St. John Cassian (Romanian icon)

The student of history is not often well-served by the reading of secondary sources. This is especially the case when those secondary sources are attempting to characterize a theologian and his theology. Columba Stewart’s 1999 study of St. John Cassian in Cassian the Monk is a happy exception to this rule. Stewart readily admits that, as a Benedictine monk, he feels a keen debt to the writings of Cassian for his own monastic formation.

From its opening pages to its afterword, it is clear that this book is a personal labor of love. Consequently, while Stewart tells us the book is written for two audiences—monastics and scholars—it is in some sense written for that one kind of attentive reader we call amator. To that attentive reader, Stewart (and perhaps also Cassian) suggests that the insights of love can speak directly to the challenges of our own day. Specifically, in Cassian’s premodern theology, we can find threads of wisdom that speak directly to the anxieties of Late Modernity.

Stewart begins his book with twenty-three pages on the life and times of Cassian the monk. While there is not as much known about Cassian as we interested readers would like, Stewart nevertheless highlights details of staggering significance.

For example, given Cassian’s fluency in both Latin and Greek, he was able to read widely in both Eastern and Western patristic traditions, and was able to translate between languages and traditions in service to orthodoxy to rebuff the heresies of Pelagius and Nestorius. Even more significantly in terms of lasting legacy, Cassian’s experience as a monk in Egypt and his service to St. John Chrysostom enabled him to bring the “light from the East” to the West. Specifically, Cassian’s writings directly influenced both St. Benedict and St. Gregory the Great, and thus all of Christian spirituality throughout the Middle Ages. Read More

On October 19 Orthodoxy in Dialogue published my “Greek Prayer for Transgender Name Change: Urging Caution,” written in response to Gregory Pappas’ article which had appeared the day before on The Pappas Post, “The Greek Orthodox Church Has a Prayer for Name Changes Following Gender Reassignment Surgery.”

Since then two theologians in Greece have reached out to me independently of each other to offer some additional clarity. They agree on the following basic outline:

• Metropolitan Timothy (Matthaiakes) composed the prayer in the 1960s for a specific pastoral case with which he was faced.
• The prayer first appeared in print in a euchologion published in 1978. (The 1985 edition pictured in Pappas’ and my article was the second printing.) 
• The euchologion was published with the imprimatur of the Holy Synod of Greece.
• There is no evidence for the use of the prayer after the initial case for which it was composed—or presumably the non-use, since the argument from silence is always tenuous at best.
• Most significantly the prayer refers, not to gender reassignment surgery for a transgender person in the surgical stages of his or her transition, but to corrective surgery in an intersex child for whom an error in medical judgment had been made at birth.

Read More

This is the sixth article in our Reformation 500 Series.

The Synaxis of the Twelve Holy Apostles

All the cults arising out of Christianity, and indeed all the Protestant denominations, have arisen because their founders—and their subsequent followers—became convinced that every expression of Christianity as they knew it was grievously faulty, beyond hope of repair. Each founder became convinced that the only choice, if one were to be a true Christian, was to begin a new form of Christianity—to start all over again.

For example, the Protestant Reformation as a whole emerged in response to the perceived hopeless corruption and apostasy of the Roman Catholic Church. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, received his first supposed “heavenly visitation” specifically in response to his anguished prayers about the confused state of Christianity in his day (early 19th-century America), with its welter of competing, squabbling denominations. (His own account is found in Edwin S. Gaustad and Mark A. Noll, eds, A Documentary History of Religion in America, vol. 1, pp. 338-341 [2003 edition]).  And Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1870s, was “a sworn adversary of historic Christianity,” according to Walter Martin (Kingdom of the Cults, p. 49 [1985 edition]).

We as Orthodox Christians can emphasize that the Christianity which the founders of these movements rejected was indeed NOT TRUE CHRISTIANITY. They were only familiar with various Western distortions of the True Faith, so to a certain extent we can agree with them in their rejection of all the various forms of Christianity which they knew about. But was it then correct for these founders of new forms of Christianity to assume that the fulness of Christian Truth and practice had been lost from the earth for so many centuries? Read More

Since yesterday The Pappas Post’s article, “The Greek Orthodox Church Has a Prayer for Name Changes Following Gender Reassignment Surgery,” has been causing some excitement among Orthodox Facebook users, especially those inclined to welcome such news. One sympathetic sharer of the article introduced it with the famous maxim: Lex orandi, lex credendi est.

As is often the case in the media, Gregory Pappas’ sensationalistic headline serves unfortunately to obscure the facts contained in the article itself. 

The prayer in question is the composition of a single hierarch, Metropolitan Timothy (Matthaiakes) of New Ionia and Philadelphia, for inclusion in a euchologion (service book) authored or authorized by himself. In no sense can it be construed as the lex orandi of the Church of Greece, much less of the whole Orthodox Church.

Those who have read my article on being the father of a transgender son know my views on the need for the Orthodox Church to develop a more pastorally responsive approach to the complex question of transgender identity. Those who know me personally—and have spoken with me at length—see for themselves the extreme caution that I bring to the table with respect not only to transgender concerns, but also to the no less complex question of sexual orientation. We need to get these things right on all counts: theologically, spiritually, and pastorally. Mr. Pappas’ headline undermines the necessarily cautious approach of pastors and theologians striving to articulate a more holistic theology of sexuality and gender which turns no one away who yearns for Christ and for the Church’s life of grace. Read More