Zen Innovations upon the Faith

Holy Archangels Orthodox Foundation

“There is a temptation to reduce Orthodoxy, especially among young male converts, to a rational system of doctrines and dogmas, canons and rituals. We get all excited about the new things we are learning, and about how far superior they are to the Catholic and Protestant systems of Christian thought, or to secular and non-Christian philosophy. But because we are not mature in the Faith, we are off balance.

All these things, doctrines, dogmas, canons and so forth, are there in order to support one primary purpose: the transformation of our souls in theosis, in short, salvation. Just because you have the right doctrine, pure dogmas and strict observance of the canons does not mean that you are deified. In fact, the great spiritual fathers all say that knowledge puffs up, inflates our ego, and inflames our passions.n These things will not save you. They are the context for the spiritual struggle but are not its content.

If we judge others, condemn others, criticize other and generally exalt ourselves, we are simply the new Pharisees. You can have perfect obedience to all the rules, and if you do not love your neighbor, they condemn you. You can fast perfectly, and if you judge and criticize your neighbor, you condemn yourself.

If you judge and criticize the Roman Catholics or the Protestants and their faith, and decide they are all going to hell, you have condemned yourself. It is not for us to judge anyone else’s faith or salvation. We need to worry about ourselves, and our own salvation. We must not only mercilessly persecute hypocrisy within ourselves, but any kind of arrogance, selfishness, self-centeredness, and egotism. Otherwise, we make the truth into a lie, because we take what is good and holy, and use it to not only destroy others, but inflate our own egos. If you don’t have love, St Paul says, you are a sounding gong or clanging cymbal.

The Fathers tell us, over and over, that until we have achieved a substantial degree of purification from the passions, we must not touch theology. In the early Church, the three year period of catechesis was primarily devoted to moral teaching from the Old Testament. You have to live Orthodox to understand the Faith.”

- Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen
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(Bond Note Response)

Orthodox/Catholic Holy Fathers and laymen, like Saint Irenaeus and Justin Martyr, engaged in apologetics from the earliest times, taking the example of the APOSTLES who did the same. This is a late invention, the idea that contending for the faith is something "personal only" and does not include confronting the errors of ordinary people and false clergy who try to supplant the True Faith with false Gospels. To categorize those who engage in apologetics as "If you judge and criticize the Roman Catholics or the Protestants and their faith, and decide they are all going to hell, you have condemned yourself" is itself the very arrogance it seeks to expose.

 

The purpose of contrasting false teachings with true teachings actually has the opposite goal, to save people from error and punishment. This applies not only to the discussion of false theologies (so-called) but to the false systems of morals creating great evil and suffering in Society. The simple idea of how we participate in the sins of others confirms what I am saying. We participate in the sins of others

by counsel,
by command,
by consent,
by provocation,
by praise or flattery,
by concealment,
by partaking,
by silence,
by defense of the sin committed.

The American Orthodox clergy has been mostly silent in the face of massive cultural decline.  This is a GREAT sin.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn expressed a hope in the 1970s that the "Churches" would at least unite in the battle against Atheism, instead they have cooperated to make the Atheist comfortable, and to persecute anyone who dare to call out them or the Atheists.


Metropolitan Jonah also says, "We must not only mercilessly persecute hypocrisy within ourselves, but any kind of arrogance, selfishness, self-centeredness, and egotism. Otherwise, we make the truth into a lie, because we take what is good and holy, and use it to not only destroy others, but inflate our own egos."  I think that he conflates love with "niceness." And history is strewn with Orthodox Saints who were not nice, but through love carried heavy burdens for the good of all and confronted evil, even with a sword. 

"St Alexander Nevsky spent his entire life in struggles on behalf of the military and the State; he rode on horseback through the whole of Siberia to the Tartar khan in order to establish peace in Russia, and became renowned for his military victories. But when he fell ill and death came, he accepted it as liberation from the labors of earthly life and gave himself over to that which was dearer than everything to his soul and became a monk, in order to enter the longed-for Kingdom of God, not as an earthly warrior, but as a warrior of Christ." Saint John the Wonderworker

Saint Hilarion echoes the words of

Alexei Khomiakov where he stated the same thing that the Romans and Protestants had lost the ability to comprehend Grace; later in the same document comparing them to heathens he said:
"having inherited the blind wisdom of blind heathendom, have not comprehended the majesty of God's Sacraments, but have required reasons and uses for everything and, having subjected the doctrine of the Church to scholastic explications, will not even pray unless they see in the prayer some direct goal or advantage. But our law is not a law of bondage or of hireling service, laboring for wages, but a law of the adoption of sons, and of love which is free."

Again, Saint John Maximovitch describing a loving but "not nice" saint.
"the Right-believing Prince Alexander Nevsky, roused the Russian people for a struggle, not with the Tartars, who had racked Russia’s body, but with the Catholic Swedes, who, taking advantage of Russia’s misfortune, wanted to seize the soul of the Russian people and kill the spiritual might of the Russian nation and Russia. For Alexander Nevsky it was necessary above all to preserve that spiritual might."
- Saint John Maximovitch

We see in our culture every attack on Truth, from every level and angle, from myriad false religions and flawed, even Luciferian philosophies.  To withdraw from this battle is to deny the value of souls other than our own.

I can't reconcile the words of Metropolitan Jonah with the words of Saint John the Wonderworker or the history of the myriad Orthodox warrior saints. His words ring more of Zen Buddhism to me than the History and Tradition of Orthodoxy. My spiritual confessor said:




Archpriest Symeon Elias

“The Kingdom of God, beloved brethren, is beginning to be at hand; the reward of life, and the rejoicing of eternal salvation, and the perpetual gladness and possessions lately lost of paradise, are now coming, with the passing away of the world; heavenly things are taking place of earthly already, and great things of small, and eternal things of things that fade away.”
—St Cyprian of Carthage