By Desmond Scotchmer

In September I visited Mount Athos, in Greece. Mount Athos, Hagion Oros, or the “Holy Mountain”, is a self-governing monastic state within the Greek republic, occupying a long peninsula that projects into the Aegean Sea, east of Thessaloniki (New Testament Thessalonica).

It’s a timeless and ancient place. Aristotle was born at Stagira, close by the Acanthian Gulf, at the northern end of the Athonite peninsula. In 492 BC, an invasion fleet sent by Darius, King of Persia, foundered while trying to round the dangerous headland at its southern end, where Mount Athos itself rises steeply from the sea to a height of some 6,600 feet.

St Paul, of course, visited Thessalonica, and wrote to the Christian community there. Monastic communities were present on the Mountain as early as the third century, and in 885, the Emperor Basil I decreed that the Mountain was to be reserved for monks, forbidding laymen, farmers, or cattle breeders to settle there. After the fall of Byzantium, during the long night of Moslem occupation, Mount Athos came to fill the vacuum left in the Orthodox world after the fall of its historic centre, becoming the bastion of Orthodox spirituality, gaining over the centuries an uncontested spiritual authority devoid of the temptation to temporal power. During the nineteenth century, the monasteries on Mount Athos reached their high point, with some 7,000 monks in 1902. The twentieth century saw a sharp decline, with the population falling to some 1,500 by the 1950s. More recently, however, there has been a remarkable influx of young, educated monks from all over Europe and far beyond, and the overall population has increased steadily, up some 32% over the past thirty years. The number of pilgrims and visitors has increased by far more than that. 

Contemporary Mount Athos is a serious place. Serious and austere: services start at 2:00, 3:00, or 4:00 in the morning, and run for five or six hours, after which you break your fast with the monks. On a fast day (Wednesdays and Fridays) you can expect a large chunk of black bread, with a tomato, a couple of olives, and a tankard of very cold, fresh water.  There is no lunch. On a feast day, there may be wine with a supper of grilled or stuffed eggplant, and a lentil stew. Accommodation at places like St Panteleimon’s Monastery, or Andreyevsky Skete is in large dormitories with thirty men or more. At St Panteleimon, it is lights out at 8:30 throughout the entire complex, and woe to anyone without a flashlight.

The mountain is wildly beautiful, with some monasteries (Simonos Petras, Hagios Pavlos) perched dramatically on dizzying heights high above the sparkling blue sea.  Some monasteries (Stavronikita, Iveron, Megistis Lavras) are like miniature mediaeval walled cities, achingly picturesque. The churches are old and fascinating, with marvellous frescoes, filled with many treasures. The libraries are ancient, and large.

Timeless and historic, Mount Athos is enjoying an astonishing rebound. The American Public Affairs programme “60 Minutes” devoted a whole programme to it last year; National Geographic featured it in a recent article. The ferry going out from Ouranopolis on the mainland at 6:00 a.m. was packed: by far the largest number of non-Greek pilgrims were Russian, mostly young, all quiet, friendly, and serious.

I went with a group of thirty-two Russians from Toronto, New York and Chicago. Where I found the austere Athonite regime of early hours, long services, simple food, and long treks between monasteries along unpaved roads and steep paths daunting and difficult, they found the difficulties a challenge and an incentive. The contrast was humbling, but then, much about Mount Athos has to do with the learning of humility.

The return to modern life in Canada was jarring. Everywhere, you are assaulted by an aggressive consumerism, an obsession with glamour, youth, wealth, instant gratification, and a shameless sensuality. The Anglican Church of Canada, too, presented a bleak picture. I read that more dioceses have committed themselves to same-sex blessings, putting themselves at variance with the vast majority within the Anglican Communion, the plain meaning of Scripture, and 2,000 years of inherited Christian teaching. This is merely the latest step in an agenda which has seen the imposition of modern, secular norms in the place of traditional Scriptural ones, a flight from Scriptural authenticity and historic witness, and a desperate chase after “relevance”. It seemed far from the resurgence of timeless Christianity that is taking place on Mount Athos.

This dreary situation, paralleled in most so-called mainstream churches, is a direct product, I believe, of a loss of confidence in the Truth of the central narrative of the Christian religion. This is attributable in turn, in large part, to academic theology as practiced in the seminaries of the western world. In these seminaries, for far too long, the assumption has held sway that we cannot really know much about the historical Jesus, as opposed to the Jesus of Christian belief. In other words, the narrative recorded in the New Testament, that God became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, who died for our sins, and rose again, to ascend in glory to the Father, is not reliable, but was rather manufactured to support a faith which somehow “developed” at some time over the first two or three centuries AD, and was then manipulated by a triumphant Constantinian Church to consolidate its own hegemony and agenda.

Yet now there is a spate of books – serious books – which begin to challenge that assumption, daring to suggest (how shocking!) that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John might actually be the most complete and reliable sources of knowledge about Jesus, and show every sign of being history rather than works of fiction. One such book, reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) on June 17 of this year, is Craig S. Keener’s The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, published by Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The reviewer gingerly reaches the conclusion that the author “makes a calm case for the truth” of the Gospel narratives and the inapplicability of the frequently-offered parallels from mythology of dying and rising deities. It all turns, says the reviewer, on “dated experience with a historical person”, that is, experience that claims a particular date and time, and experience that claims to be true. The review also points out that “there is no sign at all of any debate in early Christian literature about the tradition that Jesus rose bodily. That was taken for granted.” He concludes “So there are robust arguments that must be answered robustly on their own terms by those who are determined to maintain the fundamental unreliability of the gospels, and the eye-witness accounts that lie behind them”.

Another book recently reviewed in the TLS is Gavin Hyman’s A Short History of Atheism, on July 15, also of this year. The reviewer, after pointing out that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have drawn a crowd by treating the debate about the existence of God as an essentially simple one, proceeds to state that the book under review might more accurately have been titled The Case against Atheism, According to Recent Academic Theology, recent academic theology being, in this case, the new school of Radical Orthodoxy. Radical Orthodoxy arose in the 1990s in reaction to the liberalism of people like John Spong, and seeks to show that the God attacked by atheism is a modern construct, a product of Enlightenment rationalism, whereas a more traditional theism is utterly untouched by attacks on this shallow imposter-God. According to Radical Orthodoxy, modernity has invented a new, transformed concept of God, making Him into a rational human subject, an “object of thought”: God therefore becomes a being who exists in the same way as things in the created order exist, rather than standing outside, and beyond His creation. This approach, says the reviewer, was invented by Descartes, modified by Kant, and finally clarified by Feuerbach who suggested God was a projection of human values. As we know, all human constructs are vulnerable to demolition.

I’m not sure the reviewer is altogether right about Descartes, and I would question some of the implications of Radical Orthodoxy, but such discussions are beyond the scope of this small article. However, it is important to realize that these books, and the perspectives they offer, reveal a profound shift in the debate about religion: to new ground which is far more respectful of the “Faith once delivered”. Of course, this shift will bring with it new challenges; however, I think members of the PBSC will be heartened to know it is taking place. The religion that has been offered up in far too many Anglican Churches over the past thirty years and more has drifted far from the resounding claims of the Bible: that God is the great “I am that I am”; who called creation out of the void; who asks Job “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding”; the God who took flesh, and lived amongst us, and died and rose again. A God altogether too big for the human intellect to comprehend: the high and lofty one that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy.

These books follow the appearance in 2003 of N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. Wright was Bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010: this scholarly, influential (and hefty) book - there are some 814 pages - examines the Easter narratives (the empty tomb, the post-resurrection appearances), treating them as accounts of events that actually took place, rather than rationalizations of early Christian spirituality.

The connection between theology and liturgy is close. The rejection of traditional liturgies that occurred in the last century was intimately connected to the theological thinking of its day. It should come as no surprise that this new openness to traditional theology is being reflected by a renewed interest in traditional liturgies. Supporters of the Book of Common Prayer, sit up, and take note!

Of course, we seek not merely the historic Jesus but also the Eternal Jesus, who was with the Father from the Beginning (John 1:1-3). They are, of course, one and the same, the prejudices of Enlightenment rationalism notwithstanding. We come to know the one through the other: the Eternal Jesus leads us to the historic Jesus whose life, ministry, death and resurrection are attested to in the Gospels; the Gospels point straight to the Eternal Jesus revealed on Mount Tabor, and record the response of the Man who answered his Jewish critics with the astounding claim: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

The nagging fear that the narrative of our Lord’s life, death and resurrection as set out in the Gospels might not be reliable has sapped the strength and witness of the Christian Church in the West for half a century and more. My hope is that these books will open the way for a more robust response to twenty-first century scepticism than was offered in the last century. As the first reviewer mentioned above notes, there is no dispute in early Christian literature about the tradition that Jesus rose bodily. Surely this was because the first Christians experienced the closeness of Eternity: they had seen the face of God Himself in Christ, or had known those who had. Succeeding generations within the early Church trusted that witness, and their lives were transformed in turn. This is central: but the post-Enlightenment mind has trouble grasping it. We need to understand this phenomenon for what it is: a problem for a particular mindset at a particular point in Western intellectual history, respond to it appropriately, and then move beyond it.

T.S. Eliot reminds us that in our beginning is our end. Books on theology can strengthen or weaken faith, but the real encounter with God takes place in the human heart. I experienced such an encounter years ago, in the pages of the Book of Common Prayer. That encounter was re-affirmed in the small hours of the night, in the stillness of an ancient church on Mount Athos, during the long services before dawn, as the saints who had gone before looked back from the icons and frescoes, glimmering in the faint light of the hanging lampadas. It is in this sense that Mount Athos, and the Book of Common Prayer, connect us back to the historic Jesus through the Eternal Jesus, the Word, who was (and is) the great “I am” before Abraham.

In the stillness of eternity the claims of the doubters and sceptics are distant, shrill and false. And it is in the heart that we hear the message first, and understand it; only then is it conveyed to the mind: “Be still and know that I am the LORD”.