We see them, for instance, offering up the prayers of those on earth at the throne of God Rev. As to whom we should pray to, there is of course one kind of prayer that is to God alone, but there is another sort we offer to fellow Christians. The reason we ask the saints in Heaven to pray for us is the exact same reason we ask each other to pray for us.

So we are asking for the saints to do for us what we ask those in this life to do for us — though I would submit that they are better at it, since they are unencumbered by sin and are close to the throne of God. If you are interested in a much more thorough treatment of this issue, I very much recommend Dr.

Thank you for the reply. I have been wanting to discuss this with someone. So you say the saints are all around us, but the only resurrection that has happened is Jesus. All others according to what I read in the Bible are in paradise awaiting the coming judgement. I believe Angels are all around us, but does the Bible say something about the Saints being around us? I am not trying to be obstinate, I try to study the Bible.

Also, at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, the Lord appears with both Moses and Elias, who are certainly quite alert and not dead as they speak with Him in the sight of Peter, James and John. I am very much interested in this. I will see if I can get the book you recommend. No ancient church has pews or seats, which pretty much indicates that they stood. Most traditional Orthodox churches have some kind of seats, either benches against the wall or wooden chairs with armrests installed in the wall, with the seat part on hinges so it can be lowered or raised to allow the person to sit or stand while leaning on the armrests.

Also, some churches bring chairs in during the services to allow people to sit if they need to. Davison to the events described in the gospel of Matthew ff. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And when the multitude heard this, they were astonished at his doctrine. Reblogged this on padrerichard. I love these 12 reasons, and there are many more besides!

I left the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod 4 years ago and became Orthodox and have never regretted a minute. I thank and praise God that He led me to His Church. May God continue to bless His Church! Thank you for sharing. I am a follower of Jesus Christ and I enjoyed reading all of your reasons for Orthodoxy.

My walk with God has brought me many wonderful, peaceful, kind, and loving Orthodox Christians who were critical to my spiritual walk. I am exploring an Orthodox gathering in my area and school for my children. It is by a miracle that I have been an Orthodox Christian for 28 years. I came in skeptical at first, and found a beauty of worship and people that are constantly changing me for the better.

The Christian life is a struggle as we fight against our own passions and sinful nature. After all these years, I am finally beginning to understand this.

One reason: the overwhelming constant and continuing presence of Jesus Christ. Not my emotion or feeling but the unmistakeable reality of Him despite silly, corrupt abusive people and my own unworthiness. He called me, welcomed me through an icon of His Mother, blessed me to be received by the hands of an unfortunately unstable priest and to stay despite my pride anger and sloth and the ethnocentric hatred of some in my first parish.

In the process He has blessed me beyond anything I imagined including being the least in an outstanding parish. In regards to reason 12 you have been miss informed about Catholicism. Just like many Orthodox there are a great deal not aware of their own teachings.

But I think a thorough look at the teachings of the CCC will show that theosis is not the primary Catholic understanding of salvation. As a former Catholic and current grateful! Orthodox, I can state without reservation that the first time in my life that I ever heard of theosis was after becoming Orthodox. It is not any part of Catholic teaching. And I attended Catholic schools for thirteen years of my life. I converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism a year ago, primarily for practical reasons and a relocation.

However, theosis and hesychasm were two major draws for me initially, and I have found that the Catholic Church by and large is more concerned with social issues than theosis.

If I am able, I plan to humbly return to Orthodoxy as soon as I am able. Not to deny that in catholicism there is a strong focus on social work, but I would like to share my little experience as a dominican student friar thus catholic , ie that God made himself man to make us God is the first thing which has been thought to us in the theology classes.

As Catholic we consider Athanasius a Father of the Church and we celebrate and revere him as such. Right, and I mentioned that this is not absent in Catholicism.

Father — Wonderful article. My one difficulty with Orthodoxy is the teaching on divorce. I say as someone who wishes to understand. Please explain. Thank you. The question is really how best to move forward with salvation after that sin occurs. The orthodoxresearchinstitute. Just a passing visitor who happened upon this site. Just wanted to comment that the above is not an inactive website. Chrismated two years ago September 9. All 12 reasons, yes, but for me…. Lord have mercy! I had children to raise and out of necessity, determined that they would be raised as Christian believers who put Jesus Christ first in their lives.

I am thankful that they do and love the LORD. I love going back to the church in Erie. There are my roots. I grew up Greek Orthodox and left the Church when I married an American man who was Mormon and converted me and we raised our children in the Mormon faith.

I never felt comfortable in the Mormon Church and left it after I divorced my husband. My children all left the Mormon Church as well. I have always regretted making that choice and even though my children are all good people I know being in the Greek Orthodox Church would have given them roots, community, faith and traditions to carry them through this life and the life to come.

I carried the Greek Orthodox Church with me always. It is so ironic that the Mormon Church teaches they are the only true church but in reality the Orthodox Church is the original and true Church established by the Apostles of Christ and continues to this day, unchanged and firm in its beliefs and traditions. I left the true Church to join a church with false teachings and false prophets and I came back to the original and true Church, The Orthodox Church.

I am Russian, so please excuse my poor English. In my opinion, the reasons 1 and 12 are very important. If The Orthodox is the church of the New Testament, founded by Jesus Christ and the Apostles; if she preserves the teachings and practices of the early Christians, then I want to be a member of this church. Who is the last authority in the Roman Catholic Church? The last word always belongs to Pope. Even if a new Pope was elected a minute ago, his personal opinion can define any doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church.

What makes bishop of Rome infallible? Who, being in sound mind, may say that the Apostle Peter and Pope are equal and always share the same opinion? Church splits are often the result of smarter, more gifted people in the pews getting tired of listening to pastor Joe Shmoe every single week.

Not only is his sermon 75 percent of the service, but he scripts and choreographs the rest of it too. The smarter people find something better, or they create it themselves.

Paradigm shift. Note: I like Fundamentalists in general, especially as co-laborers in the culture wars. We drink wine at major feasts, at Easter lots of it , and certainly enjoy it in generous doses away from church as well. Russians bring a lot of vodka to the feasts. But you can know about him intellectually. And thus the great heroes of Western Christianity are often intellectual giants Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, etc. The East emphasizes mystery.

Gregory Palamas affirmed what the church had always taught, that God can be known and experienced directly, not in his essence, but in his uncreated divine energies. Palamas debated a 14th Century Western scholar who said Eastern monks would be better off studying about God instead of praying all day, valuing knowledge over revelation. Palamas said encounters like the Apostles at the Transfiguration were direct experiences with the Divine that others can also experience.

Great novelist Fyodor Dostoyevski said the same. Start at 3. The Reformers accepted this troublesome premise by default, and never rejected it. Christian movements in the last century have sought to address this real problem.

But neither group may be aware that they are fighting uphill against their own theological traditions. Orthodox Christianity is difficult. You stand during church. You fast for 40 days before Easter and Christmas, abstaining from meat and all dairy products. You also do this every Wednesday and Friday. You go to confession about once a month and share your dirt. If you ever get faithful in those areas, you can up your game by visiting a monastery, or even joining one!

On one level, it seems our culture loves seeker friendly churches. Great athletes work relentlessly to reach the highest levels. Marathons and Ironman competitions are wildly popular these days. Those kids in the spelling bee finals read dictionaries for years.

Becoming Orthodox is joining the elite, the real men and the real women. As an aside, most Evangelical churches are dominated by females, who drag their husbands to church, if at all.

Orthodox churches are often the opposite. Men usually find it first, and the women follow them. But the focal point of every Orthodox church is two icons up front that surround the altar. On the right is an icon of the man Jesus Christ.

This is the basic setup for every church in the world, without exception. In Orthodoxy, a woman has a lead role. Not in Protestantism. In Orthodoxy, a woman is greatly venerated not worshipped and greatly loved. Openly and publicly. This absolutely must make a difference on the culture. Notice the explosion of goddess worship in coffee shop bookstores across the Western world. Humanity senses that 50 percent of the population is female and that heaven should reflect that.

Orthodoxy refers to their leading lady as the Queen of Heaven Rev. Orthodoxy looks and smells like Christ. Most of the history of the church is one of suffering, struggle, and even martyrdom. Greek Christians were persecuted by the Turks for several hundred years—impaling was the preferred form of execution—before they gained liberation in the 19th Century. Ethiopia, the poorest country in the world, is majority Nicean Orthodox and the first nation to declare itself Christian.

Bishop John of San Francisco, the Wonderworker. No Pentecostal church can outweird our supernatural weird. In other words, Jim Jones will not emerge at your local Orthodox Church. But you just might experience a miracle. Modern Christianity is under a large dose of Gnosticism, an early heresy that says what really matters are spiritual things.

Physical, earthly, created things are okay, but somehow lesser than the spiritual things we do. Theology, on this picture, does not allow for radical or genuine questioning: if we start from a position of faith, then our questioning or seeking begins by already having found what it searches - namely, God. Dominique Janicaud , in his criticism of the recent theological turn in French phenomenology, made a similar point: "The dice are loaded and choices made; faith rises majestically in the background.

Philosophy, by contrast, must consist in honest questioning, really following inquiry or evidence wherever it leads. The kind of thinking that has traditionally been regarded as integral to philosophy demands deep and searching questioning and a restless and perhaps even endless exploring, but without knowing where such wondering and meandering will lead so as not to prejudice the outcome. It is what Heidegger envisioned as a type of thinking that is always underway , travelling "off the beaten track" onto bypaths and even dead-ends, but with no predetermined end in sight.

If we wish to grapple with the ultimate questions of life and death in novel, interesting and fruitful ways, a creative and adventurous spirit is required, one that is prepared to occasionally depart from the conventional and familiar in order to freely roam on roads less travelled, imaginatively constructing speculative theories and experimenting with diverse myths, models and metaphors of, for example, God and world.

I would not want to say that commitment - whether it be philosophical or religious - is necessarily ruled out by such a methodology. There is no way of saying where one's intellectual travels will lead, and one may well end up perhaps despite one's best efforts at a "religious" destination granting for now the fiction of a final destination.

Similarly, there is no wish to rule out the possibility of beginning one's journey from a religious standpoint, particularly if one thinks that there are no metaphysically neutral starting-points in philosophy.

But there is an intimate connection between the manner in which one travels and how or where one starts and ends in one's travels - the one inevitably affecting the other. Indeed, if the journey is undertaken in a "sceptical" frame - in the etymological sense of "thought-ful" - fostering an open and questioning, creative and imaginative style of thinking, with no predetermined goal or end-point, and driven by the passion for truth and meaning rather than an inviolable ideology that can never be overturned or even challenged by rational considerations, then the matter of whether one starts from or ends up at a "religious" position virtually reduces to a trivial detail.

The problem, however, is that religious commitment - of the traditional sort requiring creedal fidelity or "orthodoxy" - discourages or even prohibits philosophical journeys of the kind envisioned here. I have witnessed this unfortunate tendency in my own area of specialisation, the philosophy of religion. This field is currently suffering from a "dogmatic slumber," brought on in large part by the conservative and evangelical stream of the Christian church. Christian philosophers of religion now tend to approach their work with an unquestioning and complacent attitude towards the truth of traditional Nicene Christianity.

Even those who subject Christian beliefs to critical scrutiny give the impression at least of already having made up their minds before their "inquiry" has begun; and it is not unusual to find a high degree of confidence smacking of triumphalism displayed towards the case they have constructed in support of Christian theism or an element thereof, such as bare theism. Consider also the fact that one would be hard pressed to find in the published output of a contemporary philosopher of religion any fundamental changes or reversals, such as giving up belief in God, or relinquishing some significant religious belief.

Even when some central theistic or Christian beliefs are put forward for examination for instance, the belief in the goodness of God, when discussing the problem of evil , the results are predetermined by the general parameters or framework in this case, the Christian worldview within which the investigation is being carried out.

Allied to this, there is very little willingness to look beyond traditional Christianity - where by "traditional Christianity" I mean that version of Christianity developed in the writings of the Church Fathers and represented by the creeds of the first millennium, particularly the so-called "Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed" which is now generally associated with the second ecumenical council of So-called "heretical" theologies Arianism, Nestorianism , crushed by the power of the church and state, continue to be treated by philosophers as heresies, rather than viewed as genuine or live possibilities.

Equally troubling, there is little desire to look beyond the Christian faith and explore non-Christian religions, particularly non-Abrahamic and Eastern religions, in a spirit of sincere openness - that is, with an openness to being corrected and enlightened by the other, and not simply seeking to prove a point or convert one's interlocutor this kind of aggression being an occupational hazard of the philosopher.

What is lacking is not merely an informed awareness of non-Christian religions, but also a genuine engagement and dialogue with them, where this presupposes attentive listening, an attitude of respect and humility, and above all a readiness to undergo a possibly painful and disruptive transformation in one's worldview.

But I would suspect that few Christian philosophers would view dialogue in such terms - that is, as something that holds the potential to change one's beliefs and practices in drastic ways. This is simply not a live option for so many of today's philosophers, who are therefore restricted to entering into dialogue with other religions if they ever do so in a predominantly one-way fashion. For these reasons I have come to regard religious commitment as incompatible with philosophy.

The lover of wisdom, the philos-sophos , is one who never ceases searching and questioning, even if they become - like Socrates, the "gadfly of Athens" - irritating and infuriating, and are ostracised or condemned by their society. The life of the mind as practiced by Socrates is not well suited to church membership, or any religious affiliation for that matter other than perhaps liberal groups like Ikon.

Institutional forms of religion, at least, will sooner or later put a stop to questions and demand answers, since it is the answers that define the boundary and identity of the group. For the philosopher, however, answers are always fluid and provisional; the only constants are the questions, and therefore the path to wisdom must be a solitary one. In my case, those who have best lighted the path have been "writers" in the broad sense, rather than "professional philosophers" if that's not an oxymoron.

And in particular, a group of brilliant but relatively unknown to English-speaking audiences twentieth-century Greek poets and novelists writing in the midst of violence and war, persecution and imprisonment. I will mention only two of them. Firstly, there is the unconventional leftist Aris Alexandrou , who spent much of his life in jail or in exile for his refusal to submit to political authority. Soon after his acclaimed and only novel, To kibotio The Mission Box , was published in , he was asked in an interview, "Which political party do you belong to?

I am not a member of any church. I am not a follower of any religion. As I've said before, Desmotes teide histamai tois endon remasi peithomenos. This ancient Greek phrase - which can be translated as "Here I stand committed, abiding by the voice within" - has something of the spirit of Socrates about it.

Like Socrates, Alexandrou enjoins us to listen to our inner daimon , forging our own path and thinking for ourselves rather than letting others think for us.

The second literary figure I would like to mention is Alexandrou's contemporary, Tasos Leivaditis , one of the unacknowledged greats of Modern Greek literature. Leivaditis's early poetry is heavily influenced by a doctrinaire communist outlook, his participation in the communist resistance movement during the Second World War and the civil war, and his subsequent detention and exile in various camps across the Aegean islands.

In the aftermath of the defeat of the left in the civil war, Leivaditis gradually turned away from his previous political commitments towards a bleaker, disillusioned poetic vision permeated with existentialist concerns and quasi-religious imagery. Even as the religious tones and themes become increasingly prominent, there is never a desire for creedal or confessional allegiance, but a striving to break free from orthodoxies of all kinds, political and theological.

There is a passionate, even erotic "hankering after God" in Leivadits's later work, often recalling the apophatic stream in Orthodox theology and spirituality, with its emphasis on the mystery and incomprehensibility of God. But the apophaticism of the Orthodox Church is circumscribed by its cataphaticism , its authoritative positive pronouncements - stumbling-blocks to a generation, like Leivaditis's, betrayed by ideologies of left and right which could not accommodate the complexities, vagaries and frailties of life.

If any divinity remains from these ruins it is the one disclosed in the "books" of the French-Jewish writer, Edmond Jabes, for whom "God is a questioning of God. He also writes and translates poetry, his most recent poetry collection being Appearance and Reality. An earlier, much shorter version of this essay was published in the Greek-Australian newspaper, Neos Kosmos , on 24 October Parts of that article have been reused with permission.

Monday 7 December pm. Against Orthodoxy Raised in a Greek migrant family in Melbourne, I had a fairly conventional Orthodox upbringing, including the mandatory infant baptism, observance of the major feasts and customs of the Christian calendar, such as the forty day fast leading up to Easter, the occasional communion and confession, and so on. To be able to enter into a relationship with God through prayer, we must first come to know the God we are addressing.

We come to this knowledge by hearing the proclamation of God which the Church provides. If we are to offer acceptable worship, we must worship in spirit and truth, understanding what we worship John But to worship in spirit and truth, we must stand in the Tradition of the Church. The Church gives us a way to pray — and even specific words for prayer. Furthermore, in the Church time and space are shattered in a way. As members of the Church, we are mystically joined to believers everywhere, both living and dead.

The prayer of one member of the Church is enhanced and echoed in the prayers of the entire communion of saints. We pray for one another. We enlist those gathered about the throne of God to join their prayers with ours. By virtue of our membership in the Church, our personal prayers are amplified and bolstered by the prayers of our fellow members in the Body of Christ.

It is in the church alone that we have access to the sacramental Mysteries. In these Mysteries the divine touches and transforms the human. The creature is brought into union with the Creator for whom he yearns.