No Other Foundation

In my previous piece, “Why I Am a Christian (Part 1)” I examined the question of why one should believe in the physical Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. I looked at the essential historical reliability of the Gospels portraits of Jesus and His claims to be God. I concluded that given the number and audacity of those claims, there were only three live options on the table: either He was a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. I suggested that His many miracles made sense of and supported the third option.

Many years ago, when I was tucking my eldest daughter into bed, she asked me a question: “Dad, why do we believe in the Resurrection?” I have always taught both my daughters to be strong and to think for themselves, and so I was happy to hear the question, and I answered it as best as I could, giving the historical evidence. At the end of it all, she said, “Oh, good. I was afraid you were going to say that we should believe in it because it was in the Bible.” No chance of that; Dad is not a fideist, nor a fan of circular reasoning. The case for Christianity is a strong one, and can withstand historical scrutiny. Here I would like to set out the case for Christianity in somewhat fuller terms than I did that night so long ago.

I know a man in Christ who prays for Marilyn Monroe every day as a part of his prayers for all the departed. He doesn’t pray for her under her stage-name of “Marilyn” though. He prays for her under her real name of “Norma Jeane”, the name given her by her mother and under which she was once baptized by (of all people) the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson while under the foster care of a very fundamentalist family.

The story of Cain and Abel is the story of the human race. It is tragically timeless, for it is tirelessly enacted over and over again in every generation. As Larry Norman once queried (as aged historians may remember from his song “Nothing Really Changes”), “Will Cain kill Abel—with a bayonet?” Regardless of the choice of weapon, somewhere and some place that murder is happening even now as you are reading this.

Some heresies never seem to die, but have a disconcerting tendency to pop up in every generation, rather like the emerging heads of the whack-a-mole in the children’s game one sees in Chuck E. Cheese: whack them down as hard and often as you like, but they will pop up again someplace else.

Like many Orthodox clergy, I have lost track of the number of times my Protestant brethren have objected to the priestly title (in my case, “Father Lawrence”), citing the Bible which commands that they “call no man ‘Father’”. They are, of course, thinking of our Lord’s words in Matthew 23:9. If I am feeling puckish and mischievous, I sometimes respond with a simple denial, insisting, “No, the Bible doesn’t say that” just to wind them up and make the final riposte more satisfying. It is not particularly sanctified, but it is fun. What is the difference between “call no man ‘father’” and “call no man your father”? The difference is the difference between a title or form of address and a relationship.

In my Protestant days, I had no problem with anyone talking about Mary—so long as it was Christmas. On Boxing Day, that was it. Over. No more talking about Mary. What are we anyway, Catholics? It was understood that when we packed away the Nativity set, all talk of Mary got packed up along with it. And my proof that Bible-believing Christians should not talk about Mary? The New Testament never did. Well, hardly ever did—just long enough to narrate the Christmas story. Was she in the Acts of the Apostles? Not really. Was she in the Epistles? No. So there you go: no talking about Mary or calling her blessed.

I would like to share with you an easy technique for avoiding moral accountability. Whenever you are caught and called to account for doing something wrong (that is, when you are “busted”), you simply invoke the figure of the Pharisee. Tell your accuser that he is being judgmental and Pharisaical, and that he has no right to judge you. After all, the Lord says, “Judge not”. It works almost every time, functioning as a moral Get Out of Jail Free card.

Recently I listened to a podcast in which Larry Chapp (a universalist Roman Catholic) interviewed Dr. David Bentley Hart. In the course of the interview Dr. Hart asserted that, unlike Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy does not have an official and authoritative Magisterium. By this he meant that Orthodoxy possesses no institutional organ (such as the papacy and the episcopate dependent upon it) that can routinely and authoritatively declare what is or is not the official teaching of the Church when consulted.

Everyone presumably acknowledges that there is nothing wrong with children dressing up as fairies, Disney characters, Marvel superheroes, and (my own favourite when I was a child) black cats in order to go door to door with their friends after dark to collect candy. The argument against Halloween is that it also glorifies violence, gore, and death, so that it is unsuitable for Christians to participate in Halloween. Collecting candy is fine; it is the frightening stuff that comes afterward that is the problem. Halloween trades in things like graveyards and corpses and ugly witches on broomsticks and bats and cobwebs and Frankenstein monsters. So, the question arises: why do people delight in such scary stuff?

In 1956 an American game show debuted called “To Tell the Truth”. Each round of the game introduced three people all claiming to be the same person, and a team of panelists would ask them questions. Those pretending to be the real (usually famous) person would make up answers, while the real person would answer truthfully. The inquiring panelists would then guess which was the real person. The host of the show would conclude by saying, “Will the real (name) please stand up?” and he or she would then stand up thereby revealing their identity and the accuracy of the panelists’ guesses.

Those familiar with old-time Pentecostalist liturgy will identify the title of this piece as a part of that liturgy. Not, of course, that tongue-speaking Pentecostalists of the old school would admit to having liturgy. Liturgy, for them, is what the Catholics have (along with their step-children, the Anglicans) because they do not have God or the Holy Spirit. Liturgy is usually described by them as “dead liturgy” because the people using the liturgical book are spiritually dead and need such substitutes for true Spirit-led worship.

I have just finished reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read, comprehensive, and engagingly written. It is also a great doorstopper of a book, so large a hardbound tome that unless one has hands like those of the Incredible Hulk one finds it hard to hold the book in one hand while drinking coffee with the other. The title (“the first three thousand years”) refers to the fact that the author begins his tale in 1000 B.C. to take account of Greek culture and Hebrew history. Such a comprehensive sweep takes many pages: 1016 to be exact, not counting notes, bibliography, and index.

In the baptismal prayer in which the priest blesses the baptismal water, there is a line that baptism will bestow upon the candidate the loosing of bonds, the remission of sins, the illumination of the soul and “the gift of adoption to sonship”. The phrase “adoption of sonship” is a reference to the words of St. Paul, who used the word to describe our salvation in Christ in Ephesians 1:5. There he sums up our salvation by saying that God “predestined us to adoption to sonship [Greek υίοθεσία/ uiothesia] through Jesus Christ to Himself”. Given that this adoption to sonship serves to encapsulate and summarize our entire salvation, we must pay it closer attention and to what it all means.

On September 8, the Church sings that the Nativity of the Theotokos has “proclaimed joy to the whole universe”. It is easy enough to sing, but somewhat harder now for us to understand. Why, we may ask, did the birth of a baby girl in around 18 B.C. or so proclaim joy to the whole inhabited world?

In the late Metropolitan’s Kallistos Ware’s classic The Orthodox Church, he describes the Church as “a continued Pentecost”. This is true, but it is important not to misunderstand his meaning.

It seems to be commonly held among scholars that the so-called monarchical episcopate (i.e. the system of having one bishop governing a city church with presbyters working with him) was not apostolic and did not come to Rome until the late second century or even later. That is the opinion of scholars such as Alistair Stewart (in his commentary Hippolytus: On the Apostolic Tradition), Brent Allen (in his Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century), and others such as the late great J.N.D. Kelly. By this figuring the Christians in Rome had no one leader who spoke for all of them, but were divided into a number of self-governing communities with different leaders described by various titles. A single leader who could speak for all the communities in Rome only arose in the late second century (with Bishop Victor) or the early third century (with Bishop Pontianus). Writers such as Irenaeus who asserted there were such singular leaders and bishops in Rome from the days of the apostles were, according to