Peter’s, you make Bible stuff fun!
Ironically, the beloved first wife, Martha, is discussing the Epiphany in her Free Methodist (as opposed to Enslaved Methodist) Sunday School Class, where yours truly is assigned a seat in the rear and instructed to “keep your mouth shut!”
While your oft cited critique of “Kurch” people is noted, the Free Methodist’s eschew the bouffant hair, $2,000 dollar suits, and Prayer Temples. They are, however, invested heavily, if you’ll pardon the pun, in large people. In fact it appears to me the larger the better, and while I have yet to find the proper text to justify largeness, I have, never-the-less, decided to participate in the consumption of carbs with a certain panache.
As an aside Ms. Martha is including some other New Testament events in her explication of the Epiphany of the Christ. I’d be mores specific but my short term memory, since the raucous 60′s, has performed fitfully.
Where’d you get the picture of the Russian dudes?

>>JP: Today is Theophany in the Christian East, Epiphany in the West, and the 6th of January where Caleb lives.

According to my Book of Days of Self-Sufficiency: A Dirt Farmer’s Liturgy, the week of Jan. 5, 2010, is for the following:

Mowing to retard growth
Jarring jams and jellies
Pruning fruit trees
Castrating new calves
Cut firewood
Wash windows

January 6 is also the day of blessed birth of the youngest of five Stegall sons, four years past, and thus marks an important gathering day on the Tribal Liturgical Calendar of the Stegall Clan on the Prairie, Deleware River Valley.

Ecce advenit dominator Dominus: et regnum in manu eius, et potestas, et imperium. Deus iudicium tuum Regida: et justiam tuam Filio Regis.

Ms. Calva,

I was not going to comment on Jason Peters’ latest, despite his sneers at “Krustmas” and “Krustians,” until he disparagaed “Away in a Manger.” There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with “Away in a Manger,” a beloved Christmas carol, except that it belongs to a tradition that Peters has apparently rejected in toto. I do not see why a piece on the faith to which Peters converted must include attacks on the faith he left, but perhaps Jason Peters can explain. It’s not as if “Away in a Manger” is the only Christmas carol Peters disdains; he dismisses “Silent Night” as “sentimental shlock.”

Unlike Jason Peters, but like Benedict XVI, I like Christmas carols. At my own church, like most Catholic churches in the United States, we celebrated the Epiphany this past Sunday, a celebration that included spirited congregational singing of “We Three Kings,” “The First Nowell,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful.” I found it moving, even though none of the carols use Greek theological terms or quote any of the Greek Fathers and each of them may even be heard on “Krustian radio.”

As for Christmas, yes, I am certainly in favor of defending it, as I have written many times, most recently here: http://www.vdare.com/piatak/091222_christmas.htm

‘Away in a Manger’ is a children’s Christmas hymn, and thus should be judged as same, and not held to the standards of adult fare. No normal person, after all, trashes “Jesus Loves Me” because it’s not “How Great Thou Art” or “Crown Him With Many Crowns.”

As far as the East vs. West in terms of Christmas goes, I once heard Fr. Peter Gillquist say that while the East has it all over the West in the celebration of Easter, the West has got the East beat in regards to Christmas. I’m inclined to agree. I’ve been Orthodox for 15 years now, and I don’t miss much about my evangelical/charismatic upbringing, but the Christmas music I grew up with is one thing I do miss hearing/singing in Church.

A pneumatic illumination re: Mary, the Mother of God and, you and Jesus “hardly on speaking terms!” Is this normal among the Orthodox?
Which brings me to this: I’ve queried a number of Catholics re: the question of the Co-Redemptrix (sp) and not really gotten a straight answer…would you mind: Is Mary the Co-Redeemer? And, if so, how does that occur. I’m a fallen away Catholic who did my share of Wednesday night Novena’s to Mary but don’t remember the Co-Redeemer thing back in the 60′s.
Also, the old hymn, “Softy and Tenderly” was written by a feller from my hometown, East Liverpool, Ohio and I had it sung and my father’s funeral and it’ll be sung at mine. Sometimes the really, really simple things in life best illustrate complex truth, not to mention a love of the divine.

~~“Away in a Manger,” like “Jesus Loves Me,” is, I agree, a great hymn for five year olds.~~

So Jesus must cry only when adults sing it? ;-)

You should have included the photo that was surely taken immediately after this, the one where a 200 hundred lb. babushka of great piety and mild insanity plunges her be-robed self into the cruciform waters.

I dearly wanted to see the whole thing in person when I was living in Russia a few years back. But in the end the frost was too frosty (30 below in Moscow) and I stayed in the kitchen, huddled around the stove, sitting on the radiator. Such a baby.

Spraznikom!

Mr. Piatak, I applaud your defense of Christmas. What I wrote did not disparage this defense, but rather questioned something of its method. I have nothing against “Away in a Manger” or “Silent Night,” but I believe you yourself have rated these lower in the scheme of things than “Adeste Fideles.”. One may vindicate Christmas carols as a species and yet disparage individual carols as not to one’s taste. Hence my question as to why you felt the need to defend every (emphasis every) outrider of Christmas–not the keep, as it were–to the last man.

AML, Dude, thanks for the explanation. I was wondering where it came from. Not wanting to be snarky, I find the idea of a “co-redemprixt” as either blasphemous or heretical.
I’m figuring that if God wanted man to elevate Mary’s status to co-Logos he’d have mentioned it in the gospels.
I suppose that’s why I find my Catholic/Byzantine friends so wonderfully imaginative, not to mention creative…never quite satisfied with the truth of stuff, we can come up with more stuff.
Though I do, profoundly, miss the liturgy, and ever proud of the Catholic stand against abortion (though curious as to how Catholics vote Dem) there’s something about the preacher preachin’ from the Word of God that satisfies.

There would indeed be a huge difference between the terminology of co-redemptrix and co-Logos. Obviously, Mary is in no way the Logos. If Mary can be called Theotokos, Mother of God, as defined at the Council of Ephesus, then the idea of Mary as co-redemptrix is not as problematic. Given that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, human and divine, he requires human cooperators to bring about salvation. This idea takes seriously Christ’s humanity, but does not lose sight of his divinity either. If one were to take a monophysite position that diminishes Christ’s humanity then indeed the idea of co-redemptrix would be blasphemous. If one takes seriously the Incarnation, then I do not think the idea is so problematic. I think I agree with Rob, though, that to formally declare this doctrine would create the sort of confusion that Bob expresses.

There is quite a bit not found in the Gospels, most importantly a developed Trinitarian theology. There are hints in the scriptures, but nothing close to the precision found in the early councils, thus all of the various heresies in the early Church (Nestorianism, Arianism, etc. all claiming scriptural foundations).

I’m confused. Isn’t Peters an American Christian? Or do Catholics not consider themselves Christian?

The problem I think that many Christian sects have is the desire to “know.” In essence it is an age-old problem centered on and related to man’s inclination and natural fondness toward sundry Gnostic heresies. Specifically many derailed Christians seek to explicate the Divine Mysteries in terms of immanence, to immanentize the tension of existence in much the same manner that the ideologues of the past century have done in the secular world.

It is, of course, a totally human thing to do, at least in the sense of man as a ‘fallen’ creature, a being engaged by the libido dominandi where symbols of the truth experienced are removed from reality. We see everywhere in the secular world where the revolt against theology and metaphysics failed, as Voegelin points out, to recapture the tension of existence and derailed into “a new doctrine of world-immanent consciousness.”

To some degree and to some extent, the church is guilty of this same phenomenon, spurned on, I think, by the secular, ideological derailments of the previous century. Succumbing to the gnostic temptation the church failed to believe, to have the faith, that God could do everything (if you remember what the angel asked Abraham regarding the pregnancy of the 99 year old Sarah) and allowed itself, at least in part, to abandon a devotion and a profound faith in the transcendent pole of the metaxy wherein we find the tension or movement of human existence. And, more specifically the church in not faithfully accepting the reality of the “divine mysteries” produced among its people an alienation established on the disorder engendered in the explication of “mysteries” (in this case that Mary is the co-Redemptrixt) that have no foundation in the Word of God (sola scriptura).

Regarding this particular conversation re: Mary, the mother of God, we must understand that our participation in the Divine, the metalepsis, is located within our perspective as being. It is our consciousness that is both the sensorium of the tension and the “whole tension including its pole of the timeless (site).” And, here the problem become luminous when the church father’s derail in their efforts to explicate a “knowledge” that results in the “divinization of man (in this example, Mary).

AML, I meant to thank you earlier for this fascinating conversation. RE: Mgsr Sokolowski, he’s a favorite. I reviewed his “Human Faith and Christian Understanding” for Crisis (before it went under, and I hope my review didn’t have a hand in that) and would gladly read anything the man writes.
Re: the “divinization of Mary” well that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
First, no one should question the authority of the church lightly, but on the other hand when church leaders step beyond a foundation predicated on sola scriptura, and here I think the Protestants are correct, then the issue must be engaged. Priests, teachers, preachers are in fact responsible for the souls they reach and consequently affect and in the matter of God, they are responsible to be clear and accurate as to the teaching.
As you or someone pointed out the idea of Mary as Co-Remptrixt isn’t dogma but the Church allows it continue without criticism, indicating the possibility that it will be dogma someday. That, in and of itself is, I think, gross error on the part of the church fathers, if not the pope.
I haven’t answered several of your questions because they were rather puerile and below the level of this conversation. I understand why you asked; the urgent psychological need to “win” this debate and the consequent decline into “gotcha” remarks. It isn’t necessary. My remarks here are offered in the love of God and truth. If I’m in error, I’ll gladly accept and acknowledge that error.

^^If in fact you think my comments are puerile please show what is puerile and why you think so.

Many Lutherans would be surprised to read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther's_views_on_Mary