‘The Decline of Christianity in the West’

 

Many Christians in the West, like this fellow, are puzzled and dismayed by the muted response of Western leaders to the blasphemy during the Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Olympics:

 

Think about it: Our mortal enemy—Christendom‘s arch-adversary since their very conception in the Middle East—is now the only state actor actively defending Christ on the world stage.

 

(For instance, the Book of Concord has a reference stating that the Ottoman Empire [encapsulating Muslims as a whole] was the “most atrocious, hereditary, and ancient enemy of the Christian name and religion”)

 

I wish I could go back and tell Aquinas, Calvin, Martin Luther, and/or some of the Popes that this day would arrive. Could you imagine what they’d say? They probably wouldn’t even believe it.

Unfortunately, it is such men (Popes and Reformers) who have weakened the Church in the West by, in Christos Yannaras’s words, ‘religionizing’ Christianity, making it an individualistic, legalistic, earthly organization.  He writes,

‘The West thus abandoned the Gospel understanding of “salvation” (making a human being “sound,” intact, as a hypostatic existence through participation in the ecclesial mode of loving existence and communion).  The West returned to the commonplace religious concept of the legalistic justification of the individual through his or her virtues, self-control and good works.

‘Augustine’s legalistic way of thinking supports “individual” justification in juridical categories acceptable to the Roman mentality, introducing into the relationship between humanity and God a concept which we can call “transactional metaphysics.”

‘This “transactional metaphysics” is based on Augustine’s assumption that human sin is a “debt” which must be “redeemed” for justification in the sight of God.  Redemption is realized on two levels:  theologically by Christ’s death on the cross, offered as a “ransom” for the settlement of the infinitely great “debt” of human sin and impiety towards God, and anthropologically by the “penalty” imposed on the sinner which must be paid if his sins are to be redeemed.

‘ . . . But from the ninth century this “transactional metaphysics” had already entered into Western religious life.  Religious texts present God as a “sadistic father” burning to satisfy his justice, and by logical extension delighted at the torture of sinners in hell.  . . .

‘No other Christian heresy so effectively distorted the Christian Gospel.  Perhaps this was because the West adopted the individual’s natural tendency to reduce this wonderful existential invitation to his own level, to “religionize” the Church’s inner life, to subject it to the demands of individual ideological certainty and psychological moral self-sufficiency.  This natural tendency has always been a temptation for Christian consciences – ever since the time of the Judaizers of the first Christian communities.

‘ . . . In recent centuries discontented Europeans have realized something was wrong but underestimated the extent of the problem.  They turned against “dogma” which made faith into a codified set of propositions, replacing experience by intellectualism’ (Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, Chamberas and Russell, trans., Holy Cross Orthodox Press, Brookline, Mass., 2006, pgs. 39-42).

Mr Yannaras quotes Dostoyevsky on the fate of the Church in the West because of distortions of the Faith like the above:

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/decline-christianity-west.

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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!