Category: Salvation

Preaching the Gospel to the Poor

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 81 Leave a Comment on %s
A conversation on social media gave rise to this post.Ā  ________ And when John had heard in prison about the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples and said to Him, ā€œAre You the Coming One, or do we look for another?ā€Ā  Jesus answered and said to them, ā€œGo and tell John the things which you hear and see: The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansedā€¦

Guilt and Shame – What’s The Difference?

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 39 Leave a Comment on %s
There is a very handy saying that differentiates between guilt and shame. Guilt is about what I have done ā€“ shame is about who I am. They are not unrelated, particularly in a culture in which what we do is often given as an answer to the question, ā€œWho are you?ā€ Traditional American culture has often been described as ā€œguilt-based,ā€ in that Protestant religious thoughts centered on goodness as responsibility for ourā€¦

What To Do With What You Know

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 75 Leave a Comment on %s
In a world driven by information, it is more than a little easy to mistake knowing something as important and good in and of itself. As such, the acquisition of spiritual information is something of a going industry. In a Russian novel written back in the 90ā€™s, a woman intellectual encounters a monk who is restoring an ancient monastery in Georgia. During a conversation, she brings up a quote from St. Maximus.ā€¦

Doing the Good You Can Do

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 32 Leave a Comment on %s
St. John the Baptist confronted a difficult question. Soldiers came to him (itā€™s not clear what kind of soldiers these were). We are told: Soldiers also asked him, ā€œAnd we, what shall we do?ā€ And he said to them, ā€œDo not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.ā€ Luke 3:14 The implication of his answer is that extortion and brutality were a commonā€¦

Messiness in the Modern World

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 42 Leave a Comment on %s
Salvation can be messy. I believe this with all my heart and so I state it at the outset of this article. As such, it marks me as a heretic in Modernity. I not only believe that salvation is messy – I believe that messiness is pretty much inherent to salvation. And along with that, I believe that our aversion to messiness (in all things) is a peculiar affliction of the modernā€¦

The Sins of A Nation

· Fr. Stephen Freeman
This is a reposting of an article from several years back. Its thoughts seem appropriate for our present time as a nation. I pray it is of some help. Can a nation ever sin? If so, how can it be forgiven? The stories and prophetic writings of the Old Testament are replete with examples of national sin. There are certainly stories of God dealing with individuals, but, on the whole, His attentionā€¦

Let’s Get Out of This Place

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 18 Leave a Comment on %s
The Saturday before Palm Sunday is known as Lazarus Saturday among the Orthodox, and they celebrate Christ raising himĀ from the dead just prior to HisĀ entrance into Jerusalem (gospel of John). It is a feast that offers something of a preview of Christā€™s resurrection, and a foretaste of the General Resurrection at the End of the Age. Some years back I sat in a cave that is purported to be the grave ofā€¦

“That Which is Lacking” – Is Jesus Enough?

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 159 Leave a Comment on %s
The average Christian, reading his Bible in happy devotion, stumbles across this passage: Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christā€™s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church… (Col 1:24) The passage is particularly disturbing for a certain strain of Protestant thought that emphasizes Christā€™s sufficiency for all things. Christ has accomplished all thingsā€¦

And God said: ×™Ö°×”Ö“×™ אוֹ×Ø

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 34 Leave a Comment on %s
I apologize for the Hebrew, but youā€™ll understand in a minute. And God said, ā€œLet there be light” (“yehi’or”). There is an old mystical Jewish notion that when God created things, He did so by speaking them into existence, such that there was an exact correspondence between the word spoken and the thing created. On that basis, it was believed that a person speaking the same word (in Hebrew, of course) couldā€¦

Venerating Icons – It’s So Much Other Than You Think

· Fr. Stephen Freeman 71 Leave a Comment on %s
In 1991, I sat in a room at Duke University with Geoffrey Wainwright, Stanely Hauerwas, and Susan O’Keefe. The purpose was the defense of my thesis, “The Icon as Theology.” I was an Episcopal priest, who was turning his doctoral work in Systematic Theology into an M.A. and heading back to parish life (a long story, that). The defense was friendly, thorough, with few surprises. The one major surprise, of course, cameā€¦