Posted on 07/01/2013 6:15:23 PM PDT by bad company
Moscow, July 1, Interfax – Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplain, chairman of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations, said Russia is moving towards maximum self-reliance and must become the center of global Christianity.
“It is not accidental that many see Russia as a defender of Christian ideals and traditional moral values, as a country that provides a real alternative to the cult of the golden calf and to a suicidal understanding of what freedom is,” Father Vsevolod writes in an article, published in the Rus Derzhavnaya newspaper on Monday.
Russia must start feeling it is the center of the Christian world, he writes. Only if it does will it become an accomplished nation. The rest is “first, petty and, second, self-destructive for it,” the priest said.
“Russia has told the world in clipped terms that it can definitely speak its own language, the language of a self-sufficient and strong nation, whose traditions and experience give it the right to walk its own way, to defend its own ideas of how society should be set up, and also to offer it to the world,” Fr. Vsevolod said.
However hard one tried to influence the state into following the opinions of narrow groups that link themselves to foreign trends and position themselves as the mouthpiece of “would-be Russia”, or “other Russia,” or “real Russia, nothing worked, he said.
“It is not accidental that we said in clear terms despite pressure coming from the West that we do want to protect children from early sexualization and from the propaganda of homosexuality. And we also said that support for foreign adoptions of Russian children is an extremely irrational step. We do not want these children, adopted by perverts, to lose the hope in which many of them were baptised, and to lose a normal life,” Fr. Vsevolod said.
You proved my point.
Proverbs 28:6 “Better a poor man whose walk is blameless than a rich man whose ways are perverse.
Proverbs 17:5 “He who mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker; whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished.”
What’s frightening is the idea that they will justify such atrocities against us under the banner of religion
John Calvin and Mohammed built a whole system under this
I have better things to do than argue over such foolish posts like what you posted me
I wish you a peaceful evening!
“I have better things to do than argue over such foolish posts like what you posted me”
I also have better things to do than argue with foolish posts who equate Calvin with Muhammad, but don’t equate Putin with the Statist and murderer that he is. I guess you better get ready and convert to the Russian Orthodox Church. Maybe get yourself into a church over there with a genuine FSB Priest to set you straight on how holy the Russian state is as opposed to the filthy Georgians and anyone else who happens to stand in the way of Russia’s state interests.
This has become the official line from the Kremlin. It is less surprising, given what sits in the Kremlin if you realize that the KGB was always about control and not about ideology. Kremlin is no longer Communist, — in fact it hasn’t been that since about 1960 (the Chinese were first to notice), — and the Kremlin finds the tale of Christian Russia useful.
The truth is, there is a small, very small core of Orthodox believers in Russia; and a vanishingly small amount of Catholics and Protestants. The typical Russian Orthodox is 50% likely to also not believe in God. Don’t laugh, I got statistics. Of those who identify themselves as Orthodox, under 10% visit church on any regular basis. Orthodoxy has become an ethnic attribute, and since the Russians feel irritated by just about any other nation, Orthodoxy becomes very important to them, not as faith but as attribute.
The Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchy) is a branch of government in Russia. The government promotes them and they promote the government. That, too is not necessarily new: MP toasted Stalin as their liberator and benefactor while he was starving and bleeding the country to death. Ther last honest Russian patriarch was Holy Martyr Tikhon, who died in 1925, and even he appears to have been intimidated into a measure of collaboration with the Reds. The Orthodox core would be nourished by the debris left of Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and various fractions of the dissipated Catacomb Church.
This, in short is not a model of re-Christianization of the West, as much as I would like it to be.
Before anything good comes out of Russia it needs to be de-sovietized, both the nation and the Church. At this point in time, Putin works on re-sovietization and the Church is running interference for him.
I agree, but what about the US?
Would you know it if you saw it?
That’s exactly why Putin is promoting “religious” laws to give the ROC an exalted status.
As we'll cover next, you insist on framing this around Putin.
Aren’t you the one making things up to attack me over? You had me here supposedly opposing Putin’s repentance that never happened.
You're the one who makes this about Putin, and then accusing me of, well, let's review the posts to see who said what.
In response to this snippet from the artcle, "It is not accidental that we said in clear terms despite pressure coming from the West that we do want to protect children from early sexualization and from the propaganda of homosexuality. And we also said that support for foreign adoptions of Russian children is an extremely irrational step. We do not want these children, adopted by perverts, to lose the hope in which many of them were baptised, and to lose a normal life,” Fr. Vsevolod said.", I replied in post 6 "If you had told me in 1980 that a man who at the time was a KGB agent would be leading the battle for Christian values in defiance of the US...Unreal."
This was clearly in the context of blocking the homosexual agenda, which I included in that post.
In your reply in post 36, you made this about Putin, going so far as to say "There is no ‘Christian King’ coming out of Russia. Just a Czar wannabe who has no problem murdering those who get in his way." As if no one else in Russia could serve God in this capacity.
Fair enough. In my reply to you in post 49, I said "I'm not blind about who and what Putin is, but God has built His Church under worse, as long as the people were willing to follow Him." and "Jesus was born in the Roman Empire, and under Herod." I acknowledged that Putin was not a good guy, but also said that God could build His Church in Russia anyway.
Once again, in post 50, you ignored the Russian Christians and made it about Putin, saying "Why got to Putin or the ROC, who are built upon corruption and murder?"
My reply in post 51 was "God wants no one to perish, but all to repent. That includes the Russians, Chinese, ghetto thugs, homos, and anyone else you care to damn."
Ignoring this, you again made it about Putin in post 52, and in every post since.
Since anyone who bothers to read through the distortions in your posts can see what each of us said, care to drop your Putin strawman and reply to what I actually said?
You can keep your filthy state sponsored religion, and I’ll stick with the Gospel.
Where in the Gospel are to told to decide who can be used to serve His purpose?i
“”I also have better things to do than argue with foolish posts who equate Calvin with Muhammad””
Smarter people have already figured out those comparisons,DR E
The Great Heresies
By Hilaire Belloc
http://www.ewtn.com/library/doctrine/heresy.htm
By the Grace of God the soviets failed before, and if what you post is true then by His grace they'll fail again.
“Where in the Gospel are to told to decide who can be used to serve His purpose?”
You’ve done a lot to document your replies, but your replies are still nonsensical. Of course I brought up Putin. One of the posts mentioned the Kremlin propaganda of the “Christian King,” and since the ROC is an agent of the Kremlin, of course I bring it back to Putin. And since I know there is no real revival going on being led by real Christian believers, of course I care not for all this talk about people being “used” by God. If the Gospel was all about the homoexuals, then maybe you’d have a point. But until someone is there preaching Christ and Him crucified, as opposed to purely cultural and nationalistic messages, I cannot call it Christian. This is policy from Moscow, not Holy people fighting against the eeevils of the West. It’s just evil rebranded under a state sponsored church.
“Smarter people have already figured out those comparisons,DR E”
I am not Dr. E. And I do not find apologies and interference for Moscow to be smart.
Despite horrendous assault on the Christian civilization by the dark forces, America remains the hope for the rest of the world. We have nowhere to run and should expect liberation from no other nation but our own.
Oh, yes, they’ll fail, but after they finally do, Russia will be convalescing for generations. The patient is lucky to be alive now, and no end is in sight.
I don’t have faith that America is hope for Christians.
I know better.
FWIW,dear Brother
I believe the poorest of the poor and the poorest of all nations is the hope of Christians-where persecution is the greatest
If that should happen, Russia, with its vast territory and resources, would become a magnet for disaffected Westerners and Christians. They would be welcomed by the Russians who will need a large population if they are to resist the pressures of China and the Muslim World.
This is true not only of Russia, but of religious identity almost everywhere. In Northern Ireland, being "Catholic" or "Protestant" had less to do with theology than whether you were loyal to the British crown or not. In the Balkans, the joke was was that a Bosnian was a "Muslim" who never went to Mosque, while a Croat and a Serb were respectively "Catholics" and "Orthodox" who never went to Church. Yet they were willing to murder one another over their supposed "religion."
If religion is to survive in any form, it will do so as part and parcel of an ethnicity and a culture. Taken outside of that context, theology just doesn't mean much to most people.
May God have mercy upon their souls.
Hope is not of knowledge.
However, America remains among few nations where God has a prominent place in the national consciousness. Everywhere else religion is ornamental, or else not of interest at all.
This being said, the True Church is getting more compact everywhere. It seems that the role of nations as families of believers is diminishing for all of us.
Poverty, in the meanwhile, is entering American mental landscape again, and with it humility will come.
These are the contours of hope, but I cannot prove it to you.
I agree. This is why I am a nationalist: not every people is a nation, and to become and to remain a nation there must be a national enterprise of salvation as a common project. Similar as husband and wife in a family are mutually responsible for salvation of their household (Acts 11:14, 16:31), so are true nations centered around common spirituality that leads its best sons to Christ (Revelation 5:9).
Russia was such a nation once; today it is not. France, Ireland, Germany, Spain were highly spiritual nations and perhaps retain some potential. But today I see robust national energy only in the Americas.
On the other hand, there are universalist tendencies in many religions that actively undermine nationalism, because people develop sympathies with members of the same faith among other nations and peoples rather than with their own countrymen. A good example of this are many liberal American Catholics who want to inundate the US with as many Latin American immigrants as possible, and many Evangelicals who want to bring in lots of Third World people as potential converts recruited to their Churches. On the national question, religious organizations in the US have been consistently unreliable.
I truly believe in my heart that the Fall of the United States will bring about the greatest opportunity for Salvation fOR many Christians
US foreign policy has aided the devil for far too long for me to believe God has given GRACE FOR THIS COUNTRY TO BE IN UNION WITH HIM
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