There is a Certain Brand of Orthodox

New blog on the kid: 7 Day Adventists in Putin's Russia · There is a Certain Brand of Orthodox · Is Someone Accusing me of the Faults of the Gospel's Pharisees? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Asking Me For Patience is Stupid — and NOT Because I am Impatient, But the Patience I Have is Ill Used By Others · I'm Glad CSL Got Out of his Belsen Situation at Wyvern

In the years leading up to 1990, they were on good terms with the Patriarchate of Moscow. Or of Iași. Or Patriarchs of Bulgaria and Metropolitans of Sofia. Or Holy Synod and Metropolitan of Athens.

People like that would be likely to agree with Karl Rahner, who was quoted in a question to Progressing Spirit:

I came across these quotes from the theologian Karl Rahner, which I found very intriguing:

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or not exist at all. The no. 1 cause of atheism is the Christians.

Do you agree? (I think suffering is also a major factor in atheism, in addition to the behaviour of some so-called Christians).

Before going to on to discuss these Orthodox, let me give Gretta Vosper's answer on that specific point (quoting a longer one), here:

... So, I agree that “the no. 1 cause of atheism is the Christians,” but perhaps not as I think the question may suggest. It’s not the outrageous, closed-minded, strict Christian practitioner who creates an atheist, though many a dinner table or classroom has been silenced when such a believer attempts to impose their beliefs as ground rules in places outside their church. No. These are irritants, but they do not unravel faith.

It is responsible Christians, fully capable of sustained reasoning, who find themselves beyond belief. ... And, many who participate in or lead Christian congregations have also moved beyond traditional beliefs, their new understandings out of step but not out of keeping with the language of the old. ...

It is interesting the blasphemer "Revd" Gretta Vosper does not consider those holding the traditional beliefs as "fully capable of sustained reasoning" — but she also finds, people like me are the irritant, but not the promoters of atheism.

So, the Orthodox I have in mind have a double strategy, inspired by Rahner.

• avoid being the thing Gretta Vosper considers the "irritants" and
• being what Rahner considered as "a mystic" ...

What about the Fundie who doesn't get on board with that strategy?

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer "use your ties, marginalise" ... if you have a friend in Minsk who has a friend in Pinsk for plagiarising a math discovery, why not for marginalising a Fundie?

I recall a time when Kirill of Moscow spoke of "Christian Shariah" when it came to banning abortion. Here is a quote from him cited by Byzantine Catholic Church of America:

Science, he continued, examines “how and why,” while religion address the question of “what for.”

“It is naive to read Genesis as the text book on anthropogenesis,” he said. “At the same time, it is counterproductive to search for an answer on the sense of life in textbooks on biology and physics.”

Russian Patriarch Kirill: no contradiction between religion, science
Last Updated: 11 August 2016
https://www.byzcath.org/index.php/news-mainmenu-49/5179-russian-patriarch-kirill-no-contradiction-between-religion-science

Jonathan Pageau will explain at great length why experience is filtered in "larger than life" narratives, but will not state if any of it is directly factual, when it comes to Genesis, literally as it stands. Fr. John Romanides considered a man enjoying the enlightening of the Holy Spirit becomes an inerrant theologian, but not that he becomes an inerrant scientist. He went on to state:

"It is within such a context that we understand the inerrancy of the Bible, of the Fathers, and of the Councils of Fathers"

Do the Saints Have Unerring Knowledge of Scientific Matters?
Bio-Orthodoxy : Wednesday, August 31, 2016
https://www.bio-orthodoxy.com/2016/08/do-saints-have-unerring-knowledge-of.html

I am noting, Romanides did not place even the inerrancy of the Bible higher, and he considered the inerrancy a talent, a human faculty shaped by the Grace of the Holy Spirit, rather than a more external kind of gift, where God perfects the intention of the hagiographer to say the truth, sometimes in ways that will not totally depend on the hagiographers talents (like the infallibility of a Pope could depend on his dying before uttering an error he had thought he would promulgate). And sometimes in ways revealing natural things in a strictly supernatural mode (like Moses seeing "hydrogen" as a mode of "water" or St. John seeing ASCII as a mode of gematria, while naturally they could not have known of Mendeleyev or computers near the end times). No, it is to him a faculty of the soul and is concerned with only the supernatural.

Hence, Kirill of Moscow and the late Romanides subscribe to the NOMa view of Bible and Science: Non-Overlapping Magisteria. Popularised by the late unbelieving Jew Stephen J. Gould (and I mean doubly unbelieving, neither believed in Christ, nor even in Moses).

To such people, Kent Hovind, Jonathan Sarfati, among Protestants, or Robert Sungenis and myself among Catholics are dangerously deluded, a prime example of the kind of Christian Rahner considered as the n° 1 producer of Atheism. They do not get that Gretta Vosper disagrees.

Now, part of what makes Putin dangerous is, he is spiritually a son of "Mother Russia" and also of Patriarch Kirill and similar men. But from their perspective, it is rather people with my attitudes who are dangerous — unless duly marginalised. On the far end of opposed Evangelical points of view, there is one more or less Fundie view, which has its own reasons to consider me dangerous: I support Sunday Worship, I support the Papacy (though not "Francis" as supposedly holding it), I support the Middle Ages. So, have they joined hands? X hoping I'll discard Fundamentalism, what they would call "idolising the Bible", Y hoping I'll discard Tradition and what they call "idolising Mary"? But both agreeing, my position as it is now, Roman Catholic, and Fundamentalist, is untenable, and I have to be "protected" against having finally uttered it?/HGL

PS, to single out three issues, one where 7 Day Adventists disagree with me, one where this type of Orthodox disagree with me, one where more than this type of Orthodox disagree with my return to Roman Catholicism and Azymes, three posts on Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere:

Pretended Debunking of Mariology — Debunked
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2024/04/pretended-debunking-of-mariology.html

A Follow Up After Josef G. Mitterer? Presenting Joseph Foster ...
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2024/03/a-follow-up-after-josef-g-mitterer.html

Sir Colin Humphreys Basically Agrees with Me on Last Supper
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2024/04/sir-colin-humphreys-basically-agrees.html

There may be more to be said on each, but this should suffice that each issue is not a simple walkover, there really is a motive to isolate me./HGL