orthodoxy

To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being.

One century's saint is the next century's heretic ... and one century's heretic is the next century's saint. It is as well to think long and calmly before affixing either name to any man.

Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the __ruth_ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us _ that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it.

Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon."]

I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.

Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.

Everything in this life passes away _ only God remains, only He is worth struggling towards. We have a choice: to follow the way of this world, of the society that surrounds us, and thereby find ourselves outside of God; or to choose the way of life, to choose God Who calls us and for Whom our heart is searching.

Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God._ Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy.

The first thing I fell in love with about Orthodoxy was that my opinions are irrelevant, which is a sign of the preservation of Truth. I wanted a sound and stable faith, one that was maintained and preserved, not one that was changed and influenced by the tastes and opinions of sinners like me.

And we cannot keep our balance. Myth gives way to Reason. Revelation to Orthodoxy. We must dance or go mad.

As I ponder my pilgrim__ progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didn__ make the trip alone, but in a two-seater. And I wasn__ the one driving.

The Holy Spirit does not intervene a posteriori within the framework of Christology, as a help in overcoming the distance between an objectively existing Christ and ourselves; he is the one who gives birth to Christ and to the whole activity of salvation, by anointing Him and making him Χ_ι__ὸ (Luke 4.13). If it is truly possible to confess Christ as the truth, this is only because of the Holy Spirit (I For. 12.3). And as a careful study of I Cor. 12 shows, for St. Paul the body of Christ is literally composed of the charismata of the Spirit (charisma = membership of the body). So we can say without risk of exaggeration that Christ exists only pneumatologically, whether in His distinct personal particularity or in His capacity as the body of the Church and the recapitulation of all things.

Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?

Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt.