Episode 319 - Orthodox Questions with Father John Strickland. Part 2

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 319, Orthodox Questions with Father John Strickland.

Part 2

This is the second part of my conversation with Father John Strickland, where he tackles your questions about the Protestant Reformation, autocephalous churches, and connections to Byzantium, amongst several other topics.

John is the pastor of an Orthodox church in Pulsbo in Washington state.

He wrote a four-volume series about the history of Christian civilization called Paradise and Utopia, and he's also recorded a podcast of the same name as an accompaniment to the books, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts or at ancientfaith.com.

The next question is

another broad one.

One listener asks, how do Orthodox Christians view the Protestant Reformation?

Now, obviously, you have studied this in great detail, but I suppose the question looks like it might be saying,

how would an average Orthodox Christian view the Protestant Reformation rather than someone who actually knows quite a lot about it?

Okay.

Well, I consider myself pretty average.

So,

yeah, I mean, sure.

I mean, I think once you study the history, and again, I weigh this out in the Age of Division, the next volume in my series is called The Age of Utopia, which continues to study the Protestant Reformation.

I mean, once that happened, there arose so much conflict in Roman Catholic and Protestant, let's just call it Western Christianity, that wars broke out.

I mean, the worst war to date in the West was the Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648,

and it was just so devastating and horrific

and just ghastly that it just turned so many people off to Christianity altogether that we have, as a result, what many people call the Enlightenment,

the loss of a Christian faith

among Western cultural elites like Voltaire or Thomas Jefferson or Rousseau.

I call it the Benitenment rather than the enlightenment in my book because

for me,

white comes from Christ, comes from his church, and doesn't come from

the presupposition that Christianity is a superstition that should be eliminated from public

life and

life in this world.

So that would seem to me more a benightenment than an enlightenment.

But certainly tremendous things resulted from that,

and many of them, you know, quite beautiful.

I love the classical music tradition and spent all my time listening to that tradition.

And that would not have happened without that so-called enlightenment.

So there was a rejection of Christianity in general in the West as a result of those wars of Western religion that led to secularization.

And

so

I think looking back through that that secular culture we have today, one that had been very optimistic

in what I call the age of utopia up through the 19th century, but in the 20th century has become very pessimistic and, in fact, nihilistic.

My last volume is called The Age of Nihilism.

That has changed quite a bit.

And the evaluation of the Protestant Reformation.

in facilitating those changes

to the West and her Christian culture

is a very big question that deserves

a lot of thought.

And as an Orthodox Christian, what I try to do is bring in an Orthodox or Eastern perspective on this history of the West, the Protestant Reformation.

But the Protestant Reformation from an Orthodox point of view,

as you ask in your question,

is something that on the one hand is kind of inevitable.

Because from an Orthodox point of view, the Roman Catholic Church departed from, deviated from Orthodoxy, from first millennium Christianity.

And after 500 years, a full half millennium, that is to say from 1054, the Great Schism, to 1517, the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, so many changes and alterations of the Christian faith had accrued that it was inevitable that there would be a rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church that the Protestant Reformation became.

I mean, I can just list some of the things that are quite striking here.

Again, I think a lot of the time we in the West are trained by our culture, by our educational curricula,

by the society around us to think if one is to be a Christian, one is to either, one has two choices, Protestant or Roman Catholic.

Those are the only things.

But from an Orthodox point of view, from a first millennium point of view,

those are really two sides of the same coin.

So, what happened in the Roman Catholic Church after the Great Schism of 1054, a millennium ago,

was that a number of doctrines and practices accrued.

They began to develop once the Roman Catholic Church was no longer in communion with the Orthodox Church.

And so, I've mentioned some of those already.

Papal supremacy, right off the bat.

One can speak of the Papal Reformation of the 11th century.

I do in my book called The Age of Division, where the papacy is elevated to a position of such superior and commanding authority over the West that even emperors are often pressured by the popes into policies which they would not otherwise have taken.

So papal supremacy is something new.

We've talked about purgatory.

We could throw that in.

Purgatory is a dogma that's new.

The practice that goes with with it of indulgences, of releasing people from the suffering of purgatory by papal

mediation is new.

The demand that all of the services be in Latin and not in vernacular languages or the scriptures likewise, that's new.

The requirement that all priests be celibate

and represent a kind of clerical estate that's different than the common experience of most Christians living in parish churches.

If not brand new, it certainly was codified and canonized

and made obligatory in the 11th century, especially in the work of Peter Damien in the middle of the 11th century, right at the time of the Papal Reformation.

But we can talk about other things as well.

There's so many things

that accumulate to make Roman Catholicism quite distinct from the Christianity of the first millennium, which Orthodox claim is their own.

And so all of these things were like almost line by line rejected by the Protestants.

So if you think about Luther and his 95 theses, it starts with a rejection of indulgences, and then it grows to a rejection of purgatory.

And then because of the papacy's investment in this,

it becomes a rejection of the papacy as the Antichrist.

You know, Luther famously burns the papal bull

of excommunication in the public square as a statement like, who's the pope to tell me anything?

Well, this is a reminder, of course, that in the first millennium and to this day in the Orthodox Church, that conciliar rather than papal or supreme model of church administration was much more like

much more acceptable to the Protestants than the alternative.

And so here, again, you just see Protestants rejecting things that were new and different than what Orthodoxy had held in place from the beginning of the first millennium.

Again, Luther said that priests should not be celibate, and so he abandoned

his celibacy and monastic

vows to marry a nun, a former nun.

Calvin emphasized the importance of marriage and how life in this world for the the laity is the center of sanctification and

not monastic withdrawal or celibacy.

So there, I mean, again, the translation of

Protestant

services and the Bible into vernacular languages.

Again, Luther sets the example by translating the Bible into German.

In England, the King James Version, the English language version of the Bible, becomes authorized in the early 17th century.

So on it goes.

I mean, just on and on it goes.

The Protestant Reformation, from an Orthodox point of view, is simply a repudiation of

the main features of Roman Catholicism

that had appeared after the Great Schism and deviated from what the Orthodox Church considered to be, you know, apostolic Christianity.

So that's one half of how do the Orthodox Christians view the Protestant Reformation.

And it might lead one to think, well, there must be a lot in common between Protestantism and Orthodoxy.

And it's quite interesting that the Protestant fathers did actually reach out tentatively to some Orthodox theologians and the Patriarch of Constantinople, but they didn't seem to have a whole lot of respect for or interest in Orthodoxy as such.

That may, I think, as an historian, that probably was because Orthodoxy was not very impressive to the great magisterial minds of the Protestant Reformation.

I mean, Luther was a doctor of theology, Calvin, you know, doctor of law, but nevertheless a master of theological science, so-called.

The university system, the public debates, this was not going on in the Orthodox Church in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Byzantium had been overrun by the Muslims, and Orthodoxy was in survival mode.

Christianity was in survival mode in the Ottoman Empire.

There were certainly no

universities or even schools of any real quality.

The Russian kingdom

in the 16th century,

the depredations of Ivan the Terrible aside, did not have a strong tradition of learning.

That had never really taken

established itself in Orthodox Russia,

even up into the 17th century.

And so there was nothing impressive coming from the East.

Nothing impressive the Orthodox could offer the Protestant reformers as they fought their war against Roman Catholicism.

And so Protestantism from the start, while it shares

a lot in common with Orthodoxy in its basic repudiation of doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church that

were not found in Orthodoxy, At the same time, it's kind of a pendulum swing kind of effect.

The Protestant Protestant reformers and the Reformation tended to swing past Orthodoxy, if that can be claimed to be kind of in the center, and into an opposite direction, so that

it became a kind of attack on a lot of traditional Christianity that the Roman Catholic Church also still retained.

So, for instance,

an anti-sacramental tendency.

The Roman Catholic Church had a really rich, strong tradition of sacramentality.

So did the Orthodox Church.

And this was seen by the Protestants, in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, as something that had to be minimized.

And so, like, you know, Calvin reduces the sacraments to two sacraments and that kind of thing.

Reducing the sacraments down from the Roman Catholic seven to the Protestant two,

that was...

often a very important part of

the Protestant legacy to minimize worship, the liturgical experience of the kingdom of heaven on earth, which was so central.

I'm sure you've explored this plenty in your podcast, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople with its central dome.

In so many ways, worship in the Orthodox Church was an experience of the kingdom of heaven now in this world, visually, tactilely,

essentially, the smells and the images and the singing and the space and the architecture and the processions and the vestments.

This is all to show forth the kingdom of heaven now.

Well, Protestants, especially in their Calvinist or Reformed

tendencies,

did not like that one bit.

It seemed it reeked of what they called papism.

And so

they really minimized

and

tried to reduce or eliminate liturgy in their services.

The Calvinist church came to be architecturally defined by so-called four walls and a pulpit where there was no iconography.

In fact, they violently ripped out stained glass windows of Roman Catholic churches that they came across

in Northern Europe and in Geneva and so on.

These tendencies, the minimization of the faith, for instance, Protestantism tended to be affiliated with,

maybe sometimes only informally, but nevertheless, certain slogans.

I mentioned sola fide, Latin for faith alone, that it's faith, by faith alone that one is saved.

Martin Luther notoriously says, we are saved by faith alone and not by works.

when in fact the scriptures don't say that.

Nowhere in the scriptures is that doctrine,

is that phrase faith alone

used.

We are saved by faith and not by works works of the law, Paul says in Galatians and Romans, but he never says we are saved by faith alone.

As a matter of fact, James says,

show me your

faith without works is dead faith.

And the book of Revelation says they shall be judged according to their works.

So clearly, and it's interesting that

Luther,

who planned, who who translated the Bible, the New Testament, into German, considered, he said, excluding James and Revelation from his translation because he considered them to deviate from his conviction about faith alone.

Other things too,

scripture alone, sola scriptura, another Protestant conviction.

Again, it's an instrument.

It's simply a weapon in the arsenal of Protestantism against 16th century Protestantism, against Roman Catholicism, circa 1500.

Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone.

Where do we find indulgences?

Where do we find papal supremacy?

You look throughout

the New Testament.

You don't find any

convincing cases of papal supremacy or Petrine supremacy.

You do find conciliarity in Acts chapter 15 with the Jerusalem Council, where it's not Peter, but James, who gives the apostles their final kind of statement of faith and marching orders about how to deal with circumcision.

This is a very orthodox kind of thing.

But

the scripture alone kind of battle cry of many Protestants meant that they rejected anything that could not be found in Scripture when, in fact, scripture grew out of the tradition of the church and was confirmed and canonized within the tradition of the church.

That

there's no table of contents to the New Testament.

It had to be assembled together by bishops with apostolic succession back to the apostles who wrote

the New Testament to distinguish between what's true and what's spurious.

Gospel of Thomas never made it into the New Testament because the tradition of the church was such that it was clearly spurious.

So there are four gospels, not five.

There are 27 books to the New Testament, not 26 or 28, because it required bishops working within a tradition to state what is the true scripture.

So, the idea of scripture alone for an Orthodox is simply incoherent.

In fact, there was a generation when there was no scripture.

Most biblical scholars agree that Paul's epistles, the first to be written, were not written for about a generation after Pentecost.

So, during a whole generation, people were being saved, as it were, without any scripture to refer to.

So, that whole argument, scripture alone, along with faith alone, it seems very extreme, radical, nihilistic, or minimalistic.

From an Orthodox point of view, sometimes Protestantism looks like

a religion of minimalism.

Like, what's the least I have to commit to or believe?

You know, what's the minimum?

What's the sola

alone kind of thing?

Where rather the orthodoxy sees the faith as something expansive and complete and full, not reducible to just one or two or three or five principles.

So anyway, I think think that that gives you a sense of it.

That really speaks to my own Protestant background

as I've learnt more about the whole tradition of the church.

That definitely strikes a chord with me.

Okay, so next question.

Do Orthodox churches still see a connection with Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire?

And if so, in what ways would this legacy be apparent to someone walking into an Orthodox church today?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question, actually.

I think there's some nuance to it.

It's a yes and no kind of answer, I think.

Yes, in the sense that it was within Byzantium, the history of Byzantium, especially in Constantinople, that so much of the architecture, our architectural kind of canon.

of an Orthodox temple or church was established and became kind of finalized, finalized, you might say.

And Hagia Sophia being the great example of all this.

And so, in a certain sense, Constantinople as a center of Christian culture and Orthodox Christian culture and civilization continues to live on, has a very strong legacy,

even in our time

in the 21st century.

The no part of the answer would be

Constantinople

is an honorary term you use for a city that most today call Istanbul.

And even though in Orthodox circles, one still speaks about the patriarchate of Constantinople

and such, the fact is that

Byzantium is long gone and Constantinople is no longer the capital of a Christian civilization.

And even Hagia Sophia itself is not only no longer a Christian temple, but

has again become a functioning mosque,

if I understand

how it's used today, you know, in the past few years anyway.

Of course, the longest secular museum since the time of Ataturk, if I'm not mistaken.

Prior to that, in the 19th century, since 1453, I think interestingly, and I don't want to digress here, but interestingly, from the day the city fell to Mehmet II, I think his first act was it not, you'd know better than I would, Robin, but was to march right across the city from the breach in the walls and declare, have an imam go up and declare from the pulpit of Haggi Sophia, you know, the Arabic statement,

there's only one God and Muhammad is his prophet.

And from that day forward, it was a mosque until Ataturk secularized it.

So

in these respects, I think today Constantinople does not

play a role anymore, or certainly a lively living one, as she once did.

But the legacy

of architecture and

other things like that certainly is felt.

Yes.

And I could talk a little bit about how an Orthodox church

looks today and how that bears

the kind of

a genealogy with Eastern Christendom, especially as it was elaborated in Constantinople, if you'd like.

Yeah, please do.

There is one

Byzantine church in Istanbul that is still a church.

And when you visit there, there is Saint Constantine and his mother,

you know, as one of the icons on the wall.

So in that small way, I could appreciate how Byzantium would still be visible.

today.

Indeed.

And it's very interesting.

When I was traveling in central Russia, I was actually on my honeymoon, and my wife and I traveled to Suzdal and Vlodymir and Bogolubova and some of these other so-called medieval Russian towns that were very still much kind of unchanged since they were elaborated, built up in the 12th century and beyond.

It's very interesting.

In Suzdal, I remember seeing a church where on one side, I forget exactly how it was arranged, but on one side of the church was Constantine and Helen.

I think you often see the two of them together in churches you're familiar with.

But exactly opposite them was Vlodymir and his grandmother Olga.

And of course,

certainly your listeners may not realize this, but Vladimir of Russia, or Vlodymir in Ukrainian, in 988 converted to Christianity, partly under the influence or in memory of his mother,

not mother, grandmother Olga.

And so the Russians couldn't resist trying to match

Byzantium and trying to create their own kind of originating ruler and his female counterpart, in this case, grandmother, not wife, in the case, as

mother rather, as Helen was mother to Constantine.

So, anyway, it's another interesting thing that you see in Russia and other churches, probably as well in the West.

But, you know, back to

Constantinople and especially Hagia Sophia, you know, the central dome that was employed when Justinian rebuilt Hagia Sophia in the 6th century, that central dome became, of course, a model.

I think most people realize that kind of the idealized Orthodox Christian temple or church building often has a central dome.

This gets elaborated into different shapes.

The Russians and Ukrainians are famous for their onion domes and things like that, but still basically a central dome.

Now, that dome symbolizes heaven on earth.

And so, if you go out into a night sky, you go out into a field and look up at the night sky, you see stars above you, you feel like you're in a heavenly dome.

And people have always observed that the basic experience of Orthodox Christian or ancient Christian worship was that through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who was eternally God but became human and became part of this cosmos or world through the incarnation, has brought heaven, his kingdom,

to this world.

And in worship, sacramental liturgical worship, especially that, you know, which was flourishing in Hagia Sophia in Byzantium,

that brings heaven to earth.

And so that dome became a really important architectural statement or proclamation, proclamation, not just an adornment.

Like, you know, know, you look from the outside, you see a dome, you see, isn't that pretty?

You know, onion dome, isn't that pretty?

And all that stuff.

But really, it's more of a proclamation.

It's like an icon, and we can talk about icons too, maybe.

But in this case, it's like a proclamation of the gospel that through the incarnation of Christ, heaven has come to this earth.

And so it kind of encompasses

the believers that are standing below it in the nave, as it's called,

the main part of the church building,

showing, as it were, the descent of heaven into this space we occupy in liturgical worship.

And add to that, of course, the fact that

the icon of Christ Pantocrater, Christ Almighty,

was painted

within that dome, historically, beginning in Byzantium.

And this is found throughout the world today in Orthodox churches with a dome, a central dome.

You have an icon of Christ up there looking down on his people.

This becomes a statement, or again, a proclamation is probably the right word for it.

Not an adornment, not a decoration, not something just pretty to look at or interesting to think about, but a proclamation of the gospel that Christ is the head of the church and that he is the head, and the people standing below him are his body.

And so this creates a really strong ecclesial, theologically, you know, about the church, ecclesiological kind of experience of Orthodox worship, that entering into that worship, whether it be Haggia Sophia in Constantinople during the times of Byzantium or some other church, like here in Seattle, we have a church, St.

Spiridon Cathedral, one of many,

where you have exactly that design.

And

you stand underneath that dome and you look up and you see Christ looking down on his people, and it's the same

experience

of ecclesiology and also worship.

So that's a huge inheritance, I think, legacy

that Constantinople offers the modern church in later times is building churches with that central dome proclaiming heaven on earth.

It's interesting to contrast that with what arises in the West,

especially after the Great Schism, when you start to see churches built with spires, you know, very tall westworks, they're often called,

dual towers on either side of the western entrance to a church, first in the Romanesque and then in the Gothic style.

And then Protestants picked this up after the Reformation, and often you'll see

a Protestant church of various denominations built with a tall spire, as it were, pointing toward heaven.

And in one sense, the theme is the same.

It's the attention of the Christian is not on this earth but heaven.

That's what the Christian lives for.

But it's an interesting contrast as well with Haggia Sophia and Constantinople's legacy in Orthodox church architecture because instead of emphasizing heaven coming to earth, it rather emphasizes those on earth looking to heaven, like waiting for heaven, like looking toward heaven.

which suggests that

the attention is not here, but to leave here and get up to heaven, whereas heaven has come to earth

in the more ancient and certainly Byzantine model of architecture, which really supports the larger argument that's often made.

I certainly do in my books, especially The Age of Paradise,

that Byzantium, in Byzantium, the Orthodox Church really elaborated a very strong sense that paradise is to be experienced

in this world, in this cosmos now, especially through the liturgy, through the worship of the church.

So that's one thing.

There are some other things too,

if that's not too much already, but the central dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople certainly lives on as an important part of Orthodoxy today.

What would be something a bit more

mundane that someone might notice who didn't know anything about Byzantium but came from an Orthodox family?

Well, like, for instance, and I'm not sure if mundane is the right word for this, but

there are other elements of Orthodox architecture.

For instance, and Hagia Sophia is not the first to do this, but again, it becomes such a model for everything else.

Hagia Sophia is oriented toward the east.

That is to say, the altar is located in the eastern part of the temple.

I think you led a group to Istanbul, did you not, and visited the church.

And so, I don't know how much of a feel you got for what it was like when it was a church.

I understand they've since

they've added something or re-emphasized some point in not quite the eastern, but in some part of the, maybe the southern part of the church, the temple there, that is the point of reference that Muslims use when they face Mecca during worship.

Yeah,

the prayer niche is at a slight angle to face Mecca.

Exactly.

Yes.

Thank you for that.

And so I was struck, you know, when I was reading about this, you know, a few years ago.

Well, you know, ancient Christian worship, and we have this from the fourth century.

St.

Basil the Great, of course, very important church leader in Byzantium and Cappadocia, in the fourth century noted that Christians face eastward when they worship.

And this is a very important thing that Hagia Sophia does, you know, rather well express and becomes a model, even though it's not really the first to do this, is that

if a Christian today is, and this is not even an Orthodox Christian, most Roman Catholic and Protestant, many Protestant Christians anyway, will find that if they have a church building built in any way and in a traditional sense, they will enter it from the west and face toward the east during the course of the service.

If there's an altar, it often will be located on the eastern end of that building.

And this principle is, of course, called orientation, a word that English speakers know really well.

College students go to freshman orientation and new workers that are hired go to

employment orientation.

But often people aren't aware, they don't think about it, that the word itself means to face eastward, oriens in Latin meaning

east, rather, east.

And so

this is, again, something the Byzantium gave to the rest of the world.

It's interesting in the Vatican,

St.

Peter's Basilica is not oriented.

It faces west, actually.

Though many churches in the West, from even before the time St.

Peter's Basilica is built, face eastward.

But Byzantium certainly developed this, that church buildings should face eastward.

And so the modern...

listener to to to to us right now would perhaps maybe be able to reflect, you know, his or her church if they if they attend one.

It may very likely does face eastward if it does.

I mean, certainly if it's built, you know, historically.

And if it does,

that's a legacy also of Constantinople and Byzantium.

And of course, the point of all this is like, so why does it face east?

Well, east is the name that

Isaiah gives the Messiah.

And other references are made to

the East in the scriptures that gave Christians a conviction early on that they really should be facing east when they worship.

So, for instance, I've spoken about paradise and this place, I've mentioned my book, The Age of Paradise.

Well, Paradise, the Garden of Eden, was planted in the East.

That's actually what Genesis says.

It's planted in the East, in the Oriens in Latin.

And there are other passages, too, like in...

In Matthew's gospel, Jesus says, the Son of Man will come again in glory, like the lightning that strikes from the east.

Things like this.

So Christians faced the sunrise when they worship because it was a symbol of the second coming of Christ.

It was also a symbol, as Genesis suggested, of the real homeland of a Christian.

A Christian belongs to paradise.

A Christian, because of the incarnation of God, now has access again to the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life at its center.

And the gates of paradise, closed to Adam and Eve at the end of chapter three of Genesis, have now opened up again through Christian life and Christian worship, baptism, liturgy, sacraments, has opened up again to the human race.

And those gates of paradise now are open, and Christians face eastward, knowing they're not facing anything on earth.

They're facing the kingdom of heaven, which is beyond this world.

Here, we have no continuing city, Paul says in the book of Hebrews.

This is a very interesting thing, actually, Robin, when you contrast it with, say, Islam, because there's a very big deal placed on facing Mecca.

If one's a Muslim, they face Mecca, you know, because that's the holy place where Muhammad was so, you know,

that's where Muhammad did his work and

things like that.

And so they're facing, they're honoring that place on earth where Muhammad spent his time.

And so they face eastward if they're in, like, for instance, Seattle, kind of where I live.

But they also face, but they don't face east if they're facing, either they live in Indonesia, where a lot of Muslims live.

they face west.

But Christians face east, whether they're in Seattle or Tokyo.

We have Orthodox churches in Tokyo, and

non-Orthodox ones as well.

And so, this is a very different thing.

The idea here is the kingdom of heaven is really what the Christian, it's what the gospel proclaims is what the Christian should really be living for.

And I think Byzantium and Constantinople and Hagia Sophia in particular did a pretty good job of establishing this with a long-term impact on the modern world and modern Christianity.

Yeah, fantastic.

To explain why I used the word mundane, I was recalling a listener who I think was saying when they were a child in Orthodox Church, they were coloring in a picture of Constantine as part of Sunday school.

I may be slightly misremembering, but there was definitely a picture of Constantine.

So I was also just thinking of

more mundane things on that level.

I see, right, right.

Well, church school, yeah, I mean, we've had church school here at our church too, and that sort of thing goes on.

And Constantine, you know, the person of Constantine, you know, he doesn't go away.

You know, he's a canonized saint in the Orthodox Church, as is Justinian, as is Nicholas II of Russia.

We have

a kind of a custom or

a practice of ordaining those rulers who might have done violent things,

incautious things,

things that are not in themselves good examples of Christian life, but who died having tried to bring Christianity to life in their state and defending Christianity.

The Orthodox Church tends to look on such rulers favorably,

something different than the West, which is much more skeptical and critical of state power and sometimes for good reasons.

But Constantine's legacy, you're right, is very much alive in the West.

And there's plenty of Greek Orthodox who name their children Constantine and

Russians as well.

Constantine's a very common name.

And so

a lot of people probably do draw,

fill in with their coloring

crayons, icons of Constantine during church school, growing up in such churches.

Very good.

Well, sort of a connected question.

Another listener asked, are there any churches or shrines which Orthodox Christians consider of particular importance?

Yes, well, of course, there are many.

And so the Orthodox Church, you know, being an ancient church,

we would join with Roman Catholics and some Protestants as well

in saying this, revere holy objects, holy objects.

These holy objects

can be the relics or remains, bodily remains of saints from early times.

We have an early document, and church historians have an early document, and this can be read easily in English

in a lot of collections of early Christian documents.

It's called the Martyrdom of Polycarp.

Polycarp was a disciple of John the Theologian, and probably was martyred for his Christian faith very soon after 100.

So, in other words, within the lifetime of the apostles,

like John.

And it's said at the end of, it doesn't end with his death by burning at the stake for his Christian faith.

What it ends with is the Christians

coming to the stake after he's dead and gathering his bodily remains and taking them off and securing them.

And every year

remembering.

him on an annual basis around his bodily remains.

And so relics, you know, are a really big part of ancient Christianity and continue to be

in those

churches, those Christian bodies that look to

a distant past in their tradition and heritage.

So relics are a really big part of

being an Orthodox Christian, and

we really assign to the bodily physical remains of a person significance because we believe the person's body is holy.

I mean, if that person was receiving Holy Communion on a regular basis,

was participating in the sacramental life of Christ, then the body as well as the soul was sanctified by that.

And that's why saints, when they're so canonized as saints,

are treated, their bodies are treated with veneration and respect like that.

Because

the body is part of the humanity, just like the soul is.

Our modern world has started even in Christian circles, since the, you know, I think the Protestant Reformation, especially, I think Calvinism tended to do this, but certainly the Enlightenment and the post-Christian outcome of that was to minimize the body in the material world and think only in terms of the intellect and the mind.

But ancient Christianity saw the intellect and the mind and the body as being inseparable.

And it's a fact that the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 15, for instance, speaks quite literally of the bodily resurrection, not just a spiritual kind of afterlife, but the body will be raised.

And so it's treated with respect and buried.

Orthodox don't condone cremation, for instance.

It's treated with respect.

It's anointed with holy oil,

chrismated after the baptism, and all sorts of things are

sexual morality is a big deal for Orthodox Christians because it involves the body, the disposition and integrity of the body, things like that.

So the larger kind of, I guess,

attitude toward materiality, toward the material and physical cosmos, is a big deal in Orthodox Christianity.

And so not just bodily remains of saints or even respect for the body of a Christian, but, or of any human being, but also the physical, material

shrines you mentioned and things like that are also revered.

And so we have churches that have been long prayed in.

The Russians even have a word for a church that's been prayed in for a long time.

It's a really cool kind of word in the Russian language where

namona means like it's always been prayed in.

It's like it's full of the accumulated prayer of generations.

And so many churches and temples and monasteries, you know, are points of attention and even destinations for pilgrimages, which have always been a big deal in ancient Christianity, Orthodoxy included.

For instance, Mount Athos today, not in Constantinople, of course, but certainly part of the Byzantine Empire,

arose

by the 11th century, 10th century, 11th century, as being a really important center for the life of the church, the piety of the church.

And so people today make pilgrimages to Mount Athos in Greece.

Constantinople, I mean, you mentioned the church that's still open.

Hagia Sophia, though, a mosque today is still, you know, remembered as once, you know,

in its

glory days in Christendom, as the central church of all of Christendom, the West included.

There are other places, Jerusalem, you know, the Church of the Holy Resurrection, the Church of the Resurrection Anastasis, known in the West more as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which the Crusades, you've talked a lot about the Crusades on your program.

The Crusades were so preoccupied with, and it's that the true cross that was there, that another

revered object.

And it's not just in Byzantium, but modern Orthodox Christian sites of holiness exist.

Here I'm in America.

I'm part of the Orthodox Church in America.

And we are just getting ready to canonize the most recent saint.

She was a native Alaskan who died in 1979, rather recently, in Quethluk, Alaska.

And so the church where she was buried has recently gotten a lot of attention.

And her remains, her bodily remains were unearthed from her grave.

We have other places in Spruce Island in Alaska where St.

Herman of Alaska spent his time and other places that are very, very important to us.

Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, all these Orthodox lands of the so-called Old World, they also have, of course, a tremendous range of holy places and shrines that are considered very important.

Again, part of this idea that heaven has come to earth in Christian worship, and the earth is filled with the presence of God.

And if it's filled with the presence of God, those sites where it's especially focused on worship

are considered, you know, special and different than

the grocery store you might go to.

yeah of course

the next question uh or sort of batch of questions i tried to distill into one was about the different

um

autocephalous orthodox churches so um listeners will be familiar with this idea from the podcast that

um constantinople would grant um the bulgarian or the the Rus church its own archbishop who could kind of make decisions independently of Constantinople.

And so obviously these churches today have had a long

independent history from one another.

Now, obviously, this is another vast topic, but as an Orthodox pastor, would you be able to speak just in general terms about how you feel about autocephaly?

Does it lead to big differences in theology or practice between the churches and how do they sort of relate to one another today?

Yeah, it's a good question.

Well, you know, as an Orthodox pastor of the 21st century, I think that what's striking is how

no matter how many autocephalous churches come into existence today,

there are 15 of these autocephalous churches.

What one finds is there's a remarkable unity or uniformity in both doctrine and morality and worship among them.

It's really quite striking.

And we'll want to probably comment on what's going on in Ukraine today and how Russia, that is to say the Moscow Patriarchate, and Constantinople,

its Patriarchate and its leadership

have been at loggerheads over what's going on in Ukraine.

But what's remarkable, I'll just use that as an example of an existing strong disagreement and severance of communion that's even taking place between some Orthodox autocephalous churches today.

What's really striking is as disunified and kind of chaotic as that can seem from the outside, if you go into those churches and

you step into the divine liturgy that takes place on a Sunday in Constantinople,

and then you do the same thing in Moscow, you find that it's an identical service.

It's the same service.

There's no significant difference whatsoever.

Just language.

One's Greek and one's Russian or Slavonic.

If you were to ask the people attending those divine liturgies,

what are your moral practices?

What do you believe?

What should marriage be?

What does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be male or female?

All those big questions we have in our culture today.

They would give a completely uniform answer.

There'd be no difference whatsoever between what's said in Constantinople and what's said in Moscow.

And then one final point is doctrinally.

You know, what are the dogmas of the church?

What do the bishops teach and protect and defend?

What do the theologians teach?

In both of those churches, it'll be identical.

And so these autocephalous churches that

slowly multiply, again, 15 is not a very big number, but they do multiply with time, depending on where orthodoxy is planted in the world and things like that and the needs of the church in those areas,

they don't historically result in a

diversification of faith, just a diversification of administration.

And the faith and the doctrines and the worship, they remain the same.

The morality remains the same over the centuries.

And I think that's really the most striking thing about orthodoxy in the world today.

Whereas it can look very disorderly from the outside, inside it's actually remarkably uniform.

There's a joke

in circles that I was in about the atheist who's raised by his parents to be an atheist.

And he comes home one day and he says, Well, I'm sorry to break it to you, mom and dad, but I decided to convert to Orthodoxy, Orthodox Christianity.

And they said, Son, we raised you to be an atheist.

How could you do this?

We told you never, never affiliate with an organized church.

And he said, Well, that's why I chose Orthodoxy because

it's not organized.

Outside of it, it looks very disorderly.

And again, what's going on between Moscow and Constantinople today, you know, Ukraine and all those things is

terrible, actually.

It's horrible.

But inside, there's a remarkable unity.

And I think that that is very interesting compared to

other models where you have one single administration, maybe even like a pope at the top or something, some really clear line of administration, one single administrative structure.

But inside, there's a lot of diversity.

There's a lot of differences of opinion or thinking or doctrine or practice or morality.

So that autocephalous thing in orthodoxy is definitely a reality.

And it comes from the fact that we look back to the ancient times when

it's very easy to argue because there's really no

there's no there's really no argument as far as I'm concerned about this.

The early centuries did not see any alternative system of organizing church life.

There was never any single bishop or even apostle who ruled over the others.

Famously, of course, Peter is the first of the apostles according to the New Testament.

But as the Acts of the Apostles shows, chapter 15, when they came together in council, as in Jerusalem in Acts 15, Peter did not rule over the other apostles there.

As a matter of fact, it was James who stands up and finally gives the decision of that council on the question that they were assembled to discuss.

And it's not until much later that you start to have bishops in Rome begin to make claims of a more universal and juridical kind of supreme character.

But it's not until the 11th century that those really, you know, take their final form.

And with that comes the great schism, where

the church in the the east, the Orthodox church, she just says that's just not how we've done things and we're not going to have a single head.

There is a single head of the church.

That's Jesus Christ mystically.

And in an administrative sense, we're going to have auto-separates.

We're going to have different regional churches that work in union with each other.

in the ways that I described with doctrine and morality and worship, but do not answer to and subordinate themselves to a a single bishop at the very top of it all.

So that's kind of the administrative

structure that's called the autocephalous church in the Orthodox Church today.

So one listener did ask about the controversy surrounding the autocephaly of the Ukrainian church.

I don't want to get into modern politics, but perhaps you could just explain what the issue is between Constantinople and Moscow on that.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think what happened there, and I'm not Ukrainian, I'm not Russian, I'm not Greek,

so I'm not in position to speak with a lot of authority about this, and I've only observed this from a distance.

But I think what happened was that this autocephalous model that's called conciliarity in the Orthodox tradition, and it is in contrast with what's called papal supremacy in the Roman Catholic tradition as an alternative kind of model, that this model of conciliarity,

which accommodates and allows for autocephalous churches to appear and be created,

ran into trouble

when the Patriarch of Constantinople, whose name is Bartholomew,

felt it was time to get to encourage and allow the Ukrainian Orthodox Christians to create their own autocephalous autocephalous church, self-governing church within this larger body of autocephalous churches.

And the Moscow Patriarchate disagreed with that and so resisted that.

And the Patriarch of Constantinople decided to go forward with that in any case, especially because of the prerogative that it felt it had as the most ancient of the existing kind of leading autocephalous churches in the world.

There are some other ancient ones as well, like Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, but they're very small and historically didn't have that same position of leadership as Constantinople had had in Byzantium.

And you asked earlier about the legacy of Byzantium.

I think this is part of that legacy, that Constantinople continues to be like the most influential and authoritative of all the autocephalous churches.

And some canons

from the early ecumenical councils, one in particular supports, from Chalcedon supports Constantinople having a prerogative sometimes in issuing autocephaly.

And so, anyway, the decision was made, and I'm not here to judge whether that was the right decision or not.

And the decision was rejected and opposed in Moscow, and I'm not here to judge whether

that resistance was right or wrong.

But the result was the creation of a church in Ukraine that now considered itself autocephalous.

And since that body of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine had a long history of being part of the Moscow Patriarchate, it created immediately a lot of controversy, as you said.

And today that has not been resolved.

And the war, the tragic and horrible war that's going on right now, has magnified that problem, that issue.

And so hopefully, you know, that's enough for your audience to get a sense of how the long-term autocephalous kind of tradition of orthodoxy, especially inherited from Byzantium, has played out in our own time.

Thank you very much for elaborating on that.

And thank you very much for coming on the podcast and answering all these questions.

We obviously came to talk to Father Strickland because of his four-volume book series about the history of Christian civilization, which

I felt put you in a very good position to answer questions from

this podcast's listenership.

And I thought we'd close with a question that relates to your work.

A listener who is partway through your four-volume set asked a question.

Now,

that question might be a little too specific, but he brought up the idea

that

Christianity in its early centuries tried to bring heaven into this world,

and that

you explain in your book how that idea perhaps changed or was understood differently in different parts of Christendom over time.

But ignoring what happens later, as a sort of preview for people who want to know more,

to give us a flavor of your book, would you be able to talk a bit about that idea?

Is the listener accurate in describing the idea that the early Christian church tried to bring heaven into this world

as part of

the services they provided.

Yeah, that is the premise of the whole book series, and it's put forward

right off the bat in the first volume, The Age of Paradise, which covers the first thousand years of Christendom, which I define as a civilization with a supporting culture that directed its members toward the heavenly transformation of the world.

And so, what I think is really important to understand about

our legacy living in the West, recently,

Tom Holland wrote a book called Dominion that also talked about the long-term impact of Christianity on today, where a lot of people would say, well, Christianity is gone.

I mean, we're living in a secular world and things like that.

But as he points out in his book, you know, that's, if you trace it back, you find that a lot of what we value and a lot of what we believe can be traced back to Christian values and beliefs.

I go back even further to the first millennium before the Great Schism created, you know,

definitively an East and a West, an Eastern Christendom and a Western Christendom.

And I go back to when Christendom was one, you might say, East and West.

And I see in that first millennium a consistent and emphatic witness to

the conviction, the belief that Christianity has brought the kingdom of heaven into this world.

Or more theologically,

Christ, through the incarnation and by the Holy Spirit, has brought the heavenly kingdom that he represents into this world, that he rules into this world.

And that

this experience of paradise, as I call it, the book is called the Age of Paradise.

It's not, by the way,

in any way a suggestion that the earth had become paradise or something like that.

That's not possible for a Christian.

But that

a paradisiacal culture, a culture rooted in

the heavenly transformation of this world, became part of

the history of Christendom in the West.

That this was found especially in worship.

We talked in this very episode about Hagia Sophia and orientation toward the kingdom of heaven symbolically and the central dome and heaven on earth.

And we could talk about so much more and we don't have time to do that.

But the conviction is that

this world is not separated from heaven anymore because the king of heaven, Christ, has come into it and become part of it.

Early Christianity took very seriously the the physical, material, cosmic

significance of the incarnation.

That the incarnate, that's why icons were such a big deal.

And you've covered this in your podcast, of course,

iconoclasm being such a significant heresy.

Icons proclaim,

they proclaim that God really became human and that his Son Jesus Christ really became a man by the Virgin Mary, and that because he was a man, he had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

And you can paint this, and by painting this properly, according to the canons of iconography, not according to some individual artistic kind of you know, edgy kind of desire to express one's own inner creativity, but according to the tradition of the church, if you paint it, you are contributing to the proclamation that the incarnation is real and not just something nice to think about.

And so, all of this really results in a culture of paradise, a paradisiacal culture that was found east and west for a millennium and continued in the West well beyond the Great Schism, but began to be weakened in the West with the rise of doctrines like purgatory, which I talk about in the second volume, The Age of Division.

The Protestant Reformation also had concerns with, and

especially iconography in the case of Calvinism and sacraments.

And so sacramental worship and things like that became weakened after the Protestant Reformation and finally the Enlightenment, so-called,

began to undermine the conviction that heaven is really in this world.

I mean, famously, the deists of

the so-called Enlightenment, like Voltaire, writing Candide, you know, said, oh, yeah, there's a God.

He created all this, but we don't have anything to do with him.

You know, and Thomas Jefferson, one of the presidents of these United States I live in, you know, he wrote a book known as the Jefferson Bible where he just eliminated from the gospel account anything that was miraculous because because there was a belief beginning in the 18th century that while there's a God who created all of this, man is left alone in this world without any supernatural transcendent connection whatsoever.

And this is the basis of humanism, which springs out of the Renaissance, and which really takes over by the 19th century.

And so

by the 20th century, you get this kind of culture, maybe the one we live in now, where no transcendent connection with paradise or with heaven exists anymore.

And that's kind of my goal is to understand why we have arrived in the 21st century in what I call an age of nihilism, where we really don't believe in anything much anymore.

And what we do believe in is passing and disposable, kind of like the consumer culture we live in.

Categories

of reality are dissolving before our eyes.

And I trace all this back to the loss of a a conviction that this world, this cosmos, is actually anchored in heaven because of Christendom, because of the Christian civilization that sprang out of

Pentecost and the rise of Christianity.

So that's a summary, you know.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

Well, I would obviously recommend people check out the books, but

for those who are short on time,

they can listen to you in podcast form, again, to get a taste of your work.

And you can go to ancientfaith.com to find those episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Father Strickland, thank you so much for giving us your time and your expertise.

You bet, Robin.

I really enjoyed it.

It's nice talking to you.

You too.

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