Two recommendations (no doubt, potentially controversial): An Orthodox historical overview of Latin theology, and an interview regarding the plight of Palestinian Christians

Gratis post

I have recommended Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen de Young’s Lord of Spirits podcast before, but I wish to draw your attention to this particular episode. I suppose the occasional jokes could at times distract some listeners from fully appreciating the real substance of the discussion (I can’t say it bothers me, but then I’m given to the same vice). Be that as it may, the substance here shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s quite good.

The conversation is a long one (more than three and a half hours), but — despite that — it sprints through a lot of historical theology in record time. Happily, it corrects several false notions about Christian thought and personages in “the West” (for example, it sets the record straight about that undeniably Orthodox Catholic saint, St. Augustine, and his theological anthropology). It also accurately describes how Latin theology changed over time, and the episode’s analyses of both contemporary Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are succinct but incisive.

The conclusion in the last hour could have been my own assessment, providing the basic rationale for why I have landed squarely, unabashedly, and permanently in Orthodoxy (a tale I have told here). I think the episode is, overall, fair and generous in its overview; it is certainly not an attack on either Catholicism or Protestantism, even at its most sharply critical. But it does put light on some of the reasons why many of us (some of whom have “deconstructed” their former “deconstruction” of faith — a topic I will return to in a subsequent post) have turned to Orthodoxy.

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Regardless of what one may think of Tucker Carlson (again, this is something that bothers me not in the least), he has been talking a good deal of sense lately about the State of Israel and America’s seemingly blithe and uncritical support of whatever goes on there. Carlson’s most recent interview with Mike Huckabee should have been an eye-opener for everyone except the most fanatical Christian Zionist. (To be straightforward about this, Christian Zionism is not just a Christological, soteriological, and ecclesiological heresy. For those espousing it, like Huckabee and Ted Cruz, who should know better, it’s best understood as practical apostasy. Galatians 1:6-10 could be applied to it without much of a hermeneutical stretch.)

Before the Huckabee interview, Carlson spoke with Dr. Fares Abraham, a Palestinian-American born in Bethlehem, and founder of Levant Ministries. I invite you to listen to it carefully. You will detect no bitterness in Dr. Abraham’s words, no anti-Jewish (or anti-Muslim) sentiment, but rather a truthful and humble detailing of the raw realities Palestinian Christians face every single day. It isn’t propaganda; it isn’t “antisemitic.” Yes, persecution of Christians is even worse in some other Middle Eastern countries, but in the case here, it is America, and specifically Evangelical Christians, who are deep in collusion — financially and ideologically — with the decades-old persecution of those who, in Christ, are their brothers and sisters. (I have a little first-hand knowledge of this, both through my late mother, whose frequent trips to Israel exposed her to the situation there directly — growing up, we had family friends from among both the Palestinian Christian and Muslim communities — and later, through a former Anglican bishop of mine, the late Terence Kelshaw, with whom some of us paid visits to the same.) Decades, as I say, have passed, and the situation is much more dire today.

… With American and Evangelical Christian collusion.

Anyway, I urge you to watch Carlson’s conversation with Dr. Fares Abraham. It merits your consideration.