Orthodox Christian Initiative for Africa

Δευτέρα, 27 Ιανουαρίου 2020

Orthodoxy and culture

Khanya e isoe ho Molimo holimo (Orthodox Christian blog from South Africa)
The 1st photo is from our post Nice orthodox women from Kenya

“Orthodoxy and culture” is a huge topic, and it is impossible to do justice to it in a single blog post. That’s why it is a good topic for a synchroblog, in which it can be examined from different viewpoints. But even of fifty or a hundred people blog on it simultaneously, I doubt that we will have exhausted the topic.

“Culture” is usually defined by sociologists as ways of behaving and thinking that are learnt from other people, rather than being passed on by genetic inheritance. In that sense it is closely related to tradition, which is the transmission of values and patterns of behavious from one generation to the next. Though it is interesting how blurred that distinction can get in modern culture. People speake about organisations having DNA, when what they actually mean is corporate culture.
And like other human organisations, the Orthodox Church has a corporate culture that some may have have described (inaccurately) as DNA. Or, to be more accurate, the Orthodox Church has several different cultures, as it has inculturated itself into different human societies, and some traditions vary from place to place, but there is also a core culture, which we call Holy Tradition (with a capital T). But even Holy Tradition is not DNA, though the analogy comes a bit closer, because Holy Tradition is that part of Orthodox culture without which the Church would not be the Church. But unlike DNA, it is not passed on automatically and biologically. It is passed on by teaching, as St Paul notes (2 Tim 2:2), which is the essence of tradition. If Orthodoxy were in the DNA of the Church, then there would be no need to baptise the children of Orthodox parents, because they would have inherited it in the same way as they inherit hair and eye and skin colour. But as it is, the children of Orthodox parents are baptised (with four exorcisms beforehand) in the same way as those whose parents were not Orthodox, and are the first in their family to become Orthodox Christians.
But the Church lives in the world, and the world has its own culture, and when we speak of “Orthodoxy and culture” we are usually thinking of how Orthodox culture relates to the world’s cultures. This is a topic that has interested missionaries and missiologists a great deal. How does Christian culture relate to secular culture?
Lots of books have been written about that topic, and it would be impossible even to try to summarise then here. What I will try to do is to give a few exanples that may illustrate a few aspects of the theme of Orthodoxy and culture.

In the book Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission by Michael Oleksa we can see something of the encounter of the Orthodox Church with people of a different culture. Orthodox mission in Alaska came at a time when Western Christian mission tended to be culturally pushy, and western missionaries often engaged in social engineering, setting out to make other cultures conform to Western norms. In Alaska this is particularly noticable, as Western missionaries followed Orthodox ones, and the contrast in their methods was easily seen. In his book Fr Michael Oleksa explores some of the theological and missiological reasons for the difference, but it is interesting that even secular social scientists — sociologists and anthropologists — have observed the difference and remarked on it.
The missiological point here is that Alaskan culture became Orthodox, and though in some ways Orthodoxy transformed Alaskan culture, it did not conquer it.
Something similar happeend in Russia, though it took many years, centuries even, from the first missionaries to the appearance of a culture that could be said to be Orthodox. The transformation was not complete, yet there was a sense in which people could speak of Holy Russia. The Emperor Peter the Great did not much like this, and sought to replace Russian Orthodox culture with Western modernity, a process that the Bolsheviks tried diligently and energetically to complete, often with the use of force. For much of the 20th century there were culture wars in Russia between Orthodox culture and Bolshevik culture. But Orthodoxy had become so embedded in Russian culture that the Bolsheviks could not eradicate it without destroying Russian culture.
In 1995 I visited Russia to do research from my doctoral thesis on Orthodox mission methods, and spoke to a Russian missiologist, Andrei Borisovich Efimov. He said that the task of re-evangelising post-Bolshevik Russia would best be accomplished by the main thing that had overthrown Bolshevism, namely Russian Orthodox culture.
I was not so sure.
In the Boshevik period there had seemed to be a binary choice: Bolshevism or Orthodoxy. In the late Bolshevik period many people, despairing of the spiritual bankruptcy of Bolshevism, came to Orthodoxy. But I wasn’t sure if it would work in the post-Bolshevik era. I had passsed bookstalls outside the Metro stations in Moscow, and most of them were selling Russian translations of the works of authors like the American novelist Stephen King. The post-Bolshevik Russia was rapidly becoming multicultural, and reevangelising Russia was going to require a multicultural approach.

One of the cultures that needs to be approached is the punk-rock youth culture I mentioned in an earlier post — Pussy Riot: a cultural revolution? A Punk group, calling themselves Pussy Riot, put on an univited performance in the main cathedral in Moscow, after whicvh they were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, or hooliganism, depending on which media reports you read. I have a certain fellow-feeling for the members of Pussy Riot, who were also accused of blasphemy.
Back on 9 June 1969 the Natal Mercury carried a banner headline on the front page: ‘Church profaned,’ says Bishop. The bishop was the Anglican bishop of Natal, the Right Reverend Thomas George Vernon Inman, and the one responsible for the profaning of the church, according to him, was me. If you’re interested in knowing what provoked the bishop’s remark, you can read more about it here: Notes from underground: Psychedelic Christian Worship — thecages.
In the Pussy Riot case the dialogue, if it was a dialogue, was initiated by the punk rockers. They had performed in at least one other church before, so they obviously had something they wanted to say to the church. I would be interested to know what the response of the church was, though such things are not usually reported in the media. The Patriarch of Moscow has promised to make an official statement after the court case is over, but that is not the kind of dialogue I am thinking of. Have any priests, or other Orthodox Christians, visited them in prison? Has anyone from the church talked to them, rather than talking to the media about them? Maybe they won’t want to listen. Maybe they do not want a dialogue at all, but rather a monologue, in which they do all the talking and the church does all the listening. But one doesn’t know that until one tries.
The members of Pussy Riot have been facing the court, but there is also a sense in which the Church itself is on trial, and the followers of the punk rock culture will be giving their verdict. And it’s not as if it has never been done before — see here, for example: Punks to Monks: Eastern Orthodoxy’ s Curious Allure — Mind and Body — Utne Reader ["Ν": See also False Black: Gothic Orthodox?]
My parish priest and colleague, Fr Athanasius Akunda, recently wrote his doctoral thesis on “Orthodox dialogue with Bunyore culture”. The Banyore are the people of his home district in western Kenya, and their encounter with Orthodoxy has taken the form of a dialogue, as it did in Alaska.

We live in increasingly multicultural world, in which different cultures, which might never have encountered each other in the past, meet each other.
Orthodox culture is a kind of dual culture. Since the church is made up of human beings, the Orthodox Church has a human culture, but it also has a culture that emanates from God. In this the Church reflects the incarnation of its Lord, who had a divine and human nature. The human culture comes from the people among whom the church finds itself, and human cultures, like human nature, are fallen cultures, and have fallen away from God. But they do not need to be destroyed and replaced by some heavenly culture. Rather they need to be restored and transformed. It is the mandate for this that Father Michael Oleksa finds in the theology of St Maximus the Confessor.
Because the world’s cultures are fallen, there is always a sense in which Orthodoxy is countercultural. But there is also the hope of restoration and transformation. Sometimes it is difficult to see how this can be done, as in the example of the Izikhothane, which I wrote about in another of the lead-up posts for this synchroblog: Izikhothane — a new word for an old fashion. The behaviour of the Izikhothane is like a religious ritual, a ritual of sacrifice to Mammon. In rural areas people might offer a bull or a sheep or a goat from their herds as a holocaust, a whole burnt offering. Trampling on a bucket of Kentucky fried chicken is an urban version of the same ritual. Love of riches is far from Orthodoxy, and yet the sacrifices of the Izikhothane show that they despise and are somehow above the riches of this world. Is it all that big a step from that to rejecting the riches of this world to show that they have treasure in heaven?
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This blog post is part of a synchroblog (synchronised blog) on “Orthodoxy and culture”. A synchroblog is when different people blog on the same general topic on the same day, and then post a list of links to each other’s posts, so you can surf from one to the other, and see the topic from several different points of view.
Here are links to other posts on the topic, and more will be added as other synchrobloggers post their contributions:

Dn Stephen Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Khanya on Orthodoxy and culture
Jonathan Kotinek (Orthodox Christian) of Fixing a Hole on Orthodox Synchroblog – Orthodoxy and Culture
Susan Cushman (Orthodox Christian) of Pen and Palette on Orthodox Synchroblog: Orthodoxy and Culture
Katherine Bolger Hyde (Orthodox) of God-Haunted Fiction on Literature and Orthodox Culture

The Kingdom of Heaven, where racial discrimination has no place

The Sins of a Nation

«African needs to be helped, to find his divine roots, for his soul to be at peace, to become united with God...»
The Orthodox African Church (Patriarchate of Alexandria) denounces the exploitation of Africa by contemporary colonialists

Grace and “the Inverted Pyramid”
The Passion of Jesus Christ and the Passions of Africa
A Greek saint, who went from village to village, compared the ancient wisdom of the Orthodox Christians with the culture of the West

Mtakatifu Martino wa Tours, Ufaransa (+397)

Africa of my heart

Mtakatifu Martino wa Tours (Savaria, Panonia, leo Hungaria 316 – Candes-Saint-Martin, Gaul, leo Ufaransa 397) alikuwa mmonaki, halafu askofu (kuanzia 371 hadi kifo chake).

Alipokaribia kifo, walimuomba asiondoke, naye akasali hivi: “Ee Bwana, nikihitajiwa bado na watu wako, sikatai uchovu wa kazi: utakalo lifanyike!”

Maisha yake yaliandikwa na Sulpicius Severus yakawa kielelezo cha vitabu juu ya watakatifu.

Sifa yake ilienea haraka hivi kwamba aliheshimiwa kama mtakatifu ingawa hakuwa mfiadini kama kawaida ya wakati ule.

Sikukuu yake inaadhimishwa tarehe 8 Novemba.

Ona pia

Watakatifu
Wakristo Orthodox ya Afrika

Utatu Mtakatifu, Mungu ambaye anapenda ubinadamu

Yesu Kristo - Mungu akawa mtu na mtu inakuwa kama mungu
Bikira Maria, Mama wa Mungu
Yesu Kristo: "Ninyi ni nuru ya ulimwengu"!...
Vijito Vya Maji Yaletayo Uzima - "Mtu ye yote mwenye kiu na aje kwangu anywe"
Kanisa la Orthodox

Κυριακή, 26 Ιανουαρίου 2020

A parable of a wicked kingdom in which there lived a large number of slaves

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Ancient faith / Glory to God for all things

There was a wicked kingdom in which there lived a large number of slaves. The kingdom fought wars, built cities and was extremely successful in growing its economy. Its achievements were the envy of all the other kingdoms. The slaves did well, too. They were not given low jobs or manual labor. Instead, they were “helping” slaves. Their task was to help the people of the Kingdom get by. If life in the kingdom became empty and meaningless, the slaves would cheer the people up and help them continue with their lives.

When people began to doubt that the kingdom served a good purpose, the slaves would reassure them that together, they would make the kingdom better. One day, a terrible calamity occurred and the kingdom perished. Very few people survived. “What was it all for?” the survivors asked. “Nothing,” the slaves replied. And in that day, the slaves became free.

No one has written more insightfully nor critically about secularism than the late Fr. Alexander Schmemann. His classic book, For the Life of the World, is not only a primer on the meaning of the sacramental life, but primarily, a full-blown confrontation with the great heresy of secularism. Secularism is not the rejection of God, but the assertion that the world exists apart from God and that our task is to do the best we can in this world. Fr. Alexander suggests that the Church in the modern world has largely surrendered to secularism. “The Church’s surrender,” he says, “consists not in giving up creeds, traditions, symbols and customs…but in accepting the very function of religion in terms of promoting the secular value of help, be it help in character building, peace of mind, or assurance of eternal salvation.”

He is not alone in this observation. The Protestant theologian, Stanley Hauerwas, says much the same thing:

…the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world. One reason why it is not enough to say that our first task is to make the world better is that we Christians have no other means of accurately understanding the world and rightly interpreting the world except by way of the church. Big words like “peace” and “justice,” slogans the church adopts under the presumption that, even if people do not know what “Jesus Christ is Lord” means, they will know what peace and justice means, are words awaiting content. The church really does not know what these words mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Pilate permitted the killing of Jesus in order to secure both peace and justice (Roman style) in Judea. It is Jesus’ story that gives content to our faith, judges any institutional embodiment of our faith, and teaches us to be suspicious of any political slogan that does not need God to make itself credible.

The extent to which we have all been secularized is easily measured by just how strange these statements by great theologians sound. The Church has surrendered because it promotes the value of “helping?” The Church does not exist in order to make the world a better place? These have been common themes in my writing (and I easily acknowledge my indebtedness). But when I have said, “We will not make the world a better place,” my articles are met with a torrent of dismay. I offer here more of the same.

Hauerwas makes the clear point that the word “better” has no meaning apart from the story of Jesus, or certainly no meaning that Christians should agree to. Schmemann goes so far as to call the Church’s agreement to “help” the world (however the world wants to define that help) as surrender.

So what are we to do? First, we must recognize that the world is under judgment. As it exists unto itself, it is meaningless and without value. It measures itself by GDP and slogans of equality and freedom. And yet the GDP is but a measure of meaningless consumption and equality and freedom only mean equally free to amuse ourselves to death with whatever pleasure we might choose.

One of the “helps” the surrendered Church provides to our culture is courage in the face of death. The cultural Church reminds people that death is not the end of things, but only the beginning of something newer and greater. Death as an enemy is no longer preached. Instead, death is natural, a part of life, and though we mourn someone’s passing, we “celebrate their life” and pretend that nothing tragic has occurred. We will remember them.

When the disciples saw Jesus on the Road to Emmaus and recognized Him in the breaking of the bread, they did not say to each other, “Wow! There really is a life after death!” This is not the meaning of Christ’s resurrection. The Resurrection is not proof of your life after death, but the showing forth that Christ Himself alone is Life.

Holy Liturgy co-celebrated by Metropolitan Jonah of Kampala & Bishop Silvester of Gulu at St. Nicholas Cathedral Namungoona, Uganda (more here).

The death of Christ does not reveal death as a passage. It reveals death as an enemy, something to be destroyed. All of our life that lies under the power of death comes under the same judgment. And this judgment isn’t bitterness – it is freedom. Emptiness is revealed to be emptiness. The vanity of empires is revealed to be just that. We do not exist to serve the masters of this world, but to serve the only Master and Lord, and to reign with Him.

Outside of the Church, the truth of this is likely to be rejected. The world is willing to accept Christ so long as He is willing to be a place-holder for some other worldly-defined value. Jesus stands for peace. Jesus stands for love. Jesus stands for forgiveness. But only peace, love and forgiveness as the world gives. And those are hollow and self-serving.

Schmemann is known as a champion of the sacramental character of this world. This does not mean that he was devoted to the Eucharist as a special place of piety, an island of grace in the midst of the world. That would be surrender. He declares that the world is sacrament – that sacraments reveal the truth of things.

The Eucharist is not an island of grace – it is the revelation of Christ in the world. Bread and Wine become what they are meant to be – and we ourselves – when we rightly enter into the feast – become what we are meant to be.

There are no values apart from Christ. He is our sole value. He alone is “worthy.” In Christ, all things find their fulfillment and the truth of their existence. Apart from Him, everything is nothing.

Recognizing that everything is nothing, the slaves can become free, and sing the praise of the only worthy One, before whom all kingdoms will fall.

Παρασκευή, 24 Ιανουαρίου 2020

Saint Gregory the Theologian, Archbishop of Constantinople (January 25)

Click here please!...

Τρίτη, 21 Ιανουαρίου 2020

The Wrong Violence Against the Wrong People

The Modern Monastic Order Of Saint Simon of Cyrene (Orthodox African Americans)

In my opinion, he is a monk who does violence to himself in everything

Abba Zacharias, Sayings of the Desert Fathers (1)

In the wake of the shootings in the church in Texas, I posed the question on my Facebook page; “What does it say about our society when we need good people with guns to protect ourselves from bad people with guns?” I got some pretty interesting and compelling discussion from both sides of the gun control argument, statements about how our Christian ancestors were bold enough to be martyrs, the historical precedence of having armed guards in the temples in Constantinople. Rather than to take a stand one way or the other, I chose to stay on the sidelines and think.

The example of St. Moses quickly came to mind. Vandals were about to attack his monastery and his followers wanted to take up arms and defend themselves. The abbot forbade it knowing that he was a violent man before his conversion. If it was God’s will for him to die by the sword as he once lived by it, so be it. He and six of his unarmed men welcomed with love those who brought them to martyrdom (2). Again, I came to this quick answer. Which also could have drew a quick response as a church has women, children, and the elderly to consider rather than to be among devout monks willing to give such a sacrifice of faith. The volunteer security guard certainly could not stand by and allow a slaughter of innocent life to happen in a church or anywhere else. He did what had to be done with deadly efficiency. Also, the killing of faithful people goes beyond the use of guns as with the incident of the Jews violently cut down by a man with a machete. The deeper problem isn’t so much the weapon or the place it is used or the people it is used on. The problem is the form of violence and who it is not used on.

The well-known Macarius the Great came to Zacharias asking him, “What is the work of the monk?” In the answer given by the old man intrigues me, the monk is one who does violence to himself in everything. I doubt that he meant such things as self-cutting, or other means of harming his body. The monk engages in a spiritual violence against his own passions. He commits himself to constant and ceaseless prayer, reading scripture and holy reading as possible, manual labor, fasting, and other means of watchfulness against his slightest sin. And when he does fall to a temptation, that he is quick to confess and repent of it to continue a life of virtuous living. This is the sort of violence the monk inflicts on himself to gain the kingdom of heaven.

Does the Bible and other fathers support such a concept? Consider the ascetic life of John the Baptizer and Forerunner of our Lord. Jesus considers no man born of a woman holier than he and, “from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force (Matthew 11:11, 12). While there are other interpretations of this scripture, the editors of the Orthodox Study Bible include the opinion of John Chrysostom, the violent who take the kingdom by force are those who have such earnest desire for Christ that they let nothing stand between themselves and faith in Him (3). Had the instigator in that Texas church been devoted to this sort of violence, if everyone who came to church were committed to such violence, armed and unarmed security would be unnecessary.

Unfortunately, our society has been infected with a different violence to be inflicted on others. Our history and culture in America celebrates the good guy overcoming the bad guy with fist, guns, and any other weapon needed to get the job done. If the bad guy has done some particular evil deed, we want overwhelming force used for the sake of vengeance and to set an example for other would be enemies not to do the same or they will face a similar result. Fortunately, the volunteer armed security provider used only one bullet and did nothing more to the victim who had taken two lives himself.

I believe the greater responsibility is for us believers to be violent against ourselves as individuals. We cannot all become monastics and even then not all monks and nuns need to live to the extremes of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Even some modern holy men and women pushed the envelope beyond most of our means. Blessed John Maximovich was known for sleeping only a few hours a day in a chair or on the floor at his icon corner (4).

There are steps we can take to inflict suffering on ourselves for the sake of our souls. Eating smaller and fewer portions of food, drinking less alcohol, cutting out some time spent on engaging in social media and eliminating some time in front of the TV. Instead of these things, we can spend more time reading the scriptures and other religious books, examine ourselves more closely and repenting of those “little” sins which often lead us to “big” sins. We can shore up our own rules of prayer where we are weak and be more watchful of our thoughts as well as our words and deeds. And if it means that we develop some sort of habit that the world calls, “quirky,” but brings us closer to God, if it seems that we are depriving ourselves according to the standards of society because we are focused on entering another kingdom, if others denounce us as extreme in our pursuit of holy living, so be it. Of course, I recommend that we consult our priest, spiritual father or mother to stay on an even keel.

If we all must have armed security at our churches, may they be highly trained and act in all prudence and care as only to use the amount of prevention that is necessary. My opinion is that we need no weapon in the house of worship other than the cross. Both sides of the coin have valid arguments. However, let us all stop making excuses for our sins and go beyond our comfortable behaviors for the sake of becoming one with God.

Notes: