"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)