Category Archives: Britain and Ireland
Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Available Again
This anthology of 100 essays, first published in 1995 and now with a new foreword, is at last available again from:
frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. 3rd Edition A5 495 pp.
Price: £15.00 + £2.80 p & p in the UK. Unfortunately, Air Mail to the USA is now £12.85 (surface post, which can take up to two months, is £8.00). Please make payments by Paypal button from the website: www.orthodoxengland.org.uk
From the Back Cover
Today many search for an Undivided Christendom and the traditional teachings of the Early Church, which go beyond the latter-day divisions and disputes of Roman-Catholic, Anglican and Protestant. And amid the chaos of recent years many have discovered the Orthodox Church and Her Faith, drawn from the first millennium of Christianity. In this book the author, an English Orthodox priest, looks at the authentic Orthodox Faith, beyond the historical and cultural vicissitudes surrounding it, and pinpoints its relevance to us. He writes: Orthodox Christianity is the Faith revealed to the repentant in their quest for the Holy Spirit. Should we accept it, we would thus accept the struggle for the Holy Spirit; and in so doing we would accept the struggle to build Jerusalem here, ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.
Foreword to the Third Edition
For we hope that the Lord will deliver Russia and the Russian people from the dread years of evil which have now lasted for 70 years. Russia can be reborn only through the repentance of the Russian people, through faith in God, through living the Divine commandments. Therefore the rebirth of the Russian people – the rebirth of personal, social and national life – must be founded on the Holy Orthodox Faith and their life must be built on this. And then once more, as of old, Russia will be Holy Rus, the House of the Most Holy Mother of God.
Prophecy of the Ever-Memorable Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Laurus (1987)
All my life I have been haunted by the European world that was lost by the consequences of the tragic events and sacrifices of August 1914, now exactly 100 years ago. Growing up with nineteenth-century grandparents and great-uncles who had fought in the First European War and with tragic maiden great-aunts, I knew that all of us had to live with those consequences. There has been no peace in the world since then, since the profound injustice of the victory so cruelly and ironically snatched from the Russian Empire in 1917 by Allied treachery and then the German treachery that made the slaying of the Russian Royal Family inevitable. And that, in turn, made the destruction of Germany in the Second European War inevitable, with Russian troops taking Vienna and Berlin. And that, in its turn, made the Cold War inevitable.
That War dragged on until 1991. Then the Slav, Romanian, Georgian and Albanian Churches all lived beneath the yoke of atheism and had virtually no free voices. As for the smaller and weaker Greek Churches, they were compromised by US control. Thus, the impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, at one time financed by Anglicanism, had come under US control in 1948, when Patriarch Maximos was deposed by the CIA with threats to his life and despatched into a generation of exile in Switzerland, uttering as he went the words, ‘The City is lost’.
Those were dark days of the betrayal of the Church and, virtually alone, the Church Outside Russia spoke on behalf of us all. For during the Cold War proud anti-Incarnational modernism and ecumenism (heresies, like sects and cults which are created by heresies, are always based on pride), in either their crass, pseudo-intellectual, humanist Protestant/Catholic form, as often in the US, or in their subtle, pseudo-spiritual, personalist Buddhist/Hindu form, as often in Europe, were everywhere. ‘Orthodox’ academic theology was then dominated by that spiritual decadence which may be called ‘captivity theology’. In its intellectualism that ‘theology’, ignorant of the Lives of the Saints, utterly failed to see that Orthodoxy is a striving for holiness, which is simply a life lived with prayer in conformity with the Tradition
This was the academic theology of ‘Orthodox’ intellectuals, who had studied either in Protestant centres (Oxford, Cambridge, Strasbourg, centres in Germany etc) or else in Roman Catholic centres (especially the Gregorian University in Rome, but also Paris, Louvain, Jesuit Fordham etc). The academics infected naturally reflected the proud cultural prejudices of those establishments where they had studied, resulting not in an Orthodox, but a ‘Halfodox’ vision of the world. An associated mixture of ecumenists, liberals and modernists, those intellectuals wished to reduce the Church to a mere religion, a theory and an institution, just like the Western denominations. This was, consciously or unconsciously, spiritual treachery.
Their ‘theology’, in fact philosophy, reflected the humanistic personalism and spiritually empty symbolism of that age. Most of those intellectuals have now died, if not, they are very elderly. The generation of disciple-imitators that succeeded them has even less conviction or talent. It is hardly surprising – modernism is incredibly old-fashioned in a post-modern world. With the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, that age of decadence seems increasingly distant. I remember at that time, and I mean nearly 40 years ago, being told by an ‘Orthodox’ academic at one of those above-mentioned universities that if I was not satisfied with their food that did not satisfy my soul, I should ‘go and live in Russia’. During the Cold War that was not possible; therefore I took the next best option, to frequent the last emigres of the first generation of the White emigration in Paris and the Church Outside Russia.
This anthology of essays was written between 1974 and 1995, precisely at that time when the Church Outside Russia was isolated, indeed virtually besieged, under attack from all sides and from inside, by the extremes of modernism and ‘traditionalism’ alike. Indeed, as I came to realize, the Church Outside Russia was then one of the few points of freedom anywhere in the Orthodox Church. Figures in it expressed words of truth similar only to those of the lone Serbian theologian St Justin of Chelije, canonized in 2010, and other figures on the Holy Mountain and in the monasteries of the Carpathians.
Rejoicing in the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in New York in 1981, when the Orthodoxy hierarchy was still paralysed in the homelands, at that time we also tried to reclaim for the Church the ancient holiness of Western Europe. We knew that all holiness can only come from the Church, as we daily confess in the Creed. Our task was to help gather together the remaining living spiritual and cultural forces of the dying West and to call it back to its roots in its ancient holiness that it had for the most part renounced. This desire is very much reflected in this book. Sadly, since that time we have seen the final death-throes of once Christian-based Western civilization, witnessing the disappearance of the old culture.
For after 1991, and with great speed, the demons that had operated in the atheist Soviet Union migrated to the atheist European Union, whose spiritual deadweight has been reinforced by the atheism of North America. Only a few years ago President Putin of the Russian Federation, made wise by the failure and defeat of atheism, warned the then Prime Minister Blair that demon-inspired atheism was literally a dead end; naturally, he was ignored, for deluded arrogance never listens to wisdom. Indeed, ever since 1988 the Church that President Putin belongs to, the multicultural and multilingual Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church of God, has been reviving, re-opening or building three churches every day somewhere on the planet.
Together with it there is reviving the social, political and economic life of the Russian Federation, the Russian Lands (Rus) and even other parts of the Orthosphere. In 2007 in Moscow we witnessed the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church and the re-establishment of canonical communion, a long-awaited miracle of our times. Our great hope of 20-40 years ago for the messianic restoration of Holy Rus, so great that it was a belief, has been coming true through repentance. We have no illusions that we may not see our hopes for the full restoration of the Sovereignty of the Tsar realized, or, much less likely, Europe liberated from its self-imposed ideological yoke, but at least we know that we are on the way. There is much to do, very far to go, but the direction is the right one.
Nearly twenty years on now since the first edition, this book is here reprinted, a few typographical errors corrected, spelling updated, long paragraphs divided and a few minor precisions and corrections made. May this third edition of these essays be a help to all those who seek. May it guide them to the spiritual awareness of the Church and Civilization of Holy Rus and that Orthodoxy is Christianity and that all else, whatever its legacy from ancient Orthodox times, is ultimately but an ism, a distortion and a compromise. ‘For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith’ (1 Jn. 5, 4).
Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
August 2014
St John’s Orthodox Church
Colchester, Essex, England
The Glory of the Isles
Written from an Orthodox standpoint and intended primarily for older children and teenagers, this booklet, first printed in 2009, sold out and now reprinted, can also be read by adults. In simple language, it explains the history of the first thousand years of Christianity in Great Britain and Ireland. Giving the lives of the main saints of Britain and Ireland, it is abundantly illustrated with a map, eleven line drawings and thirteen icons, all printed on glossy paper.
Its chapters explain the Glastonbury legend of St Joseph of Arimathea, the stories of St Alban and the Celtic saints, Patrick, David, Columba, Aidan, the Italian Archbishop of Canterbury St Augustine, the Greek Archbishop of Canterbury St Theodore, then St Bede and other English heroes like St Edmund, St Alfred (with his unique icon) and St Alphege. It considers the Norman Invasion with sadness and looks forward to a potential rebirth of native Orthodoxy under the spiritual guidance of St John the Wonderworker and St Elizabeth the New Martyr. It concludes:
‘For we have a spiritual secret weapon buried in our Isles, which can deliver us from the fury of the Northmen, from whom we have suffered for a thousand years. This secret weapon, which the world cannot see, understand or take from us, is the prayers of the saints of the Isles – our True Glory. The Glory of the Isles is not in the pride of the past and its crimes. It is in the humility of the Saints. And this is what makes sincere Orthodox Christians different from others’.
Printed on high quality paper, with the 2012 icon of All the Saints of Britain and Ireland on the cover, this is an ideal resource for Orthodox church schools.
Bury St Edmunds, 2014. 38 pages. £4 (6 euros/$12) postage included.
A Victory for Confederation over Unionism
Although against the views of the younger generation, the older generation in Scotland has, unlike most of Ireland over 90 years ago, not chosen full independence, it has chosen home rule. This is in itself is revolutionary. It means that Scotland has rejected the 1707 form of Union, which was successful at the time only because of massive bribery by the British elite. This means that Northern Ireland, Wales and above all England will also receive home rule, whether the politicians grant it willingly or not. Unlike most of Ireland, independence for the peoples of the British Isles is to be gradual and non-violent. It means that the Unionist ‘United’ Kingdom, centralized in London, is no more; the Isles must now seek Confederation.
The Scottish referendum is a defeat for Unionism and the centralized State, as in the Ukraine, where a centralized State, a Leninist-Stalinist conglomerate, so keenly supported by so-called ‘democratic’, self-interested Western politicians, is massacring its own peoples. The results are a clear warning to Unionists in the EU and the USA and a clear warning to elitist Establishments everywhere. Elections to such Establishments are rarely popular and are characterized by very low turnouts. However, when the question put to the electorate actually concerns them, the effect on it is electrifying. Although total freedom for Scotland has not been achieved, the result is a turning-point in UK political life, whose configuration will never be the same again.
Firstly, the Labour Party has suffered massive defections to the Scottish National Party. Having allied itself with the Establishment, the Labour Party will probably never be elected again to government, either in Scotland or in England. Secondly, however, the Conservative Party, almost identical in views to the Labour Party, may also be unelectable – as it was already in 2010. Just as the Labour Party compromised its principles under the Tory Blair, so the Conservative Party has also compromised its principles under the Liberal Cameron. Thus the Labour Party is unelectable in Scotland because of the Scottish National Party, but the Conservative Party is unelectable in England because of the English National Party, although that still calls itself UKIP.
Since the three Westminster Establishment parties have all been reduced to rumps of careerists and opportunists, puppets of Washington and Brussels (Berlin), then the field is now free for new parties to speak up for the undertrodden and disenfranchized peoples of theses Isles. The field is now open to any party, of left or right, which can listen to the people and show a love of freedom and justice – everything that the old parties, captives of banksters, arms merchants, privatized and virtually unregulated monopolies and retail lobbies, have not done. Only through Confederation can the ‘United Kingdom’ survive for another generation, after which its dissolution will probably occur in the next referendum. It is a question of time.
Freedom for Scotland?
The Westminster elite scurries for votes in Scotland. Having appealed to sentimentalism and then bribery, it next resorted to the terror tactics of economic intimidation and bullying, so well-known to the public schoolboys who run both the politics and the commerce of the British Establishment. The US President, at whose voice Westminster wags its tail, and the Australian Premier have threatened Scotland, as also the German Chancellor, who considers Scottish freedom as treacherous to the EU.
That at least is true, for freedom is always treacherous to tyranny, whether to tyranny in London or in Brussels. Whether the Scottish National leaders will be far-sighted enough to keep post-Calvinist Scotland free from the post-Catholic EU and become a permanent part of Non-EU Europe, together with equally post-Calvinist Switzerland and post-Lutheran Norway and Iceland, remains to be seen.
It is by no means certain that Scotland will choose freedom on Thursday 18 September 2014 and in any case we can doubt the fairness of the referendum; there will always be some who can ‘modify’ the result, if the result is not ‘the right one’, as we saw in the election of President Bush and as in countless EU referenda. Nevertheless, the genie is out of the bottle. If Scotland can be allowed to choose freedom, as Crimea was allowed to choose freedom – and overwhelmingly chose it – whatever the result in Scotland, others in the EU will also want to be allowed choice. At least the EU is not like the Ukraine, where, if you want freedom, you are massacred.
Most of Ireland freed itself from the Westminster tyranny at the cost of blood nearly 100 years ago. Now it is the turn of Scotland, once long ago converted to the Faith by an Irishman, St Columba, and other Irish (‘Scoti’) missionaries, who gave their name to Scotland. Sooner or later Scotland will free itself. One day Northern Ireland will choose freedom from the centralized union that is the UK, and Wales will follow. Then only England will still be bound by the Empire-making Norman elite that governs it – already there is talk of an English Parliament. Freedom is now only a question of time.
St Andrew’s Work
Introduction
A spectre haunts Europe. It is the spectre of freedom. From north-west Europe to south-east Europe, professional politicians of the Establishment elites are quaking: they may lose their jobs and with them all their opportunistic careerism and self-seeking will have been for nothing.
Scotland
Perhaps on orders from a worried Washington, today three English public schoolboys (in fact one a Polish Jew who attended an elite State school, but his manner is still that of an English public schoolboy) have hurried to Scotland in panic. They fear freedom and the people who may vote for freedom. Washington is worried about a new country that, initially at least, will be free of both its political and economic arm, the EU, and of its military arm, NATO. No doubt the CIA, through its poodles in England, is listening in on nationalist conversations, in the hope that it can discredit Scottish leaders. Certainly, the sight of three English public schoolboys in Scotland will bring in a great many votes for the Scottish National cause.
Together with them, all European Establishments are worried. If Scotland does opt for freedom, Wales, Northern Ireland and then at last England will also free themselves, but France, Spain and Italy, at the very least, are also directly concerned, for they too have minorities, from Brittany to Catalonia, from Lombardy to Corsica. All artificial unions are doomed to collapse, whether the Soviet Union, the British Union (UK), the European Union or the American Union (USA). The implications of freedom for Scotland are enormous; little wonder that the Westminster Establishment has scurried to Scotland. However, the more intelligent among them must realize that, whether their last-minute delaying-tactic bribes work or not, Scotland’s departure from the Union imposed on it over 300 years ago is sooner or later inevitable. The game is up.
If a yes for freedom vote is recorded, the UK will no longer exist and the British flag will seem an anachronism. But if the UK no longer exists, then we shall all be free of the EU. The absurdly-named United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP, will have to call itself what it is, the Independence Party. As for the three other political parties in England, they can then at last coalesce into one and rename themselves the single party for EU-appointed careerists and opportunists – which is what they have long been. As for a place on the UN Security Council, perhaps that absurdly biased organization can at last be restructured and places given to the countries that really matter and represent the real world: China, India, USA, Russia, Germany, Brazil and South Africa.
The Ukraine
Kiev’s rag bag ‘army’, composed for 50% of western Uniats and schismatics, and then of Nazis, criminals and US, UK and Polish mercenaries, supported by US and Mossad advisors and rockets, has failed to impose its tyranny on the eastern Ukraine. Having shot down a Boeing airliner, Kiev’s army and air force have been totally discredited. Over 3,000, mainly civilians, are dead, killed by the CIA puppet, the corrupt arms-dealing oligarch Poroshenko, now a war criminal. Even the cream of US PR men could not get him more than 25% of the vote, similar to that obtained by various other US puppets in Latin American banana republics and South Vietnam over the last 65 years. Even the EU, largely responsible for the original fiasco, is realizing that the Ukraine is just another artificial union, a conglomerate formed by the Russophobic Communist Party some 90 years ago, and now ardently defended by the West (which also founded Communism in Russia).
Novorossiya, New Russia, the southern and eastern half of the ‘Ukraine’ (in fact western Russia), the object of these terrifying Western-organized atrocities in 2014, is heading for freedom as part of the Russian Federation. So too are many in central and northern Malorossiya, though in Kiev neo-Nazi bands are still terrorizing the population who seek refuge in the Russian Federation. Carpatho-Russia, miscalled by Kiev ‘Zakarpat’e’, also wants freedom; if it does not join the Russian Federation, perhaps it will return to Slovakia or even Hungary, leaving Ukrainian persecution behind it. This leaves only Galicia, or eastern Poland, where all the troublemaking Uniats and schismatics are. It seems that President Putin would be happy for it to return to Poland, since most Galicians have nothing in common with Orthodox culture.
Moreover, Uniat persecution of the Church in the Ukraine has at last brought realism to the last few remaining ecumenist fantasists and naifs in Russia and also to those in Romania. In neighbouring Moldova the Church has taken a firm stand against the EU and its Satanism, despite the bribed pro-EU politicians there. What an example to Romania. And the EU is not having its way in Serbia and Montenegro either. Despite the presence of CIA-funded Protestant sects in the Ukraine, Moldova and Romania, the people have resisted. It may be that by the end of 2014, we shall see great political changes in Europe, both north-west and south-east.
Conclusion
Both Scotland and the Ukraine, not to mention Romania, are close to St Andrew. Let us pray to the first-called apostle that, come his feast in the secular month of December, we shall have good news in all the countries where he is venerated. Freedom is in the air and sooner or later we shall have it.
Freedom for England?
Whatever the result, the forthcoming Scottish referendum is proof of the forthcoming dissolution of the United Kingdom. Sooner or later the centralized London/Westminster British State is doomed to fail. Invented in 1707 through the bribery by London of unprincipled Scottish opportunists and careerists, the Union with Scotland (in fact the colonization of Scotland by London) cannot last and may even end in a few days’ time. Once it has ended, Northern Ireland will eventually at last be united with the rest of the island of Ireland and Wales too will throw off the colonial yoke.
Little wonder that the Westminster Establishment, shaken out of its complacency by recent polls, is now in panic and making its usual empty promises to the Scottish people. However, the real question for us is whether all of this will lead to the death of the British Establishment and at last to the freedom of England. Ever since 1066 the obsessive idea of Empire has haunted London. First England went under, then Wales, then Ireland, then Scotland. The medieval Anglo-Norman Kings were also intent on subjugating France, naturally, since they were more French than English.
However, the real and ruthless imperialism came under the Germanic Georgian usurpers and the Victorians, who were obsessed with a worldwide Britannia, an obsession which dragged us into two World Wars. Now in the 21st century it is time to give up imperial pretensions and return the lands of the Isles to their rightful status, an island archipelago off the shores of North-Western Europe, forming four independent countries, united by friendship and not political intrigue and bribery. Only freedom from the alien British Establishment and its Norman elite can bring long-awaited freedom to England.
Why we do not speak of ‘British’ Orthodoxy, but of the Orthodoxy of the Isles
In contemporary England the word ‘British’ signifies the ‘Establishment’ as in ‘the BBC’, the propaganda-driven British Broadcasting Corporation. It thus refers to all the pitiful, imperial aspects of the history of this little country, whether in the period of the Romans, the Normans, the Georgians with their ‘Rule Britannia’ chant, or the Victorians who physically identified the figure of Queen Victoria with the mythical figure of Britannia and their cruel, worldwide empire.
Outside England, in particular in Scotland and even more in Ireland, the word ‘Britain’ means imperialist exploitation and the barbaric colonialism of the past. Thus, the Irish Embassy in London actively discourages the use of the term ‘The British Isles’ to refer to Ireland; for the Irish it is an insult. In the Orthodox context we note that the term ‘British Orthodoxy’ is used only by Establishment, ex-Anglican convert types among the tiny British Coptic group and a few others elsewhere.
Those elsewhere are usually under the once Anglican-dominated Patriarchate of Constantinople or else are connected with the former British Middle East and British-imposed freemasonry and new calendar. Often such people are connected with the Duke of Edinburgh, a Greek Orthodox freemason, and the current Prince of Wales, who appears to follow in his father’s footsteps; certainly he hates President Putin, absurdly identifying him with the Nazis.
The hatred of the Russian Church by the British Establishment became abundantly clear at the time of the extraordinarily biased British press coverage of the 2006 Sourozh schism, when former Anglican Establishment converts abandoned the Russian Church for Greek Orthodox freemasonry. What term then do we use to describe the Orthodoxy of those who live in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales and their dependent islands and of the saints who dwelled in these islands?
Quite simply we use the term the Orthodoxy ‘of the Isles’ (of Britain and Ireland), and the Saints ‘of the Isles’ of Britain and Ireland. This term is not only inclusive of the whole archipelago of the British Isles and Ireland, but also avoids the sad connotations of the past, which saw scenes of the burning of British flags for arrogant, ‘British’ colonialist meddling. Ex-Anglican ‘British Orthodoxy’ is one thing, but Insular Orthodoxy, the Orthodoxy of the Isles, is quite another.
Mr Cameron and British Values
Having realized fifty years too late that the idea of Britain is spiritually dead, having refused to do anything to save it from death and having betrayed it time and time again, it seems extraordinary that the present UK Prime Minister is now trying to do something. Defeated in elections by the anti-EU Independence Party and with 100 days to go to the Scottish referendum, when Britain (and therefore the British flag) may well be abolished, he has now suddenly taken to a love of ‘British values’.
Thus, when asked today which values he would like to see taught in UK schools, he today replied: ‘I would say freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions. Those are the sorts of things I would hope would be inculcated into the curriculum in any school in Britain’.
The problem with Mr Cameron’s ‘British values’ is that though they may still be shared by privileged Eton and Oxford Establishment types like himself, they do not mean much to ordinary people who live in the real world of today. First of all, ‘Britain’ itself is a mythical invention of the self-interested Establishment elite of the 18th to 20th centuries. In the 21st century that has little meaning. If he were to speak about English values (or Scottish or Welsh or Irish values), that might have some meaning.
Thus, what does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a Britain whose Establishment founded an Empire on slavery, massacre and exploitation?
What does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a country where 200,000 abortions – some 6 million since abortion was legalized – are carried out by the State every year?
What does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a country whose elite signed away its sovereignty to what is now the EU forty years ago, never allowing the people to vote on it since then?
What does the ‘British’ value of tolerance mean in a country where people are afraid to speak the truth because of the tyranny of political correctness, promoted by every ‘British’ institution, not least its tightly-controlled media?
What does the ‘British’ value of the rule of law mean in a country where we are obliged without consultation to continually meddle in, invade and destroy other countries for no reason at all, where those who oppose such invasions mysteriously die as a result of SIS actions and where our e-mails and phone calls are spied on every day by the ‘security’ services?
What does the ‘British’ value of personal and social responsibility mean in a country where the judiciary, police force, businessmen, the heads of the utility companies and politicians are vetted by the so-called ‘security’ services and are usually freemasons, a closed brotherhood which bars promotion to non-members?
What does the ‘British’ value of respect for British institutions mean in a country where all those institutions are utterly compromised by their history, whether by the ‘Enclosures’ (a legalized collectivist land grab by the rich from the poor), ‘Highland clearances’ (ethnic cleansing), colonial exploitation of Indians and Africans, compulsory deportation of the poor to the ‘colonies’, the British concentration camps of the Boer War, the slaughter of innocent youth in the First World War, the current meddling in and invasions of foreign countries and the massacres of their native populations by bomb and bullet (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya), and subsidized terrorists (Syria) and puppet regimes (the Ukraine), and the continuous lies of corrupt politicians to a people who are not allowed to vote in a system in which their vote would be represented?
Mr Cameron not only needs to define his values before he speaks, but above all he needs to start living them without hypocrisy.
Retribution
But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be (Matt. 24, 37)
I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish (Lk. 13, 5)
A local politician in the UK has suggested that the current incessant heavy rain and flooding, very severe in some southern parts of England, Cornwall and Wales, is happening because of the Prime Minister’s and Parliament’s favouring of homosexual ‘marriage’.
On the one hand, such an Old Testament view of God as a punisher and avenger, especially for sexual transgressions, typical of Calvinistic Protestantism (not to mention the kindred Old Testament religions of Judaism and Islam), reminds us that many have not yet received the New Testament revelation that God is Love. On the other hand, such a view does contain truth. The fact is that we have to pay for what we do, we are responsible for our actions. Our God is Merciful, but He is also the only Just Judge. In other words, there is such a thing as retribution. If we are, as Mr Cameron and those with him appear to be, without principles, reality will one day catch up on us. God does not punish us; we punish ourselves.
If we distance ourselves from the Creator, then we distance ourselves from the grace of God and the protection of the Holy Spirit. God does not leave us, but we leave Him. To abandon God is to be like a soldier who goes into battle without any body armour; it means inviting mortal wounds. To live our lives without God in them is to subject them to the ‘elemental’ forces of the fallen Cosmos, to the ‘elemental’ forces of fallen Nature, to the ‘elemental’ forces of fallen mankind. And what are ‘elemental’ forces? They are simply demonic forces. All ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’ catastrophes, so-called ‘acts of God’ come from this. The demons want only one thing – our suffering, for they are the source of all suffering, whether through corruption, crime, war, disease, hurricane, earthquake or flooding.
Water is for baptism and blessing; but a deluge comes from unrighteousnesss. Over 150 years ago the Russian Orthodox theologian, A.S. Khomyakov, who knew England very well, warned in his poem ‘The Island’ that for considering worldly glory higher than the courts of God the day would come when in England ‘the grace of clear thought will leave your sons’.
It has now come.