Bishop's canon calls for the excommunication of prominent layman

VirtueOnline-News ^ | 7/16/2005 | David Virtue

[sionnsar]

SYRACUSE: (July 15, 2005)--The following article was printed in the parish newsletter at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Syracuse, NY.

After the publication of this article, the rector of the parish received a call from a priest at the diocesan office who asked that the author, Mr. Raymond J. Dague be excommunicated.

As you may understand or guess, excommunication is a serious act. According to the Book of Common Prayer, excommunication is reserved for "a person who is living a notoriously evil life" (Disciplinary Rubrics, BCP p. 409).

What is the evil that Mr. Dague has committed? He has questioned the diocesan action of sponsoring a visit by Marcus Borg.

Mr. Dague's reasoning is air-tight, and maybe this is what troubles the diocesan office. You see, when they offer explanations for why they do and promote unbiblical actions, their reasoning for doing so is generally pretty poor. In fact, they often use buzz words like diversity and inclusiveness. You can see from their attempted treatment of Mr. Dague that they are anything but inclusive. Recently, the diocesan denied permission for Bp. Bob Duncan, to preach at St. Andrew's in Vestal, NY. Why? The stated reason was that Bp. Duncan is a lightning rod. After reading Mr. Dague's essay, I think that you will agree that Marcus Borg is also a lightning rod. And why was he in our Diocese of Central NY? Because the diocese sponsored his visit. Are you catching the inclusivity? Ed.

By Raymond Dague

On Saturday, June 4, 2005 the famous liberal theologian Marcus Borg is coming to central New York to give a public lecture and to speak to the clergy of the Episcopal Church. The Diocese is bringing him here. Marcus Borg is one of the founders of the Jesus Seminar in 1985. The Jesus Seminar is a group of liberal scholars who have decided that very little of what is portrayed in the Gospels is historically accurate. They say that they are in search of the "historical" Jesus, rather than the Jesus of "m yth" as portrayed by the Church for the last 2000 years.

How did we get to a state in the Episcopal Church were orthodoxy as set forth in the Nicene Creed is out, and heresy is taught to our clergy by Marcus Borg at the request of the officials of this diocese? That is an interesting story which requires some recent and not so recent history.

The recent history we mostly know, because we have been living it for the last two years. Lately the entire world wide Anglican Communion has been racked by wars over the new bishop of New Hampshire who is living with his homosexual lover. Also by vote of the 2003 General Convention, each diocese can now decide whether it wants to bless homosexual unions. Some bishops, like the new bishop of Florida, are saying that all is well, but events speak differently.

Six rectors in Connecticut are under threat of being removed by their bishop. Three parishes in Los Angeles have transferred their ecclesiastical authority to an Anglican bishop in Africa. The bishop of Los Angeles is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into a lawsuit against these parishes which legal experts say he will lose, and with it three of his fastest growing parishes. A similar lawsuit by the bishop of Pennsylvania has generated a legal bill over $1 million to that diocese, and the bishop there still has another appeal before he can seize the church he is suing.

All across the country whole parishes are walking away from their property and starting new churches, sometimes turning the keys over to their bishop to do what he wants with empty buildings with no parishioners. The Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) is picking up many of these parishes. Independent Anglican parishes are forming. Almost every diocese in the country has taken a big financial hit, and church attendance is down practically everywhere. Traditionalist groups such as the A merican Anglican Council and the Anglican Communion Network are flourishing in an apparent backlash against the slide of the entire denomination.

Weird things continue to pop up around the country with the name "Episcopal" attached. Last fall a husband and wife pair of Episcopal rectors in Pennsylvania were discovered as having been longtime Druids. Surely you would think that the bishop of these two priests would discipline them. But when they renounced their Druid practices and resigned from the "Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids" their bishop disciplined neither of them. He issued a press release touting the positive contributions they had made to the church. The husband later renounced his Christian faith to become a Druid priest. The wife is still rector of her Episcopal Church. Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold has uttered not a peep over this apostasy.

The official website of the national Episcopal Church carried a "Wome n's Eucharist" which is pure pagan worship of the female body. When a circle of women drink from a cup of wine they invoke the image of their menstrual blood in an act which looks like Satan worship.

One of the most prominent Episcopal churches in the nation, Trinity Church on Wall Street in New York City, had a very interesting celebration on Trinity Sunday 2005. While we at St. Andrew's were celebrating the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with the liturgy of the faith used for almost 2000 years, Trinity Wall Street had a clown mass. No words were said for the readings which were instead acted out in mime. The congregation responded with noise makers rather than said or sung prayers. The priest was dressed up like Bozo the Clown rather than wearing liturgical vestments. Instead of incense they blew bubbles around the altar. If you go to the Trinity Wall Street website you can watch this entire hour-long liturgy travesty.

In the diocese of Central New York the Thornfield Conference Center was recently deconsecrated when the "vision committee" of the diocese decided that the Center had no future, and its buildings were torn down. As the diocesan budget is shrinking, church attendance is off.

St. Andrew's in Syracuse and some other parishes have cut off sending money to the diocese. As a result St. Andrew's, one of the largest and fastest growing parishes in the diocese, was denied a seat at the 2004 diocesan convention. A new parish has not been started in this diocese in well over 30 years, and many have been closed, or yoked under a single priest with other parishes which are failing.

The problems of the Episcopal Church did not begin with the 2003 General Convention and the advance of the homosexual agenda. The root of this decay is far deeper than the events of a single church convention in the summer in Minneapolis two years ago.

In 1958 a liberal dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City was elected bishop coadjutor of the diocese of California, and within a year was bishop of California. Until he resigned in 1966 James Pike, like Bishop Spong of New Jersey, was the darling of the liberal news media. His antics even won him a spot on the cover of Time Magazine. Pike's first career was that of a lawyer, but his real splash was as maverick bishop. Actually "heretic bishop" is a better characterization. Pike's descent into heresy involved his denial of the doctrines of the virgin birth and the infallibility of scripture. As early as 1960 he called the doctrine of the Trinity "outdated, incomprehensible and nonessential" to the Christian faith. The Episcopal Church largely ignored Pike until he became so outrageous that he was impossible to ignore. When Pike's son committed suicide, he engaged in séances to contact his deceased son. Pike married three time s, divorcing his first two wives.

Finally Pike was presented with changes of heresy. In October of 1966, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church voted to censure him. This was a rather mild rebuke considering that Pike's widely publicized views completely contradicted the Christian faith. Some of the bishops wrote a minority report defending Pike saying, "We believe it is more important to be a sympathetic and self-conscious part of God's action in the secular world than it is to defend the positions of the past, which is a past that is altered by each new discovery of truth." In other words, even our belief in the Triune God is up for grabs as each generation discovers new truths.

When the divided House of Bishops gave only a censure rather than any real discipline, it was a signal to the entire Episcopal Church that there was no longer any church discipline about what you believed or did.

Bishop Pike then took a dr ive in the desert of Israel south of Jerusalem when his car got stuck. He tried to walk back to civilization, but lost his way. He died in the barren wilderness of the Israeli countryside as he was trying to find his way out of the desert - perhaps an apt metaphor for his entire life.

After Pike another heretic Bishop came on the scene. From 1976 to 2000 John Shelby Spong was the bishop of New Jersey. He is another Pike, but even more public and sensational. Spong wrote more books than Pike did, and rather than just being on magazine covers, he is constantly on television with interviews, has his own online web column, and rides the lecture circuit peddling heresy. Central New York's former bishop O'Kelly Whittaker invited Spong to be the speaker at one of our diocesan conventions. While his diocese was in serious decline due to his disbelief of everything Christian, Spong made a good living. He became famous as a debunker of the things which his Church believed as set forth in the Bible, the Nicene Creed, the 39 Articles, and the Prayer Book. And in doing so he is helping to pave the way for the Episcopal Church to renounce Trinitarian doctrines in favor of a doctrine of radical love and inclusiveness.

What Spong believes is set forth in his own words in what he calls his "12 Theses."

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divini ty, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post- Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way. 11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

To analyze these would take too much space here, but notice one thing about Spong's 12 Theses: they say much about what he does not believe, but little about what he does believe. Much liberal theology is similar. It criticizes what it claims is wrong belief, but has few positive statements to describe faith in Christ. Other than "God is love", "inclusiveness," and "gender neutral" language, there is not much substantive content to liberal theology. < BR>Borg is in the tradition of Spong and Pike. In a well written book The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions by Marcus J. Borg & N. T. Wright, Borg describes what he thinks about Jesus, and often what he does not think about Jesus.

Borg believes that Jesus was not conceived by Mary as a virgin, but was the biological child of Joseph and Mary. Jesus was "more likely" born in Nazareth and not in Bethlehem as recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. None of the things associated with the nativity of Jesus such as the appearance of the star, the shepherds seeing the angel, or the magi visiting the baby ever happened. Also the geologies of Jesus were fabrications, or as Borg likes to say, "history metaphorized." Jesus did not know that he was the Jewish Messiah. Jesus did not predict his own death, nor did he see his death as the salvation for the sins of man. Jesus did not utter the words of the Eucharist at the Last Supper over the bread and the wine. There was never a trial of Jesus before the Jewish or Roman authorities. Whether the tomb was empty on Easter morning is "irrelevant" to the Christian faith. He describes the Nicene Creed as "not...a set of literally true doctrinal statements to which I am supposed to give my intellectual assent, but as a culturally relative product of the ancient church" which he prefers to chant or sing, rather than say.

Borg is an attractive and glib speaker, and a fine writer. He cranks out book after book debunking orthodox Christianity, and is a bit better than his predecessors Pike and Spong in trying to articulate actual content to what he believes. But basically his calls himself Christian by remaking Christianity as he "imagines" Jesus. When you see a theologian, bishop, or priest speak about "imagining" or "re-imagining" God, watch out. They, like Pike, Spong and Borg, are remaking God in their own image, and to th eir own liking

In a very real sense, the Episcopal Church in the United States is doing just what Bishop Pike did. It is lost in the wilderness, has embraced heresy, and is dying as its membership and finances dry up. It is dying of thirst for the Holy Spirit as it wanders in a wilderness of theological and moral experimentation. It claims that it is acting prophetically at the behest of the Holy Spirit revealing new truth, but it is lost in the Wilderness of Sin.

Marcus Borg is another step along the proud road to renouncing the truths of the Christian faith and replacing them with a quasi-Christian jargon of love and inclusiveness with no requirement for repentance, transformation, and holiness. This next weekend, the Diocese of Central New York will take one more step down that road as it listens to Marcus Borg. I plan to stay home to work in my garden and mow my lawn.

–Mr. Raymond J. Dague is Chancellor to St. Andrew' s Episcopal Church in Syracuse, New York

[Polycarp1]

I presume you are being tounge in cheek about Augustine, but there is something to what you say. The healing of the Church comes with a rediscovery of the Fathers and even we Orthodox who claim many of these folks for our own need to rediscover them as well.

[FormerLib]

To an outsider such as myself, that a member of the Episcopal Church would be threatened with excommunication for challenging the idea that the Diocese should sponsor a founder of the "Jesus Seminar" is a perfectly representative action of the modern Episcopal Church.

[FormerLib]

"How did we get to a state in the Episcopal Church were orthodoxy as set forth in the Nicene Creed is out, and heresy is taught to our clergy by Marcus Borg at the request of the officials of this diocese?"

By a series of tiny steps, just as most journeys begin.

[Zack Nguyen]

"How did we get to a state in the Episcopal Church were orthodoxy as set forth in the Nicene Creed is out, and heresy is taught to our clergy by Marcus Borg at the request of the officials of this diocese?"

This is a sad question, because the answer is obvious. It has happened over a period of many decades, and while it occurred no one did anything to stop it. The same happened with some Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans, United Church of Christ. Methodists are int he midst oft he battle.

[Graves]

Make " It has happened over a period of many decades" a period of many centuries Zack.
One can start with the De Trinitate of Augustine of Hippo and one can trace the steps from there.
They become easier to trace the closer we get to the present. Remember Vatican II, the Spirit of Vatican II? We are not talking here about just what has been going on within mainline Protestantism, or even just within the West.
What gets really scary is leaving the West to see what's been going on in the East. Here again, Augustinian thought threatens to take control. We see it in Russia with the overthrow of the Czar and the Bolshevik Revolution, in Greece with the Freemasonry of EP Meletios Metaxakis and the changes he introduced.

[The_Reader_David]

Egads! We've got an even more anti-Augustinian poster among the Orthodox on FR than me.

Come now, the problem is not Blessed Augustine, per se, but the elevation of him to the status of 'Father among Fathers' first evidenced in the Carolingian court, and acceptance of his speculations as superior to the consensus patrum which has at times seemed to dominate Western thought (Latin, protestant or Anglican).

Balance: a wise Orthodox priest was once asked by a Latin what the biggest difference between the two churches was. The priest replied, "Ah, the biggest difference is that where as you have St. Augustine and Blessed John Cassian, we have St. John Cassian and Blessed Augustine."

[Graves]

Right on! "Egads! We've got an even more anti-Augustinian poster among the Orthodox on FR than me."

As I am not in the ROC, I am not required to call Augustine "Bd" and I don't.

[Claud]

Your assessment is much more balanced, and thus greatly appreciated.

By contrast, St. Augustine, some of whose writings are far more suspect than any of those of St. Gregory, was made the Father of Fathers in the West.

True to a point about the "Father of Fathers" but we tend not to draw as bright a line as you do between the Fathers and the later theologians. Aquinas is every bit a lodestar in the West as Augustine is--maybe even more so. Then throw in Molina and the Jesuits for some real fun. Fact is, Catholic theology is not the Augustinian monolith that some make it out to be.

[Graves]

"Catholic theology is not the Augustinian monolith that some make it out to be."
True enough. Fr. Azkoul does a good job of tracing its various lines in his ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS.

[Grampa Dave]

"How did we get to a state in the Episcopal Church were orthodoxy as set forth in the Nicene Creed is out, and heresy is taught to our clergy by Marcus Borg at the request of the officials of this diocese?"

'This is a sad question, because the answer is obvious. It has happened over a period of many decades, and while it occurred no one did anything to stop it. The same happened with some Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans, United Church of Christ. Methodists are int he midst oft he battle.'

That is how it happened and in the last 1.5 to 2 decades.

[Grampa Dave]

"By a series of tiny steps, just as most journeys begin."

In the 1980's my wife and I like going to the conventions even if most of the decisions were pre set. In the late 1980's the homosexual agenda pushes took more and more time from other issues.

If you dared to say anything thing, you were labled a bigot.

[Agrarian]

No less a modern and great ascetic saint of the Orthodox Church than St. John the Wonderworker of Shanghai and SF considered St. Augustine to be a saint.

The Slavonic service to St. Augustine (which can be obtained in English language translation from the St. John of Kronstadt Press) was commissioned and approved by him. He particularly recommended that the Russian parish in Tunis serve this service yearly, since St. Augustine was a local saint for them.

There is a royal path of moderation with regard to St. Augustine's memory that should be followed by all. He is a constant reminder of the need for discerning the consensus patrum, testing each Father against the writings and teachings of the others.

Claud, I would also add that I think you are mistaken if you think that we Orthodox draw a historical line beyond which there are no Fathers. St. Symeon the New Theologian, St. Gregory Palamas, St. Seraphim of Sarov in the 18th c., the Holy Fathers of Optina going right up to the Russian revolution, etc... are all considered to be a part of the seamless Orthodox patristic tradition. In our own century, St. John of Shanghai and SF (mentioned above) and St. Justin Popovich of the Serbian Church are in this tradition as well.

The particular importance of the Fathers of the ages of the Ecumenical Councils is that their writings give insight into what the Fathers of those councils were thinking when they made decisions on how to articulate the catholic faith about the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. Thus we pay particular attention to St. Maximus the Confessor when considering the decisions of the 6th Council, and of St. Gregory Palamas when considering the decisions of the so-called "Palamite" councils. .

We do not of course consider Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, or the Jesuit theologians to be a part of this tradition -- their distinctness from the Orthodox patristic modes of thought and spiritual life are examples of the gap between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. We certainly understand why they are revered in the Catholic tradition, since their developments are reflected in subsequent Catholic theology, with which we differ.

Aquinas in particular has always been of interest to me, since as I recall, some of those who opposed him most vociferously in the Catholic world were avowed Augustinians. I have always been tempted to view this, though, as a dispute between Catholics who preferred Augustinian Platonic theological speculation and those who preferred Aristotelian modes of theological speculation.

It is inescapable, though, that the writings of St. Augustine contained the germs of ideas that led to several of the key theological incompatibilities between later Latin theology and Orthodox theology. The fact that later Catholic theologians differed from Augustine on this point or that doesn't really change the fact that it was the dominance of St. Augustine's writings in the West and the fact that they were not balanced by writings from other Fathers that set the stage for the collision that happened in the 9th century.

To again use St. Gregory of Nyssa as an example, if the East had taken St. Gregory's speculations on universal salvation and developed those ideas in a vacuum without any correctives from the overall teaching of the Fathers, Christianity in the East would have gone seriously wrong. And the fault would not have lay with St. Gregory nearly so much as with those who uncritically championed his more speculative ideas. Would we find Christians today refusing to call St. Gregory of Nyssa a saint or a Father of the Church had this hypothetical situation happened? Perhaps, but they would be misguided to do so.

The important thing is not how judgment is passed on St. Augustine as a whole -- it is how his individual writings and teachings are evaluated.

I was just reading today in the letters of St. Gregory the Theologian about how he had compiled a collection of the good and useful writings of Origen, entitling the work the "Philokalia." Everyone knew that Origen taught heresy on certain points, but everyone also knew that he was still, in a sense, one of the most influential Fathers of the Church, and could and should be read (with discretion and in the context of Orthodox belief) to great profit. St. Gregory certainly did.

[Graves]

"No less a modern and great ascetic saint of the Orthodox Agrarian,
"St. John the Wonderworker of Shanghai and SF considered St. Augustine to be a saint."

I will only say this once for you and all the rest at FR, just as kosta50 has said once and for all for the everyone at FR what the teaching of the Church is as to the hypostatic procession of the Holy Spirit and the hypostatic generation of God the Son.

"St. Augustine of Hippo" is not, never was, and never will be found on the calendar of the Orthodox Church.

[Graves]

I posted that badly. Try again.
"St. John the Wonderworker of Shanghai and SF considered St. Augustine to be a saint."

I will only say this once for you and all the rest at FR, just as kosta50 has said once and for all for the everyone at FR what the teaching of the Church is as to the hypostatic procession of the Holy Spirit and the hypostatic generation of God the Son.

"St. Augustine of Hippo" is not, never was, and never will be found on the calendar of the Orthodox Church.

[Claud]

It is inescapable, though, that the writings of St. Augustine contained the germs of ideas that led to several of the key theological incompatibilities between later Latin theology and Orthodox theology

Absolutely. The way you said it makes transparent sense, particularly with regard with the consensus patrum. Augustine is bound to have had a greater influence on the West because he was *of* the West--he is part of our Apostolic inheritance and helped define who we are. But again, we're not uncritical about him. Just to give an example from the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Limbo which touches on the hot button issue of Augustine's idea of original sin. (I apologize for throwing quotes out here; I'm trying to do it in an illustrative rather than polemical way.)

There is no evidence to prove that any Greek or Latin Father before St. Augustine ever taught that original sin of itself involved any severer penalty after death than exclusion from the beatific vision, and this, by the Greek Fathers at least, was always regarded as being strictly supernatural....But this Augustinian teaching was an innovation in its day, and the history of subsequent Catholic speculation on this subject is taken up chiefly with the reaction which has ended in a return to the pre-Augustinian tradition...

St. Thomas was the first great teacher who broke away completely from the Augustinian tradition on this subject, and relying on the principle, derived through the Pseudo-Dionysius from the Greek Fathers, that human nature as such with all its powers and rights was unaffected by the Fall (quod naturalia manent integra), maintained, at least virtually, what the great majority of later Catholic theologians have expressly taught, that the limbus infantium is a place or state of perfect natural happiness....

At the Reformation, Protestants generally, but more especially the Calvinists, in reviving Augustinian teaching, added to its original harshness, and the Jansenists followed on the same lines. This reacted in two ways on Catholic opinion, first by compelling attention to the true historical situation, which the Scholastics had understood very imperfectly, and second by stimulating an all-round opposition to Augustinian severity regarding the effects of original sin; and the immediate result was to set up two Catholic parties, one of whom either rejected St. Thomas to follow the authority of St. Augustine or vainly try to reconcile the two, while the other remained faithful to the Greek Fathers and St. Thomas. The latter party, after a fairly prolonged struggle, has certainly the balance of success on its side.

Would we find Christians today refusing to call St. Gregory of Nyssa a saint or a Father of the Church had this hypothetical situation happened? Perhaps, but they would be misguided to do so.

Precisely. The fault lies with the heretics who twist and pervert Scripture as well as the Fathers. And that's where my whole argument above hinged.

My understanding is you're right about Aquinas being more Aristotelian. And maybe you're right about Augustine's speculations setting the stage for the initial collision--in the sense that (as the article above mentions), the Scholastics and other Westerners knew the historical uniqueness of Augustine "only imperfectly." Perhaps the 500 year old swing in Catholic theology back to the Greek Fathers will aid the cause of reunion.

Oh, and correction happily accepted about the later Orthodox Fathers. I'm still learning!

[Graves]

"There is no evidence to prove that any Greek or Latin Father before St. Augustine ever taught that original sin of itself involved any severer penalty after death than exclusion from the beatific vision, and this, by the Greek Fathers at least, was always regarded as being strictly supernatural....But this Augustinian teaching was an innovation in its day, and the history of subsequent Catholic speculation on this subject is taken up chiefly with the reaction which has ended in a return to the pre-Augustinian tradition."

Now let's apply the above statement from the Catholic Encyclopedia to another problem, Ineffabilis Deus - The Immaculate Conception - Apostolic Constitution issued by Pope Pius IX on 8 December 1854. Without original sin, Ineffabilis Deus makes no sense. If Ineffabilis Deus, an ex cathedra statement, makes no sense, the Pope of Rome is not infallible and Vatican I erred.

[Graves]

FYI, Below is taken from http://www.antiochian.org/1311
What is the difference between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic understandings of "original sin?" Do we Orthodox Christians even believe in "original sin?" (Nov. '01)

In the 6th Decree of the Synod of Jerusalem (AD 1692) the Patriarchs of the Orthodox Church affirm that "We believe the first man created by God (Adam) to have fallen in Paradise, when, disregarding the Divine Commandment, he yielded to the deceitful counsel of the serpent (Satan). And hence hereditary sin flowed to his posterity; so that none is born after the flesh who beareth not this burden, and experienceth not the fruits thereof in this present world. But by these fruits and this burden we do not understand (actual) sin, such as impiety, blasphemy, murder, sodomy, adultery, fornication, enmity, and whatsoever else is by our depraved choice committed contrarily to the Divine Will, not from nature; for many both of the Forefathers and of the Prophets, and vast numbers of others, as well as those under the shadow (of the Law), as under the truth (the Gospel), such as the divine Forerunner, and especially the Mother of God the Word, the ever-virgin Mary, experienced not these, or such like faults; but only what the Divine Justice inflicted upon man as punishment for the (original) transgression, such as sweats in labor, afflictions, bodily sicknesses, pains in childbearing, and while on our (earthly) pilgrimage to live a laborious life, and lastly, bodily death." What does all of this mean? Since Adam alone committed the "original sin" (or, more properly, the "ancestral sin"), he alone bears the guilt for that sin. However, the consequences of that first sin -- e.g., sickness, pain, death -- and most especially the allpowerful propensity to sin, is inherited by all of his descendants. Roman Catholics, on the other hand, believe that we are all born sinners, guilty of Adam's sin from our very conception in the womb

[Claud]

Without original sin, Ineffabilis Deus makes no sense

#1. That article I posted does not deny original sin, it just says that it never "involved any severer penalty after death than exclusion from the beatific vision". Ergo, no conflict whatsoever.

#2. And even if there *was* a conflict, that statement of the Patriarchs of the Orthodox Church (1692) you posted above also would make no sense, since it refers to "hereditary sin" *directly*.

#3. Like I'm gonna turn to the Antiochenes of North America to tell me what I believe. I'm sure this is been hashed to death on other threads, but let me just restate as per the Catechism of the Catholic Church 404-405: "And that is why original sin is called "sin" only in an analogical sense: it is a sin "contracted" and not "committed" - a state and not an act. Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants". The statement on the Antiochian website is simply inaccurate.

[Graves]

"'...Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants'. The statement on the Antiochian website is simply inaccurate."

Well, if I understood you correctly, I think you had said there is a growing recognition in the RC universe that Augustine's thoughts on "original sin" were not exactly patristic.

The problem for me, and a whole lot of other Orthodox Christians, with the papal pronouncement of 1854 is that it looks to be rooted in the "original sin" idea, i.e. in Augustinianism. As you probably know, Augustinian ideas just don't fly too well with Orthodox Christians. We look at the doctrine of Immaculate Conception and we see a poor solution to a problem that never existed in the first place.

[Agrarian]

"St. Augustine of Hippo" is not, never was, and never will be found on the calendar of the Orthodox Church.

Like you, I have no desire to continue this discussion at length about whether Augustine of Hippoe is or is not a saint of the Orthodox Church, but the above statement is misleading, particularly for any non-Orthodox (and many Orthodox) who are reading this, since most people are not familiar with how Orthodox calendars "work." I am pinging the entire Orthodox list, not for polemical reasons, but because I am going to include an icon and a couple of links that I think others will find to be of general interest.

I have never examined the individual calendars of each of the local Orthodox Churches to see if St. Augustine is or is not found listed there.

Even if he is not, this is not proof or argument of any kind, since calendars have always reflected a combination of universal veneration of great early saints *and* local/regional saints.

There *is* no one Orthodox calendar and listing of saints. Each local Church's calendar differs in the names on it, the order in which they are listed, and even in some cases, the day on which a given saint is commemorated.

Certain calendars came to have wider influence -- for instance the calendars in circulation in the Church of Jerusalem had great influence in Russia because of the adoption of the Sabaaite Typikon, so one will find a lot of relatively "minor" saints from the Holy Land in the Russian commemorations that are absent in the Greek commemorations, or the ranking of these saints will be higher than would be expected.

Likewise, the calendar of the Great Church in Constantinople came to have wide influence on local calendars under the Ottomans, but after the Greek revolution, New Martyrs of the Turkish Yoke began to be added in the Church of Greece but not on the calendars of Churches still under Muslim domination. The Calendar in Serbia is again different -- look at the Prologue of Ochrid, and one will find different names listed by St. Nikolai (Velimirovich) than are in the Russian or Greek calendars in certain instances.

And throughout all of this, again, there are very few Western saints, not because they are considered not to be saints, but because they were not locally venerated and were unknown in the East. My own patron saint is a "minor" Western saint who I guarantee you is on no Orthodox calendar (although he has been added to the calendar of the ROCOR, as have many pre-Schismatic Western saints.)

If we were to pick a date of, say, 1850, and look at all the calendars of all the local Orthodox Churches at that time, one would find very few Western saints. You would find that there would be many names missing of pre-Schismatic Western saints who are unquestionably saints by any Orthodox standard.

If St. Augustine were to be found to be absent from every single one of those lists of saints (and I really don't know whether he would be or not), all this proves is that he was what every Orthodox poster on this forum already knows him to be: a minor Father (from the perspective of the Church as a whole) who was little venerated in the East. On those occasions when St. Augustine was appealed to by the Latins at Florence, there is no record that St. Mark of Ephesus or the other Orthodox bishops questioned the legitimacy of appealing to him. In the pre-revolutionary Russian treatise on the Council of Florence by Ostroumoff, (an excellent book available in English translation in a reprint by HTM), he is referred to as "St. Augustine." The Orthodox bishops at the Council merely pointed out, correctly, that St. Augustine was ignorant of the Greek language.

I frankly don't care if some Orthodox Christians don't want to venerate St. Augustine or to acknowledge him as being a saint. I don't think it's a burning issue that will affect many of our lives. But at the same time to categorically state that "The Orthodox Church" does not and will never have St. Augustine on the calendar (especially when no one Calendar exists) is very misleading, and a bit brash in the sweeping scope of the claim.

Here, for those who are interested, is a fresco at St. John Lateran dating back to the 6th century -- it is the earliest known icon of St. Augustine, and it was in the home cathedral of the Bishop of Rome. Bishops of Rome who are acknowledged as universal saints of the Orthodox Church served the liturgy under this icon...

Here is a full listing of the Orthodox Bishops of Rome, including all the names of those who would have served the Liturgy under this icon:

Holy Orthodox Popes of Rome

Here is an interesting article on the calendar question written by a priest in the ROCOR with a great love for the saints of the West, that discusses the fact that there is only a collection of local calendars in the Orthodox Church:

Toward a World Calendar