Posted on 01/01/2006 4:48:03 PM PST by HarleyD
Hm, not quite. St. Paul wrote about circumcision, but the lifting of the dietetic law and the circumcision requirement was the initiative of St. Peter (who had a vision about the abolition of the dietetic law) and confirmed by St. James (Acts 15).
Pauline teaching became the norm even though he himself admits that he is not commanded by the Lord
You are not suggesting that there is a dissonance between the teaching of St. Paul and Christ, are you? Paul taught that the works of Jewish law specifically, or by extension, works of any law, do not save absent faith, which comes from grace. But one who believes is still subject to the law of the Church, and risks his salvation if he disobeys it.
I stand corrected. Where I come from, such a thing is almost unthinkable, which shows how much culture influences what is "normal" or even "legal."
Nevertheless, your explanation is not that simple. There are caveats involved. According to Church canons:
A. Mixed marriage (i.e., a marriage between an Orthodox person and a non-Orthodox Christian who is nevertheless baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and who confesses the Lordship of Christ, though not the norm in the Church is tolerated under the following guidelines:
1. A petition for all mixed marriages must be submitted to the Bishop for his blessing.
2. The Orthodox partner may not agree to have any future children of the union baptized in a non-Orthodox confession, including Roman Catholicism, as a pre-condition for marriage in the Orthodox Church.
B. Active participation of non-Orthodox clergy in the services and sacraments of the Orthodox Church is forbidden; and conversely, active participation of Orthodox clergy in non-Orthodox services and rites is forbidden.
C. Toleration of mixed marriages does not extend to marriage between an Orthodox and a non-Christian person, such as: Unitarian, Mormon, Jew, Jehovah's Witness, Christian Scientist, Moslem, and so forth.
Bottom line is: a spouse must be baptized in the name of the Trinity and must agree to have all children baptized Orthodox. There is no sharing of anything. While the Church does not force a validly baptized Christian to convert, that Christian must submit all religious activities and children's faith to Orthodoxy. Might as well convert!
"Although the Jews hold that the oral tradition (Law) developed parallel to the written one, there is no evidence of a written one before 500 BC."
Only if you believe that the references within the Old Testament itself to written books of the law are lies. Right off the top of my head, there is the finding of the book of the law during the reign of the King Josiah -- which, I am certain, was several centuries before 700 B.C. There are others.
Furthermore, Christ speaks clearly of Moses as the giver of the books of the law. His appearing with Christ at the Transfiguration emphasizes this.
Christ furthermore refers specifically to both David and Solomon as historical figures. He specifically refers to Psalms as having come from David, as do the Apostles elsewhere in the NT.
Christ speaks of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as historical figures, and the Apostles treat the stories of them and the Exodus, etc. as being literally true.
I could go on.
For any Christian to accept the things from the Israeli "scholars" that you quote (which I don't believe you do), he would have to accept that Christ and the Apostles didn't know what they were talking about, or that they were lying.
So I don't think that your post is a particularly effective way of convincing FK about oral tradition. :-)
The overall point, though, is true: all Scripture was at one point unwritten oral tradition. They did not appear magically at the end of someone's pen.
What grounds Orthodoxy is the fact that we believe that oral tradition was and is part of the continuing presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, and is not just an imperfect memory of the teachings of Christ and the Apostles.
It means that many parts of that tradition that weren't written down as Scripture continued to be passed down within the Church, some of which were later written down, but not treated in the same way as Scripture. Most importantly, it means that the Church's understanding of the Scriptures -- Old and New Testament alike -- carried on as a living tradition that continues to this very day.
One of our big problems with the Reformation approach to Scripture is that it cut itself off from this tradition, and attempted to go it alone in the interpretation of Scripture. Absent that tradition, there are myriads of different and mutually exclusive Protestant readings of the Scriptures.
I am only saying that Christ never said that those who follwed Him were not under the Law but only under Grace. Nor did Christ ever even hint at abolishing circumcision.
The guidelines that allow the marriage of Orthodox and non-Orthodox go back to the days of the Byzantine empire, as far as I know. They are not a recent innovation. Kolokotronis might know.
Nor do I think they are culturally determined, in the sense that there are parts of the Orthodox Church that allow it and others that don't. I am unaware of any local Orthodox Church that would refuse to marry an Orthodox Christian to a non-Orthodox Christian.
You are absolutely right that my short-hand description didn't address all of the conditions for such a marriage. Such a marriage is allowed, but clearly treated as irregular, and not meeting the ideal. I would imagine that every local Orthodox Church might have some variations on the same themes as the OCA guidelines that you link to.
While the non-Orthodox spouse is expected to allow the children to be raised to be Orthodox, that spouse is not required to participate in the life of the Orthodox Church him/herself.
It should be clear that while such marriages are allowed, in general, they are frought with spiritual risks. That said, some of the most faithful and devout parishioners in our parish were married in the Orthodox Church when they were non-Orthodox, and only converted to Orthodoxy after many years of marriage. I'll bet that Kolokotronis could tell similar stories.
I am simply stating what is known. As to whether the Israeli scholars are "scholars" or not is not mine to determine, nor ours to question simply because we don't like what their findings suggest. Sripture is an expression of God's revelation and is a testament of faith. It matters little if it is historically, or physicially accurate -- as long as it is spiritually accurate.
My older daughter, who knew God at the age of 10, but attended an Evangelical school, said about dinosaurs: "the devil planted those bones for us to find and be deceived," she said. "Dinosaurs never did exist." Oh, I see!
I think the hesychast Fathers unlocked the mysery of faith, namely that prayer is at the core of knowing, and reaching God and not academics. And while they studied the Scripture fervently, they leave no doubt that faith moves one to pray and that prayer alone humbles us and brings us to God by His mercy.
As another blessed Father says "...faith is that which completes our argument." St. Gregory Nazianzen (Third theological Oration no. 21) Everything else is mental exercise.
"+Paul clearly states that we are not under the Law but under Grace. Although Christ never taught that..."
Well, that's not quite true. For example, Christ repeatedly "broke the Sabbath." He even used a specific example of David eating something he wasn't supposed to eat (the blessed bread in the tabernacle of the Lord) to illustrate his point that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath."
Given the centrality of Sabbath-keeping in the law, this alone was a huge statement by Christ regarding the law.
You are right that the Church ended up setting dietary restrictions, and I suppose that there is some irony in this, but in the Christian era they have a different character, a different motivation, and a different goal.
In the Old Testament, God was teaching a basic concept of "clean" and "unclean" -- some of this may have been determined by the associations certain foods had in the pagan world, and in Egypt in particular. We don't know. Part may have been just the beginnings of teaching self-control and separateness from the pagan world in general. I don't know.
In the New Testament era, our fasting is of a positive, ascetic nature. It is also a specific and direct reaching back to Paradise, where we didn't use animals as sources of food. But as far as I know, there are no foods that are completely banned at all times (other than blood, which is specified in the New Testament as being off-limits.)
To a great extent, Orthodox fasting guidelines are a formalization of the kind of ascetic fasting that probably took place spontaneously and through the effect of oral tradition from the Apostles.
I think I said it was "almost unthinkable" and that "culture influences [my emphasis] what is 'normal' or even 'legal'" I should have said "in the mindset of a particualr Orthodox community," but the fact that I placed both "normal" and "legal" in quotes shows that I did not think they were either as far as the Church was concerned. Peer pressure and expectations have a lot to do with customs and what is allowed eve if they are legal. Women being (un)covered in church is one small example of it.
"I am simply stating what is known."
The "findings" of archeology and history change all the time. Since these are not reproducible sciences, there is little in the way of objective, empirical knowledge in these matters. There are lots of things that earlier generations of scholars believed simply couldn't be true in the Bible, but that their later findings led them to believe that they were true, or at least to acknowledge that they could be true.
I've spent enough time in research laboratories to know that even under very controlled conditions, "what is known" can be very elusive. I'm also acutely aware of how much a desired result can affect any given scholar's "findings." This is no less true of agnostic Biblical scholars than it is of people who believe God put dinosaur bones in the earth.
Given those circumstances, I think that I would rely on the words of Christ and the writings of the Apostles regarding who did and didn't exist and what did and didn't happen in Old Testament times before I would rely on the latest assertions of any modern scholar.
"I think the hesychast Fathers unlocked the mysery of faith, namely that prayer is at the core of knowing, and reaching God and not academics."
I couldn't agree more. And I am hard-pressed to think of a hesychast Father who doesn't speak of the accounts of the Old Testament as being anything but literal truth. They are not *only* literal truth, nor is the literal historical account even the most important part of a given passage in the OT, but they are always treated as having happened. They are allegories, so to speak, that really happened. That is certainly how the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete treats them, for example.
I misunderstood that part of what you were saying. I agree that a mixed marriage isn't intended to be "normal" practice. I also very much agree that different parts of the Church are going to move within what is "allowed" in very different ways. For that matter, even in a given country, different eras go through phases of laxness and devout fervor.
I thought you were going beyond that and saying that there were places where such a marriage would be forbidden outright.
In the Catholic world, knowledge is often transmitted in the form of a limerick. Teach your daughter this:
Dinosaurs nerver survived the Flood
They were useless in water and mud
Nor did Noah find charming
The four-legged fish Darwin
Who he caught with the Unicorn stud
But He never said that His followers were not under the Law but rather under Grace, did He? The case of Sabbath "breaking" served to teach that greater good is always the side to "err" on, not that those who followed Him or His teaching encouraged breaking or abandoning the law.
In the New Testament era, our fasting is of a positive, ascetic nature. It is also a specific and direct reaching back to Paradise, where we didn't use animals as sources of food
Our fallen nature is incompatible with that kind of diet. We now know that essential amino acids do not come from plants, or not in sufficient amounts. I am sure when we (or at least some of us) are in Paradise, eating herbs will be quite sufficient.
I disagree that this was the reason for dietary abstinence. Christians, who were originally mostly Jews, fasted as a matter of their Old Testament practice. At one point it became erratic, and the Church regulated the extent and type of fasts which differed for monastic ranks (they were longer). Eventually, the Church settled into the current fasting practices as a matter of conformity to the faith, as defined by the Church.
I think my example of +Symeon the New Theologian shows that fasting is not necessarily the requirement for salvation but what's in your heart, how Christ-like we are.
The bottom line is that the current fasting practices prescribed as required part of being faithful are man-made tradition and is not based on anything Christ specifically taught, or commanded.
If anything, fast is a form of sacrifice, self-imposed humility, self-denial, a discipline so important to reaching higher levels of spirituality because self-denial allows the Spirit to work in us; the humbler we become the less arrogant and proud we become, and more Grace-filled.
That discipline is known to all eastern religions and for the same reason.
Last but not least, Jesus never even raised the possibility of abolishing circumcision. +Paul did. But in order for him to make that concession to the Gentiles, he had to replace the law with grace.
"Which is exactly the Jewish argument against Christianity...as our distant relatives tend to remind us."
True, but there was and is also a Jewish argument *for* Christianity -- an argument made by Christ and the Apostles.
The question is not only which argument one finds more intellectually compelling, but whether one sees the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in Christianity.
When St. John the Baptist send two messengers to Christ, this was the exchange:
"Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?
Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them."
As you pointed out in your post about the hesychast fathers, that same process of observation, both inside and outside ourselves, gives witness to the truth of Christianity.
That seems to be a good summary to me. My reading of the 15th chapter of Acts is that the decision that converts to Christianity are not required to observe Old Testament law comes from the apostles (including Paul) gathered in Jerusalem:
28 For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: 29 that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity.The quotes need to be read in context starting from Chapter 11 where Peter sees a vision of many kinds of animals and a voice tells him to kill and eat. He protests but the voice from heaven says, "What God has cleansed you must not call common."
There is a long tradition in Christianity that says Christians are not subject to the law because it has been fulfilled in Christ. That is what Christ meant when he talked about the law being fulfilled.
Kosta is exactly right. Orthodoxy very much teaches first and foremost the positive nature of revealed truth. If you examine Orthodox writings carefully, you will see the great care that is taken not to go beyond what is revealed to us.
Apophatic theology is not so much a way of knowing God or figuring Him out (as if anyone could do that) as it is a way of being extremely careful in how we *talk about* God. It is a way of making sure that we do not, through the inadequacies of our words, sell God short.
Leviticus 11:6 "And the hare, because he cheweth the cud , but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you."
Last time I checked, hares are not ruminants, Agrarian. There are some thing we do know for certain that are not as the Bible says.
Lev 11:13-19 Bats and birds are one and the same thing...
Lev 11:23 But all other flying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an abomination unto you.
Flying, creeping things with four feet?
Numbers 12:10 And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and, behold, she was leprous.
I suppose we really don't know what cause leprosy, Agrarian. The Bible says it comes from the tabernacle and is instant.
1 Sam 2:8 ...the pillars of the earth are the LORD's, and he hath set the world upon them.
Pillars of the earth? The earth sits on pillars.
Changing knowledge indeed, Agrarian. Yes, our knowledge is always subject to change: it either tells us something we didn't know or it reveals that the glory of God's creation is something much more glorious than we or the writers of the Testaments could ever imagine.
Today, we know that God's Creation is truly beyond our imagination and keep growing! Today we know that there are more visible stars in the Universe that there are grains of sand on all the beaches and in all the deserts on earth. Today we know that there are not just billions of stars but billions of galaxies, each studded with billions of stars. Truly, the Glory of God has never been better known.
limerick...cute. :)
-- For the job, -- Peter complained to Paul --
My baptismal pool is way too small
-- To save time, -- Paul replied --
Keep them uncircumcized
And don't teach any diet at all
Yet it is +Paul who says "therefore love is the fulfilling of the law." (Rom 13:10) How can we not be subject to that?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.