Part 3

APOSTASY AND ANTICHRIST ACCORDING TO THE HOLY FATHERS OF THE CHURCH

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THIS WORLD AND OF THE EARTHLY SOJOURN OF CHRIST’S CHURCH

(Exerted from a booklet published by Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, NY in 1992, no longer in print.)

According to the teaching of the Holy Scriptures and the holy Fathers of the Church, the end of the world and the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ will be heralded by a great, visible spread of lawlessness and impiety amongst all peoples, the completion of the preaching of the Gospel throughout the world, including to the Jews in a restored Israel, extreme physical troubles and the coming of Antichrist and his struggle with Christ’s Holy Church.

The holy Apostles teach that in the very last times, the various ruinous heresies and false teachings will multiply and gather great strength while unbelief will increase.  Mankind as a whole will be morally deaf and blind and insensitive to everything that concerns salvation.  People will willingly believe any falsehood and reject Christ’s law.  Every possible vise and error will be accepted by the world at large.

Saint Paul, in his Epistle to the Thessalonians, says that when Antichrist appears, [there will be many antichrist spirits, movements and forerunners before the final man of sin is revealed] he will be allowed to entice many.  “…there will be all sorts of miracles and a deceptive show of signs  and wonders, and everything evil that can deceive those who are bound for destruction because they would not obey the truth which would have saved them.  The reason why God will send a power to delude them and make them believe what is untrue is to condemn all those who refused to believe in the truth and chose wickedness instead”  (II Thes, 2:10,12).

In his epistle to Timothy, the Apostle instructs, “You may be quite certain that in the last days there are going to be difficult times.  People will be self-centered and grasping; boastful, arrogant and rude; disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious; heartless and unappeasable; they will be slanderers, profligates, savages and enemies of everything that is good; they will be treacherous and reckless and demented by pride, preferring their own pleasure to God.  They will keep up the outward appearance of religion but will have rejected the inner power of it.  Have nothing to do with people like that” (II Tim. 3: 1-5).

Of course, all these vices have always been present in the world, but in the last days they will become the dominant characteristics of society.

End of Part 3

To be continued in part 4

APOSTASY AND ANTICHRIST ACCORDING TO THE HOLY FATHERS OF THE CHURCH

Part 2

(Exerted from a booklet published by Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, NY in 1992, no longer in print.)

A NEW BABYLON

As the day of the glorification of the Holy Church approaches, a new edifice arises in the world, an edifice contradictory to the truth of Christ’s Building – this is the mystery Babylon.  The actions of the ancients who dreamed of immortalizing themselves on earth, of creating a name for themselves, is being repeated.  Today’s Chaldeans, however, do not dream of having their names written in heaven, but rather of leaving a name and a memory of their deeds on earth.

Here is a new Babylon in the fullness of the word: mixing truth with untruth.  Instead of the clear light of the teaching of the Holy Church, founded on the Gospels, the prophets, apostles, fathers and Councils of the Church, these new Babylonians thirst for apostate teachings and dark philosophical systems in which truth is mixed with lies and interwoven with untruth.  This manner of thinking is the foundation of the new Babylon.  This tower of false teaching grows daily.  Great indeed is the danger of losing one’s way on the path of salvation because of the spreading dust from this Babylonian construction of a monument to the dreamers and those who seek to inscribe their own names on earth.

How great the enmity between Satan’s principality and the kingdom of God is has been revealed to us in the Revelations, especially at 12: 1-8 and 13:14.  According to the Holy Fathers these words reveal to us that, in the last days, Satan will be allowed to make war against the saints of God, and the Church (the woman vested in the sun) will flee away into the wilderness.  The Holy Church will have returned to the catacombs and house churches, becoming very small, scattered and persecuted.  The Church will have no place of honor or protection in society.  It will be much the same as it was for the Church in the first century under pagan Rome.

Christ’s Church has been persecuted and oppressed in all ages by the prince of this world in different ways at different times.  The early years saw severe persecution from without - from society, the world, the government, the Jewish religion and pagan Greek and Roman religions.  

Once the Church became recognized and under the protection of Constantine in the fourth century, the persecution of the Church by Satan came from within in the form of schisms and heresies.  Satan used members of the Church to attack the dogmas of the faith, seeking to create disunity and to destroy the doctrines necessary for salvation.  To be sure, in both periods many souls abandoned the Holy Church and joined the ranks of Satan.

A third period of persecution began with the rise of Mohammed and again the Church was submitted to open physical persecution.  During this period the Orthodox Christian population of entire areas of the East was slaughtered for refusing to renounce Christ.  It is notable that the Moslem conquest of the Orthodox Christian world took place at about the same time as new heresies were arising in Western Europe; first Papism and then Protestantism and finally such cults as Freemasonry.   At this time Satan began using both persecution from within and from without to try to destroy the Church.

A forth period of persecution came in the form of the anarchist and social revolution movements, attacking every social order on earth, striving to throw the world into a state of conflict and confusion to pave the way for the extermination of Christianity, notably Marxist Socialism, Communism and Nazism.

Satan continues in our day to use all types of persecution against the Church.  Orthodoxy today is in a type of Babylonian captivity, suffering loss from without at the hands of the Moslems in the Middle East, materialistic and humanistic socialism and the heresies of Rome and Protestantism in the West, and from the heresy of Ecumenism from within.   The special snare-words that  Satan has used in order to entice people into these movements include: “freedom”, “love”,  “brotherhood”, “equality”, and “unity of mankind”.   How many are following after these meaningless slogans, not caring who originated them or what the actual manifestations of these so-called humanitarian movements are.  How clearly they are being led by the prince of this world, by artificial enticements, how quickly they are headed for the anarchy which will bring about the last tormentor of mankind, Antichrist.

End of Part 2

To be continued with Part 3

APOSTASY AND ANTICHRIST ACCORDING TO THE HOLY FATHERS OF THE CHURCH

Part I

(Exerted from a booklet published by Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, NY in 1992, no longer in print.)

Preface

“First, be aware of this: In the last days scoffers will enter…saying, ‘where is the promise of His coming?  For…all things continue to be as they were since the dawn of creation’”.

True to this prophecy of the Holy Apostle Peter, there are many such scoffers amongst us.  There are even many who bear the name Christian who have, nevertheless, ceased to hope on the return of Christ.  Now they are planning better things of their own.  Having resolved that there will be no God-created “new heaven and new earth”, these scoffers have decided to forge a man-created new world.

To this, Saint Paul admonishes, “Let no man deceive you by any means?  That day will not come before there first comes the great apostasy and that man who is sin personified is revealed, the inheritor of perdition who will oppose himself to and exalt himself above all that is called divine or that is worshipped by man, even sitting in the temple of God, claiming to be a god himself…Therefore, brethren, stand firm and hold fast to all the traditions which you have been taught, whether by word or by our epistle.”

The Orthodox Christian Church has always taught that the cause of the ultimate destruction of civilization will be the religious and moral decay of humanity; that the time would arrive when vast segments of the Holy Orthodoxy Church would apostatize, when a counter church, formed under Satan’s leadership, would arise and when evil will reign so strongly in the life of mankind that life on earth will become almost impossible.  Then the world will lose its right and its reason for existence.  The destruction will come about according to God’s sentence, but the cause of the sentence will be the evil of mankind.

Concerning the fulfillment of such prophecies, our attention must turn to Revelation 8:7-12 and the ninth chapter, where the visionary, Saint John, persistently emphasizes that various disasters and miseries will descent upon one-third of mankind and upon one-third of the earth’s surface at the beginning of the culmination of time.  “If one considers,” says Father Alexander Kolesnikov, “those nations and peoples which have become a sacrifice to wars and revolutions in the twentieth century, then it will be seen that they make up approximately one-third of the earth’s surface and population.”

Most especially, the “permanent” disasters, which include true martyrdoms and open warfare against he Church, have befallen Orthodox Christian nations – almost entirely in the first half of the twentieth century and general as one of the results of the first general war.  Communism captured all of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus before 1950.  Nor was Greece spared fro the Venezelists and several defiled Church leaders launched their attacks upon Holy Orthodoxy in Greece in the 1920’s, almost as if to counter the holy teaching and saintly example of Saint Nectarios of Pentapolis.  Alexandria, Antioch and the Church of China have also fallen under Communist controlled governments since the second general war.  [Since the publication of this book we have seen other huge Orthodox populations in the Middle East be almost wiped out by the Muslim invasions.]  One cannot help but have the impression that the evil forces of the world have set themselves to the task of weakening the Orthodox Christian peoples in order to remove the main obstacles to the realization of their future plans.  [St. Paul spoke of the force that would hinder the arrival of the antichrist until that force would be taken away reminding us also of God’s willingness to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if ten righteous men could have been found.]

In addition to the shock of world events and of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, authors of anti-Christ philosophical, political and religious theories and systems have attacked Christianity especially heavily in recent times.  For the most part, these philosophies have taught, and still are teaching, that a “law of progress” reigns in the history of mankind.  Accordingly, humanity, in all aspects of its existence, has, throughout its history, evolved upward.  These philosophers teach that the political, social and ideological forms of the life of the human race are continually improving and that man will eventually find and bring about, by his own power and human development, the most complete and ideal political and social order of life; an order in which reason, science, peace, safety, justice and material well-being will be complete.  As a matter of fact, a large number of defiled, nominal Orthodox Christian leaders have begun to present such thesis.  Most notable amongst these are hierarchs of the Ecumenical Patriarchate which has begun to teach these things “so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect”. 

Christ, on the other hand, taught something completely the opposite.  Christ foretold that there would be “wars and rumors of wars”; that there would be “not peace, but the sword”; that the “love of many will grow cold because of the violence of mankind”.  Let us look at the history of the twentieth century and ask: who has been proven to be right, Christ or the wistful philosophers?  There has arrived no reign of reason, but rather a reign of the most coarse materialism and animalistic passions in man.  In place of peace and safety there are terrible wars and the almost daily rumor of new wars; instead of justice we have witnessed violence, rioting, murders, mass executions, concentration camps; instead of material well-being, there are regular reports of mass starvations and deprivations of millions.  Instead of accord with the reason of religion there is the almost daily appearance and strengthening of sects with the darkest of teachings – freemasonry, Theosophy, Baha’i, Kabala, Islam, so-called Christian Science, open Satan worship and witchcraft cults to name only a few.

What is more significant is the fact that the will to resist all these evil movements has begun to leave mankind.  Now, people can accept Satan cults with little or no shock, pausing only briefly to be dismayed or horrified [before returning to their favorite movie happy hour].  That society in general is willing to condone Satanic acts is clearly demonstrated in the legalization of abortions.  The mass extermination of babies for immorality and convenience has not only ceased to shock most people, but has become accepted as a “norm”.

END OF PART I – TO BE CONTINUED

The Crucial Distinction Between the Rationalism of Western Christianity and the Mysticism of the Eastern Orthodox Church

The split between the East and the West in 1054 AD, known as the Great Schism, was not merely the result of a few different theological points.  To be sure, there were serious differences of theology such as the addition of words to the Creed that altered or distorted a proper understanding of the relationship of the Godhead to the Trinity – a distortion that works its way out in how salvation is perceived and lived.  Then there was the divide over the primacy of the pope as well as other theological differences. 

But underlying the theological differences was a major divide between Western rationalism and Eastern mysticism.   This divide led to different ways of understanding God and salvation that has profound significance even today. 

Civilization in the West developed differently than in the East.  Rome fell prey to several major influences and movements that did not have any significant impact on the East. 

In the West society’s ways of thinking and understanding were shaped and formed by the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, Scholasticism and the development of Rationalism and Science as the foundation for all thinking, even theological.  These movements began in the world but quickly infiltrated the Papacy and what we know today as the Roman Catholic or Latin Church.  It’s a long history but some of the most noted theological voices of rationalism in the West were Aquinas, Anselm and Augustine. (Augustine in his later years.  In his earlier writings he was Orthodox but ended up being unduly influenced by Western rationalism.)  The Protestant Reformation was a product of these influences and continued to build upon the foundation of rationalism failing to understand that the issues they protested against were the products of the same rationalism that fueled and guided the Reformation.

Rationalism in Western Christianity looks to human intellect, reason and rational enlightenment as the best ways to approach and understand God.  There is an attempt to make the Christian Faith conform to human ideas of what is rational, scientific and enlightened.  Christianity should be explainable and discerned by knowledge and reason.  Thus, knowing God is more of an intellectual thing achieved by acquiring knowledge of God through study, books, lectures and information.  From this perspective the theology is derived from the theologians in the theological schools.  The theologian is someone with book knowledge, an intellectual scholar who can know and reveal God by study and research. 

In the East, the Church approached God much more from a mystical or spiritual point of view.   For those who have remained true to the Orthodox Tradition this is still true today.

This approach is derived from the understanding that sin and the resulting passions that afflict us also darken our minds and keep us from the true knowledge of God.  It is believed that a person who is still subject to the passions – pride, greed, vanity, lust, sloth, self-righteousness, selfishness, envy, jealousy, etc. – cannot attain to the discernment of the knowledge of God within himself.  Only those who by grace and by prayer, fasting, self-denial and obedience have been purified of their sinful passions, illumined by the Holy Spirit and attained to a full and complete communion with God (theosis) can truly know and reveal the knowledge of God.  Their hearts and minds are enlightened/illumined with the knowledge of God by direct experience of God in a way that is not known by the carnal person who is still subject to sinful passions.   God is known by experience in a purified heart more than in a head full of knowledge. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God".

The knowledge of God comes not from the intellect, books and lectures but from the saints who have experienced communion with the uncreated Light of God.  They have entered into the Glory of God as did Moses on Mt. Sinai, Elias on Mt Horab and the disciples on Mt. Tabor.  In that Glory, the knowledge of God is revealed to the heart of man, not as intellectual knowledge but as the experience of God in the Holy Spirit.  These are the true theologians of the Church.  It is on this basis that the Orthodox Church claims to possess the fullness of the Faith and to be the True Church of Christ.  It is not because we have theologians who are smarter than your theologians but because the truth we hold is born witness to by those who in purity have been in the presence of God and have beheld the vision of the uncreated Light/Glory of God.  God is revealed to the Church mystically/spiritually, not rationally according to the wisdom of this world.  The wisdom of this world knows not the things of God.  We look to the saints, fathers, confessors and martyrs for the revelation of the knowledge of God – those who in purity have beheld the face of God in the Holy Spirit.  We do not derive our interpretations and understanding of the Christian faith from rational book knowledge still subject to the sinful passions.  We believe and honor the saints of this age for the same reason we believe and honor the saints of old - Abraham, Moses, Elijah, all the prophets and the apostles - because they learned the knowledge of God through the experience of beholding the vision of God in a way the rest of us do not due to our sinful and darkened mind and passions.

Conflict between these two approaches to God came to a head in the fourteenth century in the debate between a Roman theologian named Barlaam and St. Gregory Palamas, a monk from Mt. Athos and Archbishop of Thessalonica. 

Barlaam, following the rationalism of the West, said that man can come to the knowledge of God through his reason and intellect and is a Christian by virtue of living an ethical life and fulfilling the obligations of the Christian life.

St. Gregory posited that knowing God and living for God is a matter of union and communion with God in the Holy Spirit that involves purification of the passions, illumination of the heart by the Holy Spirit, and participation in the uncreated Light of God Himself.     

The ultimate result is two different approaches to salvation.  For the Western rational mindset, salvation became much more centered in the knowledge of certain facts, following certain steps or principals, adhering to certain ethics and fulfilling certain obligations.  The theology of salvation developed much more along legal, Roman law, and juridical models emphasizing the objective/external nature of salvation. Salvation is much more cerebral and perceived somewhat as a one time event obtained by a prayer.

The mystical approach of the East developed a therapeutic model of healing seeing salvation as a life long journey and the Church as a hospital.  This healing includes the purification of the heart from sinful passions, the illumination of the mind by the Holy Spirit, and beholding the Glory of God through theosis.  The illumination of the mind grows out of the purification of the passions and theosis grows out of both.  The theology of salvation centers on the mystical union with God in the Holy Spirit and a transformation or deification of human nature.  The path to salvation is a path of denying self, crucifying the sinful passions, devotion to prayer, obedience and fasting.  All of this presupposes life in the Church/Body of Christ where we absorb the life and spirit of the saints, submit our lives to a spiritual father for confession and guidance, and partake of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Our salvation is a matter of inner spiritual union with Christ and His Body the Church through the Holy Spirit.

From time to time, Protestantism and even elements of Rome, have gone through periods of awakenings growing weary of the rational and intellectual approach to salvation – the institutional church as it is called.  This has resulted in the “Great Awakenings”, revival movements and charismatic movements of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  But even these movements, having no awareness or connection to the mystical faith of the Eastern Orthodox Church, have always succumbed to extreme and wild emotional fanaticism, embracing numerous heresies, and leaving in their path a wake of disillusioned and burned out people either seeking the next movement and guru or becoming agnostic if not atheistic.