The Orthodox Christian Conference on the Family

The following consists of the proceedings of the Conference on the Family, which was held at New Ostrog, the Orthodox Monastery of All Saints of North America. The conference was held under the auspices of The Saint Maximos Centre for Orthodox Studies.

Opening Remarks
and Introduction to the Conference
by Archbishop Lazar

Glory to Jesus Christ!

We wish to welcome all of you to our monastery and to the Joy of Canada Pilgrimage which we will be observing this weekend. We also welcome you in the name of the Saint Maximos Centre for Orthodox Studies. Many of you travelled from Edmonton to be here, some of you came from California, Utah and other parts of America. The speakers who have honoured us with their presence will make your journey worthwhile, as will participation in the pilgrimage and feast for the wonderworking ikon of the Theotokos, Joy of Canada.

I was prompted to choose the Orthodox Christian concept of "family" as the subject for this year's pilgrimage for several reasons.

Over the past few decades we have been bombarded with various extreme views and much propaganda about family values and the cause of the disintegration of the supposedly ideal family. Last year, our monastery received a brochure from one of the American ultra rightwing Christian groups asserting that the Jews are responsible for the breakdown of the ideal Christian family. The Jews, the brochure asserted, have an agenda to undermine the Christian family in order to prepare for the reign of the Antichrist. Others assert that the imagined conspiracy is an agenda of the black power groups, the women's movement, Asian immigrants, the gay and lesbian community, the American Democratic Party, the American Supreme Court or any number of special interest groups.

Televangelists, entrepreneurs and profiteers such as Dr Dobson make a substantial income by manipulating people's fears and frustrations and focusing both fear and hatred on scapegoat groups. I would like to focus for a moment on two problems that this creates - although our speakers will take us into a deeper examination of the problems and their answers.

The first problem with the "family values" enterprise of the American ultra right is that it deflects one from examining the real roots of the problem, and in many ways contributes to the problem. It also tends toward a fortress mentality of the nuclear family. Let us look very briefly at some of the actual roots of today's problems with the family.

 

The Protestant Contribution to the Problem

For most of its relatively brief existence, Protestantism has expended considerable energy condemning both traditional and hierarchical structure. For the past few centuries, the evangelical and fundamentalists wings of Protestantism have worked very hard at sowing suspicion of sacred traditions and all tradition handed down within the framework of the Church. This has inevitably given younger generations a cumulative negative perspective on tradition per se. The centuries of Protestant propaganda against the natural hierarchical structure of the Church gradually cultivated a suspicion of the natural hierarchical structure of the family, and even of the structure of lawful authority in the school systems and the state.

He who does not have the Church as a mother, does not have God as his Father.
-Saint Cyprian of Carthage

From an Orthodox Christian perspective, not only does the Church have a natural hierarchical structure that mirrors that of the heavenly kingdom, but the Church constitutes a hierarchy of family. The parish is a family, not a club or association and not merely a building where one drops in to worship on Sunday mornings. The parish is an extended family of the so-called nuclear family. The diocese is an extended family of the parish families, and the Church as a whole is a family of dioceses. In a way, this reflects the structure of the universe where planets belong to a solar system, solar systems to galaxies and galaxies to clusters. Hierarchical structure appears imbedded in creation itself. Our speakers will discuss the nature of "family" in greater detail, but we want to emphasize here that a sizable aspect to our current problems with the family has arisen from these centuries of Protestant propaganda against tradition and hierarchical structure.

In this conference, our first two speakers will examine the problems from an Orthodox Christian perspective, with the aim of presenting an Orthodox view of the meaning of family. We might also note that the approach taken in these two presentations also represents the typically more moderate and compassionate Canadian perspective. The third presentation, that of theologian Dr. Kharalambos Anstall, examines the reciprocity of the Holy Trinity as a model of the family. This last paper is deeply theological.

NOTE: Only the first two papers so far have been presented on this web site. The lengthy and important paper of Dr. Kharalambos Anstall will be added to this site soon. His paper will also be available in our scholarly journal, The Journal of the Nemanjic Institute.

 

The Family as the Bearer of Tradition
by Rev. Fr. Andrew Jarmus

Reflections on the Spiritual Vocation of the Family
by David J. Goa