Fr. Romanides: Imperfect ideological systems

• From this morning’s read­ing in “Patris­tic The­ol­ogy” by Fr. John Romanides:

  “For real equal­ity to exist, the human per­son­al­ity must first be healed. If it is not healed, any ide­o­log­i­cal sys­tem what­so­ever, no mat­ter how per­fect it may be, can­not be imple­mented, because instead of gen­uine rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the ide­ol­ogy work­ing for the sys­tem, those look­ing out for their best inter­ests will always find their way in and cor­rupt it.”

  Any hope that that mes­sage can rise above the politically-centric furor and be heard by God’s folk before it’s too late? Am I cyn­i­cal to think that it prob­a­bly can’t?

  I’m a con­ser­v­a­tive, but I’m Chris­t­ian first — I would vote for any can­di­date or mea­sure that I really believed would lead to a stronger Church. But for the life of me, I can’t see how prop­ping up human­is­tic ideas that failed 40 years ago and 60 years ago and 100 years ago makes the Church stronger. Is there ever a time when peo­ple of Chris­t­ian con­science can under­stand that Ortho­dox Chris­tian­ity and human­ism are not only not the same, but are in oppo­si­tion to each other?

  If we are no longer inter­ested in out-moded ideas like virtue and build­ing char­ac­ter, what in the world are we doing pick­ing up utopian con­structs that those much more moral than we are couldn’t pull off?

  I’m really try­ing to get to the point where I don’t care. It seems like what most peo­ple are doing, just to get a lit­tle peace. It’s prob­a­bly smart, because the alter­na­tive feels a lot like watch­ing a school­bus slowly go over a cliff and not being able to do any­thing about it. But I haven’t got the hang of the detach­ment quite yet, so I’ll prob­a­bly keep yelling for a lit­tle while longer. Then — since I’m actu­ally IN that school­bus — I’ll just shut up and brace for impact.

  
  

  Related posts:

  1. The per­va­sive­ness of the Chris­t­ian idea
  2. No room at the inn. Or the megachurch.
  3. “Pas­tor with 666 tat­too claims to be divine”
  4. The peo­ple speak to “DaVinci”
  5. Cra­dle and con­vert Orthodox

  
  
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• s-p 08.04.2009
  

  Civil author­ity is a God ordained sys­tem as a hedge against human anar­chy which always tends toward evil, even with good inten­tions. Any­one who believes a polit­i­cal sys­tem can trans­form peo­ple is deluded. Any­one who believes that a polit­i­cal sys­tem manned by Chris­tians will trans­form the world into utopia is deluded. It’s fallen, folks. Sure, vote for the good because our sys­tem per­mits it, but the gospel calls us to BE good.

• Anam Cara
  

  ditto s-p

  I no longer watch the news or weather on TV. I can’t do any­thing about either and they both depress me. I am far hap­pier stay­ing con­cerned with my fam­ily and my imme­di­ate com­mu­nity. Just as Jesus said today has enough trou­bles of it’s own, there is plenty of work to do right here, plenty of souls to reach right in my own neigh­bor­hood — no mat­ter what the weather is like or who is run­ning the country.

  I see my job as to be faith­ful with what God has given me, to use the resources He has entrusted to me to help oth­ers — irre­gard­less of gov­ern­ment pro­grams, etc. When the time for an elec­tion comes, I will see what is going on and vote accord­ingly, but for now — I can’t bear to hear it since noth­ing I believe in seems to mat­ter to the politicians.

• Grace
  

  That’s good advice (by both). I really am try­ing to just stop look­ing at this stuff, but some­times it comes and finds me. The day before I read the above per­spec­tive from Fr. John Romanides, an Ortho­dox acquain­tance posted some­thing on Face­book that was the kind of glib denounce­ment of con­ser­v­a­tive dis­sent that plays out reg­u­larly through many modes of old media and new media. It wasn’t the mes­sage itself that unnerved me: it was the pre­sump­tion by an Ortho­dox per­son that his mostly-Orthodox audi­ence would be in total agree­ment with laugh­ing at the stu­pid, hay­seed naysayers.

  These are lit­tle things — shared jokes, anec­dotes over cof­fee — but they’re the way that we com­mon peo­ple share cul­ture. To have those who I know make their spir­i­tual home in the Church hap­pily buy into a world­view that under­mines the Church makes me nuts. But this morn­ing, I kind of wished I hadn’t sounded so crazy. It doesn’t help any­thing, and it may actu­ally play into the stereotype.

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