In an essay posted 2 April 2024, Father Peter Heers presented some thoughts on the future of religion in the world vis-à-vis perennialism. For those unfamiliar with this religious system, Fr Peter gives a brief outline of it:
Perennialist doctrine teaches that each religion has a formal, institutional aspect, which is the respective religion’s exoteric aspect, where they differ most profoundly; and each religion has an esoteric aspect, which exists in the spiritual methods of the religions, where they seem to draw closer together, and may even reach a point of identity.
He then goes on to explain its main tenets:
The perennialist view of religion turns on the axiomatic notion of multiple and diverse Revelations, “which ‘crystallize’ and ‘actualize’ in different degrees according to the case, a nucleus of certitudes which…abides forever in the divine Omniscience” . 1 But, this begs the question: what is the compelling reason that God wills multiple revelations of Himself which are manifestly divergent and apparently opposed? For Schuon, the reason is that humanity’s divisions require it. Humanity “is divided into several distinct branches, each with its own peculiar traits, psychological and otherwise, which determine its receptivities to truth and shape its apprehension of reality.”2 To these diverse branches, then, God addressed diverse revelations which were shaped by the peculiarities of each grouping of humanity:
“…what determines the differences among forms of Truth is the difference among human receptacles. For thousands of years already humanity has been divided into several fundamentally different branches, which constitute so many complete humanities, more or less closed in on themselves, the existence of spiritual receptacles so different and so original demands differentiated refractions of the one Truth.” 3
Therefore, the Perennialists hold that God has assigned each of the “great world religions” to a specific sector or race of humanity, and “each is fully true in the sense that it provides its adherents with everything they need for reaching the highest or most complete human state.”4 Islam for the Arabs; Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism for the peoples of the Far East, Christianity for the peoples of the West; Judaism for a selection of the Semitic peoples, and so on.
Later on, he also shows what this religious system will bring forth in the world:
Just as the last generation of men will cry out for peace and security precisely due to their lacking it (and then the sword will fall), men who are now crying out for unity (indeed universal unity) — precisely because they lack it — will find it in perennialism, which gives them this unity almost effortlessly (without the Cross and crucifixion of the mind). Like communism, which could not satisfy the longing of men, due to its negative, repressive orientation, modernism’s syncretistic ecumenism does not satisfy men’s longing for a deeper, mystical unity of each man and mankind as a whole. Mankind will demand a robust, traditional and universally acceptable explanation (appealing to Orientals) of how religion does not divide but unites mankind. Perennialism is poised to be the theoretical justification of many Christians (even “orthodox”) for the essential, if transcendent and esoteric, unity of religions under the Antichrist.
Fr Peter’s prediction of the embrace of perennialism is being confirmed in multiple ways. He noted one in his essay, the statement of the GOA’s Archbishop Elpidophoros: ‘When you elevate one religion above all others, it is as if you decide there is only one path leading to the top of the mountain. But the truth is you simply cannot see the myriads of paths that lead to the same destination, because you are surrounded by boulders of prejudice that obscure your view.’
More recently, we have the statement of the Roman Catholic Pope Francis about all religions leading to the same ‘God’: ‘“If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t,’ where will that lead us?” he asked,” according to Crux Now. “There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God].”’
And even more curiously, there is now a parallel development in the natural sciences promoting a form of perennialism/pluralism. It centers around a new form of pantheism, that each world in its totality is essentially a living being with intelligence and will (Adam Frank, writing for Noēma):
Understanding that life had the power to change an entire planet’s atmosphere was Lovelock’s lasting contribution to Astro biological science. But more than just an experimental method, Lovelock’s insight into the power of biospheres was also the basis for his invention of “Gaia theory.”
Originally called “Self-regulating Earth System Theory,” Gaia theory argues that life on Earth co-opted the planet for its own ends. Specifically, and as we will see, throughout the planet’s history, the biosphere has exerted strong feedbacks on the non-living parts of the planet. These feedbacks maintain the world in a habitable state. Human bodies keep their temperatures at an average of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit regardless of outside conditions. Lovelock was arguing that planets with biospheres achieve a similar kind of homeostasis: They self-regulate.
These living planets, god-like, give themselves a telos, an end goal – a healthy environmental equilibrium (Greta Thunberg would no doubt approve), which is described with a suitably pseudo-mythological term, ‘autopoiesis’:
This kind of self-organization was important enough to be given its own name by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela: “autopoiesis.” To be autopoietic is to be self-creating and self-maintaining. It is the essential strange loop that makes life a complex adaptive system and makes complex systems so different from everything science has attempted to understand before.
Autopoiesis and self-organization are why it’s natural to describe complex adaptive systems in terms of teleology. They clearly have goals. The goals might be rudimentary, as in the process of microbial chemotaxis. This is where single-celled organisms recognize and move up gradients of nutrients. In this case, the goal is just to endure, to keep on living. But the teleologies of complex adaptive systems can also be highly structured as in a society that seeks to increase access to healthcare for its citizens. The key point is that life, through the lens of complex adaptive systems, is never blindly bumping into its environment. Instead, such systems can be usefully described as agents who embody some degree of knowing about their environments and their own internal states.
. . . A biosphere that achieves self-organization and autopoiesis has become mature. Through collective webs of life, mature biospheres actively maintain rather than degrade the conditions needed for their own existence. Information flowing through and being used by these living networks means we can think of a mature biosphere as a collective that holds knowledge of its own state and responds to changes in that state and the environment. Mature biospheres “know” something and use that knowing to maintain their own planetary-scale viability across geologic time.
. . . What is essentially new and different with mature techno signatures (which is what makes them so exciting for Astro biological science) is that teleology is explicit in their emergence. A species becomes planetary when it first constructs a technosphere, even an immature one. But by recognizing the consequences of their own power in building such a planet-spanning technological system, any species that goes on to evolve their technosphere to maturity has built intention and goal into the new form their coupled planetary systems will take. By explicitly embodying teleology and meaning in this way, a mature techno signature represents the full completion of the Gaian potential, a planet awakened to itself.
. . . A mature technosphere is the ultimate goal of the planetary. It would be a re-emergence of planetary intelligence as it followed the organizational design of the mature biosphere which preceded it. But how would that kind of technosphere organize its material, energetic and informational structures? The essential innovation is that those structures would make it impossible to degrade the technosphere’s capacity for self-maintenance. Better yet, it would make such degradation unthinkable.
And then we arrive at the mirror of perennialism in this new worldview of The Planetary, ‘epistemic pluralism’. Notice the similarity to religious perennialism – each culture has its own narrative/cosmology (something like its founding myths or book of holy writings):
Rooting a new world system in the cosmology of the planetary also takes us into entirely new territory in the stories we tell about what we know and who knows it. Singular “Theories of Everything” were a demand of the older materialistic, mechanistic cosmology. The planetary does not require such totalizing narratives to be taken from a single perspective. There is an epistemic pluralism inherent in the planetary because it recognizes that phenomena can always be seen from multiple standpoints.
This view is built directly into Complexity Science, which relies on many paradigms of research focus and method. Each of these can tell different kinds of stories about the same question. As the complexity theorist David Krakauer writes, “complexity science should help us understand why a plurality of paradigms is not only of utility but is inevitable.”
There is, therefore, no one culture or cultural history that can establish hegemony over others in the planetary. This is also how it can escape what philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour identified as the source of previous ecological movements’ political ineffectiveness. By embracing the multiple perspectives and multiple scales on which biospheres and technospheres function, the local is never subsumed into the global. There is always a place for people to stand, stand by and stand for. There is home and land with its specifics of life and culture to attach to. The planetary is never disembodied.
In this system, there is the esoteric unity (the unseen life-force pulsing through the biosphere and technosphere) and the exoteric diversity (the many cultures of the world that exist because of the life-force and how they view, understand, and describe it). Thus, we have ourselves an eerie analog to the religious perennialism Fr Peter presented above.
Movie goers frequently absorb perennialist messaging subconsciously from franchises such as Avatar or even Star Wars.
It would seem, then, that there is good reason for Orthodox Christians to be especially on their guard against perennialism in all its forms. The devil seems especially keen to promote it and to use at this moment it to destroy folks’ souls. That being so, let us cleave all the more closely to the Orthodox Church, and be all the more earnest in telling men and women and children about her, the one place on earth where true unity in diversity can be found, known, experienced – and in rejecting the Antichrist’s false imitations. From Fr Peter, once more:
This idea of God distributing revelations of Himself tailor-made for subsections of humanity, so crucial to the entire perennialist outlook, comes into contradiction to the plane witness of salvation history, beginning with the Day of Pentecost, at which the curse of Babel was overturn and the unity of all the races of men was actualized in Christ. In Christ the “dividing wall” was overcome and “so many humanities” were united, sharing as they do the one human nature which Christ put on and now sits at the right hand of the Father. As Fr. George Florovsky writes:
The Church is completeness itself; it is the continuation and the fulfilment of the theanthropic union. The Church is transfigured and regenerated mankind. The meaning of this regeneration and transfiguration is that in the Church mankind becomes one unity, “in one body.” The life of the Church is unity and union. The body is “knit together” and “increaseth” in unity of Spirit, in unity of love. The realm of the Church is unity. And of course this unity is no outward one, but is inner, intimate, organic. It is the unity of the living body, the unity of the organism. The Church is a unity not only in the sense that it is one and unique; it is a unity, first of all, because its very being consists in reuniting separated and divided mankind. It is this unity which is the “sobornost” or catholicity of the Church. In the Church humanity passes over into another plane, begins a new manner of existence. 5
–Walt Garlington is an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
I thought I already sent this, but I guess it didn’t go through. If you find it in spam, please delete it. This one is more full.
Nothing in the article is factually wrong, but the framing is skewed.
/Just as the last generation of men will cry out for peace and security precisely due to their lacking it (and then the sword will fall), men who are now crying out for unity (indeed universal unity) — precisely because they lack it — will find it in perennialism, which gives them this unity almost effortlessly (without the Cross and crucifixion of the mind)./
Heers acts as though this is a new idea. In reality it goes back to the late 1800s and generated the fundamentalist reaction in the 1910s. Arguably it goes back as far as protestantism. This isn’t a “prediction”. Heers doesn’t have a special gift of discernment by calling out an idea 150 years old. He’s not a lone prophet crying in the wilderness.
And I don’t think that people really want unity. I think we like division and tribalism.
I would posit that the true heresy of our times is liberation theology. I find that far more cancerous than receiving Presbyterians by chrismation. And it’s subtle and tricky so that you fall into it if you aren’t very careful.
The part about Gaia Hypothesis. This is a fringe theory for wacko white girls, although it’s the obvious conclusion of evolutionary theory. Really, it’s a return to paganism. The rejection of Christ never leads to cold, dispassionate materialistic atheism. It always circles back to paganism.
(Granted, a few years ago Bartholomew went to Mt Sinai with a bunch of other religious leaders and declared that “creation manifests divinity,” which sounds kind of the same.)
And this itself is rooted in nominalism, the belief that there are no universal natures. This destroys the incarnation and underlies nearly all modern philosophy, including evolution. Archheretic John Romanides, the darling of probably all ROCOR “anti-ecmenists”, taught nominalism. He also lamented the lack communists in Greece and taught that the all the world’s religions will find their fulfillment outside the Church.
https://jaysanalysis.com/2019/09/20/analogy-of-being-atheism-the-logoi-fr-romanides-critiqued/
/It would seem, then, that there is good reason for Orthodox Christians to be especially on their guard against perennialism in all its forms. /
Uh, yeah. Duh! No one is fooled by perennialism. The only people promoting it are the people paid to promote it. The lie is obvious.
The actual danger is liberation theology. All the Orthodox Brahmins ran after the St Moses the Black race heresy group with no discernment whatsoever, and people flip out at me when I point it out. Even the spiritual children of Fr Seraphim Rose — Bishop Gerasim and Abbot Damascene — have participated in their conference.
Dr Heers ends by quoting Harvard professor Florovsky. I personally don’t get my theology from unitarian seminaries run by Freemasons and blood-drinkers, but I’m just some layman worm on the internet. Florovsky taught a Vatican II theology of the Church and taught that 300 years of theology were a complete mistake, a “pseudo-morphosis”. Like Heers, Florovsky stood on the shoulders of giants and spits. He was a protestant in a cassock.
http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/the-house-of-the-father-florovsky.aspx
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/orthodoxyandheterodoxy/2012/06/28/the-limits-of-the-church-by-fr-georges-florovsky/
(I’m not actually recommending anyone read these articles. Florovsky has a way of writing in a dry way where he says very little but is immensely impressed by his feeling of being insightful (c.f. Schmemann).)
Notice with the Florovsky quote at the end, that it just kind of hints at nominalism. Humanity was divided, and Christ united them into one. There’s a certain sense in which that is true, although I personally have never read in the Fathers where that is articulated. But you can also take it in a sense that there is no common humanity until Christ. It’s a nifty way to reconcile evolution with Christology.
And actually, this Florovsky quote is not at odds with perrennialism. You could just as well see it as all the different religions coming together under the same god after Jesus saved all of mankind with the incarnation. (The recent article on Antiochian House heresy made a similar argument, and you can almost guarantee that professor drank deep from the Florovsky well.)
Let’s look at the second Florovsky article:
/It is sufficient to state that there are occasions when, by her very actions, the Church gives one to understand that the sacraments of sectarians – and even of heretics – are valid, that the sacraments can be celebrated outside the strict canonical limits of the Church. The Church customarily receives adherents from sects – and even from heresies – not by the way of baptism, thereby obviously meaning or supposing that they have already been actually baptized in their sects and heresies. In many cases the Church receives adherents even without chrism, and sometimes also clergy in their existing orders. All the more must this be understood and explained as recognizing the validity or reality of the corresponding rites performed over them ‘outside the Church’./
No, that’s not correct. That’s a false premise. The Church often accepts the form of sacraments of outsiders and actualizes the spiritual effect, but the Church does not teach that sacraments exist outside the Church.
/If sacraments are performed, however, it can only be by virtue of the Holy Spirit, and canonical rules thus establish or reveal a certain mystical paradox. In what she does the Church bears witness to the extension of her mystical territory even beyond her canonical borders: the ‘outside world’ does not begin immediately. St Cyprian was right: The sacraments are accomplished only in the Church. But he defined this ‘in’ hastily and too narrowly. Must we not rather argue in the opposite direction? Where the sacraments are accomplished, there is the Church. St Cyprian started from the silent supposition that the canonical and charismatic limits of the Church invariably coincide, and it is his unproven equation that has not been confirmed by the communal consciousness of the Church./
That is to say, where a “valid” baptism is, which in Florovsky’s mind is protestants, Catholics, monophysites, Nestorians, and various schismatics, there is the Church. Is that perennialism?
/As a mystical organism, as the sacramental Body of Christ, the Church cannot be adequately described in canonical terms or categories alone. It is impossible to state or discern the true limits of the Church simply by canonical signs or marks. Very often the canonical boundary determines the charismatic boundary as well, and what is bound on earth is bound by an indissoluble bond in heaven. But not always. And still more often, not immediately. In her sacramental, mysterious being the Church surpasses all canonical norms. For that reason a canonical cleavage does not immediately signify mystical impoverishment and desolation. All that Cyprian said about the unity of the Church and the sacraments can be and must be accepted. But it is not necessary to draw with him the final boundary around the body of the Church by means of canonical points alone./
Zero of the Fathers taught any of that. He’s not quoting any saints or councils.
All of the Fathers taught no salvation whatsoever outside the strict, visible boundaries of the Church. The 1672 Council of Jerusalem gave the most pointed and authoritative expression of this in the post-Medieval world. In recent centuries a few like Sts Theophan the Recluse and Raphael of Brooklyn loosened this a little, but Florovsky is taking the speculative exceptions making them into the rule, and then he persecutes the those who follow the rule. All the seminaries teach this (except maybe ROCOR), and our priests assume that it’s the tradition.
I’m not saying that absolutely all outsiders will go to hell. I’m saying that that is what the tradition actually is. The honest thing is to understand why they said that and re-contextualize it for our times.
Florovsky also misunderstands economia and akriveia, which most people. Akriveia does not mean strictness — it means the letter of the law. And economia does not mean looseness — it means application. Secular law works the same way — the law is written, and then we argue how to apply it. And anyway, the akriveia about reception of outsiders is that most trinitarian sectarians are received by chrismation or confession. That is the norm of the tradition, although there are exceptions throughout time. It is a lie to say that akriveia is that everyone gets a new baptism.
What does Peter Heers say about Florovsky? Surely he condemns him in the strongest terms, yes? What could be more different than Florovsky’s Vatican II ecclesiology and Heers’s hysterics about Vatican II ecclesiology?
https://www.orthodoxethos.com/post/fr-george-florovsky-on-the-boundaries-of-the-church
/the ever-memorable patristic scholar and Orthodox Theologian, Fr. George Florovsky /
Now you may be asking why does such a radical anti-ecumenist endorse and readily quote such a radical ecumenist? The answer is because it’s all a pig circus. They’re arguing from the same faulty premises. This is what higher education does. It kills any kind of creativity and makes you drunk on your own collection of facts.
Is ROCOR seminary a special exception? No, they teach this crap there too. Until recently Heers was teaching Dogmatic Theology there, as I understand it, and he still claims to be a professor. That Heers was a radical anti-ecumenist does not mean he isn’t a modernist. He is just as much a product of this system as all the “ecumenist” bishops he rails against.
If people want an Orthodox response to modernity, I would recommend Archbishop Averky. His writings have aged uncomfortably well, and he doesn’t go off into these goofy hysterics that Heers makes money with. Fr Seraphim Rose described him as a “giant” of 20th century Orthodoxy.
http://orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/abpaverky_writings.aspx
Lord, have mercy! Forgive me, but one of the main ‘sacraments’ of the “true orthodox” types does seem to be polemics…constant polemics. And true to form your own words:“And I don’t think that people really want unity. I think we like division and tribalism” make that case against your position. Frankly, your response comes across to me more as ideological axe-grinding against persons rather than a disputation with certain thoughts and ideas of said persons, say, in the manner of St. Maximos’ “Disputations with Pyrrhus”. All sense of Christian love and charity gone in the flames of constant internecine war.
First, your statements make it pretty clear you equate Fr. Peter’s words with your own thoughts and feeling about those words. For example, you write that: “Heers acts as though this is a new idea. In reality it goes back to the late 1800s and generated the fundamentalist reaction in the 1910s. Arguably it goes back as far as protestantism. This isn’t a “prediction”. Heers doesn’t have a special gift of discernment by calling out an idea 150 years old. He’s not a lone prophet crying in the wilderness.” Really? Does he? Is that what he’s saying? The essay itself answers readily as Fr. Peter first quotes our Savior (Rev 3:10) as well as Elder Athanasius prior to his own. Fr. Peter isn’t ‘acting’ in any such way that I can see, only summing up a very long trajectory of commentary based in the words of our Savior Himself!
Again we have you taking as a wholesale endorsement of Florovsky by Fr. Peter simply because the latter writes Florovsky is “ever-memorable” as an Orthodox theologian and patristic scholar. So much weight placed in so little de-contextualized verbiage. Someone who acts like a complete jerk can be widely recognized and ‘ever-memorable’, after all, with no endorsement issuing from a single soul. I’m sure you can think of examples. Sure, Florovsky’s work is full of flaws, but does this require the rejection of every word he either wrote or said? No. What we do, is we read Scripture and the study Holy Fathers and find those places of agreement between them and the work in question. Perhaps most of it proves trash, but maybe some, even if a little, proves worthwhile.
To paint the negative picture you do of Fr. Peter is highly suspect on yet another ground. Not once, particularly in your hand-wringing in regard to ‘validity’ in Florovsky, do you mention the latter’s reliance upon Blessed Augustine. This is significant, given the OE article from which you hastily equated Fr. Peter’s words with endorsement, clearly contextualizes and critiques this very reliance upon Augustine and his concept of ‘validity’!Yes, it’s no wonder you also warn people away from the Orthodoxinfo posting of Florovsky’s article since the webmaster himself told of Bishop Athanasius Yevtich’s crititque and OE fulfilled where, again, you gleaned his supposed ‘endorsement’.
Then you lose all credibility as you straddle the goofy limb you saw out from underneath yourself insinuating a tie between Fr. Peter, the Gaia Hypothesis, Bartholomew and Romanides. Good grief, Charlie Brown, you seem desperate to discredit! So much so, you post a Dyer stream critiquing Romanides to bolster to your ‘argument’. Apparently, you’re unaware that in this very stream even Dyer doesn’t dismiss Romanides wholesale. Then you go on to play telephone in telling us that Romanides “lamented the lack of communists in Greece” which only proves you haven’t actually read Romanides yourself, but only repeat what others say. In chapter 47 of Patristic Theology Romanides writes:
“Marxism started out with principles taken from experience and ended up where it ended up. From a scholarly point of view, Marxism and Patristic theology share the same foundation, so that if Marxists and Patristic theologians would come together, they would be able to communicate with each other.”
He’s talking about metaphysics and empiricism, but in line with the rest of the book, the Patristic experience is that of theosis rather than metaphysics. Nowhere does Romanides endorse Marxism. In fact, he says explicitly it’s an atheistic and materialist philosophy hostile to the Church. My advice is to read the book yourself rather than regurgitating propaganda. Romanides shows more of a Christian attitude to communists than ‘true Orthodox’ often show to Christians! And, no, that doesn’t mean I fully endorse him in case you’re speculating.
I could go on, but in sum, your comments ring far more of the cherry-picking and bad faith argumentation coming from so many protestants than anything coming from Fr. Peter. I’ve listened enough to his work to have heard him critique Florovsky, and Romanides for that matter, to demonstrate adequately that he can admire a person and a portion of their work without ‘endorsing’ all of it. One can admire others, or their work, despite their faults. Apparently, that’s neither the case for you, nor for ‘true orthodox’ I’ve encountered, where it’s all war, either/or, all the time, at least online. So far, I’ve seen nothing to dissuade me from this view and your comments only convince me further this is the case. God bless you.
Thank you for your response.
Notice at the beginning I say that nothing in the article is factually wrong. My main point is that Heers is a hypocrite. It’s not that I am the “true Orthodox” so much as he thinks he is. He has double standard, condemning all the “ecumenists” unless it’s an author that he likes. My point is that both the radical “ecumenists” and the radical “anti-ecumenists” have the same premises. Heers is as much as a modernist as the people he criticizes.
I also criticized the image he projects to the world through his videos and publishing. It’s a false conservativism. I’m referring to more than this essay.
Furthermore, Heers is not in the Church. He has gone off his own way, and so his opinion doesn’t matter. Heers does not speak with the authority of a priest, and so there’s no reason for anyone to pay attention to him.
Regarding Romanides, he says that Marxists and Patristic Theology have “the same foundation”. That seems to be an endorsement of Marxism, or at least a gross misunderstanding of Patristic Theology. Romanides was really a bad misunderstanding of Dionysius the Aeropagite, and I don’t think any of these academic theologians understand the books they are reading. My point in bringing him up is that “neo-patristic” academic theologians are really following academic syntheses of the Fathers than the actual Fathers, and this is true whether they are a ROCOR radical or an OCA secularist. All these people are modernists who do not understand the Fathers, and we can know that by reading the Fathers ourselves.
I have read snippets of most major academic theologians, but I generally don’t read them because I don’t read crap. I have a finite amount of time to read before I die, and I try to spend that wisely. I already know that Romanides and Florovsky are wrong.
But to your point that there is good even in bad authors, the Fathers address this dynamic, and their general response is to avoid them anyway. St Ignatius Brianchaninov in particular says that even if there are good insights in “heretical books” (referring to those of protestants and Catholics), you should still avoid them because the good is intimately mixed up with the bad, and most people don’t have the discernment to sort through it correctly.
And all the monastic Fathers say that if your spiritual father rejects anything of the Church tradition, then you should abandon him. I would have to sift through my books to cite exactly, but I want to say that St Ignatius Brianchaninov (The Arena), St Theophan the Recluse (Thoughts for Every Day of the Year) and St Paisios Olaru are among these. If the spiritual father is willfully teaching some things wrong, then the good things he teaches don’t matter.
I hope that helps. I am criticizing the dirtbag ethos of professional “theologians” and internet grifters. My point is their hypocrisy, not the letter of their words.
God bless you and I hope this comment finds you well.
Yes, you do say that nothing in Walt’s articles is factually wrong, but then go on to undermine the article by attacking Fr. Peter, not only personally, but his aptitude as a coherent defender of our faith, and now his status as a priest. For the record he is very much a priest, even without a parish currently. My own priest recognizes this situation and knows Fr. Peter well enough to have told me Fr. Peter is one of the most prayerful men he knows…and he is most definitely in the Orthodox Church whether you happen to like it (or him) or not. There has been no de-frocking of him of which I’m aware.
One of the issues I see in your comments, and with ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ orthodox types, is the emphasis in being absolutely correct over that of conversing in good faith. Another, is the notion that people, – Florovsky, for example – write during different times of their lives, sometimes even contradicting themselves over the course of a life. Yet, the Fathers are rife with quotations of those who held some heretical views: Origen being a famous example. To this day, some of Origen’s work is used. While I can see why St. Ignatius Brianchaninov would warn us away from books containing heretical views, the Fathers most definitely don’t seem to hold a consensus on this view.
Forgive me, but I find a couple of other things questionable in your response. First, you accuse Fr. Peter, and/or his work, of ‘false conservatism’. Conservatism is an ideology, not the Royal Path. To weigh Fr. Peter in this way is precisely to judge him according (fallen) human standards, a trajectory which time and again, fails and ends in ruin like the communism you (and I) loathe. And this segues into my second reason for finding your comments questionable: You once again vilify Romanides on the basis of his supposed endorsement of Marxism when I clearly quoted him as qualifying his statements as coming from “a scholarly point of view”. Again, your lack of reading, or seemingly, even your interest in researching a topic of which you have much to say and know little about, renders your point of view irrelevant at best. He qualifies his statements. Perhaps that’s too ‘modernistic’ for you? The short of it, is that Romanides was simply stating that a dialog was possible, and perhaps even fruitful, due to certain shared experiential and practical methodologies. Severed from Christ the Marxist paradigm becomes and is futile and hostile to the Church.
Worse, you go on with bluster to denigrate academic theologians in toto…seemingly unaware that Fr. Dimitru Staniloae was recently glorified who is a confessor of the Faith and an academic theologian…one of the greatest of the 20th Century. For some reason, I expect you will find him ‘crap’ too, even though he actually suffered for the Faith under a brutal regime. Have you?
It’s a strange thing to watch when you ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ orthodox types get online and rant about ‘modernism’ when it sounds so much like the Protestants who bellyache about the Fathers (ex: St. Dionysios) for ‘Hellenizing’ what they believe to be the ‘original’ Church. Whether it’s Neo-Platonism, or Aristotelian philosophy, they are on the hunt for their preconception of ‘original’ and ‘genuine’ without their influence. Like it or not, some of the more contemporary Fathers and/or scholars use modern tools and language, just as the early Fathers did in their day to explicate the Orthodox Faith. Some of it in the hands of scholars can be garbage. Some of it, however, is the way the Orthodox Faith speaks today. Again, this needs to be weighed against the Tradition of the Church, not our little minds or even just one or two Fathers.
Forgive me, brother, but your views strike me as not only largely wrong, rife with false claims and faulty presuppositions, but without any openness to even admitting to where and when they are wrong, particularly here in the case of Fr. Peter who is most definitely a priest. He just did a looonnngg stream speaking on this subject in addition to exactly no priests whom I’m aware stating otherwise, excepting some of the secular-minded in the OCA…like the one’s you criticize. In view of your incessant equation between ‘ecumenists’ and “radical anti-ecumenists”, I can make a similar equation: you (a conservative) and the lefty ‘orthodox’ (Public Orthodox/Orthodoxy in Dialog) make similar claims against and share a similar disdain for Fr. Peter: Therefore, you endorse the latter since you share some of the views of heretics.
I don’t believe this is the case, of course, but can you see why your charges of ‘hypocrisy’ ring hollow? I believe it would behoove you to educate yourself on the things you write about prior to writing. As a Christian, it’s the very least one can do in good faith online and in these times.
Well, I never claimed to be “true Orthodox” or even “conservative”. I also never said that any and all academic theologians must necessarily be wrong, and elsewhere I have commended Lossky.
Regarding your comparison of me and the Public Orthodoxy types, we dislike Peter Heers for different reasons, or at least, we draw the same conclusion from different premises. By contrast, my comparison of the ecumenists and anti-ecumenists is the complete opposite — they have all the same premises and happen to draw different conclusions.
So your analogies are facile. Logic doesn’t work based on superficial similarities.
Peter Heers is firmly outside the Church. He correctly teaches that there are strict visible boundaries to the Church, but he is not inside of those boundaries. Therefore he is not in the Church. Because there are no sacraments and no priesthood outside the Church, therefore he is not a priest. He can justify his “canonical irregularity” all he wants on youtube, but if he can’t point to a bishop he commemorates during liturgy, then he isn’t in the Church and isn’t a priest and has no teaching authority as such.
This is a fact, and if you can’t accept this premise, then we have no commonality for debate.
Nope. He has not been defrocked, nor have I heard of any serious attempts within the Church to do so. Either one trusts the processes of the Church or one does not. You do not. He is a priest until he’s not via the Church, not you nor your opinion and arbitrary timelines. It ain’t about you. Period.
As to logic working, true conclusions are based upon true premises. Sadly, not only have you openly promoted easily debunked falsehoods on this forum, but refuse to confront, much less, recant them. Nor is logic sound when based upon insinuation, loose associations and bad faith. On those grounds, you’ve not even made it out of the gate.
You’re right. I can only know you by your fruits. If it walks like a duck and quacks like one…Indeed, we have commonality for neither debate nor discussion.
Good day and God bless.
Peter Heers is an apostate schismatic. He isn’t a priest, and he isn’t Orthodox.
Is he wrong here as quoted by Walt?
Quoting Florovsky is always wrong.
That’s the great joke of these “anti-ecumenists”. They’re the flip side of the “ecumenists”. They quote the same heretical academic theologians. They have the same narrative of the development of modern Orthodox thought. All they disagree on is how to apply it.
The originator in the diaspora of the radical anti-ecumenism and baptism rigorism that Dr Heers is known for is Fr Panteleimon at the Boston Greek Old Calendarist monastery. But who was his godfather? Athenagoras. Yes, that Athenagoras.
“Traditionalist” internet priests like Peter Heers or Priestmonk Kosmas provide a safe, moderate radicalism. They take an issue that sounds radical but is easily digestible, and they overwhelm uneducated lay people and priests with carefully chosen facts to make it seem like objective truth. The result is that all opposition to modernism looks as facile as Heers’s videos.
You can know that someone is a false teacher if they tell you what makes you feel good. They will leave out important details that would make people turn against them. For example, Heers says nothing about the Antichrist being a Jewish homosexual.
The true saint would never be allowed on YouTube. If Heers were “patristic”, his videos would have been banned as soon as they came out. He’s just another internet grifter making money by para-social relationships. If he wants to be a priest, then he needs to serve liturgy at a parish and mentor young people.
I will write a more full response when I have time later.
Looking forward to it.