Popular theology is a little bit whacked.  Or, in more elegant and precise terms, many people’s understanding of God is fatally limited and flawed.  It posits that God (beard or no beard) sits up there somewhere, and having made the world with all its scientific laws (such as entropy and gravity), now just lies back and watches everything work on its own.  The sun rises because God made the earth in such…

In the days of St. John Chrysostom, the Liturgy began with the entry into church of the bishop and the people.  The bishop would ascend to his episcopal chair at the back of the altar facing the people, greet them by saying, “Peace be unto all!” (and their response, “And to your spirit!”), and then he would sit down to listen to the readings.  Nowadays the Liturgy begins by singing the three…

The world is filled with wonders:  it is apparently a controversial thing to affirm that Judaism was a true religion worshipping the one true God.  A sentence affirming this in the recent online OCA Essential Orthodox Christian Beliefs:  A Manual for Adult Instruction has given great offence to those reading it with hostile eyes, and so I will try to explain it again perhaps a little more clearly.  What follows are of…

As the pastor of a church community where many of our members are converts from Protestant Evangelicalism, I am sometimes asked about my view of the current Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues.  What follows is a part of my response. The practice of speaking in tongues (or “glossolalia”) is clearly Biblical.  On the day of Pentecost, the 120 were empowered by God to speak in foreign human languages they had never…

In an interview that was part of the BBC 2005 documentary on Auschwitz there is a chilling interview with a person (then quite old) who took part in the shooting of Jewish men, women, and children in Ukraine.  He said that he felt nothing when shooting them, “because my hatred toward the Jews was too great”, and this was because he felt his family had been treated badly by local Jews.  When…

I have just finished reading a volume published in 2017 entitled, In Search of Ancient Roots:  The Christian Past and the Evangelical Identity Crisis by the Presbyterian author Kenneth J. Stewart.  Dr. Stewart is, as the title of his book suggests, distressed at the modern phenomenon of Evangelicals leaving Evangelical churches to become Roman Catholics or Orthodox in their search for more ancient roots.  He writes from the Reformed perspective, being the…