The Whole Counsel Blog
Why the Law was Given, and by Whom
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At the beginning of the story of salvation, God made promises to Abraham. These promises were really a reaffirmation of the purpose for which humanity had been created in the first place before the coming of rebellion, sin, and death. The story of Abraham begins in Genesis 12, following on the three rebellions, the three “falls” of Genesis 1-11. Once mortal life ending in death had achieved its purpose, Christ would defeat it and release humanity from its hold. In the same event, his rising, he would also defeat the evil powers and principalities who had dominated the nations since Babel. Death and the hostile powers stand as opposed to humanity’s destiny in Christ as spoken to Abraham. Those promises,…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
The Revelation of Forgiveness
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The Whole Counsel Blog
The Promises to Abraham
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The promises made to Abraham form the basis for the entire Biblical understanding of salvation. In addition to his name, Yahweh, God identifies himself throughout as the “God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.” This is clear even to a very casual reader of the Scriptures. Nonetheless, if asked what the promises to Abraham were, most even educated Christians would speak of the promise that Abraham would have a great many descendants and those descendants would live on a particular piece of land in Palestine. The New Testament in general and St. Paul in particular, however, speak of the promises to Abraham as the beginning of the promise of salvation fulfilled in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The apostle…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Cain, the Sinner
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As has been previously discussed on this blog, Genesis 1-11 narrates three “falls.” There are three distinct times described when human persons joined with spiritual beings in rebellion against God. The first of these, in Genesis 3, led to the devil being cast into the underworld and humanity’s expulsion from Paradise, the presence of God. Through Adam’s sin, death laid claim to the human race. The second rebellion is described in Genesis 4-6. Cain and his descendants join with rebellious angelic powers to bring sin and corruption into the world, culminating in acts of demonic sexual immorality which produced clans of gigantic tyrants. This resulted in the cleansing of the world by the waters of the flood. Finally, humanity’s sin…
The Whole Counsel Blog
The Uprising
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Many of the subtleties of St. Paul’s Greek, unfortunately, disappear in many English translations. This is not necessarily the fault of translators. For example, St. Paul refers to two different groups when he refers to “dead” without the article and “the dead” with the article. Despite this, it is difficult to translate texts into English without translating both as “the dead.” Liturgically singing that Christ is ‘risen from dead’ is awkward, at best, in English. In other cases, English translations reflect accurately St. Paul’s wording, but two ideas are so closely related in English that St. Paul’s distinction is unclear. So, for example, the apostle carefully distinguishes between “the Jews” and “Israel.” This distinction is often lost, however, to English…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
The Sin That Corrupts From Within
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Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
The Idolatry of the Pharisee
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Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
The First-Born
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The Whole Counsel Blog
Christianity and Paganism
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An area fraught with disagreement is the relationship of Christianity to what has been called paganism. The latter term itself presents some difficulty as it is a later coinage used to describe earlier religious forms. It is not a term used by the people whose practice it describes and it gathers together under one head a vast swathe of beliefs, practices, and ways of seeing and interacting with the world. The very concept of ‘religions’ is a later, Western European Protestant one. Ancient people did not think of themselves as members or practitioners of ‘a religion’ among others. Nor did they distinguish between ‘religion’ and other areas of life like politics, philosophy, or some secular sphere. Nevertheless, paganism is used…
The Whole Counsel Blog
The Geography of the Underworld
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When the Scriptures speak about the underworld, the realm of the dead, they use identical terms to those used by the surrounding culture. This includes the names Sheol or Hades, as well as references to the realm under or beneath the earth. This is not just the use of certain borrowed words or terms or even analogies. In the ancient world, there was a well-developed sense of the underworld, of places in this world in which it became present, and of points of access in this world which led there. Again, this sense did not consist of an ever-increasing series of metaphors and analogies or of cleverly-spun symbolic tales. The ancients firmly held that their descriptions of the underworld in…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Don't Feed Yourself to the Water Dragons
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The Whole Counsel Blog
How is the Holy Spirit Like a Dove?
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Christ’s baptism by St. John the Forerunner in the Jordan is narrated in all four Gospels. One element of the telling of this event found in all four is the descent of the Holy Spirit (Matt 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32). In each of these cases, the Spirit’s descent is compared to a dove. Possibly because this comparison is conveyed in traditional Orthodox iconography through the depiction of a literal bird, it is often misunderstood. The text is not meaning to convey that the Spirit turned into a bird or made some sort of bird manifestation. In some less traditional iconography, the Spirit is even depicted as a bird in other generalized settings. Two details, however, are here…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
16 Realistic Observations about Orthodoxy Online
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The Whole Counsel Blog
The New Year
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This week, most of the contemporary world will celebrate the beginning of a new calendar year. In the ancient world, a variety of calendars were used by different peoples to organize time in a manner held to be sacred. This produced different beginning dates for the annual cycle in addition to years of different lengths and often, as with the modern leap year, periods of time inserted as corrections. In ancient Israel through the Second Temple period, two overlapping calendars are in evidence and both are described in the Torah as well as in the practice of the people throughout the era. Corresponding to these two calendars are two different beginnings for the annual cycle. There were, in essence, for…
The Whole Counsel Blog
St. Ignatius, the Nativity, and the Heavenly Host
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“And hidden from the ruler of this age was the virginity of Mary and the one born from her, and likewise the death of the Lord. Three famed mysteries which God worked in silence. How then was he made manifest to the ages? A star in heaven shining beyond all of the stars and its light was ineffable. And its great newness brought about wonderment. The remaining stars with the sun and moon became a chorus for that star. And it exceeded, with its light, them all. And there was confusion: from whence did this great newness and strangeness come to them? By this, all magistry was destroyed and every evil chain disappeared. Ignorance was taken away. The ancient kingdom…
The Whole Counsel Blog
The Offering of Incense
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The offering of incense in Orthodox Christian worship is likely the most misunderstood element of that worship. Worship, in general, outside of the Orthodox Church in other Christian traditions is widely considered to be a matter of preference. If not merely taste, worship ‘styles’ are seen to resonate differently with different people and this resonance is taken to be spiritual experience rather than nostalgic or aesthetic experience. Many communities profess to offer the same worship in a variety of styles on a given day, implying that the connection between the details of worship and its content or experience is loose and variable. In this way, ritual is reduced to language. It is a vehicle for communicating certain content to an…
Nearly Orthodox
Dormant
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It’s hard to imagine moving house at nine months pregnant. I’ve never done it, though I’ve been pregnant and have moved house many times in my short lifetime. But to be traveling, well, fleeing really, and waiting for your first child to come, I cannot imagine it. I can remember moments, though, in which I was just hanging on, waiting, mustering courage and energy and hope to get to the next rest…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Moral Revisionism is Irrational and Anti-Christian
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Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Moral Revisionism is Just Bad Protestantism
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Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Morality is the Original Dogma
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Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Exorcism is Central to the Gospel
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The Whole Counsel Blog
The Rich Man, Lazarus, the Afterlife, and Asceticism
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The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is often treated quite differently than Christ’s other parables. None of the others have the history of being taken quite so literally. This parable is often mined for details and cited authoritatively in regard to concepts of the afterlife or at least of the intermediate state of souls between the time of a person’s death and the general resurrection at the time of Christ’s glorious appearing. In some cases, this goes so far as an argument that this story may not even be a parable as it is not identified as one in the text. Arguing against this last assertion is the fact that the Parable of the Good Samaritan…
The Whole Counsel Blog
The Antiquity of Hell
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Popular conceptions of heaven and hell in the modern world have been deeply shaped by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Specifically, the conception of hell has been deeply shaped by the Inferno. which has enjoyed a far wider readership and fascination than the corresponding sections on purgatory and paradise. In fact, Dante’s particular vision of hell has had so profound an impact that debates over universalism in the present time tend to take for granted that anyone who accepts historic Christian teaching on eternal condemnation believes in some variation of Dante’s hell. Perhaps no other work of literature has so transformed Western Christianity’s popular understanding than Dante’s, with the possible exception of Milton’s. Both of these authors, however, were composing works of…
The Whole Counsel Blog
The Bodies of the Saints
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One element of the practice of the Orthodox Church that is particularly troubling to many of those who are outside, particularly in contemporary Western society, is the veneration of relics. This is true even for Christians of Protestant background. In part, the relics of the saints produce either a fascination or an aversion due to the denial of death ubiquitous in our modern cultures. Long gone are the days in which the bodies of departed family members would lie in the home for visitors to pay their respects, then to be solemnly buried with prayers on the property of the family or the church where their graves would be seen and visited continuously by the family and community. Rather, our…
The Whole Counsel Blog
On Circumcision and Baptism
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Contrary to modern misperception, every element of the Torah, the law of God, is still in force and relevant to the life of the Christian faithful today. There can be no clearer or more authoritative testimony to this fact than the word of Christ himself (eg. Matt 5:17-19). Despite its contemporary caricature, the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 represents a strict reading and application of the Torah to the situation of Gentiles entering into the assembly, the Church, of Christ. St. Paul fiercely defended himself against the charge of seeking to abolish the Torah or promote its violation throughout his missionary journeys as described in the Acts of the Apostles and in his own epistles (eg. Acts 21:20-21; Rom 3:31). …
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
The Reintegration of the Christian
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Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
What Would Happen If God Just Showed Up?
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