Faith in the Lord

 

Night sky in southern Tasmania

Taking Abram outside the Lord said, 'Look up to heaven and count the stars if you can. Such will be your descendants,' he told him. Abram put his faith in the Lord, who counted this as making him justified. 

Genesis 15:5f

There are many nights like last night. Cool, the heavens clear, the stars ever so visible with little interference from the street lights, and again I said my good nights to the growing list of those I love who have entered eternal life.

Without denigrating lawyers (my sister is one), I would prefer to order my life without the assistance of solicitors. Nevertheless I have required their services in the purchase of property, making wills and challenging our local council. Undoubtedly lawyers’ expertise helps sort out the issues, and certainly when drawing up contracts we want to be sure that they are watertight and that they say and do what we mean and intend.

The word covenant has an ancient history and is used richly throughout the religious, biblical, legal and political worlds. In Hebrew the word berith relates both the sense of unconditional gift from God (as with Abram/Abraham) and the conditional sense where certain requirements must be met in order to maintain the covenantal relationship. Though we often think of there being one covenant between the Lord and his people, there are several, each deepening the relationship between both parties.

Covenants are contracts. They establish the expectations of the parties who enter into an agreement to provide a service or goods.

The covenant made by God with his people does have one most important difference: it requires faith. As imaginative as the story of Abraham and Sarah is – leaving Ur, setting up in Canaan, Sarah’s pregnancy, the promise of innumerable descendants – we need to understand it is already infused with faith. The covenant is the actual means of understanding the mutual commitment that God and humanity have between them. You will be my people, and I will be your God (Ezekiel 36:28). There are mutual obligations.

The stories that emanate from scripture constantly remind us of God’s fidelity to that covenant and humanity’s struggle with its obligations. One major stumbling block was the Hebrew’s knack of codifying every aspect of their lives in relation to that covenant, so that the Law became more important than the relationship. In Jesus the New Covenant is established which again sets God’s love, his desire to be in relationship with you and me as pre-eminent.

There is nothing more important in that relationship than knowing that God loves us, and that he loves us unconditionally.

The Transfiguration (Luke 9:28ff) - like looking to the heavens and seeing the array of stars in the heavens is, to me, a clear sign of his covenant with us, but more so a constant and loving reminder of God's passionate and lavish fidelity.

 

Peter Douglas

 

Expanding the Orthodox empire

Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine are rooted in Russia’s ancient imperial ambitions for a Eurasian state.

Mark Jenkins

In 2016, I happened to be in Karyes, capital of the monastic republic of Mount Athos, when Vladimir Putin swept into the small hilltop in a motorcade. Russia has had close links with Mount Athos since the ninth century. Then, in the 12th century, Athonite monks led the regeneration of Russia from small settlements in the far north, under the leadership now of Moscow, Kiev having been knocked out of action by the Mongol invasions.

Alighting from his four-wheel drive, the Russian president was escorted into the 10th-century church of the Protaton, and towards a stall traditionally reserved for the emperors of Byzantium, where he stood for vespers. The authority of the emperors of Byzantium, from whom the Russian tsars traced their line of descent, extended over an ordered hierarchy of satellite states revolving in obedient harmony around the throne of a transnational autocrat.

The ancient belief that Russia has a unique, indeed messianic, role to play in world history is perhaps most vividly expressed in the 16th-century “Legend of the White Cowl”. In 1868, Dostoevsky wrote: “Russian thought is preparing a grandiose renovation for the entire world (you are right, it is closely linked with Russian Orthodoxy), and this will occur in about a century’s time, that’s my passionate belief.” In the view of German historian Oswald Spengler, the next thousand years will belong to Dostoevsky’s Christianity.

A feature of Dostoevsky’s thought is his vehement rejection of the European Enlightenment’s optimistic humanism. After his experiences in a Siberian gulag, Dostoevsky abandoned his earlier faith in Enlightenment ideas about progress.

As well as refusing to accept the Enlightenment’s faith in the ability of rationalism and materialism to lead man towards ultimate knowledge, Dostoevsky also rejected the Enlightenment’s dualism, its insertion of a barrier between mind and matter. He spoke of his experience of moments when he felt “all is good”, moments in which he felt a sense of communion with nature, a sense that inner and outer is not separated by an impassable barrier. Dostoevsky believed that the dualism of the Enlightenment paradigm had resulted in man becoming alienated – the sin of Adam.

Dostoevsky argued that – in marked contrast to the increasingly alienated ways of life being lived in the West – the Russian peasant’s connectedness with the land, as well as his life lived within a community, helped make him a more intelligent, more integrated individual than his modern, western counterpart – even though he might be illiterate.

Dostoevsky felt that the best hope for Russia’s future lay in its development of a network of decentralised “village republics”. In his view, Russia’s lack of industrial development was a blessing in disguise. It gave Russia an extraordinary opportunity to lay the foundations for a whole new culture, a whole new civilisation. Such hopes, however, were shattered by the revolution of 1917.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, however, Russia found itself in need of a new political idea. Initial attempts to emulate western-style liberal democracies had ended in chaos. By the late 1990s, a man called Aleksandr Dugin, sometimes called “Putin’s Rasputin”, had come forward with an update of an old idea – Eurasia.

Dugin’s Eurasia strategy was rooted in the work of Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who believed that the West is in a state of terminal decline, and that the 1917 revolution had been a counterblast of a primordial, Moscow-led Holy Russia against a westernised St Petersburg. Trubetzkoy envisaged a new Moscow-based theocratic elite exercising its power through a series of regional councils.

Kremlin strategist Dugin has also been called the “Prophet of the Russian Empire”. He sees empires as arrangements able to combine a strict strategic centralism with the broad autonomy of regional forms of government, and in his view history shows that empires have by far excelled the societies that preceded their rise. Dugin believes Russians have what he calls “an empire-building will”, and that the only way Russia will be able to preserve its sovereignty in the face of US hegemony will be through a recovery of its status as an empire within a new, multipolar world. Putin’s speeches are littered with references to Eurasia.

According to Dugin, the Eurasian heartland is home to a civilisation rooted in beliefs and customs very different from those of the West: a preference for the collective over the individual, and for the idea of a family of nations under a supreme ruler. Dugin also believes that Russian identity is, in a fundamental sense, linked to its Orthodox faith. Since at least 2009, Dugin has been speaking of what he sees as the threat to Russia’s imperial ambitions posed by the continued existence of Ukraine as an independent state.

Dugin wants to tear Europe away from the USA and reorient it under a Franco-German alliance led by Berlin. He believes the UK is a puppet state of the USA, and that Russia should not use conventional military force to rebuild its empire. Instead, it should work to generate general chaos, thereby triggering the inner collapse of its enemy – the US led liberal West. Dugin believes Russia must use its huge natural resources, especially oil and gas, to divide and weaken its enemies, and that the programme of the European Enlightenment must be “liquidated” because “liberalism” is responsible for many historic crimes.

Dugin is especially exercised by the West’s focus on the individual rather than the community, as well as its worship of what he sees as the false god of progress and obsession

From The Catholic Herald March 2022