The Christian Vanguard

The other day, I shared a quotation from a saint recognized in the East, St. Maximos the Confessor (about 649 AD). It read,  For the extremities of the earth and all in every part of it who purely and rightly confess the Lord, look directly towards the most holy Roman Church and its confession and faith, as it were to a sun of unfailing light, awaiting from it the bright radiance of the sacred dogmas of our fathers, according to what the six inspired and holy councils have purely and piously decreed, declaring most expressly the symbol of faith. For from the coming down of the incarnate Word among us, all the Churches in every part of the world have possessed that greatest Church along as their base and foundation, seeing that, according to the promise of Christ our Savior, the gates of hell do never prevail against it , that it possesses the keys of a right confession and faith in Him, that it opens the true and only religion to such as approach with piety, and shuts up and ...

A protestant friend of mine was expressing his worry of the term "heresy" being thrown around too loosely among his other protestant friends. This is a fair worry. Even within Catholicism, the word gets tossed around too easily among the laity, in my opinion. However, there is a difference between my friend and I: our criteria for what counts as heresy. My protestant friend said, "If I am not contradicting any of the ecumenical councils, I am not a heretic." I pointed out he denies the Council of Trent. His response was that Trent was not ecumenical. "Which Orthodox bishops ratified Trent?" he asked me, which of course isn't really a question, but an argument. He believes that enough Bishops have to be present in order for a council to be ecumenical, and since the Orthodox were obviously not present in Trent, Trent cannot be ecumenical. This makes some sense. The big 7 ecumenical councils that all Christians believe, even the Protestants, were ratifi...

In my previous post, I talked about a disagreement I had with a Coptic Orthodox fellow. The topic may seem a bit out of context if you don't know who they are and how they relate to the rest of Christendom. So I will talk a little bit about that here.  The Coptic people are essentially Egyptian people. It's like an ethnicity, from what I gather. Historically, they are associated with the Orthodox Church(es), though, the exact nature of this relationship is what distinguishes them. You might be tempted to think that because they call themselves Coptic Orthodox, that they are Orthodox in the same way someone might be Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox. But many other Orthodox people will insist that the Coptic Orthodox aren't really Orthodox, and or even properly Christian. This is because they deny one of the ecumenical councils, the Council of Chalcedon.  One of the defining pillars or standards of Orthodoxy are the ecumenical councils, that is, the councils that e...

The iconic soup can. What is the big deal? Well, it's not really a big deal, and that might be the point. This paper on Andy Warhol's possible Eastern Christian aesthetic has helped me see that. It's an interesting paper, and I think it's worth a read, especially if you are Catholic or Orthodox. The basic idea is this: the aesthetic style of icons, no context and no space, is present in some of Warhol's work, as evidenced by the soup can, Golden Marilyn Monroe, and Silver Liz. Okay, I see that. I think that's pretty plausible. And I didn't really see that before, but I did have some vague sense of it. I just never really unpacked it because...it's a can of soup. Icons help us encounter a transfigured and holy person. That is why icons lack space and context. Is Warhol trying doing this too? Well, if he is, it doesn't work. Yes, in some sense, all of creation is good, and goodness is convertible with beautiful, so in some sense, all of creation is b...