ANCIENT FAITH

Spiritual Healing for Modern Religion

Life Giving Spring is online resource for Sacramental Living rooted in Ancient Faith, named after a miraculous healing spring in Greece attributed to the Theotokos that is commemorated on Bright Friday, the Friday of the first week following celebration of Pascha. Come explore unconventional methods for creation of lifestyle in support of Ancient Faith community and culture (worldview), and collaborate on ways of implementing such lifestyle.

Life Giving Spring will hopefully inspire aspiration toward death to the world, and search for alternatives to pervasive modern industrial definitions of : “family”, “community”, “culture”, and “economy”. From study is sought means for implementation of prototypical Ancient Faith intentional community where time and effort are spent on changing one's own self and way of life instead of focusing on legislating moral behavior of others in the socio-political arena.

Will the REAL Theanthropos please stand up?

With such type of question ended each episode of the popular American game show To Tell The Truth, where a celebrity panel questioned 3 contestants to discern which of them was truly the person all claimed to be. Similarly can be questioned the historical identity of 3 primary types of Christian faith that all claim to be corporeal Body of Christ, the Divine-human person, Theanthropos : Ancient Faith, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism.

Ancient Faith is theologically centered in types of Divine Image, or icon as represented in its sacred art, iconography. By comparison, theological types deviating from Divine Image are evident in imagery of Western European Romanism, where Renaissance misunderstanding of ancient Greek art birthed artistic “naturalism”. During the Renaissance, Romanism applied naturalism to its sacred art (which developed secularly into modern art of the West), and by its theological type further obscured the sacred art (iconography) of Ancient Faith (New Hellenism) and its theological significance from Western European Christendom.

These deviations in turn gave rise to Protestant reaction from within Rome's Western European sphere of spiritual influence, generating still more theological types, some of which eradicated sacred art altogether, and condemned veneration of icons as idolatry, as worshipping created matter instead of the Creator. In rejection of sacred iconography, Protestantism (despite criticizing the “legalism” of Romanism) retrograded to iconoclasm similar to Judaism and Islam, theological type indicative of fixation on forensic, external moral law no differently than Romanism. In deviation from sacred art and loss of understanding of humanity as Created in Divine Image (icon), both Romanism and Protestantism departed from centrality of Christian theosis (deification) of Ancient Faith as the meaning and purpose of human life, thereby also forsaking orthodoxy and orthopraxis .

Ultimately of equal if not greater importance is that “christianity” for the most part from East to West (Orthodox to Roman and Protestant) has tragically forsaken sacramental living for modern way of life. In doing so, modern “christianity” has become an empty, mere “tinkling cymbal” instead of culturally creative “salt” for eternal preservation of human society, for community, for interrelated holy communion between Creator, humanity and all Creation.

When the Son of man comes, will He find [Ancient] Faith on the Earth? - Luke 18.8

The Dialectic of Russian History
Dr. Matthew Johnson
St. John of Shanghai said...:
Significant portions of the Russians, who have gone abroad, belong to the intelligentsia which in the last days before the revolution, lived according to the ideals of the West. Although they were children of the... Church, confessing themselves to be... [Christians], the people of that class had in their world outlook strayed far from Orthodoxy. The main sin of these people was that their beliefs and way of life were not founded on the teachings of... [Ancient] faith. They try to reconcile the rules and teachings of the Church with their western habits and desires.
[Ed. Note: Such could be the case with most immigrants of Ancient Faith from the “old country”, who came seeking American fortune and succeeded in subordinating their faith to westernization.
See: Realms of Gold: An Iliad of Our Time]

Greek Orthodoxy - From Apostolic Times to the Present Day
Demetrios Constantelos
Following three centuries of underground existence and persecution in the Roman Empire, it was again the Greek Church, the Greek language, and Greek missionaries that carried the Christian message in both the East and the West. The Latin element emerged as a major factor in the history of Christianity only in the West and as late as the fifth century. It is significant that Saint Paul, writing to the Church of Rome, did not use Latin but Greek. The early Church in Rome was Greek-speaking, and the Church in the West was an extension of the Church in the East. The leading Roman Catholic theologian Tomas Spidlik, a member of the Society of Jesus, is quite right when he writes: 'We must stress one principle and stress it hard, that the Latin Church originated from the Greek Church as a branch grows from a tree trunk. The Church was implanted by the Greeks and expressed itself in the Greek language until the end of the fourth century'...

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