YO-Mail
(Young Orthodox Mail)
Vol. III No. 5
In this issue:
From the
Office: Christ is Risen!
New section on Dating Questions
Food for the Soul: Joseph of
Arimethea and the Myrrh-bearers: Keeping Faith When Things Seem Hopeless
An Orthodox
Look: Movie: Spider-man
In the News: Equating the Probability of the
Resurrection
On the
Calendar: 13th
All-American Council Youth and Young Adult Activities: Deadline Extension for
YO-Mail Subscribers!
Love and
Dating: Because
You Asked for It
Real
Questions/Real Answers: The Orthodox Christian Bible
From the
Office: Christ is Risen! Also, New Section on Dating Questions
Christ is Risen! Indeed He
is Risen!
Hello reader!
The Paschal season continues
and we can still great each other with those incredible words of hope and joy:
Christ is Risen!
You asked for a section on
answering questions about love and dating and you were heard! E-mail us your
questions to youth@oca.org and put “Love and
Dating” in the subject line. We’ll answer your question directly and then post
it later in an upcoming issue. Don’t worry all submissions will be treated
anonymously.
Food
for the Soul: Joseph of Arimathea and the Myrrh-bearers: Keeping Faith When
Things Seem Hopeless
Joseph of Arimathea, a
respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom
of God, took courage and went to Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus.
And Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he
asked him whether He was already dead. And when he learned from the centurion
that He was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. And he bought a linen shroud,
and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud, and laid him in a tomb,
which had been hewn out of the rock; and he rolled a stone against the door of
the tomb. Mary Mag'dalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.
And when the Sabbath was
past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices,
so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the
week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one
another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the
tomb?" And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back; -- it was
very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right
side, dressed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them,
"Do not be afraid; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has
risen, He is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his
disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see
him, as he told you." And they
went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon
them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid. (Mark 15 43 – 16:8 43:)
On the second Sunday after
Pascha, we hear this Gospel reading in Church during the Divine Liturgy. It is
the account of people who care for the dead body of the person they believed would save them from the terrible
situation in which they found themselves. They were Jewish; a people under
occupation by a foreign power, a people in persecution, a people in fear.
They became followers of
Jesus, witnessed His many miracles, heard His words, and saw Him as their
Savior from pain and from fear. They
also saw Him die, and with his death saw what they thought was the end of all
their hopes. Instead of reacting out of
disappointment and anger, they responded out of love and came to His tomb to
finish the preparation of His body for death. Instead of finding a dead body to
anoint, however, they find the impossible: the stone of the tomb rolled away
and an angel that tells them Jesus was not there, but was risen from the dead!
In days when we find
ourselves searching for hope and coming to terms with the fact that things that
we thought of as invincible are, in fact, very vulnerable, this passage gives
us an important message: “Do not be afraid!” These are powerful words that
reflect the reality that we often put our trust and faith in beliefs that can’t
help us. Like the myrrh-bearers we must realize that this is God’s world, that
He is in charge, and that He will shine hope when all hope is lost. Because of
Christ and the empty tomb we know that no matter how bad things get, ultimately
we can look to God’s Kingdom; where there is no sickness or sorrow, but life
everlasting.
As His Beatitude
Metropolitan THEODOSIUS writes in his Paschal message “let us shine in times of
uncertainty with the Light which can never be overcome by darkness. Bolstered
by the same assurance through which the fear of the Myrrh-bearing Women was
overcome, let us run, as messengers of hope, to proclaim the empty tomb to a
world "groaning in travail" (Romans 8:22).”
“O
Lord, give me the peace of understanding that Your Will governs all and that
You are truly the lover of mankind Who has destroyed death, established eternal
life, and called all people to turn towards You and live.”
An
Orthodox Look: Movie: Spider-man
Spider-man, starring Tobey Maguire as our friendly neighborhood
web-slinger, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson, and Willem Dafoe as the Green
Goblin, stays pretty close to the comic book.
The most obvious change is the switch from mechanical web-shooters to
organic web-shooters; however, Sam Raimi, the director, softens the impact of
the change by having Peter make the same motion to shoot webs as he does in the
comics. Despite some other changes, the
movie remains very faithful to the comic book and will please Spider-man fans.
In
the News: Equating
the Probability of the Resurrection
We came across Emily Eakin’s May 11, 2002 NY Times article, “So God's Really in the Details?” and thought it would interest many of our statistically and philosophically inclined readers.
The text of the article follows:
Economists
use probability theory to make forecasts about consumer spending. Actuaries use
it to calculate insurance premiums. Last month, Richard Swinburne, a professor
of philosophy at Oxford University, put it to work toward less mundane ends: he
invoked it to defend the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.
"For someone dead for
36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely
improbable," Mr. Swinburne told an audience of more than 100 philosophers
who had convened at Yale University in April for a conference on ethics and
belief. "But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only
operate because he makes them operate."
Mr. Swinburne, a commanding
figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence
for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the
probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his
lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his
audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a
dense thicket of letters and symbols - using a probability formula known as
Bayes's theorem - and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only
if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is
.97"
In plain English, this
means that, by Mr. Swinburne's calculations, the probability of the
Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 percent.
While his highly technical
lectures may not net Christianity many fresh converts, Mr. Swinburne's efforts
to bring inductive logic to bear on questions of faith have earned him a
considerable reputation in the small but vibrant world of Christian academic
philosophy. Thanks to the efforts of Mr. Swinburne and a handful of other
nimble scholarly minds - including Alvin Plantinga at the University of Notre
Dame and Nicholas Wolterstorff at Yale - religious belief no longer languishes
in a state of philosophical disrepute. Deploying a range of sophisticated
logical arguments developed over the last 25 years, Christian philosophers have
revived faith as a subject of rigorous academic debate, steadily chipping away
at the assumption - all but axiomatic in philosophy since the Enlightenment -
that belief in God is logically indefensible.
"They are the first
group within 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy to tackle questions of
religious faith using the tools of philosophy," said Brian Leiter, a
professor of law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and editor
of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, which ranks academic philosophy
departments. "It would be accurate to say that it's a growth
movement."
Mr. Wolterstorff, who
retired from Yale in December and in whose honor the conference was organized,
agreed. "And it's not just graybeards," he added, referring to the
dozens of younger scholars and graduate students in attendance. "Within
the general discipline, this development of the philosophy of religion has been
extraordinary."
To be sure, not all of the
movement's philosophers agree with one another, use the same tactics or even
hold the same religious beliefs. Some, including Mr. Swinburne, for example,
are what's known as evidentialists: they accept the Enlightenment doctrine that
a belief is justified only when evidence can be found for it outside the
believer's own mind. According to the classic evidentialist argument, for faith
to be considered rational it has to be supported by independent proof, and
there simply isn't any. (Asked what he would say if God appeared to him after
his death and demanded to know why he had failed to believe, the British
philosopher and staunch evidentialist Bertrand Russell replied that he would
say, "Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence.")
In "The Existence of
God" (Oxford University Press, 1979),
Mr. Swinburne, a Greek
Orthodox Christian, tried to meet the evidentialist challenge using Bayes's
theorem. Supplying pages of intricate, technical argumentation to back up his
claims, he wrote that many natural phenomena - including the universe itself -
are, well, if not incontrovertible proof of God's handiwork, at least
"more probable if there is a God than if there is not." (Mr.
Swinburne, it turns out, is not the first to enlist Bayes's theorem in defense
of religion. In a 1763 paper presented to the British Royal Society, the
minister Richard Price used it to show there was good evidence in favor of the
miracles described in the New Testament.)
More influential at the
moment, however, are the "reformed epistemologists" led by Mr.
Plantinga and Mr. Wolterstorff, who are Calvinists. These scholars reject the
evidentialist insistence on independent proofs. After all, they point out, the
ability to distinguish good evidence from bad requires reason, but why trust
our ability to reason? Where's the proof that our reason is any good? For the
evidentialists, reason is considered a "basic belief," one that
doesn't require additional evidence to be true. But if reason can be considered
a basic belief, then so, too, say the reformed epistemologists, can faith in
God.
Accepting faith as a basic
belief, they say, does not make faith irrational. On the contrary, they insist,
a belief can lack independent evidence and still be rational. Some beliefs are
simply self-evident. Most people know that 1 + 1 = 2, Mr. Wolterstorff points
out, just as they accept beliefs about their bodily state - like "I feel
dizzy" - without having to consult other sources. "We believe lots of
things that don't have publicly formulated arguments," Mr. Wolterstorff
said. "Reformed epistemology challenges the need for arguments."
To buttress their case, the
reformed epistemologists lean on Thomas Reid, an 18th-century Scottish
"common sense" philosopher, who, arguing that many legitimate beliefs
are simply instinctual, complained: "Are we to admit nothing but can be
proved by reason?"
But despite their intricate
arguments, some critics - including Christians - worry that reformed
epistemologists make it far too easy to justify any belief, no matter how
absurd. Mr. Plantinga calls this the Great Pumpkin Objection. As he stated the
problem in a seminal 1983 essay, "Reason and Belief in God": "If
belief in God is properly basic, why cannot just any belief be properly basic?
What about voodoo or astrology? What about the belief that the Great Pumpkin
returns every Halloween? Could I properly take that as basic?"
The answer, as you'd
expect, is "certainly not." But explaining why turns out to be a
formidable challenge. Mr. Plantinga has devoted three thick volumes and the
last 20 years to the effort, stressing, among other things, that for a belief
to be justified, it must be held by a person whose mental faculties are
functioning properly.
More aggressively, he has
suggested that our capacity for true beliefs is proof that a divine creator -
rather than Darwinian natural selection - is behind evolution: if human beings
evolved by random process from mentally primitive creatures, how could we be
sure that any of our beliefs - including our belief in evolution - are true?
At the Yale conference,
however, neither Darwin nor the Great Pumpkin Objection seemed any more
pressing than conundrums that have dogged Christianity far longer -
occasionally giving the event the aura of a medieval synod. If God is
omnipotent and wholly good, why does he permit evil to occur? The philosophers
wondered. And if God ultimately decides what happens in the world, in what
sense can human beings be said to have free will?
Mr. Swinburne also came in
for his share of questions. "Bayes's theorem provides a model of learning
from experience," one philosopher observed. "As time goes by, it
seems you would accumulate more evidence against the Resurrection because the
expected Second Coming doesn't occur."
Mr. Swinburne acknowledged
the point was worth considering. But he wasn't about to concede it entirely.
When Jesus spoke about the Second Coming, "he might have said soon but he
certainly didn't say when," Mr. Swinburne insisted, adding, "I don't
think you have a very strong case there."
July is approaching and so is the 13th
All-American Council! We have received hundreds of registrations from youth and
young adults all across the US and Canada (and even some from abroad). It’s not
too late to sign-up and be part of the OCA’s largest gathering of youth and
young adults ever.
The weeks activities include educational sessions, a
youth summit to discuss and determine ways in which teen can take a more active
role in the Church, trips to local attractions including Wet ‘N Wild, Universal
Islands of Adventure, Wonderworks, Disney Quest, and Fun Spot, and the
opportunity to be with hundreds of Orthodox Christians your own age.
Even if you are getting your forms in after June 1st,
as YO-mail subscribers you can still register without paying the $50 late fee.
Just write “YO-Mail” on your registration form and send it in by June 21st and you will be exempt from the $50 late
fee.
For more information on the Council’s youth and young
adult activities and downloadable registration forms go to http://yya.oca.org/13aac.
Hope to see you there!
Love and
Dating: Because You Asked for It
Ok, readers, you asked for this section and here it is! This
is your place to ask questions on love and dating and get an Orthodox
perspective. E-mail us your questions to youth@oca.org
and put “Love and Dating” in the subject line. We’ll answer your question
directly and then post it later in an upcoming issue. Don’t worry all
submissions will be treated anonymously.
Real
Questions/Real Answers: The Orthodox Christian Bible
Q. BE writes:
Hello
YO-Mail
I have a question that has been bothering me for quite sometime. Many times I
hear that early church councils settled the canon of scriptures. This claim has
been made by Catholics and Orthodox alike. If the canon was settled by
the councils, how is it that the canon of the Orthodox/Catholic churches are
not identical? We have 3rd Maccabees, Psalm 151, and some other books
that they don't have.
Why the differences?
And also,
I need your help in a
question posed to me by a protestant.
Basically, he says that the
Council at Hippo and Catharge are not infallible in determining the Old
Testament canon because they were not an ecumenical council, but a local synod.
What council or ecumenical
council confirmed the OT canon that we have today in the Orthodox Church?
A. Well BE, it
sounds like you’ve been doing some serious thought and research about this. To
answer the first question, St. Athanasius established the New Testament canon
in his Paschal letter of 367 AD. Canon
85 of the Apostolic Canons, Canon 60 of Liodicea, and Canon 32 of Carthage
reaffirmed St. Athanasius’ list of texts.
Both the Orthodox and the Catholics recognize these canons.
The differences between
Orthodox Bibles and Catholic Bibles are due to the sources each church
uses. The Orthodox tend to favor the
Septuagint where Catholics tend to favor Hebrew texts. Thus, Orthodox Bibles follow Septuagint
numbering and divisions and Catholic Bibles follow Hebrew numbering and
divisions. The content is the same, but
the books are divided differently.
Although these were local
councils, they were recognized to have an ecumenical character. They spoke a universal truth; thus, despite
not being “ecumenical,” these councils speak authoritatively on this
issue. It is also interesting to note
that councils which called themself ecumenical often proved to be anything but! For example, the 4th Council of
Constantinople (869-70) saw itself as ecumenical. The council’s teachings, however, were not inspired by the Holy
Spirit and were later seen to be false.
The temptation is to look
for answers to this type of question in rules and precedents. The Orthodox Church moves organically and
tests questions like this against the Tradition of the Church, its entire life,
inspired by the Holy Spirit, rather than just canons issued by councils. As an example, the Council of Florence-Ferrara
in 1439 issued several canons but the Church as a whole never accepted
them. The Church is called to grow
closer to God and not to engage in endless case studies.
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