining our bodies, pure, spotless and undefiled so that we may “be an example of the believers, in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, in purity” (I Timothy 4: 12).

Question: Can we offer panihidas, candles and prayers for the reposed whose bodies were cremated?

Ann Coffman

Answer: To answer this question we must accept some axioms.

A) Any human being trying to lead a Christian life finds the idea of intentional violent destruction of human body prior to its burial unacceptable.

B) Panihida is a memorial service by which we ask Our Lord to mercifully look down upon the soul of the departed Orthodox Christian who throughout his life remained faithful to the Gospel of Christ and the Holy Traditions of the Church. With that we also assume that there could have been many instances when the person sinned and questioned the Faith, but he had never challenged the Word of God and His Holy Church by apostasy or blasphemy, or, even if he did do that, before he died he repented of those transgressions and thereby was re-united with the Body of Christ — His Holy Orthodox Church.

If the reposed person had made the choice to be cremated in explicit defiance of the teaching of the Holy Apostolic Church, then, by doing so, he proclaimed that the Church and her opinion on the issue of cremation was of no importance to him. By this statement he consciously placed himself outside of the salvific realm of the Church, and our attempts to hold Church services on his behalf would be in violation of his freely and consciously made choice. We have free will, which means that if we honestly and whole-heartedly choose darkness not even Christ would intervene, for He does not break human will.

However, if the person was unaware of the Church’s negative attitude towards cremation, or was lied to about the matter, this is a sin, as done in ignorance, we hope would be forgiven by Our Merciful God. In this case, we do need to pray for the forgiveness of this person by offering panihidas, candles, alms, prayers, etc. Moreover, these prayers should be intensified because to the rest of his sins and transgressions, this person also added the sin of willful destruction of the temple of God — his God-given body. What exactly does the body endure during the process of cremation and knowing this why would someone subject their loved one to it? More on this discussion to follow...