Month: December 2024

Should You Leave Your MAGA Church? Or Should You Choose To Stay?
Current Events and History

Should You Leave Your MAGA Church? Or Should You Stay?

12/09/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Rev Trevors does not address the common situation where the pastor or priest is setting the MAGA tone when he is leading the congregation, which is so often true in congregations in America. This generates another concern: Should you stay in a church where you will be challenging the teaching authority of the pastor or priest?
Is this a special case for this more basic question: Does the Decalogue exhort us that respect precedes love? Is love impossible when we disrespect either God or those in authority?
There is no verse in Scripture that directly commands the believer to attend weekly services. Several verses in the Psalms sing on how the believer should joyfully be drawn to the house of God, but in the New Testament we only have the verse in Hebrews that simply exhorts:
“Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” […]

St John Climacus on Love, Lust, and Marriage: Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15, on Purity & Chastity
Ladder of Divine Ascent

St John Climacus on Love, Lust, and Marriage: Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15, on Purity and Chastity

12/07/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Laymen often wonder: How can those who are married be chaste? In his commentary on the Ladder of Divine Ascent, Father Vassilios Papavassiliou teaches us that “people tend to think of chastity in purely sexual terms as the virtue opposed to sexual depravity.” But just as the word concupiscence has a deeper meaning for Catholics, chastity has a deeper meaning for Orthodox Christians. “In the Orthodox marriage service, we pray that the newlyweds may live in chastity. But yet in the same service, we pray numerous times that they may have honorable children. How can a couple live in” “sexual purity, and yet have children?”
The simple answer is that chastity and sexual purity are not exactly the same. He points out that “a fuller, more accurate translation of the Greek term sphrosini is whole-mindedness, or harmony between the flesh and the spirit.” Father Vassilios teaches us that in the Church “the intimate union between husband and wife is a living symbol of the union between Christ, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride,” which is why intimacy should be experienced by a man and his wife. […]