Father Dabney put his finger on the crucial issue for the South (and for any people): There must be religious unity for a people to survive and flourish. He writes,
In what I found to be a fluid disposition, Rebecca Dillingham makes the argument, and I would agree on principle, that the South has been crippled by our denominational diversity. Although I do not agree with her conclusion that Orthodoxy is the cure, myself being more in favor of a blend of Southern Presbyterian theology and Anglican liturgy (I attend such a church); I absolutely agree that stability in the churches of the South must be addressed.
In saying this, however, he also reveals one of the main reasons why there isn’t religious unity in Dixie, although we don’t think he meant to: Folks treating religion as a DIY project. That’s what his solution for the religion question for the South boils down to, a preference for a new combination of recent arrivals in Christian history – ‘a blend of Southern Presbyterian theology and Anglican liturgy’.
One may discern immediately that something is amiss with this formulation according to the principle of ‘lex orandi, lex credendi’, which translates roughly to ‘The law of worship is the law of belief’ (see p. 19 of this essay). There is a contradiction in blending Presbyterian theology with Anglican worship forms, as theology and worship form an integrated whole. Presbyterian forms of worship and Presbyterian theology cannot be separated, cannot be spliced together with other Protestant, Catholic, etc., theologies and forms of worship. They are mutually exclusive of one another. Such experimental religious combinations will not fare any better than the genetic splicing together of different plant and animal species that scientists have been madly going about lately.
New-fangled denominational mishmashes will not be able to withstand the attacks of the enemy over the long haul. What is needed is to find the Church that Christ established (not the one that man concocted), the one He promised that the ‘gates of hell shall not prevail against’ (St Matthew’s Gospel 16:18).
A central question we may ask, therefore, is – Which Church received its form of worship from God Himself, and still uses that same order of worship? This can only be said of the Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox Church. The priest Fr George Mastrantonis says concerning this,
The Divine Liturgy is considered the most significant ancient Christian service, not so much for its phrasing and words as for its meaning. In fact, the Divine Liturgy was in practice right after the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Disciples of Christ on the 50th day after His Resurrection, as the sacred writer of the Acts of the Apostles records (Acts 2:46 ff). . . . The Divine Liturgy as such was the center of the inspiration of the first Christians in their communion with God and with one another.
In upper rooms and catacombs the Apostles and later the Presbyters and Bishops of the primitive Christian Church offered the Divine Liturgy for its sacred Mysteries. It seems that relics and reminiscences of that time were preserved in the Divine Liturgies of the 2nd century and especially of the 4th century when the Liturgies took their final form. But whatever were the various forms of the Divine Liturgy of the primitive Church, as well as of the Church of the final formation of the Divine Liturgy, the meaning given to it by both the celebrants and the communicants was one and the same; that is, the belief of the awesome change of the sacred Species of the Bread and Wine into the precious Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, the Lord.
The three most well-known versions of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, with their ancient, apostolic lineages, are listed and described by Fr George:
. . .
The rest is at https://identitydixie.com/2023/05/28/dixies-church/.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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