"solid ammunition"

One of the multifarious problems when one disregards 1500 years of Christian history:
Is Jesus the Only Savior?
Finally, solid ammunition against religious relativists, multiculturalist totalitarians

Of "Spiritualities"

While Western Europe (and its later extensions in the Americas) offers a history which, after the conversion of the Norsemen, presents a single, relatively smooth and increasingly triumphant growth into world dominance, in contrast to the nearly uninterrupted dislocations and catastrophes of the Christian East, the inward story is very different. From particularly the High Middle Ages, through the late Medieval to the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian, and modern periods, one finds a never ending efflorescence of different spiritualities, from the growth of the Medieval orders to the ever more manifold expressions of Protestantism.
Fr. Alexander Golitzin

On "free will"

…hesitation in our ascent towards the good we call ‘free will’.
Vladimir Lossky

The ways people avoid a theology of theosis

...just use the ambiguous and ubiquitous "holiness," "faith development," or "spiritual transformation".

The founder of the research institute, George Barna, said that holiness is a matter embraced by the Christian Church, but not many Americans focus on it in their faith development. ... Many adults describe holiness as possessing a positive attitude toward God and life. ... When asked what makes up holiness, 21 percent answered, “I don’t know." Other responses fell into categories such as “being Christ-like” (19 percent), making faith your top priority in life (18 percent), living a pure or sinless lifestyle (12 percent), and having a good attitude about people and life (10 percent). Categories receiving still smaller percentages included focusing completely on God (9 percent), being guided by the Holy Spirit (9 percent), being born again (8 percent), reflecting the character of God (7 percent), exhibiting a moral lifestyle (5 percent), and accepting and practicing biblical truth (5 percent).

Holiness, holiness is what I long for....Holiness, holiness is what I need (CCM band now kick in)

The virtue of foolishness

Either we are fools for the world because of Christ or we are fools for Christ because of the world.
St. Nikolai (Velimirovic)

The Church and "Christian morals"

Christianity is not concerned with the interests of reason; but only with those of the salvation of man. In Christianity, therefore, there are no purely theoretical tenets. Dogmatic truths have moral significance, and Christian morals are founded on dogma. Included in the concept of the Church is this: the Church is that point at which dogma becomes moral teaching and Christian dogmatics become Christian life. The Church thus comprehended gives life to and provides for the implementation of Christian teaching. Without the Church there is no Christianity; there is only the Christian teaching which, by itself, cannot "renew the fallen Adam."
St. Hilarion (Troitsky)

Faultlines

Christianity has always been reproved by atheistic socialism for not having made men happy and given them rest and fed them, and by preaching the religion of earthly bread socialism has attracted millions and millions of followers. …it is because it (Christianity) has not wished to violate the freedom of the human spirit, because it appeals to human freedom and awaits therefrom the fulfilling of the word of Christ. Christianity is not to blame that mankind has not willed the accomplishment of that word and has betrayed it; the fault lies with man, not with the God-man.
Nicholas Berdyaev

Super Duper WCC

In light of the current "council":

We explained, first of all, that the very name “World Council of Churches” is untenable, since the Holy Fathers of the Second Ecumenical Council laid down the dogma that there is one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and not many, out of which it would be possible to build or create some kind of “council” or “union” which would be a type of super-Church.
Bishop Artimije of Raska and Prizren

On Oneness

The presence of human imperfection among her members is powerless to obliterate the unity, for Christ Himself promised that the "gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church." Satan has always sown tares in the field of the Lord and the forces of disunity have often threatened but have never actually succeeded in dividing the Church. No power can be mightier than the omnipotent will of Christ Who founded one Church only in order to bring men into unity with God. Oneness is an essential mark of the Church.
Oberlin Statement of Orthodox - North American Faith and Order Study Conference

The guise of altruistic emotions

But one cannot make a greater error than to identify the spiritual love of one who knows the Truth with altruistic emotions and the striving for the “good of mankind,” a striving that, at best, is grounded in natural sympathy or in abstract ideas. For “love” in this sense, which we call “Judaic,” everything begins and ends in empirical works, the value of which is determined by their visible effect. But for spiritual love, or love in the Christian sense, this value is only tinsel. Even moral activity (philanthropy and so on) is, taken in itself, an absolute zero. What is desirable is not the outward appearance, not the “skin,” of special activities, but life full of grace, which overflows in every creative act of a person. But “skin” as “skin,” the empirical outward appearance as such, can always be falsified. No age dares to deny that there are “false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ,” that even “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11 13-14).
St. Pavel (Florensky)

The virtue of selfishness

Don't you worry...the materialism of our modern world will forever perpetuate the desire for such books:
Have your 'God' and eat it too!

Concealed curves

I read, savored the words, and observed, as I savored them, the concealed curve in Lenin's straight approach.
Isaac Babel

Ah, yes, the justification of terror through "concealed curves".

The foundation of glorious America?

One would think that men who had sacrificed their friends, their family, and their native land to a religious conviction would be wholly absorbed in the pursuit of the treasure which they had just purchased at so high a price. And yet we find them seeking with nearly equal zeal for material wealth and moral good,—for well-being and freedom on earth, and salvation in heaven. They moulded and altered at pleasure all political principles, and all human laws and institutions; they broke down the barriers of the society in which they were born; they disregarded the old principles which had governed the world for ages; a career without bounds, a field without a horizon, was opened before them: they precipitate themselves into it, and traverse it in every direction. But, having reached the limits of the political world, they stop of their own accord, and lay aside with awe the use of their most formidable faculties; they no longer doubt or innovate; they abstain from raising even the veil of the sanctuary, and bow with submissive respect before truths which they admit without discussion.
Alexis de Tocqueville

The self interpreting Bible?

The interpretative understanding of the New Testament for Orthodoxy is not just a matter of using human logical capabilities. The interpretation presupposes first and foremost the correct understanding of the Church, which is the ecclesiological base upon which we build the interpretation of the texts, fulfilled with an ecclesiastical ethos and infused by the liturgical grace of the sacraments. In the Orthodox interpretation it is not the method which is most important, but rather the faithful life of the interpreter in the Church.
Konstantin Nikolakopoulos

Rehab for the R-man

Alcoholism=problem!
Homosexuality=no problem!

Doctrinal minimalism

...Christian unity is grounded and expressed in the unity of the Apostolic Tradition, and that the divisions among Christians, complicated as they might be by “non-theological” (cultural, historical, socio-psychological, etc.) factors, are ultimately rooted in deviations from the one faith. These divisions cannot be healed by compromise or doctrinal minimalism.
SCOBA guide for ecumenical diaogue

Life preservers

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it… The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving…
Nietzsche

Responsibility

In making the individual responsible, Christianity thereby acknowledges his freedom. In making the individual dependent on every flaw in the social structure, however, the doctrine of the environment reduces him to an absolute nonentity, exempts him totally from every personal moral duty and from all independence, reduces him to the lowest form of slavery imaginable.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

The 'authority' of the Church

No—the Church is not an authority, just as God is not an authority and Christ is not an authority, since authority is something external to us. The Church is not an authority, I say, but the truth—and at the same time the inner life of the Christian, since God, Christ, the Church, live in him with a life more real than the heart which is beating in his breasts or the blood flowing in his veins. But they are alive in him only insofar as he himself is living by the ecumenical life of love and unity, i.e., by the life of the Church.
Aleksei Stepanovich Khomyakov

True Philosophy

Rationalism, i.e., the philosophy of concept and rationality, the philosophy of things and lifeless immobility, is wholly connected with the law of identity and can be succinctly characterized as a homoiousian philosophy. It is a fleshly philosophy.
By contrast, Christian philosophy, i.e., the philosophy of idea and reason, the philosophy of persons and creative acts, is based on the possibility of overcoming the law of identity and can be characterized as a homoousian philosophy. It is a spiritual philosophy.
The tendency to pure homoiousiansism as to its limit determines the history of modern philosophy in Western Europe, whereas the attraction to pure homoousianism constitutes the distinctive nature of Russian (and of all Orthodox) philosophy.
St. Pavel (Florensky)

In Spirit and Truth

Christian unity cannot be realized merely by determining what articles of faith or what creed should be regarded as constituting the basis of unity. In addition to subscribing to certain doctrines of faith, it is necessary to achieve the experience of a common tradition or communis sensus fidelium preserved through common worship within the historic framework of the Orthodox Church. There can be no true unanimity of faith unless that faith remains within the life and sacred tradition of the Church which is identical throughout the ages. It is in the experience of worship that we affirm the true faith, and conversely, it is in the recognition of a common faith that we secure the reality of worship in spirit and in truth.
Oberlin Statement of Orthodox, North American Faith and Order Study Conference

On the natural law

Why then is sodomy against the natural law? First of all, because man is a species-being and, as we have said, the species to which he belongs-the species that defines his nature-is both rational and social. Men cannot live at all-much less live well-except by the mutual protection and mutual support of other human beings. Morality refers to those rules that mankind has learned, both from reason and experience, are necessary for surviving and prospering. The inclination of many men-what we might call the inclination of their lower nature-to take their sex where they can find it (whether their partners consent to it or not) and ignore the consequences, must be subordinated to their higher nature, which includes the interest of society (and their interest of nature in the species).
Harry Jaffa

Apropos to the feast of St. Photius the Great

…you, who bring forth the fathers as being pridefully against the dogmas of the Master, recall the violence of the ecumenical councils which proclaimed godly doctrine throughout the whole world, are you neither troubled nor humbled by the threat? You make these your fathers without living the life in yourselves; you neither reverence the incorporeal nature, not hold the common devotion to the Master. This allows no occasion of appeal, because the earthly is included in the same anathema. You call Ambrose, Augustine and other good men your fathers. But does this make it any more tolerable, since you suppose them to be armed against the Master’s teacher, to draw the condemnation on yourselves and also on these men? For you certainly assign your own evil reward to the fathers. But it is only the offspring of this novelty which is evil. Your anathema will not pass through you into those blessed men, because not one of your godless and senseless sophism will be found with them. You presume that they partake in your ungodliness. With bright works, however, and with their whole voice they cry against the anathema which you would bring upon them.

But I do not affirm that all the things that you assert are taught by those blessed men. Even so, if any among them has fallen into something unseemly – for they were all men and human, and no one composed of dust and ephemeral nature can avoid some step of defilement – then I would imitate the sons of Noah. I would cover up the shame of my father with silence and gratitude, instead of garments. I would not have followed Ham as you do. Indeed, you follow him with even more shamelessness and impudence that he himself, because you expose the shame of those whom you call your fathers. Ham is cursed: not because he uncovered, but because he did not cover, his father. You, however expose your fathers and glory in your vanity. Ham exposes the secret to his brothers; you tell yours not to one or two brothers, but in your rash and reckless abandon, proclaim it to the whole world, as if it were your theater. You behave lewdly toward the shame of their nakedness and with luxury toward their dishonor, violently pursuing them, and rejoicing when you expose their nakedness to the light!
St. Photius the Great

"Modern Art" you say?

Man, in this art, is no longer even a caricature of himself; he is no longer portrayed in the throes of spiritual death, ravaged by the hideous Nihilism of our century that attacks, not just the body and soul, but the very idea and nature of man. No, all this has passed; the crisis is over; man is dead. The new art celebrates the birth of a new species, the creature of the lower depths, subhumanity.
Fr. Seraphim Rose

The harmony of the Divine Liturgy

…what…is the baptismal formula? [In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit] It is essentially no more and no less than an expression of the dogma of the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity. Thus, everything that precedes the Creed is a preparation for 'attending' to the word 'consubstantiality,' ὁμοούσια. 'Consubstantiality' is precisely 'wisdom.'

The idea behind this order of the liturgy is clear: mutual love alone is the condition of 'unity of thought,' ὁμόνοια, the one thought of those who love one another, in contrast to the external relation to one another which yields nothing more than 'similarity of thought,' ὁμοίνοια, on which secular life is based: science, social life, government, etc. But 'unity of thought' provides the ground that makes possible joint confession ὁμολογήσομεν, i.e., understanding and acknowledgement of the dogma of consubstantiality, ὁμοούσια. In or through this unity of thought, we come into contact with the mystery of the Triune Divinity.
St. Pavel (Florensky)

The ideal society:

We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy…
Thucydidis

The legitimacy of Orthodoxy

It is not possible to subject faith events to the arid judgment of postmodern scientific research and experimentation. Orthodoxy, as a system of beliefs of faith and principally as a way of life, does not need the faux analyses and research of types of psychology which give the appearance of being scientifically legitimate.
Konstantin Nikolakopoulos

Putting the mind to the Cross

The dogma of the Trinity is a cross for human ways of thought. The apophatic ascent is a mounting of calvary. This is the reason why no philosophical speculation has ever succeeded in rising to the mystery of the Holy Trinity. This is the reason why the human spirit was able to receive the full revelation of the Godhead only after Christ on the cross had triumphed over death and over the abyss of hell. This, finally, is the reason why the revelation of the Trinity shines out in the Church as a purely religious gift, as the catholic truth above all other.
Vladimir Lossky