The Whole Counsel Blog
Who are Demons?
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In the previous posts of the present series, the Devil and a group of fallen angels were discussed. The former was cast down into Sheol, or Hades, to devour and rule over the dead. The latter were confined in chains in the Abyss for their crimes until the end of the world. In another previous post, the angelic beings to whom the nations were assigned at the tower of Babel, who later became corrupt and sought the worship of the nations they were to govern were described. These beings did not fall as the others and remain in the heavenly places according to St. Paul (Eph 6:12), though they are judged at the resurrection of Christ (Ps 82) and their…
The Whole Counsel Blog
The Angels Who Left Their Former Estate
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In a previous post, the giants of the Old Testament, who came into being through demonic sexual immorality, were discussed. Only brief comments were made at that time about their angelic “parents”. These angelic beings, however, play an important role in the unfolding of the Old Testament and in New Testament theology. In another post, the three events of Genesis 1-11 which might be termed a ‘fall’ of humanity were discussed. It was commonplace in the Fathers and other early Christian writers to speak about the sinful state of humanity remedied by Christ in terms of one of these three events, with the other two subordinated, but which event varied. St. Irenaeus sees all three in terms of the sinful…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
No, Christmas is Not Pagan. Just Stop.
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Well, it’s time for a good Christmas rant. This requires a rant, because every year, we see the same ignorant silliness. (Sorry, but it’s just true.) Supposedly, Christmas is secretly pagan, secretly syncretist, secretly a co-opting of pagan stuff and ignorantly claiming it to be Christian. But the truth about these things is so available that it’s literally staring out at you even from…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Who is the Devil?
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The figure of the Devil or Satan as a personal spiritual being appears at a few distinct points in the scriptures in which his origin and identity are described. The Biblical picture of this entity, however, is very often distorted by later popular Christian literature and modern popular culture. There is far more of Milton than of scripture in the average Christian of today’s understanding of who the Devil is, what his goals and purposes are, and how he came to be who he is today. The various demons and devils of scripture, the subject of the next several posts, are often merged together or arranged into some kind of hierarchy, or more recently bureaucracy, in a way that is…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Why People Leave Church When Leaders Fail
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Back in August, (formerly) Roman Catholic political columnist Damon Linker announced that he’d left the Roman Catholic Church, and this past week, he explained why, noting along the way some of the reaction against his announcement: It’s hardly surprising that writers deeply devoted to the Catholic Church would reject the reasons for my decision to leave the church. The former editor of Commonweal Paul…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Those Who are Baptized for the Dead
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First Corinthians 15 is the chapter, out of St. Paul’s entire corpus, which most fully expresses the Apostle’s understanding of the resurrection of the dead. The first half of the chapter discusses the importance of Christ’s resurrection and how it is inviolably linked to the resurrection not only of human persons, but of all things. In the second half of the chapter, St. Paul describes, in so far as he can, what the resurrection of humanity and ultimately of the entire creation means. The chapter closes with St. Paul reveling in a hymn of victory over death. In the midst of this discussion, St. Paul gives a series of rhetorical examples as evidence of the centrality of the resurrection of…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Angels, Demons, and the Eucharist
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In a previous post, the role of the angelic realm in liturgical worship was briefly discussed. The primary place in which the lives of Orthodox Christians intersect dynamically the angelic realm of God’s heavenly council is within worship broadly and the Divine Liturgy in particular. The reality of angelic presence and participation in the worship of the Holy Trinity is referenced continually in liturgical hymns and prayers as a means to awareness of this reality. God’s divine council, including the angels and the saints in glory, participates in Christ’s reign over creation in both governance and in the public work (Gr. leitourgeia) of worship. This takes places continuously in the unseen, heavenly realm and is joined by human persons in…
Nearly Orthodox
The Wilderness Journal and the Face of God
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So, imagine me packing furiously for this beautiful opportunity to speak at the (first ever) Ancient Faith Women’s Retreat when what does my friend, Melinda Johnson, who I like an awful lot, send me? Boom. I mean I know I wrote it. It took three years and a lot of puzzling over the first volume of the Philokalia, but to see even a photo of a stack of the book is…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Extra-Biblical Literature in the Orthodox Church
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This blog has often, and will continue to, make reference to extra-Biblical literature. The two most important categories of this literature are Second Temple Jewish literature and early Christian writings such as the Apostolic Fathers. Second Temple Jewish literature reveals to us the religious world and mindset of the first century AD from which Christianity emerged. It shows us the theological lens through which the apostles understood the revelation which came in the person of Jesus Christ. The Apostolic Fathers, and the Fathers of the second and third centuries as well, in particular, show us the continuity with, and transformation of, Second Temple Judaism that came to constitute the Christian religion. Not only is the New Testament rife with allusions…
The Whole Counsel Blog
4 Maccabees: Martyrdom and Reason
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As is the case with 4 Ezra, 4 Maccabees is a Biblical text that lies at the very edges of the Old Testament canon in the Orthodox Church. In later Greek manuscripts, 4 Maccabees is included in an appendix. In older Greek manuscripts no such distinction is made, though 4 Maccabees is often found at the end of these manuscripts rather than following 3 Maccabees, along with Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh, two liturgical fragments. It is present in Old Georgian Old Testaments and was for a time, though no longer, in the Romanian Old Testament. Due to their relegation to the ‘apocrypha’ in most English Bibles, 1-3 Maccabees are not well known to most English readers. …
The Whole Counsel Blog
Chosen to Bear Fruit
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Though it may at first seem counterintuitive, the most important Biblical text for understanding the Christian Gospel as St. Paul proclaims it is the book of Deuteronomy. The book of Deuteronomy sums up the Torah, the Pentateuch, in presenting the Prophet Moses’ great final sermon to the people of Israel before his death and their entrance into the land promised to their forefathers. It is, in condensed and pointed form, the covenant document granted by God to his people Israel. In the ancient world, the type of covenant document, ‘berith’ in Hebrew, which is represented in the Old Testament is a particular type of ancient suzerainty treaty. When a king conquered a new city or territory and took possession of…
The Whole Counsel Blog
The Election of Israel
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In last week’s post, the story of Jacob and Esau and the histories of Israel and Edom, the nations which took their names from the twins, were seen to lies in the background of St. Paul’s discussion of election in Romans 9-11. The Jewish people, which had been the primary recipient of God’s promises as a birthright, now found itself estranged, in large part, from those promises in favor of the recently redeemed Gentiles who already were coming to represent the great body of the Church. St. Paul elaborates on the fact that this pattern has happened before in the scriptures, the disastrous effects of allowing this transition to evolve into enmity, and most importantly the blessings that are promised…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Jacob I Have Loved, Esau I Have Hated
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The story of twin brothers Jacob and Esau, or Israel and Edom, represents a major portion of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis. St. Paul returns to this story in his Epistle to the Romans, chapters 9 through 11 in answering a particular situation in the life of the Roman church. This major passage, separated from its original context in the Epistle to the Romans, the New Testament, and the scriptures as a whole, as well as from its historical context, has become one of the primary bases for an entire stream of Western thought regarding election and its relationship to the salvation of the human person. In order to properly understand what St. Paul is teaching in the Epistle to…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
What We Own Is Sacred Because We Are Sacred
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Sunday of the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, October 14, 2018 Titus 3:8-15; Luke 8:5-15 In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. One of the accusations that certain non-Orthodox Christians level against the Orthodox is that we worship idols. They say that when we bow before an icon or kiss it or…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Here There Be Giants
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In recent times, the rediscovery of the original ancient context of Genesis 6:1-4 has led to a fascination with the subject of the ‘Nephilim’, who are here said to be produced through sexual immorality involving angelic beings and human women. In some quarters, this has been developed into full-fledged conspiracy theories regarding these ‘Nephilim’ still existing in our world today. Those fascinated by crypto-archaeology produce doctored photos of what they hold to be gigantic human skeletons, the remains of these people. This near obsession has exploded as a counter to a re-reading of the Genesis and later texts, begun by St. Augustine, which reads these texts in a de-mythologized way, seeing all involved parties as human. The interpretation of these…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Genesis and "the Fall"
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The first eleven chapters of Genesis have long been seen as a literary unit which serves as a sort of prologue to the rest of the book of Genesis, the Torah or Pentateuch, and the whole of the scriptures. Within these chapters, we read of the creation of the world and of humanity, the expulsion from paradise, the descent of man, the flood of Noah, the descent of the nations, and the tower of Babel. Theologically, particularly in the Late Antique West, Genesis 3 and the expulsion from paradise became the site of major focus, defined as “the Fall” of man. Debate began as to what precisely this fall entailed and what it represented. It was taken primarily as a…
The Whole Counsel Blog
4 Ezra: A Biblical Book You've Probably Never Read
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In one of the earliest postings on this blog, the difficulty of defining the exact limits of the Old Testament within the many language traditions of the Orthodox Church was described. Though there is clear agreement on a certain set of books and their authority across all of Orthodox tradition, the exact list of books found in a published Orthodox Bible will largely be a function of the language tradition from which that Bible comes. Many of the books of the Old Testament which all of the local churches agree are authoritative are not read from publicly in our present liturgical life, which further complicates the issue of the canonicity of certain of those books. One such text is 4…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Queen and Mother
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Recent posts have discussed the divine council of angelic beings which surround the throne of God, the way in which certain individuals in the Old Testament were exalted to join that council, and the way the saints in Christ become members of the divine council, sharing by grace in Christ’s rule over his whole creation. Within these themes, and the mediatory role of the saints and their patronage, the Theotokos, Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, has a special role, as has been recognized within the Christian faith from the very beginning. The veneration of the Theotokos in the West developed in ways which ultimately produced Marian dogmas which the Orthodox Church does not recognize. In response to these developments,…
The Whole Counsel Blog
The Saints in Glory
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The word which we commonly read in English translation as ‘saint’ or ‘saints’, derived from the Latin ‘sanctus’, translates the Greek word ‘agios’ (plural ‘agiois’) which is seen constantly in the inscriptions of iconography. In the New Testament, this word is used to describe both the worshipping community of the church in its sojourn on earth and the ‘dead in Christ’ (cf. Acts 9:13, 32, 41, Rom 1:7, 12:13, 1 Cor 14:33, 2 Cor 9:12, Eph 2:19). This Greek term is actually the substantive form of the adjective ‘holy’, and could simply be translated ‘holy one’ or ‘holy ones’. The reason it has traditionally been translated as ‘saints’ is to indicate that by the time of the New Testament, the…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Humans in the Divine Council
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In last week’s post, God’s divine council, the angelic beings surrounding his throne with whom He shares graciously his governance of the heavens and the earth, was introduced. There are several ways in which human persons in the Old Testament encounter and interact with the divine council. These encounters and modes of interaction lay the groundwork for a transformed relationship in the New Covenant, which will be the subject of next week’s post. Simply put, every encounter with God the Father in the Old Testament is mediated either through God the Son, as was discussed in a previous series on this blog, or by angelic beings, as will be discussed here. Though these encounters are far from common, the most…
The Whole Counsel Blog
God's Divine Council
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In the scriptures, when the hosts of angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, virtues, principalities, powers, cherubim and seraphim are described, they are described using predominately one of two metaphors. The first of these has already been used here in the previous sentence, that of the ‘heavenly hosts’. This reference to the multitude of angelic beings forms one of the names given to the God of Israel in the Old Testament, Yahweh Sabaoth. Because of the similarity in English transliteration, this title is often confused with a reference to the Sabbath. It is not, however, the Hebrew words ‘shabat’. Rather, it is the plural substantive form of the verb ‘tsavah’. This is the verb that is used in Genesis 1, for example,…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
What if a heartbroken Catholic knocks on my church door?
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I have watched now over the past few weeks as each awful page is turned in the growing sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. It’s been bad for years now, but what’s come out just recently is looking even worse. I have been very hesitant to say much publicly on this, because it is so fraught with possible missteps. So forgive me…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Who Wrote the Bible and Why Does it Matter?
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The first question in this post’s title may seem an obvious area of discussion. There have been articles, books, and documentaries with the title ‘Who Wrote the Bible?’ In any modern commentary on a book of the Bible, a significant amount of space is devoted to discussing the authorship of that book. Introductions to the Old and New Testaments, the latter in particular, will devote a large portion of their text to various theories of authorship for different texts. Beyond just the identity of an author for the text, texts of the Old Testament are frequently split into various source documents with various authors then proposed for various portions or layers of the text. In the debates between liberal and…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Is the Book of Revelation Canonical in the Orthodox Church?
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To ask in the present day whether or not any book of the New Testament is truly canonical in the Orthodox Church may seem odd. While the history of the canonization process of the Old and New Testaments took place over several centuries and is neither neat nor tidy, it is an issue, particularly in the case of the New Testament, which has been settled for more than a millennium at this point. It is taken for granted that the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants all share the same list of 27 canonical New Testament books. Delving into the history of the book of Revelation in particular, however, and the arguments for and against its canonicity, reveals…
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
The Churching of Infants: Reflections on Liturgics in a Pan-Orthodox World
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Among my less-public duties is that I serve in the Department of Liturgics for the archdiocese in which I serve. I am not a liturgical scholar nor a translator. My job is mainly to help make sure that the English we use is the finest and most appropriate. I am, however, a liturgist in the sense of being a liturgical celebrant at the holy…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Christ in the Apocalypse
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The book of Revelation takes its name from the first verse, identifying the text as ‘the Revelation (Apokalypsis) of Jesus Christ’. This is important to understanding the text. It is not the revelation of ‘end time’ events in the distant future. It is not the revelation of esoteric spiritual secrets about the cosmos. It is a revelation of who Jesus Christ truly is. The Revelation received by St. John is a communication from Christ to seven churches in Asia Minor, who are facing persecution, schism, compromise, and heresy. In answer to all of these difficulties faced by his people, Revelation proclaims the divine identity of Christ, who he is, what he has done, and what he shortly will do when…
The Whole Counsel Blog
Christ in the General Epistles
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The ‘general’ or ‘catholic’ epistles are a group of texts within the New Testament consisting of the epistles of James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, and 3 John, and Jude. These are a group of texts which are too often neglected for several reasons. They are relatively short texts, which means though they are part of the Orthodox lectionary, they tend to be moved through very quickly, and mostly on weekdays in the regular lectionary cycle. While the Pauline epistles share a common background and theological purpose, the general epistles are extremely eclectic. James, for example, has little in common with the others. Based on biographical information in the Acts of the Apostles and his own biographical comments in…
