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[classic_symptom]

So it's finally summer. I'm not sure what to think. I shook the dust off my feet at the outskirts of Tampa and now I'm living with my mom in Lakeland for a couple months. I'll be working at the USF bookstore for the majority of the break, and then I'm taking a math class the last month before Fall semester begins.

I recently received a letter from

Comments

[anonymous]

tl;dr

[martiancyclist]

I followed you here from the Christianity community, to see what elaboration you might have on what you posted there.

I'm a fairly recent convert to Orthodoxy, so I can't guarantee that what I write is the Church's position, but this is the best I understand right now:

With regards to the Old Testament, while we certainly do believe that it is Divinely inspired, and written by honest people, what we're most interested in are the messianic prophecies therein. In the first few centuries of the Church, it was pored over in exhaustive detail for every phrase that sounds like a phrase from the Gospels. We get these really detailed hymns, then, about OT typology, for example

[classic_symptom]

I'm probably joining the Russian Orthodox Church myself (with the Anglican church being another possible option). While I agree with most of the Orthodox tradition, there are some Western tendencies that are so deeply ingrained in me that I'm neither able nor willing to get rid of them. One of them would be the rationalist/scientific tendency, which I think is valuable with the theist and atheist alike.

[martiancyclist]

I'm now Russian Orthodox myself (ROCOR). It's a good place to be.

So far as I can tell, there's nothing inherently wrong with being rational or scientific; problems only arise from limiting yourself to what's purely rational. But if you've accepted that Gallilean rabbis can rise from the dead (certain of them, anyway), you clearly haven't gone off the deep end in the rationalist direction.

The Church needs rationalist-leaning people and mystical-leaning people both; the mix is good for everyone. One of the nice things about the fullness of Orthodoxy -- how there's so much of everything in there -- is that everyone can find something they connect with, though it's different for everyone.

[classic_symptom]

Agreed. I think Theodosius Dobzhansky would heartily agree.