by cyranorox » November 23rd, 2008, 5:56 am
Pelikan, born outside the OC, and widely acknowledged as one of the top experts on Church history, did become Orthodox.
The old slander about Constantine and the Emperors is a tired old rag. The quote early in the thread that services became less spiritual is pure prot. bunk, likely because the services, when described and developed, were simply less like protestant; they imagine the early services to have been more like theirs.
Rus, for all his annoying rightwing baggage, has it nailed: there is a Church: the Holy Spirit does not work against Himself, in the form of setting up competing churches [effigies of Christ, but not His Body]; Christ saves in and through His Church, and the prayer of that Church for all mankind.
The slander about paganism is easily refuted: just as we did not reinvent a recipe for bread, or make wine by some new process [well, once!], we subsumed the annual festivities set within God's year; we took the jewels of pagan thought, not because they were pagan, but because they were human, and a preparation for the Gospel, and, in the big picture, grown and fostered by God for the purpose of being transfigured in the true Church. We do not worship goddesses, but we know that all that was good in the goddesses was a reflection back in time from the Mother of God. All the dying and reviving gods, all the charm of Orpheus and the extasies of Dionysos, the wisdom of Odin and the attraction of Krishna, are all glints of Christ's reality.
Bad aspects of pagan thought did come in later, for example the idea of the infinite offense requiring infinite payment, from late German pagan thought - but the OC never admitted that.
i like coffee and tea.
I like gunpowder for breakfast....
Apocatastasis Now!