OCCASIONAL NEWSLETTER No.19 (26th July 2020)
Dear Friends,
A few newsletters ago (number 13), I put at the top a photograph of a mosaic depicting the creation of the heavenly bodies, which appears also at the top of this newsletter. I’ve put it there on this occasion because today’s readings are about faith, and my background in the sciences inevitably makes me wonder what it means to have faith in God - the creator and redeemer of the world - if you are, like me, a trained scientist who believes in the broad accuracy of the modern scientific account of how the cosmos came to be as it is.
Here it is important to recognise that faith – pistis in Greek – is not quite the same as belief that some set of statements is “true.” Ultimately, faith in God is trust in God. I once heard our archbishop say something that I thought very wise: he said that “the Church proclaims Truth but it doesn’t define it.” What I took him to mean was that what the Church proclaims is nothing less than Christ himself – “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6) – and it does so both in its worship and in its words (doctrinal formulae, scriptural texts, and so on.) These words often have many layers of meaning. The Genesis accounts of the creation, for example, convey to us a fundamental truth: that the cosmos in which we live has its origin in the will of God. What those accounts do not do, however, is give us what we would nowadays call a “scientific” account of how the cosmos came to be as it is. Rather, as Saints Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus learned from the early Christian philosopher, Origen, scripture has layers of meaning, and the literal meaning may sometimes be ignored if there is good reason to do so, since it is of less importance than its moral and mystical meanings. Indeed, these two saints, writing in the fourth century of the Christian era, made an anthology of Origen’s writings and began it with Origen’s statement that certain passages of scripture, “by means of seeming history, though the incidents never occurred, figuratively reveal certain mysteries.” Whether, in choosing this passage to open their anthology, they actually had in mind the Genesis creation accounts is not clear. However, when we look at St. Basil’s commentary on those accounts, we certainly find that he applied this insight to them. Indeed, he almost seems to have anticipated modern evolutionary theory. As one modern scholar has put it, “Basil expresses his conviction that although the Creator's word is spoken in an instant, the Creation's obedient response is extended in time.” Indeed, he goes on, at times Basil speaks “in language that seems almost to anticipate modern scientific concepts.”
It is for this reason that modern arguments about “the Bible versus science” simply make no sense to an Orthodox Christian. We are not biblical fundamentalists but the inheritors of a profound and subtle tradition of biblical interpretation. Those who want to set up a battle between science and religious faith are therefore mistaking fundamentalist religion for the real thing. Indeed, they are often making other mistakes as well. The biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, famous for his authorship of The God Delusion, makes so many philosophical mistakes in his arguments for atheism that the philosopher Michael Ruse – himself an atheist – has declared publicly that Dawkins is the kind of atheist who makes him “ashamed to be an atheist.”
We do, however, need to interpret the well-established theories of modern science in a way that challenges some of the ways in which they are often interpreted. When we speak of “laws of nature,” for example, we need to go beyond the way in which they are often understood, in which there is no sense of their relationship to God. Having a sense of that relationship does not mean that we need to use these laws scientifically in a way that is different to that of the atheist scientist. For us, however, the laws that any created thing obeys are a manifestation of the presence of God in that thing. (In technical theological and philosophical language, they are an aspect of the logos of each thing, about which St. Maximus the Confessor spoke, or of the divine energies spoken of by St. Gregory Palamas. As Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has put it, Maximos’s thinking focuses on the way in which “Christ the creator Logos has implanted in every thing a characteristic logos, a ‘thought’ or ‘word’ which is God’s intention for that thing, its inner essence which makes it distinctively itself and at the same time draws it towards the divine realm,” while for Palamas’s complementary thinking, God, in “his essence … is infinitely transcendent, utterly beyond all created being, beyond all participation from the human side. But in his energies – which are nothing less than God himself in action – God is inexhaustibly immanent, maintaining all things in being, animating them, making each of them a sacrament of his dynamic presence.”)
The fact that we now interpret these two traditional and complementary ways of thinking at least partly in relation to the laws of nature is an example of how our Orthodox Tradition can be expressed differently at different times. As Metropolitan Kallistos has put it, “Loyalty to Tradition, properly understood, is not something mechanical, a passive and automatic process of transmitting the accepted wisdom of an era in the distant past.” Tradition is, he says, “not static but dynamic, not a dead acceptance of the past but a living discovery of the Holy Spirit in the present. Tradition, while inwardly changeless (for God does not change) is constantly assuming new forms, which supplement the old without superseding them.”
It is not, of course, everyone’s vocation to try to work out what these new forms should be. (Indeed, few are qualified for that task.) What each of us can do, however, is to use our faith, our trust in God, to assure ourselves that this task is now - as it has been throughout the Church’s history - one which can be successfully undertaken as “a living discovery of the Holy Spirit in the present.” And if anyone tells us that “science has disproved the validity of faith,” we can treat that statement with the scorn it deserves.
With love in Christ,
Fr. Christopher
SERMON ON MATTHEW 9:27-35
In today’s Gospel reading, St Matthew reminds us that through faith in Christ our lives can be transformed, and we can be made whole, while also warning us that hard- heartedness leads us away from Christ, no matter how religious we might externally appear. The Evangelist immediately places before us two blind men. Blindness, along with other physical ailments, was a cause to be considered an outcast at the time of Christ, and also illness had a close link with sin. The two men initially express a confused belief in Christ shouting, “Have mercy on us, Son of David”. Here they recognise Christ as the Messiah, as Son of David, and perhaps as St Theophylact of Ochrid points out, through asking for mercy, have begun to understand Christ’s divine nature to some extent. Christ does not react instantaneously, instead, he asks them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?”. In doing so, he is asking them to confess their faith, and is respecting their freedom as humans, made in the image of God. The blind men’s response is a simple and heartfelt “Yes, Lord”, to which Christ replies “According to your faith let it be done to you”.
The two men make a direct confession of their belief. Christ, however, while healing them also calls them to cooperation with God in accepting the miracle, as the miracle is done, “according to your faith”. Having regained their sight, Christ asks them out of humility and to avoid people discovering who he truly is to, “See that no one knows of this”. The two blind men promptly spread the news of their healing, not out of disobedience to Christ’s instruction, but rather out of thanksgiving and joy for their being made whole again.
Following this, another healing takes place, “a demoniac who was mute was brought to him... the one who had been mute spoke”. In this case the man is so overcome by evil and his health, and unable both physically and spiritual to express his belief, that Christ simply heals the man without initially requiring his faith and cooperation. The people of the area were amazed, and set Christ, through his authority to heal by a word alone, above the Prophets and Patriarchs of Israel, “never has anything like this been seen in Israel”. The Pharisees, placed in opposition to Christ, are unable to accept, unlike the blind men, that what Christ is doing is from God, and instead suggest that, “by the ruler of the demons he casts out the demons”. As we know (from Matthew 12:25) this is simply not possible, “every city or house divided against itself will not stand”. Christ’s work can only come from God as he is preaching the Kingdom, healing illness, and forgiving sins. The work of the demons is diametrically opposed to such a ministry.
St Matthew calls us to place ourselves in the shoes of the blind men. While we have faith in Christ and follow him, there will be times when we find ourselves spiritually blind, and cut off from God through our sins. In some ways, this is an even deeper blindness than the physical one the men experienced. Christ asks us to turn back to him, through repentance and confession, and is waiting expectantly for us to make that return. It is not enough for us for Christ to ask us to make that return, we actually have to cooperate with him, through our confession of faith, through returning to the Church, through engaging with the ascetic life, and through seeking reconciliation through confession. We are made in the image of God and have free will, as such Christ is not a spiritual “fanatic” who will force us to do things; we have to proclaim that “yes”, and accept our being made whole, and having received it, aim to maintain this synergy with God as much as possible, in case we sink back into spiritual darkness.
If we allow Christ to transform us in this way, we can begin to enter into theosis and accept Christ’s transformational healing more and more in our lives, and draw ever closer to him. However, in saying this, as in the case of the demoniac, we are not limiting Christ, if we become too separated from God, then he entirely capable of making that first move, and re-orientating us towards him, and initiating that discussion of return and cooperation. Like the blind men and the crowds let us be thankful for Christ’s healing in our lives and that of others, and flee the hard-heartedness, ingratitude and thanklessness the Pharisees displayed! May the light of Christ illumine all of our blindness!
