Saturday, May 6, 2017

The O&H blog takes out Public Orthodoxy's trash

Is Public Orthodoxy posting articles from homosexual men who were laicized? It seems so. If that's not bad enough the article itself is a deplorable caricature of Orthodox thought seeking to normalize same-sex congress. After much public outcry, Dr. Alfred Kentigern Siewers has written a rebuttal to such thinking. I'm unsure which public Public Orthodoxy seeks to speak to or speak for, but I'm happy to walk on the other side of the road and give them wide berth.


(Orthodox and Heterodoxy) - Public Orthodoxy’s recent post by Giacomo Sanfilippo on “Conjugal Friendship” claimed to take a postmodern approach to sacramental conjugality in Orthodox Christianity, but ended up falling into ethnophyletic and gnostic heresies from an Orthodox standpoint.

The article raises outdated questions of modernist sexual identity in the name of postmodernity. It then answers them wrongly from the standpoint of Holy Tradition:

“To the question, ‘Can two persons of the same gender ‘have sex’ with each other?’ we hear from Holy Tradition a resounding no,’” it states. “Yet if we ask, “Can two persons of the same gender form a bond in which ‘the two become one?’” the scales begin to fall from our eyes.”

The scaly eyes seem part of a straw man view of the Body of Christ, however. For the Orthodox Church does not call it impossible for two persons of the same gender to engage in sex with each other. Recognizing that possibility in her teachings on love and anthropology, she does not equate secular Western definitions of gender and sex in her response to any forms of sexual activity in fallen human nature. Nor does Orthodoxy privilege Western individualism by identifying a certain definition of gender with personhood. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos notes that Holy Tradition sees Personhood (Hypostasis) in the mystery of the All Holy Trinity, not in individual will of a fallen human nature open to transfiguration by God’s grace. In the Personhood of Christ we are made, according to Genesis 1, not as persons making ourselves...
Complete article here.

3 comments:

  1. Josephus,

    Nice way to put it. I appreciated Dr. Siewers insider view and able deconstruction of the important academic "post-modern" suppositions. That said, my experience from the detritus of the Mainline tells me that correct rebuttals along with forbearing "tolerance" is not enough - Orthodoxy needs bishops who are able to firmly stand up and censor, publicly, loudly, these gross denials of the Faith. I know some bishops who are up to it, but I also know others who are not...

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  2. Jake and even the one's who are remain largely silent referring to group statements in the past.

    While these statements are usually good they lack the immediacy and the authority of a particular bishop who is well thought of has.

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  3. Yo, Dog, PO is the official blog Didactor tou Gennous of the Oecumenical Patriarchate. You can't get hired in any major American University as a scholar on Orthodoxy unless your posts get approved for PO

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