Starting a list of Orthodox books I’ve read & recommend to others - a 🧵. After starting my journey from Protestantism to Orthodoxy in 2015, I began working my way through history, the canon, the fathers & theology. I still have a long way to go. So I’ll add chronologically…

We are waiting to put together a non-profit organization with the aim of promoting beauty in the Orthodox churches in North America. Right now there are 2 major initiatives that we would like to pursue in earnest. We are working to put together a means by which individuals can sponsor icons for, well, sponsors. As the Orthodox Church continues to grow, there is of course a great need to get quality, meaningful, and beautiful icons into the hands of the newly illumined. However, these can be quite expensive and those desired as sponsors or godparents can't always afford expensive hand painted icons. We wish to establish networks that help alleviate this problem by providing behind the scenes sponsorships or avenues for Orthodox Christians to help provide in this way for the spiritual benefit of their brothers and sisters in the faith. The other initiative is to provide funding to help cover the costs of Iconography projects for parishes that may not be able to afford them. If you have any interest in these projects in any capacity, phrase leave your comments or send me a DM You can help us with this also by liking, sharing, and commenting on this post so that it is visible to more people

STARTING THIS SUNDAY: class on early Christian sacred spaces! LINK⬇️

This is why apostates like Schooping used all the same arguments and all the same texts as the purveyors of PSA and ended up with Sola Fide. He used late Russian texts to leverage a Protestant way of reading earlier Patristic texts, he couldn't tell the difference between Anselm and Calvin, jumped the history and imposed forensic imputation onto earlier texts and VIOLA! SOLA FIDE and off he went. I know, I argued with Schooping for over two years directly and he made all the same mistakes. So what the purveyors of PSA are doing is unwittingly putting people in the church on the path to Protestantism. This is why some of them are now putting forward forensic imputation. They are on the same path.

There is no "broad sense." PSA as a term doesn't even get used until the late 18th, early 19th century by Protestant authors to pick out their specific view. Up till then they are using "satisfaction" language with modifications to make it comaptible with Sola Fide. There is biblical and historical language that is utilized by different views. All language of debt, payment, satisfaction, etc. is compatible with the different views in the same way that the surface grammar of justified by faith alone is compatible with multiple views. All one has to do is start with Anselm and work your way up to Aquinas. It isn't till late Scholasticism that the philosophical categories that make PSA (and Sola Fide) possible even begin to exist and have theological purchase in the west. So payment for sin can be conceived in lots of different ways and it was so historically. That is why it is the fallacy of anachronism to take the Protestant sense and then read it back into earlier sources. Much the same is true for trying to justify the Satisfaction model in the same way. The entire point of Anselm's satisfaction model was to have a theory of the atonement that did not rely on scripture/special revelation at all as an apologetic to Jews and Muslims, which is why when he put it forward it scandalized western theologians since the constituents of the deposit of faith are not deductions of reason alone.

“The sanctification of Him who wants to sacrifice Himself and of His sacrifice once offered do not have a meaning worthy of God except when understood as manifestation of the will for communion on behalf of the Father and as acceptance on behalf of Christ as man, or as beginning of the realization of communion and as its realization indeed. Otherwise it remains an attachment of a ‘physical’ identity to Him who is sanctified and to His sacrifice. Understood in this, the only possible manner, Christ’s death no longer appears as the offering of a substantive satisfaction to the offended honor of God on behalf of men, or as the expiation of a substantive punishment in their stead, for the same reason.” - Saint Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God: Volume 3, p. 113

“Western theology, both Catholic and Protestant, has not known another modality of man’s liberation from sin except that of suffering death for him or the amnesty on the basis of a satisfaction offered to God. The Holy Scripture and Holy Fathers see the solution beyond this external alternative, namely in God’s movement toward communion, which is also imprinted within the human being. In both other cases God remains external, punishing, or He places the human being from without into a movement of satisfaction.” Saint Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God: Volume 3, p. 113

I feel like everybody that's holding to PSA as Orthodox never studied PSA as a protestant and don't understand the boundaries that PSA outlines. Fr Stephen went to that reformed school and says it's not compatible with Orthodox. PSA ≠ substitution.

The other problem is that they are unfamiliar w latin scholastic satisfaxtion models. So they invariably post quotes that they think are expreasing PSA when its not at all. The next problem is the decelopment and changes in legal theory that took place from late antiquity to the early modern period. So they then just assume translated words into Engliah mean whatever rough and ready idea that they have in their head.

“For neither as God nor as man was He ever forsaken by the Father, nor did He become sin or a curse nor did He require to be made subject to the Father. For as God He is equal to the Father and not opposed to Him nor subjected to Him….Appropriating, then, our person and ranking Himself with us, He used these words.” Saint John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book 4, Chapter 18.

“In our scholastic theology, the focal point of our salvation has been shifted from Bethlehem to Golgotha. This shift in our Russian theology occurred comparatively recently, about 200 years ago, when the Latin theological trend came to Moscow via Catholic Poland and Kyiv, and when various scholastically minded fathers acquired greater authority than the ancient fathers of the Church.” - Saint Hilarion Troitsky, Bible, Church, History: A Theological Examination

Simple! When it comes to what Eastern Orthodoxy believes, only listen to those on social media who: 1.) Are canonical 2.) Not anonymous 3.) Have the blessing of their Parish Priest to teach online. Those who say we don't teach PSA can tell you their real name, the Parish they attend and the priest and bishop as their clergy. Most of the ones who say we teach PSA can't do the same because they don't want to be held accountable.

An excellent piece of advice from Perry Robinson, regarding the importance of reading the source material & the best experts in those fields vs watching a YT chat or debate. Invest in your future: start buying & reading books. A whole beautiful new world opens up.

What is more, contemporary defenses of PSA make this point over and over again and those defenses aren't from Restorationists but from the Reformed. It is exactly why the Medieval Satisfaction model had be to changed by the Reformers. It did not fit with Sola Fide and the changes allowed the Reformers to undercut the sacramental system.

Interesting how Fr. Daniel Sysoev on Frequent Communion defends St. Nikodemos & the Kollyvades & says it isn’t Orthodox for detractors to rely only on Russian saints from the 17th-20th centuries. The same argument is made in “On the Reception of the Heterodox” from UMP.

“For Orthodox Christians of the 20th century there is no more important Holy Father of recent times than Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky. This is so not merely because of his holy life; not merely because, like another Saint Gregory Palamas, he defended the hesychast practice of the mental Prayer of Jesus; not only because he, through his many disciples, inspired the great monastic revival of the 19th century which flowered most notably in the holy Elders of Optina Monastery; but most of all because he redirected the attention of Orthodox Christians to the sources of Holy Orthodoxy, which are the only foundation of true Orthodox life and thought whether of the past or of the present, whether of monks or of laymen.” Saint Seraphim Rose, Introduction to Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky: The Man Behind the Philokalia

"The very preoccupation of these Kollyvades Saints with Western books... came from the very same urgency to save the Orthodox people from the inevitable progressive advance of heterodox rationalism into the Orthodox countries...to clean them up, as it were, to re-edit the text."