I don’t usually post my homilies here, and I’m not intending to make a habit of it: they can generally be found, if anyone is interested and if I post them at all, on my church website and its associated podcast, “Translating the Tradition”.
But since today’s homily was inspired in part by a fellow Substack writer, I thought it only fair to post it here, along with a few qualifying remarks. I was thinking about how to respond to the writings of
, most specifically the initial post in his Substack, “Why I’m not a Christian Anymore”, and his post “The God of the Bible vs the God of the Philosophers”, which led to some of the musings at the beginning and the end of today’s homily. However, while I want to give credit where credit is due and to offer to Ben my central observation in the homily as something to consider in his “Journey Through Reality”, I also want to clarify what my intent here is not. Namely, my intent here is:not to reconvert Ben to Orthodox Christianity: While I would of course love to be able to do that, I’m under no illusions that a passing remark of mine (and that’s all I was really able to afford in the homily!) would have any chance of reconverting such a thoughtful young man who is already clearly well on his way away from Christianity—all I’m hoping to do in offering this here on Substack is to maybe give him one or two things to think about on the journey. Besides, he made it clear in his first post that there’s a host of other reasons he’s not a Christian, none of which I’ve addressed in this homily.
not to address Ben directly: My homily is primarily addressed to my own people, who know me. Ben seems like he’d be a lovely person to get to know and chat with (based primarily on what little I’ve read of his writing and his willingness, despite his obvious disagreements with his father, to recommend his father’s Substack), but I don’t know him and have no expectations that he should or would be interested in engaging with me on his journey.
not to respond to or refute anything that Ben has said, other than to offer my central thought, which is simply that I think he’s misunderstood the role that philosophy plays in Christian thought (or at least most Eastern Christian thought)—namely, that the primary intent is to use the limited but very useful tool-set that philosophy provides to try to make sense of our collective experience of God, not to reason out the nature of God from “first principles”.
I think Ben’s journey through reality looking for Truth is admirable, and I think I’ve been fairly close to where he found himself at the beginning of his journey. I came to some different conclusions, obviously, which is why I’ve ended up an Orthodox priest, but I feel hopeful that, if he’s seeking honestly, we may well end up at the same destination eventually. He seems to me to be the sort who might appreciate the sentiment I wrote in a poem many years ago—even if he might express it somewhat differently:
I am a friend of all seekers of Truth and all men of pity, from Boaz to Ruth, and I am a lover of simpler times when men looked for reasons and wrote them in rhymes. And so, in this pitiless time of "true lies" I rejoice to find friends who have opened their eyes.
That being said, I do also suspect there is “a great gulf between us”, given that the two main objections to Christianity that Ben raises in his opening post are Orthodox Christianity’s “outdated and problematic” understanding of sexuality and the sexes, and it’s belief in (as he puts it, using David Bently Hart’s deliberately polemical turn of phrase) “eternal conscious torment”—both of which I think are highly problematic objections to Christianity, but which are clearly beyond the scope of these short “show notes” (as Substack terms anything attached to an audio file). Which is why my offering here is just that—an offering, a small suggestion of a shifted viewpoint that Ben may or may not want to consider and that may or may not be helpful to him in the grand scheme of his overall journey.
The last thing I want to post here is a bit of context for my homily that “my people” will know, but that I don’t think I’ve posted about previously on Substack: namely, that I think there’s a very helpful distinction to be made between what I term the “Hebraic” approach to God’s intervention in “our” affairs, and what I call the “Greco-Roman” approach. My logic runs like this. As far as I can see in the Old Testament (and the New Testament too, for that matter), the Hebrew’s foundational assumption about God was that He was good. The text that I usually refer to to illustrate this point is Abraham’s rhetorical question when he’s negotiating with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah: “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” The assumed answer is, of course He will.
This assumption is not shared in Greek philosophy or religion, as far as I can tell. Not only are the Greek gods more than a little amoral (even immoral, at least by Judaeo-Christian standards), but the main argument for the existence of a single Creator in Greek philosophical thought—that there must be a Prime Mover—does not carry any implication that that Prime Mover is either good or bad.
Given this, most of the Church Fathers, writing as they are from within the Greek philosophical tradition and making use of it to make sense of the Christian tradition they’ve inherited from the Hebrews, are often at some pains to make sure that they’re not making the Prime Mover—God—the author of evil. This led them and leads us—working as we ourselves are from within this Greco-Roman-informed heritage—to often talk about evil as something God “allows”, where those writing within the Hebraic tradition—working, as they are, with the automatic and absolute assumption that of course God is good—would simply say that God did it. Examples of this within the Old Testament that I like to cite here are God sending an evil spirit to torment Saul, or sending Nebuchadnezzar to take the Israelites into captivity as a punishment—events and, more pertinently, clearly attributed causations that we, working as we are from within our Greco-Roman Christian heritage, have a lot of trouble accepting, never mind justifying.
I would suggest the two traditions are actually in harmony with one another, and are, in fact, different ways of saying more or less the same thing within two radically different contexts. For context, then, my homily is intended to move us back more towards what I would term the “Hebraic” mind-set: after all, shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?
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