Photo by Eberhard Grossgasteiger

DEFICIENT FASTER: It’s been tough fasting these past few weeks.  You know it’s not the same when you switch the ingredients.  It’s not as delightful eating soy cheese and soymilk ice cream.  And tofu beef tacos are not the same as regular tacos on Taco Tuesdays.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: What are you babbling about?!

DEFICIENT FASTER: Fasting, of course!

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I heard you talking about something you called Taco Tuesday, not fasting.

DEFICIENT FASTER: Oh yes, but that’s on fasting days during Great Lent.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I’m sorry, but if you may please teach me; I don’t think I know what you mean by fasting.  I do not think that word means what you think it means.

DEFICIENT FASTER: Sure!  I’d be happy to teach you!  Fasting is when you change the type of ingredients you eat because they are not allowed during periods of fasting.  It is a way to please God and to store up treasure in Heaven for ourselves.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Why though?

DEFICIENT FASTER: Uh… because… uh, we should show our gratitude to Christ for what He did for us.  If He died for us on the Cross, then the least I can do is fast for Him all the fasts during the year.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: Dear brother ANCIENT CHRISTIAN, I must apologize for this uncultured barbarian who thinks fasting is changing ingredients and has no idea what fasting is nor why we do it.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I was hoping that he was sharing his own opinion and nothing that he has actually heard taught at church.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: I hope not as well, brother; there are so many ignorant people out there with strange ideas.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I am glad to hear there are other sensible people out there who don’t believe such things.  Please explain to this fellow here what the nature of fasting is.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: Certainly!  Fasting is when you try to destroy all desire in your body so it does not cause you to sin because desire is the origin of sin.  Thus, fasting is a virtue because one has worked so hard to uproot this problem in themselves.  Then they can be well pleasing to God.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Why though?

EXCESSIVE FASTER: Because in this way we are pleasing Christ who destroyed desire in His body too.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Are you being serious or are you being sarcastic with our brother here who was talking about Taco Tuesday?

EXCESSIVE FASTER: I am serious.  Why would you even ask such a question?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Oh boy, I am afraid of these strange modern times in history.  I would rather go back to the grave than spend my leisure with you too.

DEFICIENT FASTER: Hey, that’s not very nice.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: I finally agree with you on something, Mr. Taco.  How insulting of this ANCIENT CHRISTIAN!

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: You are a sensitive lot aren’t you?

Both modern Christians were silent.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: The least you could do is ask me “Why though?” and not call me “insulting.”

DEFICIENT FASTER and EXCESSIVE FASTER: Why though?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Because that is not how we understood fasting in the early Church.

DEFICIENT FASTER and EXCESSIVE FASTER: How did you?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: We understood fasting as a sort of training (Gr. askesis) for a competition.  Just like when athletes of different sports train, their bodies’ orientations change so that some muscles are prominent and others not quite.  For example, a swimmer has a different build than a runner and both are different than a wrestler.

Now training by itself is worthless unless we use our training to win the competition.  But what is the competition that we are training for?  The competition is our day to day life, and the championship is inheriting the kingdom of God.  By reorienting our person to God, we compete successfully.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: That’s quite a thought-provoking analogy.  Explain that further.

DEFICIENT FASTER: So where do the ingredients come in?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Fasting is not a virtue like love is a virtue.  Love by its very nature is the goal of the Christian life: love for God and love for others and the two are interwoven as we learn from the First Epistle of the Apostle John, if we love one another then we are able to love God, so the two are intimately related.  The Apostle John says, “In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest: Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother.  For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another” (1 John 3:10-11) and “If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (1 John 4:20).

Another virtue is hope because hope is the state of being that drives you to act because you believe you will receive the promises which the One you love has promised you.  Hope is also the sign that you have a real faith in the One who promised.  I’m sure you can tell that fasting is nothing like faith, hope, and love.

DEFICIENT FASTER: I guess not.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: No, fasting is not like those three.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Nor is it like the other virtues such as prudence, courage, temperance, and justice. All these virtues are states of character and action.  Fasting is neither a state of character nor is it like the actions of the virtues.  Both the root and the result of the virtues differ in nature than fasting.  Fasting is an action, but it is not necessarily a result nor is it a root of anything.

DEFICIENT FASTER and EXCESSIVE FASTER: So what is it?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: It is a type of training (Gr. askesis) to orient us toward God.  Just like in any training there are three types of athletes: those who train too hard and injure themselves; those who train too lightly and fail quickly at the competition, and those who train moderately and are competitive and can win, so there are also three types of fasting: an extreme type, a deficient type, and a moderate type.

We as humans are susceptible to being conquered by the power of our impulses, the two most powerful impulses we have are the desire to eat and sexual desire.  These desires are good in themselves and for what they do because God created us to eat to live and to have fellowship with others and He also created sexual desire for husbands and wives to enjoy each other and from that relationship to replenish the human race.  But these volatile desires when not properly moderated lead to gluttony and sexual indulgence, and these things can warp a person’s attention and character.

You see, for these reasons, fasting is a way to reorient our attention toward what is truly important.  If we fast too lightly by making it about ingredients, then you have lost the whole point of fasting which is to train your soul to be stronger than your bodily impulses and to be attentive to the spiritual realities.  When you think fasting is nothing more than a change of ingredients, then you have not actually trained your soul to be stronger than your bodily impulses, but you have fooled yourself into thinking that you are fasting.

Now for someone just learning to fast, that might be a proper start, but only as a start.  It is like kindergarten.  An adult Christian who fasts in this manner is like a child who has not graduated kindergarten.

Such fasting will make us less attentive to our souls and to God.  It will also make us reactive.  Those who are given over to their bodily impulses are reactive.  When they feel hungry, they will nibble on whatever they can find.  Or worse, they will drink hard drinks immoderately.  And those who are overpowered by their sexual impulses are consumed by the search for the next sexual activity or sexual partner.

Both the nibbler and the lustful person are fully reactive to their impulses.  They don’t respond, but they react.  That’s the definition of slavery.  They don’t have inner motivation, but they have become impulsive. Their impulses have conditioned them like those in the circus have conditioned the animals they perform with.  This should not be so.

But it goes further than that, such people become obsessive and fantasize (which I define as dreaming while awake).  They obsess and fantasize about when they will eat, what they will eat, and what is that new thing that the other person is eating.  Ironically, the refrigerators of such people are full of spoiled food because when they go to the market they fantasize about food and buy all sorts of items, but in reality they don’t satisfy their desires, but they become disorderly both in their souls and in their homes.  They are bad stewards of what they have.  Everything is in a state of disorder.

As a whole, they lack self-control or what we in the ancient world called inner power (Gr. enkrateia) which is the ability to have power over yourself, and this power is the foundation of the virtues.  This is why fasting is a type of training; training by itself is useless, but when the training builds you and orients you to be a winner, then the training has value.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: You just described the fasting regimen of this impoverished fellow here who thinks he will please God.  You also just called him a loser, which in truth he is.  He should be ashamed of himself.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: And you should be too.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: What?!  I don’t fast like him.  I don’t have anything in common with his style of fasting.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Yes, you do.  Both you and he are extreme.  He is extreme in his deficiency of both the definition of and practice of fasting, and you are extreme in your excess.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: But it surely is better than his form of fasting.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Actually no.  In some cases, it might be worse.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: How?!

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: You see, those who are too excessive in their fasting lose attentiveness.  Their attention becomes static.  Everything becomes focused on fasting, and thus instead of being active, they become stagnant.

Soon, they are not motivated to do anything other than fast.  They come up with excuses for not doing certain activities especially those that are the most meaningful like spending time with the ones you love.

Then they too become obsessive, but instead of over their impulses, over the smallest of details of fasting.

For this reason, self-control (Gr. enkrateia) is unable to develop in them because they create unnecessary temptations for themselves.  When such people go to sleep, they dream about eating non-fasting foods.  The subconscious speaks loudly in dreams!

Then they become guilt-driven and frustrated.

The spiritual life is not about guilt nor should it be frustrating.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: But you are supposed to struggle through the spiritual life.  It is not supposed to be easy.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: My friend, there is a difference between struggling through something and being frustrated.  A competition, such as a race, is a struggle, but it is not frustrating.  Frustration comes when nothing happens in any regular or logical pattern.  Certainly, those who run a race have some level of predictability and pattern.

When you think of it, all of life is a struggle, but that does not make it frustrating.  Actually, that struggle gives life its meaning and it is one of the main windows that shows us the beauty of life.  Because when we overcome all sorts of struggles one by one, life’s beauty shines out little by little until it is very clear.

Excessive fasting turns the spirituality of fasting into frustration and unnecessarily so.  Unnecessary frustration is a hindrance and it is no credit to you to put yourself through that.  It’s extra without benefit or reward.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: I never thought of that before.

DEFICIENT FASTER: Neither did I.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: So what’s the point of fasting then?

Both modern Christians were silent.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: The point of fasting is to move you from being monological to being dialogical. When you are a slave to your impulses as in the case of the one who doesn’t fast or the deficient faster, everything is focused on the self.  There is no space for any part of your attention to be offered to anyone outside of you whether to those you love or to God.  All conversations and interactions are in reality conversations with yourself, a monologue.

DEFICIENT FASTER: But I have certainly seen people who do not fast and those who fast like me (which I see now is truly deficient) and we can have regular conversations with people.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: It appears to be a regular conversation, but the word regular is overrated.  By regular you mean just like everyone else.  The reality is the types of conversations such people have, even though they appear to be meaningful, are in reality directed toward fulfilling the goal of eating or having sex.  I’ve seen your young people here speaking with one another, and it is bizarre.  I see a young man and a young woman sitting and talking with each other, but there is no substance to what they are saying, and the conversation can go on for a while too.  The goal is sex.  But then once they have had their fill, whether in marriage or illicitly, they say “communication problems” arise.  But it is not communication problems, but the reality of the lack of substance rudely slaps them in the face after they have been satiated.  There was never anything of substance, and it caught up with them once the vigor of early youth had its time.  This is why so many relationships have failed in your generations.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: And what about those who fast excessively?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: They are also living a monological existence because everything is referred back to fasting and whether “you are doing it right.”  You end up talking to yourself, even in what you think is prayer and meditation.  Too much of your energy is exerted toward excessive fasting that you cease to be productive spiritually in a similar fashion to how ground that is plowed too much loses its moisture and nutrients and cannot bear crops like ground that is plowed properly.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: But I have known many people who are austere in fasting and they have deep spiritual lives.  How do you explain that; is it just an appearance, an illusion?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: No.  Bodily impulses are like a moving target.  Those who rule them effectively will can eventually become less attentive for smaller reasons.  For example, you have heard of those who fast until noon without food or water, those who fast until evening, and those who fast on only uncooked fruits and vegetables.  It seems like increasing degrees of austerity in fasting, but the reality is after years of practice, such apparently tough forms of fasting are no longer strong enough to help them reorient their attention to God and their souls, and the small things like a cooked vegan meal becomes too distracting for them, and they give it up when they fast kind of like those who give up social media and television during fasting; it makes them inattentive, but for others it may not be an issue.  But this increasingly austere fasting comes after years of fasting; you should not start a person on this regimen.  To compare it with sports again: for a child running half a mile without walking at all is incredibly tough, but for a seasoned long-distance runner, they will do it without sweating.  It is no longer a challenge and cannot develop their abilities, and if they “train” by running a mile every day, they will eventually lose their ability to be long-distance runners.  This is why you cannot compare any two types of fasting to each other, but we certainly have a baseline.

EXCESSIVE FASTER: What is that baseline?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: That baseline is that there should be a time without eating at all for a specific portion of the day, and that we abstain from certain foods such as those derived from animals.  This is the right start.  It allows for an appropriate standard of rigor no matter what level anyone is at.  These are the letters and numbers of fasting in the same way that a kindergartner learns their letters and numbers.  It may seem like a joke at first, but the letters and numbers that a kindergartner learns in their first year of school are the foundation for all reading whether it is a novel, or history, or philosophy or theology and all work with numbers whether balancing your checkbook, or engineering spacecraft, or managing a fund.

When we take the principles of this baseline and engage in a moderate fast (of course under the guidance of a spiritual father who knows us well so we are not too light on ourselves or are too ambitious).  At that point, we will become dialogical; our attention and conversation with both others and God will be of an exchange that is truly substantial.

When we fast, it frees up our attention because we rule (or to say it better, we properly order our bodily impulses) so that they are not as imposing as they are in non-fasting periods.  This causes us to become more attentive to our souls, to prayer, to loving others, and to ascending to God.

We become active because we have trained our attention by practicing restraint of the bodily impulses and freeing that energy for spiritual pursuit.

DEFICIENT FASTER and EXCESSIVE FASTER: But what is the sign of a dialogical existence?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: To begin with our motivation is planned and thoughtful and we act on those plans.

We become balanced in our behavior, and do not obsess nor fantasize.  The desire of the spirit is given way.

Then we develop self-control (Gr. enkrateia) which is the foundation of the virtues.

A sign of being dialogical is that we are able to listen to others, to just listen and to reflect on what they are saying.  We then learn about the people with whom we are interacting. We are able to engage them and share wisdom and edify them.  This edification is for their good, which is the definition of Christian love (Gr. agape): to will the good of the other.

And if they are dialogical or become so by interacting with us, then we can be edified by them when we reflect on our conversations.  That becomes honest conversation as well, one that is not for ulterior motives like eating or sex.  This type of dialogical conversation is real pleasure, pleasure that fills.  And is not of that baser sort that your generation calls pleasure, but which is really relief of pain.

This becomes a preparation for learning how to pray to God and listen to Him through the Scriptures and the Fathers.  When we become dialogical, we don’t just command and demand.

When you think about it that is what children with large egos do: they command and demand.  It is also how the masses conceive of prayer.  We demand things from God.  We try to command the One who commands the order of the universe.  Now think about what types of relationships you would have if that is the only way you spoke with your family and friends.  You wouldn’t have family or friends.  So what makes you think you can speak that way with God?

By being dialogical we also learn to be patient with others, and this develops love.  This patience also prepares us to be patient with God’s plan in our lives, or at least if we are not adequately patient, we don’t fall into despair because we know that He does things in His Providence.

When we also deal with people for real, we learn that they are not like the images we have formed of them, and this does not upset us like it does the masses.  Rather we deal with the reality of the people we love.  This also leads us to understand that God’s reality may not be like the image we had formed of Him.  And we develop a more real love for Him and not just butterflies in the stomach.

And that brings me back to something you, DEFICIENT FASTER, said.

DEFICIENT FASTER: What was that?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: At the beginning of our conversation, you said, we fast because “we should show our gratitude to Christ for what He did for us.  If He died for us on the Cross, then the least I can do is fast for Him all the fasts during the year.”  While the way you word it makes it seem like a good work or virtue (which fasting isn’t), there is something truly spiritual in there which is the dialogical element in that we should respond to God’s love.  This response is thoughtful and planned from us.

The Apostle John in his First Epistle talks about this when he says, “We love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19) and “because as He is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17).  This is dialogue and it has started with Our Lord Jesus Christ.  We continue it by responding to Him and becoming like Him just as two who are truly conversing with each other in a dialogical with another become like each other.  We become like Christ and we radiate that to the world.

In the end, depending on how a person is oriented, it changes something in them whether it is a physical orientation or a dispositional one.  True fasting, which is done with moderate rigor, reorients us and makes us dialogical so that we are oriented to our Lord Jesus Christ and thus we transform into the likeness of God and radiate it that to the world.

When we fast excessively, we become oriented toward moralism.  When we fast deficiently, we become oriented toward our own individual impulses and desires.  But when we fast moderately, we become oriented toward God.  Our desires are reoriented toward Him.  We allow the rational soul to develop.  We fan the sparking embers of the rational soul, and then everything becomes interpreted through the desire of the soul for God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

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Style can be defined as a specific “kind” especially “with reference to form, appearance, or character.” For example, you can have different kinds of cars, but in the end, the cars have the same underlying reality even though their forms and appearances differ.

One can define a car’s style by pointing to the different types of forms or appearances cars may take. For example, 1970s muscle cars have a certain distinctive style, but their essence is the same as today’s modern cars. The difference is in style. There are many different styles of car, for example, sports cars have spoilers on the back of the car, yet they are still cars. Some cars have built in navigation and some don’t, yet they are still cars. The difference is one in style.

What is Ethos?

Ethos is “the character or disposition of a community, group, or person.”

If we have a tank (another vehicle that moves using an engine), then that has a different character than a car. It has a different purpose. Even though there may be similarities, it is no longer one of style, but one of character and purpose.

You may remember hearing the word “ethos” in high school or in college in public speaking or argumentative writing in the appeal to ethos, which is the third type of appeal in persuasion. The whole idea of the appeal to ethos can be summed up in making an argument based on an authority which the group recognizes, due to that authority’s character and disposition which represents their group’s ethos whatever that may be, and which ends up resulting in the listeners being persuaded.

Style and Ethos of the Orthodox Christian Church

Recently, there has arisen a debate over what is appropriate in an Orthodox Church and what is not, and it often ends up in a discussion about style. Yet in these conversations ethos is confused for style.

One can define a difference in style (for example in preaching and writing) by pointing to the different rhetorical and poetic devices one uses. These devices can even be named because they have been studied for millennia in the West. Rhetorical and poetic devices are universal things; different cultures and languages use the same stylistic devices. Some of these universal devices include analogies, synecdoche, allusions, metaphors, and imagery.

We see these differences in style in the Church Fathers. But with respect to the ethos, it is usually the same. When there is a difference in ethos in the Church Fathers, it can be sensed easily.

Icon of the Church Fathers, 11th Century

St. Sophia Cathedral, Kiev

Examples of Style in the Church Fathers

St. Athanasius

To begin giving examples of style, St. Athanasius is a fitting example from the Church Fathers. St. Athanasius uses analogies heavily in his writings. Analogies are not simple artistic comparisons, but they compare the relationships between groups objects in order to clarify understanding of more difficult knowledge such as spiritual knowledge.

For example, in Contra Gentes (part I to On the Incarnation), St. Athanasius uses 8 analogies to describe the nature and relationship of the Logos to the Universe. In On the Incarnation, he uses more than 14 analogies to explain how Christ saved us through His becoming human, dying on the cross, and rising from the dead.

Therefore, usage of analogy is a defining stylistic mark of St. Athanasius.

The Cappadocian Fathers

Another group of Fathers that has distinct stylistic features are the Cappadocian Fathers: St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. Gregory of Nyssa. They often analyze the language of the Scriptures, the tradition, and the Fathers in their writings to help them get to a clearer understanding of the nature of God, His work, and the nature of spiritual things. While there were precedents of this in the writings of earlier Church Fathers, for the Cappadocians it is characteristic.

In On the Holy Spirit, St. Basil spends a good chunk at the beginning of the book analyzing how different words signify many different types of relationship such as the words “of,” “from,” “through,” “and” and “with,” to come to an understanding of how the divinity of the Holy Spirit has been indicated in the Scriptures, the liturgy, and the writings of the early Church.

In his Homilies on the Hexaemeron and his Homilies on the Psalms, St. Basil examines different figurative structures to arrive at a deeper understanding of Scripture. For example, in his first homily on the creation, when it says in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” he points out that this is a synecdoche, meaning that every little thing in the universe’s creation is signified by reference to the whole of “heaven” and “earth.” In his homily on Psalm 1, when it says, “Blessed is the man…” he also understands this to be another type of synecdoche where both men and women are signified by mention of the blessed man so that the Psalm applies equally to men and women.

In On the Soul and the Resurrection, St. Macrina and St. Gregory of Nyssa pause to consider how the Bible communicates realities that are immaterial by using material metaphors. An example of this occurs in their analysis of the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man.

St. John Chrysostom

When it comes to discussions of style in the Church Fathers, St. John Chrysostom is the greatest among the Greek speaking Fathers. He used many rhetorical and poetic devices in his sermons, but his frequent allusions to Greek culture and philosophy to highlight something in the Christian life are often a distinguishing characteristic of St. John Chrysostom especially in his writings directed at educated people.

For example, in On the Priesthood he alludes to the Siren’s Rock which appeared in Greek mythology to explain how vainglory in priests is extremely dangerous (On the Priesthood III.9, 77). The Siren’s Rock was the island of the Sirens who sung an enchanted song that lured sailors to their island and the Sirens then killed the sailors.

Due to the high literary quality of his writing by using these devices to communicate the Christian spiritual life to his listeners and readers, he was given the title Chrysostom meaning “golden mouth.”

If you want to be skilled at speaking and writing beautifully and clearly, then it is good to read the writings of St. John Chrysostom. I have personally benefited by imitating his style when I teach; it has caused my students to think clearly and to enjoy the experience of learning.

St. Augustine

Another Church Father whose writing style is of the highest quality is St. Augustine. He is the greatest of all the Latin speaking Fathers when it comes to style. A stylistic feature that distinguishes St. Augustine is his vibrant use of metaphors. Other Church Fathers used metaphors, but not like St. Augustine. This adds to the aesthetic value of his work. It also hooks and enlarges the imaginations of his readers.

In his book Against the Academics (published in English as Answer to Sceptics), which was written to refute the idea that we can never have any certain knowledge, he speaks in metaphors to his reader, Romanianus saying, “We pray that He permit your mind—which has long been gasping for breath—to emerge, at length, into the pure air of true liberty” (Against the Academics, 104)

Then when he is observing his students debating the nature of truth and whether we can have certainty about anything, he gives a great metaphor on thinking: “While I wish to invite both of you back to the arena of those intellectual exercises that impart refinement to the mind, I fear lest it become a labyrinth for both of you.” (Against the Academics III.7, 175)

He engages the imagination of the readers by appealing to beauty throughout to communicate his ideas. Instead of communicating the basic ideas of not understanding and having difficulty with intellectual topics, he describes these things in the language of drowning and walking through a maze.

St. Ephrem the Syrian

St. Ephrem the Syrian used poetry to express theology, and he primarily used metaphor and imagery (as will be seen later on in this article) to communicate the dogmatic and theological truth of the Christian faith.

But here we see something interesting. St. Ephrem’s structure of poetry is borrowed from the Syrian heretic father-son duo Bardaisan and Harmonius.

So now a question arises, why did St. Ephrem borrow the style of a heretic? The answer to that question is easy: it is because it was a borrowing of structural style to serve the Orthodox Christian tradition. He created original orthodox Christian content in that style and also combatted the heresies originally communicated through those stylistic structures. By so doing he made the dogmas of the early Church so clear in the minds of his listeners and readers that they became ingrained (Dr. Sebastian Brock, Introduction to Hymns on Paradise, pgs. 36-38)

The Orthodox Christian Ethos

Like I said above, there has arisen a debate over what is appropriate in an Orthodox Church and the discussion usually ends up being about style. Yet the reality is style and ethos are confused for one another.

As you can see from above, the styles that distinguished the different Church Fathers were structural being rhetorical and poetic devices, but their ethos is generally the same.

To get a feel for what their ethos is like, if we examine the works of the Church Fathers on sin, salvation, and prayer we find that they are in broad agreement. And when one is not in agreement, that person sticks out.

To begin with an examination of ethos, we can look at the doctrine of sin. In the Early Church sin was understood as a disease and disorder. This idea is present in all the early writings of the Church whether they wrote in Greek, Latin, or Syriac. As a result, salvation was viewed as healing. Further, this healing comes about because Christ has destroyed the power of Satan and death.

To illustrate this from a Greek speaking Father, St. Athanasius explains sin as a disease and disorder. He gives several analogies to make this clear in his books Contra Gentes and On the Incarnation, which are the classic works on the work of Christ and sin and salvation.

The most piercing analogy that he gives is the one where there is a stained portrait (which symbolizes humanity) and the original subject of the painting (who symbolizes Christ) comes back to sit down once again to be repainted on the same panel (to correct the corruption of humanity).

Another analogy he gives is that of the sun rising with its rays illuminating and purifying what it touches.

As an example of the same ethos from a Syriac speaking Father, St. Ephrem expresses the same idea in poetic form such as in this passage describing Paradise as the place where God is,

“More numerous and glorious
—-than the stars
in the sky that we behold
—-are the blossoms of that land,
and the fragrance which exhales from it
—-through divine Grace
is like a physician
—-sent to heal the ills
of a land that is under a curse;
—-by its healing breath it cures
the sickness that entered in
—-through the serpent” (Hymns on Paradise X.9, 157).

As an example of the same ethos from a Latin speaking Father, St. Augustine called sin “inordinate desire” meaning things are out of order. In one neat passage from his book On Christian Instruction (more widely known by its Latin title De Doctrina Christiana) he explains what sin is and what salvation is, in line with the other Church Fathers:

“Likewise, the Wisdom of God, in healing humanity, has employed Himself to cure it, since He is both the physician and the medicine. Therefore, because man fell through pride He has applied humility to cure him. We were deceived by the wisdom of the serpent, but we are freed by the foolishness of God. Furthermore, just as that which was called wisdom was really foolishness in the case of those who despised God, so that which is called foolishness is wisdom for those who vanquish the devil. We abused our immortality, and, as a result, died; Christ used His mortality well, and so we live. The disorder began in the corrupted soul of a woman; salvation came from the untainted body of a woman. There is another example of the use of opposites in the fact that our vices are cured by the example of His virtues. But, it was as if He were applying like bandages to our limbs and wounds when, as a man born of a woman, He saved men deceived by a woman; as a mortal He rescued mortals; by His death He freed the dead” (De Doctrina Christiana I.12, 37).

But more than any of this is that the Fathers both teach and model how prayer ultimately is a lifting up of the heart to be in and with God. This is why so many of their writings are so reflective because in many cases, their writings are prayers. St. Ephrem’s Hymns on Paradise along with his other collections of hymns are really prayers, not only poetry. St. Basil’s Homilies on the Psalms are really reflective prayers, not only sermons on prayers because he sees Christ everywhere and this is a modeling of how to lift up our hearts to be in and with Christ. St. Augustine’s Confessions is ultimately a prayer of praise and thanksgiving to God by reflecting on God’s work in his own life; it is not only an autobiography. What the Fathers model is how to integrate our entire selves: knowledge, memories, emotions, the Bible, and dogma in lifting up our hearts to God. It is a sort of ascension to God.

But in St. Augustine, we can sense that while many of the things he says are in line with the other Church Fathers, he begins to say things that are off. For example, he clearly sees sin as a sort of disorder as evidenced from the passage above, but he also begins to describe sin and salvation in legal terms. This is not quite how the earliest Fathers saw sin and salvation as seen above. So, we can easily sense when something is off.

As you can see from the examples of dogma and prayer, Orthodox Christianity has a distinct character. Salvation is understood as a healing and not as a release from a criminal sentence. Prayer is understood to be a lifting of the heart to be in God and not just petitions. Therefore, many different types of activities can become prayer even such as reflecting or writing a book. These things are not a matter of style, but they are the ethos of Orthodox Christianity. The many different styles seen above communicate the same ethos.

But some are content to gravitate toward modern Christian dogmas, forms of prayer, and ways of living. Then, when they are faced with how this can be, they ask “What in this is against Orthodoxy?” But we do not get Orthodoxy by negation. Orthodox Christianity has defining characteristics as seen above. They think it is only a difference of style, when it really is a difference in ethos.

We should not confuse ethos for style any more than we should confuse tanks for cars.

It could be the case that they do not really know what the Orthodox Christian ethos is, and superficially, they think both modern Christianity and Orthodox Christianity are the same thing. They most definitely are not.

The Orthodox Christian Ethos is For All Christians

What is interesting in all this is that many educated Protestants and even entire congregations have discovered the depth and maturity of the spirituality and wisdom of the early Church. They have adjusted themselves to reflect on these things and to inform their spiritual practices from the Fathers.

There is a name for this; it is called the Paleo-orthodox movement.

The Ancient Commentary on Scripture series is published by the foremost proponents of Paleo-orthodoxy. It is edited by Christopher Hall.

Further, there have been four books written by Christopher Hall titled Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers (1998), Learning Theology with the Church Fathers (2002), Worshiping with the Church Fathers (2009), and Living Wisely with the Church Fathers (2017). The goal of these books is to clearly introduce the ethos of the early Church for the spiritual benefit of modern Christians.

There is a sad irony in all this which is that many Orthodox Christians have not recognized the value of what they have and have moved toward the lower forms of Protestantism, and the educated Protestants have naturally moved toward what the Orthodox Christians already have.

It requires initiation and spiritual education to access it.

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Context means “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”  These events, statements, and ideas are often written down and we know of them by reading about them.

But also, the older a text is, the more and more invisible is its context.

There are many different types of context.  The most common include:

1. Author’s Purpose (Why was this text written?)
2. Author’s Background (Who is the author? What do they do for a living? Are they trustworthy?  Here though we have to be careful because we need to pay attention to their argument before we dismiss it based on who they are)
3. Audience (Who were they?What were they like?)
4. Vocabulary (Does the author use any technical words or uses what we think are everyday words in a special way?)
5. Text Structure (What type of text is this? Is it a letter? Is it a book? Is it a story?)
6. Historical Context (What was going on at the time and place where this text was written?)
7. Cultural Context (What type of ideas were out there when this text was written?)

But wait!  Some of you may be thinking that context is nothing more than reading a passage and the part that comes before it and the part that comes after it.  But that’s not quite correct.  Context is much more complex than that.

A way to think about context is that you are in a dark room, and you are given one very weak light to try to reveal some big object in the middle of the room.  It reveals something about the object, but not enough so you can figure out what it is.  Then you are given several other lights, let’s say now you have a total of seven lights (one for each type of context listed above).  While they were weak by themselves, now they have revealed the object in the middle of the room.

Context is absolutely essential if we ever hope to read and understand the Bible and draw out from it as much as possible.  Yet, we do not always identify contexts when we read the Bible, and if we don’t we may have one or two dim lights trying to illuminate a dark object in the middle of the room.  We will get something about it, but we will not be able to adequately know what that object is.

Why Didn’t I Learn About This? 

Some of you are thinking, “Nobody ever taught this when I was in school.”  And possibly you were a high performing student too.  I believe you.

The reason for all this is that reading instruction has heavily emphasized comprehension only, and for that reason, there is no encouragement for students to read older texts, ones far removed from their time.

Think about it.  How many books did you read that were older than 100 years old while you were in school?  How many were not novels?  For the most part, the context of the books you read is essentially the same as the one you live in.

Now, how many books did you read that were less than 20 years old?  The context is almost the same.  Although, I found out that since the digital revolution of the 1990s, the context between then and now is indeed different.  To illustrate the point, last year (2018) I was checking one of my students’ reading ability, so I had that student read out loud to me.  She was reading a suspenseful short novel that was written in 1995.  In one scene, one of the characters takes out a camera, and has to replace the film quickly in order to take pictures of a warehouse where criminal activity is going on.  At this point, she stopped reading and had no idea what film was and why the character had to replace it in their camera.  I then literally had to explain to my student the historical context of the 1990s in order for her to understand what was going on in this scene.  After explanation, she understood, and she not only understood, but she realized how fast the character had to act before losing the chance to photograph the condemning evidence against the other character.  She had every other piece of context, but this one was enough to stop all comprehension and dissolve all feeling of suspense.  Now, there was one very positive thing that this student did: she identified the problem, which was she did not know what film was and its usage in cameras.  Most of the time, we do not cleanly identify problems in misunderstanding.

Now think about the Bible and how we are not 20 years apart from its writing like the book my student was reading, but we are 20 centuries since the last book was written in it.  Could it be that there is some context that we are missing that may possibly lead us to misunderstand the books?  Could it also be that we will not even be aware that we do not know the context?

There is good news in all this. For the grand majority of the time, we can determine the 7 types of context I listed above for the books in the Bible, but before getting into that, we need to see how big of a problem this is for all of us Christians.

What is the state of reading proficiency in the United States?

To begin with, readers can be classified into four categories:

1. Below Basic
2. Basic
3. Intermediate
4. Proficient

The average American adult (about 73%) reads at a sixth-grade reading level.  To word it another way, this means that the average American reads at Basic to early Intermediate skill.  The characteristics of this type of reader is that he or she:

1. Can understand information in short, everyday type written material.
2. Understand basic explanations in pamphlets, guides, or instruction manuals.
3. They can summarize
4. And they can possibly make simple inferences

Now, what characterizes a proficient reader?

A Proficient Reader can:

1. Read lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts.
2. Synthesize (put together) information across many different sources (this is absolutely necessary for determining context and using it to understand what you are reading)
3. Make complex inferences
4. Compare viewpoints

Only about 13% of adults are characterized as Proficient Readers.

But can’t we read without using those 7 types of context?

Some of you may be wondering about all this and may be suspicious of what I am saying.  You are thinking that you have always read books (you are probably thinking novels or self-help books and probably those written within the past 100 years) and you have never had to build an understanding of those 7 types of context beforehand.

You are right.  But it’s because the context of those books is your context, so there is no need for you to consciously build an understanding of context and use it.  You already have it.

The emphasis in reading education in the past 40 years has moved away from focusing on the critical reading, analyzing, and developing as a person by reading the classics of Western civilization to simply comprehension of texts, even those written very recently.

This emphasis on comprehension has taken away the ability of students to read anything they want, and now they can only read those things that are of a fairly recent date.

This is also dangerous because it gives us an extremely false confidence that we can read and understand the Bible, and if we find something off, then it cannot be us, but it must be the Bible.  And in reality, what is off is us, and our lack of having the right contexts to use in order to read and understand the Bible.

This is dangerous in two ways. The first is that anyone who decides he or she wants to start a Bible study does so and leads it and he or she is not equipped (although they think and fully believe they are), and they start misinterpreting the Bible royally.  This can lead to division in churches and indeed the founding of new churches, maybe even new denominations.

The second way this is dangerous is that someone who wants to read the Bible (either due to genuine interest or due to doubts) will not understand the central message of the books of the Bible and will leave either not believing or confirmed in anti-Christian sentiment.  St. Augustine is an example of this.  The man left Christianity when he decided to read the Bible in his late schooling and the beginning of his higher education, and he was ill-equipped (even though he was highly educated), and this led him down the road to heretical sects and finally to full blown skepticism.  Years later, when he was in his early 30s, did he finally begin to learn the right context for reading the Bible from St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan.  The result was a transformed life (and one that continues to transform others) and one of the greatest Christian writers of all time.  He describes this in his autobiography, The Confessions, and he actually reflects on the act of reading and what it means.

Further, in his book On Christian Teaching, he goes in depth about how to read and understand the Bible, and he does so with such piercing insight that is centuries ahead of his time and still almost fully applicable to today.  He detects many of these different types of context listed above including historical and cultural context and explains how to use them in reading and understanding the Bible.  He went from skeptic in the Bible to a master teacher for others on how to read, understand, and live the message of the Bible.

Example of Context Building

The way we solve the problem of context is by asking the questions that give us the answers to the 7 types of context above.  If you scroll back up above, you’ll see that I have questions in parentheses next to each type of context.  For the most part, these questions can be answered for the books of the Bible, some much easier than others.  But answering these questions requires labor.  For example, it is not readily evident to a high schooler reading the Bible that each of the Psalms has its own context and it is not to be read as a book but as a set of poems on similar topics (this is Text Structure).  Also, it is not readily evident to that high schooler that the Psalms’ immediate context was used as praises in the Temple. (This answers on a basic level the questions of Author’s Purpose, Audience, Historical and Cultural Context).

Now let’s try building context to understand some things in The Epistle to the Colossians and The Gospel of John.

Using Context to Read and Understand The Epistles of Paul

If one builds knowledge of the history and culture of Greco-Roman society in the ancient world, then it becomes clear that the Apostle Paul was directly engaging that culture when you read his epistles.  He is not engaging a general people, but a specific people living within that Greco-Roman world and under its influences.  His choice of language shows that he is addressing the concerns of the new Christian communities he founded as they tried to integrate the Christian faith within their lives.

His choice of words reveals something about his audiences: in some texts such as Romans and Corinthians, Paul references a lot from the Old Testament and explains it at length, meaning there was the presence of ethnic Jews or former converts to Judaism from among the Greeks or well-educated Gentiles who knew enough about Judaism that the appeal to the Old Testament would strengthen their belief in Christ.  This is confirmed from the Book of Acts, and that illuminates why he does what he does.

Yet, in other epistles the Apostle Paul hardly references anything from the Old Testament because his audience was purely Gentile and were dealing with other obstacles to accepting Christ than the audiences who had some familiarity with Judaism.

This leads us to ask the question: what obstacles were there to hinder the Gentiles from accepting Christ? Was it religious?  Was it philosophical?  What were the religions at the time?  What were the philosophies?

After looking into the matter, we find that philosophical systems of thought were widespread including Platonism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism, and the writings of these philosophical schools from the time period still exist today and exist in English translation for that matter.  All three of these philosophical schools had teachings about the nature of humans, the world, and God.  For example in Platonism, the body was seen as a prison, as something hindering us from our goal, as something evil, but the soul was good.

At this same time, there arose a heresy called Gnosticism.  The Gnostic heresy was a sort of mix between Platonism and Christianity and spread throughout the Roman Empire in the first several centuries of Christianity.  Paul engaged the Gnostic heresy in his Epistle to the Colossians.  Gnostics believed somewhat like Plato that all matter including the body was evil, and only the spirit was good.  They explained this as being the result of the one highest God, whom they called “The Father” as emanating lesser gods called aeons.  The whole of the aeons with the Father were called “The Fullness.”  They were also referred to as “The Godhead” which means the “state of being divine.”

One of these aeons, the Demiurge (a term borrowed from Plato’s writings), created the material world, and because he was a lesser god than the Father, the resulting world was evil.  But we drew our spirits from the Father, so they were inherently good, but our spirits became imprisoned in the material bodies in the world that the Demiurge created and were subject to many heavenly beings who stood between us and the Father.  This is the origin of evil in their view.  This led them to fear these heavenly beings and work their whole lives doing things such as learning about them in order to be able to move beyond them after death in their ascent to the Father.  It also caused them to hate the material world, so they practiced severe fasting and ascetism because they saw the body as evil, so it was worthy of mistreatment because it was the source of evil in their lives.  The last of the emanations from the Father was called the Christ.  In the Gnostic teaching on Jesus, they denied that He ever became flesh, but He only appeared to be that way.  He was the Son of the Father, not of the Demiurge who made the world.  And he came to rescue the humans by showing them the way back up to the Father through a secret knowledge by which they can bypass the different heavenly powers.

Now, the Apostle Paul working within the authentic Christian tradition as received from the Twelve Apostles, took the Apostles’ understanding of our Lord Jesus and explained Him using the terminology of the Gnostics in The Epistle to the Colossians but with the goal of clarifying the true nature of our Lord Jesus to them.  This is why Paul uses very different terminology in this epistle than in his other epistles such as “Godhead” “fullness” and “philosophy.”

The word philosophy here does not refer to philosophical methodology such as logic and explanation, but to philosophical systems or thought such as Platonism and Gnosticism.  The historical and cultural context helps us determine what philosophy means here, which is a system of thought.  If one referred to logic in the first century they called it “logic” or “dialectic,” not philosophy.  Now this bears on modern day interpretations of Paul’s argument in Colossians.  I have often heard Christians whether Orthodox, Catholics, or Protestants claiming that we should be wary of philosophy and not waste time with it because even Paul says so in this epistle.  No logic, no systematic thinking, no nothing.  Even in some Orthodox cultures, if one is talking too much or being complicated, they berate him saying, “Stop philosophizing!”

But with our knowledge of context, if the Apostle Paul was writing against philosophy as a whole as we understand the term today, then this would make no sense at all because he uses philosophy in the form of logic and systematic argumentation everywhere he writes.  The Epistle to the Romans is a large argument.  The Book of Acts portrays him as “reasoning” with the Jews and Greeks regularly.  The word used for reasoning in The Book of Acts in the original Greek is derived from the word “dialectic,” and this is philosophical methodology.  What the Apostle Paul is doing here in The Epistle to the Colossians is also philosophy, but not the same system of thought as the Gnostics.

Further, when he writes to the Colossians, “In Him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9) he is explaining that Christ is not part of the Fullness of the gods, but He contains the totality of all that is divine in His body, which counters the claim that Jesus only appeared to be human, but He is actually human and He is not part of the gods, but He contains all of divinity within Himself.

Further, what is translated as “and you are complete in Him,” should be translated “And you have come to fullness in Him” as it is in the NRSV.  It is the verb form of the Gnostic term “Fullness.”

What the Apostle Paul is saying is that Christ is not the last of the heavenly powers but he is above them all, and we are full in Him meaning there is no need for anything else other than Christ.  There is no need to fear any heavenly powers.  There is no need to become obsessed with the secret knowledge about them.  Christ contains the fullness of the Godhead.  Further, Christ has “disarmed principalities and powers [having] made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it” through His death and resurrection.

He also addresses their asceticism at the end of chapter 2 and says that these things are not helpful in “checking self-indulgence” because treating the body as evil in itself is missing the point of Christian asceticism which is to train the body for virtue.

Yet some modern Protestants misinterpret this verse as dismissing all forms of asceticism and find fault with Catholics and Orthodox Christians for fasting and practicing other forms of asceticism.  Yet, Gnostic and also Platonic asceticism has one goal, which is denial of the body because it is evil, and Christian asceticism has an entirely different goal, which is training the body for virtue.  The Apostle Paul is addressing the former.  He practiced the latter as is evident from the Book of Acts and his epistles.

The Gospel of John

The Apostle John also engages the Gnostic heresy in his Gospel.  That heresy had grown more widespread in his days than in the days of Paul.  He uses the philosophical terminology of the ancient world in addition to the terminology of the Gnostics themselves in order to explain who Jesus is in the grand scheme of things.

For example, the words “world” “Word” “only-begotten” and “fullness” are words that are used to explain who Jesus is and how the Gnostics do not have the right explanation of Jesus.

The word “Word” in Greek is Logos, which refers to the ordering and sustaining principle of the universe.  It is immaterial, but without it the material world would not continue nor would it be ordered.  In Jewish philosophy in the Greco-Roman world, the Logos was equated with God’s Wisdom as explained in the Book of Proverbs 1-9. This Wisdom of God is an attribute of God not separate from Him but which can be distinguished in Him. Further, it appears to have a personal dimension.

When the Apostle John begins the Gospel with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing which has come into being came into being” (John 1:1-2) he shows that Jesus participated in the creation of the world and also orders and sustains the world.  He slams down the idea that the creator of the world is any different than the Father of Christ and also Christ since He is the Logos/Wisdom of the Father.  So there is no inherent evil in the material world, and in the final part of the prologue he writes, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us… and of his fulness we have all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:16).  He becomes what He Himself has created, and thus we partake of the fullness in Him.  He also described Him as “an only-begotten” meaning there are no others gods, but only the Word of God who in actuality belongs to God.

The entire Gospel focuses then on the aspects of Jesus’s words and ministry which reveal this understanding of Jesus.  The Gospel’s events and subject matter being situated within a firmly Palestinian Jewish context, it also reveals from those events the evidence that the Gnostics are mistaken in their understanding of Jesus.  Jesus is the only-begotten of God, He is God made human, He is the one who has power over the material world, not to show us an escape from it.  This is His world, and He has chosen to come down to it out of God’s love for us as a way to show the end purpose of God.

What We Learn From Such a Reading of the Scriptures

What do we learn from such a close reading of the Scriptures?  To step back for a moment to something discussed above, the last two points characterizing Proficient readers is that they can 3. Make complex inferences and 4. Compare viewpoints.

A lot of church people discourage a deep historical reading of the Scriptures because it can lead to an emphasis other than the spiritual and applicable, and no doubt this is true, but it is not related to such a reading, but a lack of knowing how to apply such a reading.  This is why it is possible to have atheists teaching the Bible in mainstream colleges and even seminaries while not believing a word of it.

Yet on the other hand, such a deep historical reading reveals a spiritually applicable way of life, but it requires a lot of contemplation on it by comparing the contexts of the Biblical writers to our context and us making inferences about how we can apply what we see.

For example,

After such contemplation, many virtues of the Apostles appear which we can imitate in our own contexts such as:

1. They truly understood other viewpoints.
2. They showed others a better way than those viewpoints.
3. They focused the intellect on the work and life of Christ as it makes sense in and of the world.
4. They were not afraid of the views of the world around them.
5. They were courageous.
6. They truly had the joy of Christ live in them and radiated that joy to others.

These are all things we can imitate, and this is the model for true teaching.

What often happens in the churches is repetition and not actual teaching for the purpose of understanding. This type of “learning,” leads to fear and/or hatred of other viewpoints and lack of any type of tolerance in any way of those who hold them.  To draw an analogy, in school, a lot has to be memorized and repeated before understanding can happen.  Churches, like schools, spend most of their time on memorizing and repetition, but not enough time on understanding.

If we grasp and apply the pattern that the Apostles show us, then we will have a deeper insight into the Scriptures, the world, and our lives.  We will integrate everything, and our minds will be firmly grounded in Christ and such a grounding will make it easier to follow Him.

Furthermore, in a world more and more hostile to Christianity and on seemingly intellectual grounds, it will encourage us to learn something about those grounds, compare it to what we know of Christ, and bring the understanding of Christ to them as the Apostles did, and as the early Christians did after the Apostles.

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“False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel.” -J. Gresham Meacham

The word “sophist” originally meant a paid teacher of public speaking and argumentation especially with respect to morality or politics.  The sophists often only cared about teaching their students how to persuade audiences regardless of whether their arguments arrived at true conclusions or not.

For this reason, the word “sophist” is now derogatory because it indicates someone who makes fallacious arguments but due to appealing to his or her audience’s emotions, is able to persuade them to change their thinking or take action even if his or her argument is not valid.

Introduction: The Old Sophists

In the early 6^thcentury B.C., the Greeks saw the birth of philosophy.  Philosophers back then asked questions about the nature of the world such as the following:

• Do we understand the natural world through our five senses alone or do we need immaterial thinking (such as deduction and mathematics) to understand the world?

• Do things in the world change, and if they do, then why do we perceive something permanent about the character of the world.

In a nutshell, in their examination of nature, they came up with very difficult questions, and these questions caused endless debates between schools of philosophy.

In the mid-5^thcentury B.C., a group of thinkers called the Sophists rose up (also among the Greeks) and claimed that all these questions about the natural world were nonsensical.  They declared that no one would ever arrive to answers on these questions, and we should spend our time focused on questions of morality, character, and governments, that is on practical matters.

The Sophists did not contribute much to these new questions because they also believed that these new questions would not have clear answers, but relativistic ones.  For that reason, they focused on teaching their students public speaking and how to win arguments even when their conclusions were not valid.  The focus was: learn how to persuade your audience to further promote yourself to public office.

This style of teaching was based on the Sophists’ worldview, which was relativism.  They denied the possibility of hard knowledge, and for that reason they also denied the absolute character of truth in any area of life.  The Sophists were hardcore agnostics and some were outright atheists.

An example of such a style of thinking can be found in Protagoras declaration that “Man is the measure of all things,” meaning that man is the source and origin of all truths.  It is appealing, but totally unsupported.

Or in Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus argues that injustice is better than justice and that there is no true justice.  He argued that things perceived as just such as a shepherd taking care of sheep is nothing more than a way of giving the shepherd the ability to fatten, slaughter, and eat the sheep.

As you can see, this type of thinking is not helpful to the development of knowledge and the discovery of truth.

Atheists held to this type of relativism until science became an undeniable example of the development of knowledge and the discovery of truth about the natural world.

In the mid to late 5^thCentury B.C., a new philosopher rose up who responded to the Sophists.  His name was Socrates.  He affirmed the possibility of hard knowledge and came up with a method for determining the truth of this knowledge, which was by observing multiple examples of an idea, and then coming up with a universal definition based on those observations. Often, this was hard, and sometimes no clear answer emerged.  An example of this is in the Platonic dialogue of Euthyphro where Socrates does not arrive at any clear conclusion about the definition of piety.

Regardless, he showed that when we are faced with a difficult question, we should not give up by saying things are relative or impossible to understand.  He affirmed the absolute and universal character of truth and often succeeded at discovering the truth by putting forward valid arguments.

Socrates’s philosophy started a new flourishing of thinking, led the increase of knowledge, and led to the beginnings of methodological science. For example, his student, Plato, picked up where he left off and started applying this critical thinking to morality, the physical world, law, government, and even to perception and psychology.  Plato’s student, Aristotle, refined the ideas of the philosophers who came before him, and this led to the increase of early scientific thinking.  Aristotle produced the largest body of scientific work in the ancient world.  Although it was not modern science, it was the beginning, and all because science becomes possible when one believes there is absolute and universal knowledge and that that knowledge can be accessed by rational thinking.  If this belief is not firmly held, then science is impossible. It would be a useless and self-defeating endeavor to try to discover universal truth when one does not even believe in universal truth.

The New Atheists

“New Atheists” does not mean the atheists of today.  It refers to a specific type of atheism that is characterized by the preaching of atheism through argumentation based on disciplines such as science, history, and philosophy.  Most popular atheism books are written by New Atheists.

This article is not a repudiation of all types of atheism. There are some atheists out there who are sincerely seeking the truth and are willing to believe if they have their questions adequately answered; the New Atheists do not belong to that group. The New Atheists are not willing to believe.  They only feign to be open to evidence.

The younger generations of atheists who argue for atheism belong to the category of New Atheists and a number of college professors employ New Atheistic arguments even if they are not consciously aware of it.

What led to the rise of the New Atheists?

It is debatable what led to the rise of the New Atheists because the New Atheism is a recent phenomenon going back to the late 1990s and exploding in the 2000s following the publication of popular atheistic works. In those works, they argue things like Christians have perpetuated violence, have been superstitious, and have slowed down the progress of learning, and that these things are characteristic of Christianity throughout its history.

Yet, the reality is not that Christianity is not guilty of anything that the New Atheists accuse it of whether perpetuating violence, or being superstitious, or slowing down the progress of learning.  A little reading on the subject from the true scholars in those fields (and not the popular New Atheists who are not qualified to comment on those fields), shows that their arguments do not represent what really happened in the past.

The reason they have become so popular and have convinced many people is because of Western Christians’ poor engagement with intellectual culture and scientific discoveries.  Christians do not know how to answer these arguments because they are unread in their own history.

An American professor named J. Gresham Meacham wrote a prophetic article in 1913 titled “Christianity & Culture,”in which he explained what he saw as the decline of Christian engagement with philosophy, academic disciplines, scholarship, and learning in general, and he painted a roadmap of what the future would look like, and that future he predicted is the present we are living now.

He wrote, “Careful preparation for Sunday-school lessons as for lessons in mathematics or Latin was unknown.  Religion seemed to be something that had to do only with the emotions and the will, leaving the intellect to secular studies.  What wonder that after such training we came to regard religion and culture as belonging to two entirely separate compartments of the soul, and their union as involving the destruction of both?” (Meacham, 3)

The New Atheists are the New Sophists

So how do the New Atheists succeed in convincing masses of people? They generally do so through four methods: bad logic, name calling, distortion of facts, and lying.  These methods are the modern versions of the ancient Sophists’ style of argumentation.

Here are some examples showing each method in use by the New Atheists.

Method # 1: Bad Logic:

The Old Sophists were known for using the fallacy of equivocation. Equivocation means that you use a word with two different meanings.  First, you make an observation using one meaning of the word, then second, you apply that observation to the second meaning of the word.  This is not valid.

Here is an example of equivocation from the New Atheists:

Christopher Hitchens often used this following argument in his debates with Christians.  He would say,

“Think of an evil action done in the name of faith.  You have already thought of one.  Now think of an evil action an atheist would do just because he is atheist.  You can’t think of one.”

The Christian would then feel frustrated and would not have an answer while the atheists in the audience applauded.

Yet, when one stops and thinks, he or she would realize that Hitchens has no valid argument against Christianity because he is using the world faith with two meanings.  The first faith he is arguing against is Christianity, but his supporting argument, and the faith the audience just thought of (including you the reader) is radical Islam.

These two “faiths” are not the same, and you cannot use radical Islam to argue against Christianity.  This is the Fallacy of Equivocation.  It is a mistake in logic that leads to an invalid argument and a conclusion that cannot be supported based on the evidence one gives.

If Hitchens were honest (or had known how to think logically), he should have reworded the argument to say, “Think of an evil action done just because one is a Christian.”  He would have had difficulty getting people to think of an action that could not be debated unlike the example he gave above.  But Hitchens, like the New Atheists, is not interested in arriving at the truth, but for spreading his religion of New Atheism.  This makes the New Atheists the New Sophists; they are only interested in making their audiences atheists.

Method # 2: Name Calling

The New Atheists regularly engage in calling Christians names.  They call Christians things like “superstitious peasants” among many other things.  This serves nothing more than emotional appeal without substance.  It bothers those who are believers and it makes nonbelievers laugh.  These are nothing more than memes without pictures.  They are distractions to cover up the lack of substantive arguments.  This is also the primary method of an unthinking schoolyard bully.

Method # 3: Distortion of Facts

The third method that gives the New Atheists the appearance of being good debaters and thinkers is distortion of facts.  They do this either through laziness or malice.  I’d like to think it is the former, but due to the nature of many distortions, it leads me to conclude that this is done due to malice.

Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusionmischaracterized the five arguments that Thomas Aquinas gave for the existence of God instead of actually familiarizing himself with the original arguments as understood in their original contexts.  For example, he refers to the Teleological Argument as the Argument from Design, and “refutes” it by showing that mutations and natural selection, which together produce evolution are unconscious processes, but that does not refute Thomas Aquinas’s Teleological Argument because Aquinas’s argument is not the argument from design, but it could better be expressed as the argument that all things in the universe tend toward a purpose or an end. Far from being refuted by natural selection, natural selection actually supports the Teleological Argument, and after DNA, it may very well be its strongest piece of evidence in nature that things tend toward a purpose or an end.  But Dawkins didn’t bother to understand the arguments; he thought he understood it by the name people give to it, which is “The Argument from Design.”  It does not mean design like you think of today, and whether Dawkins intended to or not, he distorted the facts.

A good article that explains Aquinas’s Teleological Argument (if you are interested in understanding it) is “Between Aristotle and William Paley” by Edward Feser.  If you have access to a journal database (if you are in college), then you can find this article.

Method # 4: Lying

If you ask college students, maybe even college graduates, if in the Middle Ages people thought the earth was flat, then it is likely they will answer yes.  I recently had this discussion with two friends of mine, and they said “yes, Galileo was the one who showed the earth was round,” so I answered, “No, he didn’t.” The other friend said, “It was Copernicus, not Galileo.”  And I answered again, “No, it wasn’t.”  The answer is the ancient Greeks; Aristotle gave two empirical pieces of evidence in the 350s B.C., and others followed with more empirical evidence in the following centuries.  Here is a video that explains it and has references if you want to look up the sources yourselves.

People who are well-read know this, so the fact that this had been a view up until recently (I remember when I was in elementary school in the 1990s, they taught us that people thought the earth was flat until Columbus and that the Catholic Church had opposed him because he taught a spherical earth). The fact is that the Church thought the earth was spherical, and this was not what caused friction between the Church and Galileo.  It was not until I went to college and in my astronomy and western civilization classes where I was shown the historical sources that I realized I had been taught a lie.  Where that lie came from, I later found out it was by two anti-Christian atheists who had first written this in two textbooks in the late 19^thcentury. Their names were John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White.

In his book God is not Great, Hitchens wrote about how the early modern Biblical translators, “Like Wycliffe, Coverdale, and Tyndale were burned alive for even attempting early translations [of the Bible]” (pg. 125).  He does this to show how evil the Catholic Church was.  Yet, the fact of the matter is, neither Wycliffe nor Coverdale were burned alive or even killed for that matter.  Both died of natural causes.  Tyndale was killed by strangling and then his body burned.  Hitchens did not make an honest mistake here.  Hitchens has written this to make atheists even though two thirds of what he wrote here is not true nor is it representative of Christianity.

If you take these four methods away and let the New Atheists argue, then they will have nothing with which to argue.  We must reduce them to what they were in the ancient world which were uneducated countercultural self-boasters of their own importance.  How they came to be seen as the intellectual and the educated is beyond me because their atheism is not based on their studies, but on presuppositions that they confuse with the conclusions of their studies.

The New Atheists have been called out by fair-minded atheists.  An example is Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science, who wrotethat Dawkins’s book The God Delusionmade him “ashamed to be an atheist. Let me say that again. Let me say also that I am proud to be the focus of the invective of the new atheists. They are a bloody disaster and I want to be on the front line of those who say so.”

How Did We Even Arrive to This Point?

I think we have arrived to this point (and it has been aggravated) by the fact that children are no longer taught formal logic until their last year of high school and only if they are in advanced classes.  Otherwise, they receive their first lessons in formal logic sometime in the first two years of college in their Gen. Ed requirements. When I took my first course in logic, which was taught by a teacher who was one of the clearest explainers I have ever met, half of the class regularly failed the assessments.  This illustrates the state of logical and critical thinking in the United States; it’s very bad!

On the contrary, in Europe and America logic was part of early secondary education and revisited and used throughout the school years.  This continued until the early 20^thcentury.  That’s the same century you find the explosion of atheism.  There is a clear correlation between the disappearance of logic in the school curriculum and the explosion of atheism, and with further research work, we may be able to show causation as well.

Here is one more example of such nonsensical illogical thinking.  I often hear atheists saying, “All babies are born atheist.”  When I hear that, it causes me to wonder about what exactly is it that they are trying to argue?  Is the implied conclusion, “Therefore, everyone should be atheist”?  I reflect on the fact that babies are born knowing nothing at all, and to compare atheists to babies in this state is not something to be celebrated.  Where is the reverence for knowledge?  I thought they argued that atheism was based on knowledge?  So if they try to argue for atheism by saying that all children are born atheists, this is deplorable.  See what I mean about that they, like the Sophists, argue with the intention of making others atheists whether their arguments are valid or not.

With the abandonment of the intellect, which uniquely makes us human, which separates us from all other creatures, and indeed has always been identified in Christianity with the Image of God, it thus comes as no surprise when people have abandoned the ability to use the intellect as they do their legs that it is only a matter of time before they lose belief in God in the same way that if they abandoned their ability to use their legs, they would lose their ability to walk.

What this means is that people are left to make decisions based on how they feel and not on how they think because that faculty of intellectual reasoning is not quite there due to a total lack in education of logical thinking in modern times.

The Old Apologists and the New Apologists

The new philosophical reaction to the New Sophists can be found in Christian apologetics.  But one first must understand that apologetics was practiced from the earliest days of Christianity.  In many ways, Paul the Apostle was the first Christian apologist.  When he went to Athens, he went to the Areopagus (Mars Hill) to engage with the Greek philosophers (who were the intellectuals of the day) including Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.  The Epicureans were atheists; the Stoics were pantheists.  It is interesting that you find large portions of the secularized population today drawn to these two worldviews.  When Paul the Apostle met them, he referenced Nature and their impulse to respond to Nature in a religious way.  He even cited a poem written by a Greek, “For in Him we live and move and have our being,” which can be seen as Stoic in order to use a common and familiar starting point to lead them to Christ.

The following century saw several Christian apologists rise up. Athenagoras and Quadratus of Athens among the lesser known apologists and whose works survive as fragments. But we have three lengthy apologetic works from St. Justin Martyr who wrote in the 150s-160s.  He engaged Greek philosophy and Judaism in these works to clarify, explain, defend, and argue for the Christian faith.  You can get a copy of these writings by clicking here.

In the 3^rdcentury, Origen the scholar wrote voluminous work answering a critic of Christianity named Celsus.

In the late 350s, a philosopher emperor named Julian left Christianity and converted to paganism becoming the last pagan emperor of the Roman Empire.  He wrote several works against Christianity attacking Christian teaching.  This drew the response of multiple Church Fathers in various works titled Against Julian.

St. Augustine in the late 300s wrote a book called Against the Academics (sometimes known as Answer to Skeptics).  He wrote this book as he was considering converting to Christianity, and in his days, at the Academy of Plato, the predominant opinion was that we can never know the truth.  Yet Christianity claims to be the truth and to present truthful claims.  Is there truth and how do we determine truth?  The answers are found in this book.  He addressed those Sophists of his day, defeated their arguments, and that paved the way to his own conversion to Christianity. The Academics’ same arguments have turned up again today.  If you want to address them, then this book is an indispensable resource, and it is not that long either.

The point is from the beginning of the history of the Church, Christians have always had an intellectual spirit that engaged with the learning and knowledge of their times.  It is only recently that Christianity has been reduced to a religion of the heart and soul, and the mind has been neglected.  Indeed, Jesus said that the first great commandment is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and WITH ALL YOUR MIND” (Matthew 22:37).  It is time we started following this commandment in full and not only two-thirds of it.

Conclusion

Historically, atheists have not been friends to knowledge.  If one applies the New Atheists’ ways of arguing against Christianity (which were primarily the four methods listed above) to exploring reality instead, then we would never arrive at any knowledge of the world.  These methods are not fit to explore the reality of Christian history, morality, and belief.  Rather, when there were atheists in the past who were friends of knowledge, this was rare and difficult to find.

For modern atheists to pretend that atheism has been the great advancer of knowledge is a Sophistic argument that only wins due to the lack of knowledge in their audiences and it qualifies as a distortion of facts and straight out lying.  If one carefully studies, for example, the history of science, one finds that methodological naturalism was a significant contribution of Christian European philosophers who thought about how to study nature based on what it meant for something to be natural in the context of being created by God.  Methodological naturalism was not based on atheistic premises and conclusions.  Had atheism been the primary system of thought in the Middle Ages, then modern science may have never arisen.

Please note, if you are interested in seeing New Atheistic argumentation firsthand, you will notice that if any atheists react against this article, it will usually be one out of two reactions: calling me names or dismissing this article without giving reasons why.  These are also two Sophistic fallacies: Ad hominem and ad lapidem. They will not actually take points from the article and discuss them and whatever deficiencies they perceive.

That is not to say that some atheists may have reasons, they may very well have reasons for their beliefs.  If that’s the case, then we will begin a dialogue as the Old Apologists did long ago.  The Christian faith has never feared dialogue; that was the main source of how it spread in the first 350 years of its history in conjunction with the example of the way early Christians lived.  The only reason to convert back then (before Christianity became the empire’s religion) was solely based on the message and work of Christ. That was to be communicated through dialogue.

Had people followed the Old Atheists (the Sophists being one group), then knowledge would have never progressed.  There would only have been an ambition to rule, to get your way, and to seek personal promotion.  This is why Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle worked very hard to discover and explain the rules of thinking that allow you to validly examine reality and reach true conclusions.  This type of thinking led to better education, the beginnings of science, advancement in poetry, advancement in storytelling, better governments, led to wisdom, and most importantly, it was utilized by Christian apologists to spread the faith and message of Christ.

If people will follow the New Atheists today, then what we have to look forward to is a society full of ambition, people stepping over others, people seeking personal promotion while rejoicing at others’ falls.

At the very end of his prophetic article, J. Gresham Meacham suggests that “an age of doubt might be followed by the dawn of an era of faith” if the Church does her work (Meacham, 15).

It is time for us to do that work especially with the resources we have available to us today from clear translations into English of the ancient apologists, ease of accessibility to knowledge due to online retailers like Amazon, and books written by new apologists to help us navigate and utilize this knowledge.

Let us rise up and engage with the intellectual culture thus becoming ambassadors of what the Kingdom of God looks like in its intellectual aspect, and then we will continue the work Christ began and entrusted to us to continue. We are ambassadors of the Kingdom of God.  Anyone who is called to be a good ambassador must learn the language, culture, and ideas of the country to which he will go to represent his.  If we are trying to represent what the Kingdom of God is (which is nothing less than heaven on earth), then we must present it so, and that includes intelligent and deep thinking.  By raising generations of emotionally pious believers who do not know anything further than the most basic practical science, basic reading to read signs and menus, and basic mathematics to balance their checkbooks (if they can even do that), then we will not win those who are most influential in society, those who are using their reasoning abilities as God intended for us to use and develop, and those who may sincerely want to love God with their minds.

What will you do?

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The Work of the Holy Spirit

The Spirit, just like the Father and the Son, works in the field of time.  I once heard a scholar, I can’t quite remember who, who defined the History of the Church as “the life of the Spirit in the Church.”  This is true.  The Holy Spirit works in humans moving them to repent, to watch, to pray, to preach Jesus, to serve others whether in hospitals, or orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, impoverished countries, to become priests serving the flock of Christ, and to teach the faith to those who already believe in order to deepen their faith.

The Writings of the Early Christians: Tracing the Work of the Holy Spirit throughout History

When the Christians of the past wrote, especially the earliest Christians who did so only to preach Jesus and to deepen other Christians’ understanding of their faith and did not receive anything in return, their work was the result of their reflection on the Holy Spirit’s work in their lives and in the Church.  So, their writings are also the result of the work of the Holy Spirit, but not in the sense of the inspiration of the Scriptures because the Scriptures lay out God’s plan for salvation and how it happened.  The writings of the earliest Christians are a reflection on that plan and how it was fulfilled.  This is the distinction.

To give an analogy in order to explain what I mean: The Scriptures are a river, but the writings of the early Church are like trees planted by the river.  The river is one and flows of its own accord, but the trees differ depending on whether they are healthy or not and how far their roots go down, and if we look at the trees from far away, we can determine how and where the river runs by seeing the direction of the trees as they grow along the river.  The Scriptures were directly inspired by God for the communication of His plan to all who would ever believe.  Thus, the Scriptures are one and flow of their own accord.  But the trees, that is the writings of the early Church, can be deep-rooted or not. This is why we cannot look at only one or two of the writers of the early Church, but we have to look at all of them together (that is to look at the trees from afar) because then we can understand the big picture and what the dogmas, the general way of thinking, and the practices of the early Church were, and we see that they are dependent upon the Scriptures (the river).  They grow along the Scriptures.  The writings of the early Church were also closer to the Apostles, so they interpreted the Scriptures in context and delivered Apostolic practices of worship to their readers.  They are the most well-nourished of trees and should be sought before anything else.

Image from Pixabay

We live in a culture (especially in America) that is largely ignorant of the past.  This is the result of the great travesty of American education which, among other things, results in students not learning the skills of historical thinking.  They are taught facts and dates and told why they were important, but they are not taught how to determine whether or not an event or movement was important.  Further, they are not taught about how the past was truly qualitatively different from the present, and the layers of history (theological, spiritual, social, institutional (the church), and governmental) that led to the quality of life we live today.  Simply being told why something is important, and from only one or two points of view (governmental or military) in secondary schools does not lead to an adequate or even appropriate (especially for an informational civilization) understanding of the past and how it directly influences the present.

In addition, most people do not invest in their own memories.  I have met people that have told me they intentionally try to forget most of their work experiences, but they do not understand that in their memories they have the library of their own souls.  If they do not reflect and remember what they went through, the bookshelves are empty, and life is a vicious cycle full of stagnation and no growth.  Our memories make us who we are, and also the lack of memories make us who we are.  We can be mature people with rich personalities as a result of our reflections and remembrances of our lives’ experiences or we can be brutes simply waiting, for what we perceive to be something, but never quite knowing what it is that we are waiting for.  The mature who reflect have direction in their lives.  Those who do not reflect have no direction in their lives; they are like feathers tossed about by the wind.

When these two factors come together (ignorance of history and intentional forgetfulness of one’s own experiences), the result is deadly as can be seen from above because life will be a set of vicious cycles happening over and over again.

The same holds true for Christians living today who are ignorant of the writings of early Christians.  They never develop a deep and mature faith.  They can get stuck in arguments and discussions and be deceived by false teachers of the faith.  The earliest Christian writings provide a corrective for so many errors. It is an interesting phenomenon that demands reflection (and one that produces fear) that Christian leaders who are most ignorant of church history revive ancient heresies without knowing it.

The Christians of at least the first seven centuries valued the writings of the Christians who lived in the past as the treasure box where the correct teaching of their faith was stored.  This was due to the fact that God became man and entered into historical time thus history was seen to be of the utmost value.  In addition, He sent the Holy Spirit into historical time to continue with those who have believed in Him, and the reflections and writings of early Christians revealed the work of the Holy Spirit.

Before the New Testament was canonized as part of the Bible, it was referred to as the memoirs of the Apostles, that is their memories.  You find that the earliest Church writers refer back to these writings even though they did not yet understand theoretically that these writings were on par with the Old Testament, but they returned to them because of the idea that one must go back to the believers who lived before Him to ensure a correct understanding of the faith, and with these texts especially so, because they bore direct witness to Jesus and the fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation and the generation that first believed in Him.  Then, beginning in the late 2^ndcentury and even more so in the 3^rdcentury, you find Church writers referring back to the writers who wrote before them but after the Apostles.  By the 4^thand 5^thcenturies, the Church Fathers were consistently and as a matter of good taste referring regularly to the ancient Christian writers.

This is part of the Apostolic Tradition that holds fast what was faithfully delivered to the Church as the Apostle Paul commanded his churches (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

The Past Meets the Present: The Apostolic Tradition

The great orator Cicero said it beautifully, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” This is what happens when we live in total ignorance of the Christian writings of the past; we are children, and this is not something to be celebrated but something to lament over and to repent from.  The Apostle Paul compared these types of people to those who still drink milk and not solid food (1 Corinthians 3:1-2; Hebrews 5:12-13).  This is what happens when we ignore early Christian writings whether they be the history of the church, the lives of the martyrs and saints, or spiritual and theological writings.  We continue living off milk never maturing.

The Christians who came before us are our ancestors whether we are physically related to them or not.

We live in a time, perhaps the first time in centuries, where apologetics has returned to the forefront of the Christian faith.  Apologetics was also at the forefront of the Christian faith in the first five centuries when multiple apologetic works were written due to the attacks of critics of Christianity whether nonbelievers or heretics. If we only read those writings (some Christians don’t even know that apologetics existed from the very beginning), I believe we would not be in much of the mess we see today with being unable to answer skepticism, relativism, postmodernism, philosophical arguments, the faith/science debate, modern heresies, and all the resulting issues that come out of these “-isms.”

But, for many, they have chosen to live in ignorance of the Christians of the past whether intentionally or by habit.  The point here is that it is not simply the Christians of the past that today’s Christians are ignoring, but it is the work of the Holy Spirit through the generations of the Church that they are ignoring, and it is no wonder that such Christians should get lost.  It’s the logical result: if one believes they can follow the Holy Spirit yet ignore His work, then they are ignoring a large part of who He is and what He has done and continues to do.  They have only accepted some of His work, not all.  That is not following the Holy Spirit.

Modern Christians have become trees without roots. And this is perhaps where we should leave off.  God is the Lord of History; history is the field in which He works.  All three Persons of the Trinity work in, through, and throughout time.  He works through His followers through all times, and we can learn from those followers even if we have never lived while they were alive on the earth.

The invention of writing has allowed minds across time to communicate with each other and for those who lived in the past to impart to us their wisdom, and this is especially true when we read their writings which show us the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives, and for that reason, they will always have something to teach us and we will always have something to learn from them.  When we familiarize ourselves with these works and let them deepen our understanding and practice of our faith, then our lives will be transformed, and we will transform the lives of those around us, and the result will be that we will live according to the plan of God’s Salvation, which He also communicated to us through writing.

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To contrast, I also remember during the week of Pascha, the Paschal Praise is repeated multiple times that week, and at the end of the Good Friday service, one final praise is chanted while the priests enter the sanctuary and the children who are chanters enter in with them.  The older chanters are situated outside in the chancel, and the Paschal Praise begins one final time in antiphony with the children beginning and the congregation and chancel chanters responding.  This happens 12 times in alternating fashion.

This makes us think about where else we hear the voices of young children, which is in reading the Scriptures.

A Problem

It has become a trend in Protestant churches to separate children from adults.  The rationale is manifold.  One may reason that it is good to take the children to their own service.  Maybe send them to babysitting to give the parents some peace while they try to worship or get an emotional high because the service is too long for the children and that can interfere with the parents’ experience.

Christ blessing the children, c. 1600

This trend has also started creeping into Orthodox churches as well.  And sadly, some may see this as a good management tool.  They may argue saying that the Liturgy is too long for children.  But the problem is not that the Liturgy is too long; the problem is that the children (and actually many of the adults including those advocating this) do not understand the Liturgy, and you cannot love nor enjoy what you do not understand.  It is impossible.  You must understand something about it in order to love it.

Some may respond, “Well, people have loved things they have not understood like watching stars for millennia.  They did not understand how stars worked yet they enjoyed watching them.”  Yet, they did understand that they gave off light and appeared at night, and the different constellations appeared during different times of the year.  So when people complain that the Liturgy is too long for children, this is not the problem.  Think about this: children often sit and watch movies that are as long as the Liturgy and enjoy them.  Why?  Because they can follow what is going on.  The problem is we have not taught our children how to follow the Liturgy.  We can’t solve a problem if we can’t even identify it, and if we think the problem is the Liturgy is too long, then we will never solve the true problem.  This is why we often see adults who are totally lost in following the Liturgy even if they have been regular attendees since childhood.

To remove children from the Liturgy because “they do not understand” is to ensure they will continue not understanding.  This is best summed up by a saying of St. Thomas Aquinas who said “A small error in the beginning of something is a great one at the end.”  The best thing to do is to teach children the structure, progression, and meaning of the Liturgy.  Suddenly, you will find a change in our children.

How Should We Think About Children in the Churches?  What Did The Early Church Do?

Children are marginalized today, and they were even more so during the time when Christianity began.  But some may ask how are they marginalized?  Here is an example: I see professionals who get offended when others tell them they should spend time with their families, and I truly often wonder why.  Why are they working if not to take care of a family?  What is more important: family or work?  I actually had this discussion with the high school youth at my church several months ago, and they entered a debate with one holding it was the family and the other arguing that it was the work.  This is one small example of how children are marginalized, and they are so marginalized that some may not even recognize that this example is, in fact, an example of marginalization.

The early church, in taking Christ’s teachings seriously that Christianity was for everyone (including children) incorporated children into its formal life from the very beginning including in the ministry of reading the Scriptures out loud to the congregation.  Christopher Page of Gresham University, the author of The Christian Singers and the West, in a Gresham Lecture in 2016 said, “It was also the sound of youthful voices that mattered to the Christian communities. The rulings of early Christian councils sometimes insist that readers should continue to read until the age of puberty but no further” (“Towards a Ministry of Singing,” Christopher Page, pg. 5 on the manuscript, 3 November 2016).  There are many reasons why this was the case including the purity and innocence of children, but also the sound of their voices must have reminded believers that they were also hearing the future of the church in those children’s voices.  The Reader in the early church then was a ministry of children in many parts of the Roman Empire.

Many of us are unaware that the value we have for children is a direct result of our Christian faith, specifically in its early centuries, influencing the West.  This is examined in detail in the book When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity by O.M. Bakke.

What This Means

If you hear the sound of children in the churches, then you are hearing the sound of the future church.  It is like a seed that develops over time.

If you hear the sound of babies crying, then from those same voices will come those who will teach the Church of God.

If you heard the sounds of babies screaming, then those same voices will be the ones chanting and leading others in the worship.

These are the sounds of the future Church: teachers, priests, bishops, apologists, writers.  You already hear these voices in the cries of the children in the churches on Sundays.  But it is difficult to see, because they are like seeds; their structure is still not definite, but all they will become is faintly present.

Remember that next time you are tempted to become upset when you hear too much crying in church.

Evidence

In all descriptions of early church worship, there were no children’s services and adults’ services.  There were no youth services.  All people regardless of age group attended the same service.  Children saw the reverence of parents and other adults from the earliest times of their lives.  They saw the martyrs their churches produced.  This produced seriousness and reverence in the young, and those young grew to become solid Christian adults.  We cannot expect this to continue if we segregate children from adults during the Liturgy.  We cannot get the same results without having the same conditions.

Conclusion

We cannot let the attitude of the secular world which has come full circle since the days of the later Roman Empire take over us and marginalize our children.  Look at the disastrous results it has had on our society.  Think of the Millennial Generation.  A large number of them are not able to consistently hold jobs or complete college or complete it with a viable degree.  Further, they are not receptive to Christianity for no other reasons than having been fed a ton of false ideas from the television and computer screens that raised them (the parents only cared about their children’s feelings not being hurt when they played sports so they successfully lobbied for the participation trophies which has led to the disastrous results we all see and are paying for today).

We need to take our children seriously because while they apparently seem small now, they are not.  They are the living breathing future of the Church which we see today as seeds, and these seeds will grow either to become a beautiful forest that gives shade and comfort, or it will become a mangled mess of vegetation.

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MODERN CHRISTIAN: My friend, we do not have priests.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: So who was the man giving the sermon during your service; I did not recognize most of your service except for the sermon.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: That was our pastor.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: A pastor is a priest.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: No, he is not.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I am a bit confused, my friend.  How is your pastor not a priest?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Because pastors are not priests.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Is that how you think?  How did you arrive to such a conclusion?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Based on the Bible.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I am a bit dumbfounded?  Can you explain what you mean further?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Absolutely!  I would be happy to!  I know my Bible very well.  There is only one priest in the New Covenant, and that is Jesus.  The old priesthood has been fulfilled in Christ because He is the “priest forever.”  There are no other priests.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: That Scriptural reasoning is not right.  You have many things confused.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Is that so?!  How do you know?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Well, I lived in the early church for one, and we had priests, and all generations before us had priests going back to the Apostles and to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: I am sorry, but I cannot accept that.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Why not?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Because the New Testament would have said something about priests if it were so.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: It does.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: You know what, you’re right!  I do remember now that the New Testament refers to all believers, not some, but all believers in Christ as priests.  For example, in 1 Peter 2:9, it calls us “a royal priesthood.”  This is further echoed three times in the Book of Revelation beginning in 1:6 calling us “priests to His God and Father” and again in 5:10 as “priests to our God,” and finally in 20:6 where it says, “Blessed and holy is he who has part in the first resurrection.  Over such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years.”  So yes, the New Testament said something about priests four times, that is all of us who believe in Christ are priests.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: But what about the man who gave the sermon?  He was clearly of a different rank than the rest of the congregation?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: That was the pastor, not a priest.  We are all priests to God; there are no ranks in Christianity.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Is that pastor the only one who gives sermons or does any member of the congregation give sermons also?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: No.  Sometimes other pastors give sermons; the congregation does not.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: But you said you do not have ranks.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: We don’t.  Otherwise we would not all be priests.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: So how come only the pastors give sermons?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Because that is their ministry.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Perhaps this is where we should start the discussion on what I mean by the Christian Priesthood.  And more importantly, we should define our terms.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: What do you mean?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I mean your interpretation of all the above verses is correct.  All Christians are priests to God, but that is the general priesthood of all believers.  This refers to us as the ones who bear Christ in us in order to preach Him to the world and to “let His light shine through us.  Yet, there is another priesthood which is the one I was referring to, which is the sacramental and pastoral priesthood which is reserved for only those who are called and is not open to anyone.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: I have never heard of such a priesthood in the Bible.  That is something the Roman Church invented in the Middle Ages.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I am not Roman, and I did not live in the Middle Ages.  Yet we had priests.  Also, the Bible does indeed talk about this priesthood.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Show me then.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Let’s begin by defining terms.  It is important that we agree on terms before we begin the discussion.  Do you agree?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Of course.  The last thing we want is confusion.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Good then.  The word we used to refer to priests in the early church was presbyteros.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Oh yes.  That word means “elder.”  We have a council of elders at our church.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Really?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Yes.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Was your pastor one of them?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Yes.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: So all of them are pastors?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Oh no.  They do things like manage the money of the church, determine which of the poor need the most help, and look over the church properties and things like that.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Well, that is not what presbyteros meant in the early Christian church.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: What did it mean then?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: It meant….

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Tell me.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: If you may, please don’t interrupt me.  Please let me begin and finish what I have to say before asking questions.  Fair enough?

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Yes.  Go for it.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: The word presbyteros (which does indeed originally mean elder) was used in the early church to refer to our priests.  The word presbyteros did not simply mean “elder” in the context of early Christians, but it took on a specific technical meaning as can be seen in the New Testament.  It was used to describe a Christian office, which was ordained by the laying on of hands.  That word entered Latin as presbyter, then it shortened in the Germanic languages to presbyt, then prest, from which we get the English word priest.

However, this word is different from the Greek word which was used to describe the priests who served in the Jewish Temple or even pagan priests.  That word is hierus.  This is the word that was used to describe all Christians as priests as you referenced in 1 Peter and Revelation.  Yet never have all Christians been called presbyteroi.  That office was reserved for certain people having met certain qualifications and having been ordained by the laying on of hands.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: That is interesting, especially the etymology of the English word for priest from the Greek presbyteros.  Yet, that is not a complete justification of how this is related to the priesthood of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: I will get there, but at first I had to define the terms.  The word priest in English describes those who administer sacred rites, yet the word comes from the Christian technical term for elder, not any word which etymologically means priest.  Why is this?  What this means is the Christian elder had some connection to sacred rites, and ones which were not done by all other Christians, but only the presbyters.  It is for this reason that in English the word to describe priests of any kind comes from the Greek word presbyteros because for the Christian community, they could understand the idea of priest from their presbyters.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: It still remains for you to prove that.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Well, the word which properly means priest in Greek like the priests in the Jewish Temple is hierus.  The Temple is called hieron, which comes from the same root word in Greek.  The priest was the one who worked in the Temple leading worship and prayer, teaching, and offering the sacrifices of the people.  He performed sacred rites.  In addition, the type of sacrificial, liturgical worship which the priests administered was called leitourgeia in Greek, and the priest presiding over that worship was called a leitourgos in Greek.

So the language used to describe priests in the Temple was hierus (priest), leitourgeia (liturgical worship, ministry), and leitourgos (liturgical minister).

We will find the same duties given to presbyters in the New Testament, and this can further be confirmed by the study of early Christian history.  Presbyters were an office in the early church and it was not simply a distinction given to those who were aged.  This word thus takes a technical meaning.  What that meaning is we can begin to figure out by looking at the First Epistle to Timothy.  In 1 Timothy, Timothy, the Apostle Paul’s disciple is described as a youth in 1 Timothy 4:12 and is further told to shun youthful passions in 2 Timothy 2:22.  Yet he is called an elder, and that he received the eldership by the laying on of hands in 1 Timothy 4:14.  How can this word simply refer to an aged person when the person holding this title was a youth and received it by the laying on of hands?  It is because this was an office and was ordained in the same way that the Apostles Paul and Barnabas received their ministry and how the deacons were ordained according to Acts 13:1-3 and Acts 6:1-6 respectively.

Every single time in the New Testament this word is used to describe Christians, the word does not simply mean elder in the context, but it refers to a technical meaning.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: What are some examples of this word being used in a technical way?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: In Acts 14:23, it says, “So when they had appointed elders [presbyterous] in every church, and prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord in whom they had believed.”

The word translated as “appointed” in English is actually the Greek word cheirotonesantes in Greek meaning “laying on of hands.”  This means that the name of presbyteros was given to certain believers by the laying on of hands indicating it was an office and not simply an observation of age.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Are there other instances that highlight a technical meaning such as this?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Yes.  In Acts 15, where the Council of Jerusalem takes place. The Apostle Paul and his companions arrive at Jerusalem to discuss matters of doctrine and practice, and it says, “they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders [presbyterōn]” (Acts 15:4) and after they reported their matters of concern, it says, “The apostles and the elders [presbyteroi] met together to consider this matter,” (Acts 15:6), and after they came to a decision, it says, “Then the apostles and the elders [presbyterois], with the consent of the whole church, decided to choose men from among their members and to send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas” (Acts 15:22 NRSV).

This shows that the elders were held in high ranking near the Apostles.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: I see what you are saying.  There is definitely something more than just age here.  But I take real issue with that because what you are showing indicates that there were ranks in the early church, and probably by your reasoning, there should be today.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: What is your issue with ranks?  Life is full of ranks.  We are taught that from birth and through everything we do in life.  Our parents have a higher rank than us their children.  Teachers must be of a higher rank than their students.  Bosses are higher than employees.  Even the nonliving universe teaches us that there are ranks.  The sun must be greater than the earth for the earth to exist.  The earth is in submission to the sun for life and the seasons.  In similar fashion, the Apostle Peter Himself tells the Church to be under the authority (it actually reads as “submission” in the NKJV) to the presbyteroi.  He says in his Epistle,

“Now as an elder myself (sympresbyteros, which can actually be translated as fellow elder), and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory to be revealed, I exhort the elders (presbyterous) among you to tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight (episkopountes, from the Greek word for bishop, the same word applied to the ministry of the Apostles in Acts 2), not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it—not for sordied gain but eagerly.  Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock.  And when the chief shepherd appears, you will win the crown of glory that never fades away.  In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders (presbyterois).  And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another” (1 Peter 5:1-5 NRSV).

MODERN CHRISTIAN: But we are all equal before God.  That is why I don’t believe in ranks.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Equality does not mean everyone is a clone of the other, and certainly not in ministry.  Not all are called to shepherd the church of God as is clear from the Pastoral Epistles of the Apostle Paul and even in the passage above from the Apostle Peter.

We are equal in terms of that every soul is precious to God and we have all been redeemed by our Lord Jesus Christ, but I do not see how equality translates into no specific, ministerial priesthood.  It does not follow.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: Well, you have shown that this was an office, and let me grant you that it was a rank, but you have not shown how this office performed sacred rites, which you referred to earlier as employing the language of hierus (priest), leitourgeia (liturgical service), and leitourgos (liturgical minister).

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: To answer your question, this is clearest when the Acts of the Apostles is describing the ordination of the Apostles Paul and Barnabas.  In Acts 13:2-3, according to the New King James Version, it says,

“As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Now separate to Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’  Then, having fasted and prayed, and laid hands on them, they sent them away” (Acts 13:2-3 NKJV).

But according to the New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version, the first part reads, “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting.”

Well, that begs the question, why is the same phrase translated with two different words.  What is the original word in Greek?  The word is leitourgounton which is the verb for leitourgeia and leitourgos.  This verb refers to the action of priests in liturgical, temple-like worship.  This service concluded with the laying on of hands on Paul and Barnabas to sanctify them for the Apostolic ministry.  This laying on of hands is the same as that which the Apostle Paul uses to describe Timothy’s ministry (1 Timothy 4:14).  This means that Paul’s ministry was ordained in the same way as Timothy’s and that it was done in the context of liturgical worship.  This is also why the Apostle Peter describes himself as an “elder” (1 Peter 1:5).  Later the Apostle John called himself an “elder” as well in 2 John and 3 John.  This means that the ministry of the presbyteroi resembled the Apostolic ministry closely and that both were ordained in the context of a liturgical service.

Further, the Apostle Paul in Romans 15:15-16 says, “Nevertheless, brethren, I have written more boldly to you on some points, as reminding you, because of the grace given to me by God, that I might be a minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering of the Gentiles might be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.”

The word that is translated minister here is leitourgon in Greek which refers back to the priest in the Temple.  Now, in all fairness, this word can mean public official in some contexts, but that makes no sense in this context.  The only other meaning it has in Greek is a minister of liturgical worship.  Is that justified in this case?  It absolutely is because of what follows.

What follows is a second time for the word “minister” used in this passage.  In that place where it reads, “ministering the Gospel of God,” the word in Greek is hierougeo, which means to perform sacred rites, that is the work of a priest.  He uses this word to describe his ministry as an Apostle, that is, one who was ordained by the laying on of hands to spread the Gospel of Christ.  Not all Christians are Apostles; indeed, the New Testament only mentions 70.  It is clear that the earliest Christians such as Luke and Paul saw Apostolic ministry as a sort of priesthood that was limited only to the Apostles, and later their successors in the elders and bishops, and not the ministry of all Christians.  Therefore, there was indeed a unique pastoral and ministerial priesthood which was not the calling of all Christians, but only the calling of a few.

We had liturgical worship and ministry in ancient Christianity, and it still exists in the Orthodox and Catholic churches today.  What you see here in the few examples above, of which there are many more in the New Testament, is the beginning of liturgical worship and ministry among the Apostles and the early church.  Also, you are seeing the justification for it, that this is Apostolic.  Next, it follows that if there was a liturgical worship, there must also be priests.

Now as you mentioned above, our Lord Jesus Christ is truly a priest, the High Priest.  The prophecies declare it, and the Epistle to the Hebrews goes at length to show that He is the High Priest.

Now, there is not only one priest in the Temple, but many.  Yet, there is only one High Priest.  The New Testament never said that He is the only priest, but that He is the only High Priest.  The New Testament also calls some shepherds/pastors which is seen in Acts 20:28, Ephesians 4:11, and 1 Peter 5:2 (see the Greek), but in 1 Peter Chapter 5, it also calls our Lord the Chief Shepherd (1 Peter 5:4).  He is the Chief and source of the shepherds, but He is not simply the only one.

Titles such Shepherd (pastor in Latin) and Overseer (episkopos in Greek, which means bishop) are applied to him.  They are also applied to the Apostles, the Bishops, and the presbyteroi in the New Testament.

It is clear, then, that their ministries are an extension of His Priesthood.

MODERN CHRISTIAN: And what was the work that He did which the Apostles and the presbyteroi do?

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN: Several.

1. Prayer and preaching the Gospel to those who have never heard. Our Lord Jesus and the Apostles and the bishops did this.

2. Laying on of hands to give the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to new believers and to ordain bishops and priests (the Sacraments of the Laying on of Hands for the Holy Spirit and for the Priesthood). Our Lord Jesus and the Apostles and the bishops did this.

3. Overseeing (in Greek episkopos) the Christian flock (our Lord Jesus does this too). Our Lord Jesus does this, and the Apostles and the bishops did this.

4. Appointing bishops, presbyters (elders), and deacons to serve the Christian community. Our Lord Jesus did this with the Apostles who are described as episkopoi in the Acts of the Apostles 2 (see the prophecy from the Psalms).

5. Teaching the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not enough to the preach it, but also to teach it and deepen the knowledge of the Church. Our Lord Jesus did this as seen in His explanations of His parables and the prophecies.  The Apostles did this as seen in their sermons and epistles.  The bishops did this in the early church as seen in the writings of the Church Fathers.  And the faithful bishops and priests still do this on a weekly basis.

6. Administering the other sacraments of the church. Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted them, the Apostles performed them and passed them down, and the bishops and priests continue this work until today.

If you notice, all of what is written above is what our Lord did too.  The Apostles and their successors shared in the exact same ministry, so if these actions of His are priestly actions, then they too are sharing in priestly actions, therefore they are priests, and only the Apostolic authority can claim this priesthood.  Their priesthood is built and founded on Him and His atoning and reconciling death and His glorious Resurrection, Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

If you pay attention to the New Testament, the bishops took these roles as well when they were appointed by the Apostles.  The presbyters at times fulfilled some of these roles and at other times all of these roles.  Timothy and Titus are two such bishops.  These are not Apostles, but they were appointed by the Apostles by the laying on of hands and receiving this gift (charisma in Greek) of ministry.  They were tasked with praying steadfastly for the church, preaching, appointing bishops, presbyters, and deacons, no differently from the ministry of the Apostles themselves.  They were tasked with overseeing the flock of believers, no differently from the Apostles themselves.  They were tasked with teaching the Gospel, no differently from the Apostles themselves.  And, they were tasked with imparting the gift of the Holy Spirit, no differently from the Apostles themselves.

As seen above, it is clear that the Apostle Paul saw this work of Apostleship, which extended to bishops and presbyters to be a priesthood, a priesthood serving the Gospel of the Lord.  Luke, in like manner, writing the first history of the Christian Church in the Acts of the Apostles was clear in his descriptions of the worship and offices of the Christian Church.

It is clear also, that not all are called to be bishops and presbyters.  Indeed, the qualifications seen in the Epistles of the Apostle Paul to Timothy and Titus make it so that only a small number of people can be qualified to become bishops and presbyters.  Go and reread the Epistles to Timothy and Titus to see those qualifications.

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