No Other Foundation Fr. Lawrence R. Farley, and Ancient Faith Ministries

Imagine my surprise to find that the view that Jesus was not divine was not confined to J.W.’s and Christadelphians. When perusing Facebook (just one of my bad habits) I found a debate televised on Faith Unaltered between Dr. Dale Tuggy (who denied the divinity of Jesus) and Dane Van Eyes (who affirmed it). Apparently cults like the J.W.’s were not the only ones now denying the divinity of Christ. Who knew?

When we are reading the literature of the ancient Hebrews (i.e. the Old Testament) it is important to be aware of the kind of glasses we are wearing—that is, we should be aware of the unspoken conceptual presuppositions that we bring to our reading. If we are not aware of our ingrained conceptual presuppositions, we can make mistakes in understanding ancient literature.

Now that Great Lent is upon us, the question sometimes arises about where we should put our spiritual focus. There are two places we should certainly not put our focus—and only one place where we should.

Presented for your consideration (as Rod Serling used to say): an old man dressed up as an Orthodox priest-monk who is actually neither priest nor monk, performing outrageous antics both in public and online in a furious attempt to draw attention to himself. Mr. Milton Kapner calls himself Brother Nathanael, and he is a Jewish man who has attracted a large following of online listeners to his regular virulent anti-Semitic rants. Though he was once a novice in an Old Calendarist monastery in Colorado, he was kicked out of that monastery and is now not a monk at all, despite wearing monastic garb, but “a showman with a persecution complex who likes to be the center of attention” (from “Orthodox Christianity Then and Now”).

In reflecting on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, the Very Rev. Dr Bogdan Bucur calls our attention to the difference between the Lord’s invitation to those at his right hand in Matthew 25.34: “Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world,” and the injunction to those on His left, “‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt 25.41). In this account of the last judgment, the difference between those on the right and the left is their deeds during their earthly lives. Fr Bogdan urges us to consider the concrete actions the Lord is expecting us to take during our time on this Earth to physically and practically minister to all those in need around us.

The work of the prophet Haggai is short and easy to miss; it is a mere two chapters in our Bibles sandwiched in between the books of Zephaniah and Zechariah. If you are flipping quickly through the final pages of the Old Testament he easy to miss. After ploughing through longer works such as those of Isaiah (66 chapters), Jeremiah (52 chapters, plus 5 more chapters of Lamentations), and Ezekiel (48 chapters), Haggai looks positively puny in comparison