“Christ Himself said that He will build a Church, but is now talking about the Church? No, now prefer to talk about Christianity, and Christianity is considered as some kind of philosophical or moral teaching. Christianity – it sounds like novecentismo or Nietzscheanism! The counterfeit Church of Christianity, as a subtle poison penetrates the minds of even the Church and society.” Chapters from the book “no Christianity without the Church” (1915) Hieromartyr Hilarion (Troitsky), Archbishop of verey.
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Christianity is inseparable from the Church
Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky)
Enough only to look closely at the Symbol of faith to understand how important the idea of the Church. After all, in the creed, almost all the members made after there were various heretics, isogashii particular truth. Therefore, all creed can be called like a polemic. His story shows how in the struggle with various heresies replenished its contents.
Not the same with the ninth member of the Church. From the outset, this member was in the creed, which added even regardless of the occurrence of any false teachings. After all, if there was even the Protestants and sectarians, dreaming about some beztserkovnaya Christianity. It is clear that the idea of the Church from the very beginning were at the head of the Christian beliefs. From the beginning the Christians were the Church and believe in its saving power, and the truth that Christianity is inseparable from the Church, we can take this directly from The Lord Jesus Christ.
So, we have to admit the truth: Christianity from the Church completely inseparable and without the Church Christianity is impossible. The necessity of recognizing this truth will be particularly apparent to us if we compare it with the opposite delusion, if we look at the consequences of the separation of Christianity from the Church.
In fact, the opposition between the gospel Church and replace the Church’s vague notion of Christianity brings the most deplorable results. The life of a Christian giving, is only another exercise in the endless series of teachings ancient and modern, the teaching is very uncertain, for without the Church the possibility of countless his understanding of the most arbitrary and even contrary to each other.
In this respect Christianity is in a worse position than a prominent philosophical school. In fact, the founders of the philosophical schools left behind books of their works, left more or less clearly stated doctrine, more or less fully expressed, so there are limitless opportunities for arbitrary interpretations of their teachings. The Lord Jesus Christ His teaching in the writing have left. He did not write anything. Therefore, nothing is easier than to your taste to reinterpret the doctrine of Christ, and to invent “Christianity,” giving this name to their own misconceptions. The same sacred books of the New Testament were written not by the apostles the book, but by the inspiration of the Holy spirit. The Holy Church has the true interpretation of the gospel and Epistles of the apostles.
The tragedy of Christianity beztserkovnaya
Many divorced people do we have, dreaming about some beztserkovnaya Christianity. These people seem to constantly anarchic system of thinking; or they are not capable, but often just too lazy to think through their thoughts. But, not to mention the most obvious contradictions of this beztserkovnaya of Christianity, you can always see that in this fertile Christian life, the Holy enthusiasm, the enthusiasm is absolutely not the case.
When people take the gospel, forgetting that it gave them a Church, it is for them – like the Koran, relieved by Allah from the heavens. When they managed to view in the gospel of the doctrine of the Church, then all Christianity is the same doctrine as powerless to re-create life and humans, like every other doctrine.
Our first parents Adam and eve wanted without God to become “like gods”, relying on the magical power of beautiful apples. So many of our contemporaries dream to be saved without the Church and without God, though the gospel is. The book of the gospel, they hope in the same way as Adam and eve hoped for the Apple of Paradise.
But the book is not able to give them a new life. People who deny the Church constantly speak about the “gospel principles” of the gospel teaching; but Christianity as life is completely alien to them. In beztserkovnaya form, Christianity is the only sound, occasionally sentimental, but always caricatured and lifeless.
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There have been cases that people light conceived by the Cabinet to establish a world religion, sent millions of messages with an invitation to unite in this “common religion”, a project which was attached to the appeals. But this project was formulated in the most General terms: under him with the same convenience could subscribe Catholic and Protestant, Mohammedan and Jew.
And, of course, if all people agreed with this project, it did not unite them among themselves. General abstract provisions to anything anyone would not require, people would still be the same, no one would have received no salvation. Completely insane idea to connect people on the basis of any doctrine, for that required a special supernatural power, and which has the one, Holy, Catholic Church of Christ.
Very easy in all these and similar phenomena of modern life to answer the question: on what grounds could they have come and what is their meaning? The soil for them, precisely what genuine Orthodox Christian ideal of the Church for many of our contemporaries were too high. Christ came to the earth to renew the human nature. For this update, He created the Church. The update is accomplished not without difficulty. Here, according to the Apostle, it is necessary to fight to the blood (Heb. 12:4), to fight, of course, sin.
And people just fell in love with their sinful nature, love sin and don’t want to part with it. Now people are so ossified in their selfishness, that the Orthodox ideal of the Church seems to them some personal violence, confusing and unnecessary despotism. Orthodox ideal of the Church requires quite a lot of selfless humility, of love in General, and therefore for the poor the love of the hearts of our contemporaries, for whom the most precious of their sinful self-love, that ideal and seems to be a burden grievous to be borne.
How can that be? Oh, the humanity knows what to do in such cases! When some ideal sound not on the shoulder, too heavy, it is replaced with something more similar to, belittle the most ideal, distorting its essence, but sometimes leaving his former name. After all, how many are now already given up on the ideal of love (!). They say that on the basis of love to build the public life is absolutely a pipe dream, which it is better to refuse in advance to avoid worse later.
Moreover, the fascination with the ideal of the Church, even the religious life, downright harmful is called; if it hinders the progress of social life. Leaving love as the in life public, only for private needs, all his attention turned exclusively on the right, who think to cure all society’s ills. Along with this virtue in General is substituted for the observance of order and external decorum. Gold is expensive, and to replace it invented the gilding, and to replace the missing virtue invented decency.
Absolutely they do the same with the ideal of the Church, which requires full unity of souls and hearts. The Church is a substitute for Christianity – the value of a brand, as we have said, uncertain. Conscience sometimes remains calm: after all, “Christianity” is the name decent! And to substitute for it the name of no Church can be everything that will like. Here it is impossible not to notice the evil actions of a murderer, old serpent.
The demons, therefore, take the form of an angel of light, that their own kind is disgusting to humans. Not easy to persuade a man to complete godlessness and blasphemy. The devil knows this, and therefore is in a roundabout way, it inspires only to separate Christianity from the Church in full confidence that without the Church people still come to atheism, you will lose salvation and will die in his power. The devil now, as in the temptations of Christ in the desert, turns to the Scriptures to prove the possibility of separating Christianity from the Church.
But the trouble with our times is that no one wants Frank to admit his spiritual poverty, in the bitterness of his heart to the point that serious and even strange has become the ideal of the Church.
No, replacing gold with copper, to gold doesn’t want to attribute any value. Now with the bitterness of the attack on the Church and deny the very idea of the Church, hypocritically hiding behind the loud and formulaic, boring phrases about “individual freedom”, “individual interpretation” of Christianity, the religion of freedom and spirit.
Christ’s ideal of a single Church society (“that they all may be one as We are one” (Jn. 17:22) is humiliated and disfigured, but because he loses his vital. Beztserkovnaya Christianity, some “Evangelical” Christianity, different world Christian student unions – all this is nothing as belittling and distortion of Christ’s ideas of the Church, killing all truly Christian grace-filled Church life.
SV. Irenaeus of Lyons does not allow the possibility of separating Christian truth from the Church. “Should not, – he wrote – seek among others the truth which is easy to obtain from the Church, for the apostles, like a rich man in the Treasury, it is collected in it all that belongs to truth, so that everyone takes from her the drink of life. It is, namely, the door of life, and all others are thieves and robbers.” Forgetting this truth is always and only led to confusion.
About the apostates of his time, St. Irenaeus writes: “They don’t eat for life from the Breasts of the mother, do not use the purest source that comes from the body of Christ, but dig for themselves broken wells of earthly trenches, and drink putrid water out of the mud, away from the faith of the Church, not to apply, and rejecting the spirit, not to reason. Occurduring from the truth, heretics dignity fond of any confusion, disturb them, at times thinking about the same things and never having a strong opinion, want to be sophists of words than disciples of the truth.” The same sad fate of the “walk” becomes of apostates from the Church and now.
That is why so many in our time are different, very bizarre “searches” that forgotten truth of the Church. In the age of the Apostolic fleeing was attached to the Church, and “from all outsiders, no one dared to molest him” (acts. 5:13). Then it was not possible to question: where is the Church? It was a clear and specific value, sharply separated from all secular. Now between the Church and the “world” is some kind of staging environment. Now there is no clear separation of Church and not-Church. There are still some unknown Christianity, not even Christianity, but a General abstract religion.
The light of the Church has obscured these vague notions of Christianity and of religion, and all seeking can’t see why the “search” so often turns into “wandering”. Hence in our days, such an abundance of “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). Opened, if it be permissible so to speak, some kind of sport “seeking God”; the “God-seeking” has become the goal. Because of our many “seekers” allowed to think that they, if their quest was successful, he would have felt himself supremely unhappy and immediately started with the same zeal to engage in “bogoviceva”. After all, the search for God many people in our time were formed in his name.
And I remember the harsh sentence of his grace, Bishop Michael (Gribanovsky) over all sorts of searches in General: “Because that left without principles; and while looking for the best, worst, enjoy the hustle and cheat without compunction. And what is conscience, if no one knows what is truth, what is good, what is evil!”
Intermediate concepts of religion and Christianity only alienates many people from the truth, because sincerely seeking God, they are a kind of ordeal. The path of these searches-trials take many, but not all are successful for it. A considerable part of and “goes to ordeal,” not finding blessed peace.
Finally, in this area, so to speak, the demi-Monde-half-truths in this sphere unspoken and uncertain, in this “uncertain and undecided world” shrinking of the soul, becomes flabby, poorly responsive to fertile enthusiasm. Such a soul will try to “search” even when find. It creates a sad type of “religious prazdnuete”, as called by the F. M. Dostoevsky.
Marked the position on all things Church people in our time a great responsibility.
Church people are much to blame for the fact that all “seekers,” they are vaguely indicate bad his example illuminate the final path of the quest. And this point is not an abstract concept of Christianity, namely the Church of the living God.
You, like many people, until the end of the last tedious way of searching, to judge that a complete calm comes only when people believe in the Church, when he all my being to accept the idea of the Church so that it is unthinkable, the separation of Christianity from the Church. Then begins, indeed, “a sense of Church life.”
Man feels that he is a branch of the great, ever blooming and ever unatego of the tree of the Church. He regards himself as not a follower of any school, namely a member of the body of Christ with whom he has shared life and from whom he receives this life. Because only those who believe in the Church who charters the Church is guided by the evaluation of the phenomena of life and the direction his personal life, who finally “felt life” Church, the one and only person – on the right track. Many things that seemed vague and seductive, will become definite and clear. Particularly expensive is that in times of General vacillation, fluctuation from side to side, right to left and left to right, each person of the Church feels like it is on the unshakable rock of centuries, is as firmly under his feet.
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The Holy spirit today breathes in the Church
In the Church lives the Spirit of God. This is not a dry and empty dogmatic position, save only in respect to the past. No, this is “the truth, experienced the cognitive” anyone who is imbued with the ecclesiastical mind and ecclesiastical life. The Holy life of the Church cannot even be the subject of dry academic study; it is the study of the available experienced. About the life of grace, clearly perceived, human language can always speak only hazy and dark. On the life of the Church knows only one who has it; for him, it does not require proof, and for not having her and she is almost not provable.
Therefore, for a member of the Church should be the task of his life – constantly, more and more, to unite with the life of the Church, and at the same time, and for others to preach about the Church, not replacing it with Christianity, not replacing her dry and abstract teaching. There’s not supposed to make any concessions. There is no Christianity, no Christ, no grace, no truth, no life, no salvation, nothing without the Church, and yet there is only one Church!
Too often now talking about the lack of life in the Church, about the “revival” of the Church. All these speeches we find it difficult to understand and rather inclined to admit them absolutely meaningless. Life in the Church to dry out can never, for before the end of the century of the indwelling Holy Spirit (Jn. 14:16). And life in the Church is. Only beztserkovnaya people do not notice this life. The life of the spirit of God is incomprehensible to the human soul, it seems to him, even foolishness, because it is available only spiritual.
We, the people, mental mindset, rarely given a sense of Church life. Meanwhile, the now people, heart of a simple and pious life, living constantly with this feeling of grace Church life. This spiritual atmosphere is the breath of the Church is particularly felt in the monasteries. That’s where convinced of the power and reality of the grace of God living in the Church! Marvel and thank God when I see that Church life really bringeth a change of person, makes him “a new creature”. Here the enlightened mind, are high clean looks, a heart softened with love and joy descends upon the soul. Backslidden from the Church, proud of his education, in fact, much lower and rougher living a Church life of the monk, the fool.
No, not about the lack of life in the Church, in our opinion, it is necessary to speak, but only about the lack in us of the Church’s consciousness. Many people live a Church life, not even this is not clearly aware of. But if we consciously live the life of Church, and we never preach about the good of this life. With outsiders we are in dispute is usually about Christian truths, forgetting about Church life. Teaching, theory, dogma in our eyes are as if above the life of the Church. We are also sometimes able to replace the Church, Christianity, life – abstract teaching.
Our problem is that we are a little appreciate his Church and the great good of the life of the Church. We do not confess their faith in the Church boldly, clearly and definitely.
Believing in the Church, we constantly like to apologize for what we (all) still believe. We read the ninth member of the Symbol of faith without much joy, and even guilty.
Church of man are now often greeted with an exclamation of Turgenev’s poetry in prose: “You still believe? Yes, You are absolutely retarded man!” And how many people have so much courage to boldly profess: “Yes, I believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, belong to the Holy Orthodox Church, and because I’m the best man, for in the Church only possible that new life for which the Son of God came to earth; only in the Church can come in the full statue of Christ, therefore, only in the Church possible genuine progress, true salvation!”
Not often do to the question: “You’re not one of the disciples of Christ?” we are ready notitia and clestia: “For I do not know man”?