OrthodoxyOrDeath wrote:CGW,
The problem can be stated in very simple words. Where is truth? Where Jesus is. And where is Jesus? In the church. How do you know when you've found the church?
Well, that is where the problem lies.
The Church is right before you in all Her glory, and you continue to ask "Where is the Church".
I do not ask "Where is the Church?" except as a rhetorical device, and you treat it as a genuine question also as a rhetorical device. And again, while I do not know the specifics of your personal history, if you are among those who have changed jurisdiction, then the answer surely must be "I was already there." For as one passes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction through passing judgement, it must surely be that the truth (and thus the church) is carried from one to the next with you. For if it is not, of what use are these judgements? How can they be trusted?
I did not pass into the Episcopal Church in this way, and I did not pass judgement on my former church, though in time I came to decide that some of what I had hitherto believed was not true. And certainly some of that decision was the fruition of being taught by the church.
You argue against things which I do not teach, and thus you waste words. I am not to be so diverted. And at any rate as far as sin is concerned the intended to purpose of the church matters not, for the church is a power structure and like enough unto a corporation that it falls prey, in sin, to the sins of the world. By this I do not mean that it is made corrupt, but that its members do indeed act corruptly. And the saints do not deny this.
If I see glory in the Orthodox churches, it is because I see the same glory I see in my own church. But in this place, I do not, as a rule, see glory. I see petty arguments over praxis, and over clerical politics and the clerical fallout of secular politics.
I have an answer for "Where is truth?" Or rather, I have a surety about where it is not. If the truth of the church were to be found in the intellectual contention we have here, then all would agree. The rabbis, the pharisees would have all knelt down to kiss Jesus' feet. And yet Nicodemus had to be told by Jesus that the rabbinical game was to be abandoned.
In all your reference to Pilate there is concealed the irony that you seem unwilling to hear a truth from me. You don't seem to understand that I hesitate to inquire of Orthodoxy with you because I doubt that you are a reliable witness. Those who live by the proposition also die by it, and yet it doesn't seem to me that you are really willing to risk much of anything here. There seems no chance at all of me persuading you to join the GOA, much less the Episcopal Church.
And you, "CGW", don't seem to be here as an inquirer about what Holy Orthodoxy is, as you have been told and your questions remain the same - they are not questions of discovery, but of ambivalence. You are here to parade your doubt and hold it up high so that everyone can share and marvel at your ideas.
I don't really want people to marvel at my ideas. I just want people to stop the same stupid self-destructive behavior that I have seen for twenty years. You see, every fall a new class of sophomores discover internet discussions of verious kinds, and every year I have suffered through the same stupid "proofs" of atheism, the same stupid arguments about-- well-- everything. Every year they think they have discovered something radical, when all they have found, if that, is the doorway to a greater battlefield. I am tired of people who, because they have found one theologian or on school of theology, are now possessed of all the answers.
Humility, for most people, means admitting that you don't really quite understand what Tillich is talking about, or whether Reinhold Niebuhr's moral calculus is just (and Christian), or that you can't really tell whether the deconstructionists are brilliant, blithering idiots, or blatant frauds. And most people aren't up to dealing with these questions; they must either dismiss these people out of hand, or be caputed by one without really realizing their own captivity.
Your trouble seems to be that you do not accept anything unquestioned, and are proud of it. You consider all values relative, even those which you accept, because you really don't believe in One Church, One Truth; your position is that of a well-disposed agnostic who is willing to agree with whatever is told to you, but will let you understand that, of course, there is no way of proving anything that is said, and therefore, it is inevitably meaningless.
Oh, but you are so wrong!! See, you've chosen a self-serving answer without considering that you might not have me all figured out, and that there is something that I accept without question, and that it leads me to a different answer than the one you would have me led to. Or in other words, that I have other than intellectual reasons for becoming and remaining an Episcopalian.
To be blunt: your religious world is too small. You simply don't understand the Christian world outside of your corner of Orthodoxy. And you approach it in a way that ensures that you never will understand it. And that same approach is what, at least for you, appears to create the schism between traditionist and other Orthodoxy.