Monday, June 11, 2018

Met. Kallistos Ware strays way off the reservation

The hitherto highly respected theologian has written the Forward for the new edition of "The Wheel," a pseudo-Orthodox publication that appears dedicated to challenging the traditional Christian understanding of gender and sexual morality. At least one Orthodox site claims, inaccurately, that Ware has endorsed unnatural marriage. He did not, as far as I can tell, cross that line.

But he came damn close.

From my perspective he seems to be spouting the same theological revisionism that has devastated what we once called the Mainline Protestant denominations and which, like a deadly cancer, has now infected and is spreading within the Roman Catholic Church.

This needs to be addressed quickly and decisively. The Holy Synod must demand a formal affirmation of his adherence to the Orthodox Christian Faith which I believe would necessitate recanting a great deal of what he wrote. This is not a time or place for "dialogue," one of the favorite words employed by modernists which can be generally understood to mean "let's talk until you realize how wrong Christianity has been for its first two thousand years." This is a time for a firm defense of Holy Orthodoxy in the face of liberal Protestant heresy.

HT: Bill Tighe

9 comments:

  1. Vladyka Ware has always been a feminist sympathizer.

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  2. Bureaucracy is the disease. They tend to conform to one another, regardless of position, doctrine, etc... The vast majority of people are too stupid to understand doctrine anyway. So, we will continue to see this trend, until some sort of epidemic or other catastrophe rudely reminds us why our ancestors made such things taboo.

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  3. Very sad! I love the writings of Bp. Kallistos Ware. It is sad to see him saying things so contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ and his Church!

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  4. Met Ware has been employing the same method re: universalism, ecclesiology, and the female priesthood. He employs rationalizations and questions to lead his followers off the precipice. Lord have mercy, the Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate is a stumblingblock.

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  5. Perhaps some of this stems from +Kallistos being a titular bishop. The actual hierarchy seems more grounded.

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  6. Also, "The Wheel" needs some strict scrutiny. Looks like an EP project.

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  7. The Wheel looks like an effort to be the Orthodox version of the National Catholic Reporter. It is clearly a heretical publication.

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  8. Five of the fifteen articles in that issue of The Wheel can be read online; those that are in color here:

    https://www.wheeljournal.com/current

    as opposed to black-and-white. Having now read both Bishop Kallistos' "foreword" and Fr. Andrew's "editorial," I find the latter distinctly more problematic in some respects than I do the former. Metropolitan Kallistos's skates close to the edge, but all one can really derive from it is that there may be some "grey areas" in which there are many "open questions." As to Fr. Andrew's, while there are some very good things in it, esp. pp. 16-18 on the "sexualization" of all human relationships/friendships, there are some causes of concern. Perhaps it is too far a fetch to think of the ruminations about "becoming human" (as opposed to "being human") in the first paragraph of the article on p. 11 as a gift to abortionists and their fautors (acknowledging that abortion is not a subject under consideration at any point in the article), but what is one to make of Louth's explicit invocation for purpose of analogous comparison of "women's ministry in the church" (p. 11, para. 3) and "the ordination of women to the priesthood" itself (pp. 14-15, the long para. that runs from p. 14 to p. 15)? (I assume that he things that the ordination of women to "the diaconate" is not a problematic poit in those Orthodox circles in which he moves.)

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  9. Kallistos Ware is still essentially an Anglican.

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