Breitbart News features Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of the Russian Orthodox Church, Part 1: 'Are We On the Eve of World War III?'

We can only hope that the sober, cautionary voice of Metropolitan Hilarion, Chairman of the Russian Orthodox Church's Department of External Church Relations (DECR), will become much more widely known and heeded.

See also Part 2, an incisive, 'must read' Op-Ed by Metropolitan Hilarion, titled: No Winners in a World War.



WHO IS THE MAN WHO FEARS WE COULD BE ON THE EVE OF 'WORLD WAR III'?
by Robert Moynihan, Breitbart News — August 31, 2014

Hardly any Americans will know of Hilarion Alfeyev, 48, a Russian Orthodox bishop who acts as the "foreign minister" of his Church, but it is important that they do. He is a bridge between not just the Orthodox Church and Catholicism but a bridge between Russia and America.

As a Catholic American, I first saw him 15 years ago on a cold December day in Moscow. Hilarion, then 33, was already a rising star in the firmament of the Russian Orthodox Church.

He had done his graduate studies in philosophy at Oxford — rather rare for Russian Orthodox Church leaders.

Back in Moscow, he had been named Secretary for Inter-Christian Affairs in the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, meaning his task was to deal with Protestants and Catholics.

Hilarion had been sent to attend a special ceremony in the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Moscow. It was a small courtesy extended by the Russian Orthodox leadership to the Catholics, who number only a few thousand in that great city of 17 million.

The Catholic cathedral had been closed for 72 years, from 1920 until 1992. The Soviets had taken it over and constructed offices in the main nave, right up to the roof, with several levels of hallways and little cubicles. Grass and small bushes had sprouted from the roof and steeple.

After years of work by the Catholic Archbishop of Moscow, Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the cathedral was being re-consecrated and opened again.

On that day, Hilarion was the only Russian Orthodox cleric in a cathedral filled with hundreds of Polish, French, American and Filipino Catholics who tended to regard all Russian Orthodox with a certain diffident suspicion. He might have felt defensive, even intimidated.

Yet Hilarion, dressed in a long black robe, rose from his place in the front row, strode calmly to the lectern, and offered a sincere, warm congratulations to all present for the reopening of the cathedral.

Here was a Russian who seemed very far indeed from the boorish Nikita Khrushchev, with his famous “We will bury you!” while pounding his shoe on the desk at the United Nations. Here was a Christian monk who was also a gentleman.

The Sign of The Forerunner

The prophetic significance of Muslim beheadings of Christians.

The Beheading of St John the Forerunner, commemorated August 29 in the Orthodox Church.

John the Baptist’s rich and descriptive title in the Orthodox Church is, “The Holy, Glorious Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist, John.” He is much more than “John the Baptist.”  He is a sign, a mystery. 

As “The Forerunner” he is a clear sign of the First Coming of Christ, but also of the Second Coming; he is a mystery of the fulfillment of this age, and of its trials and woes.

ISIS: Still Beheading Like It's the End of the World

Timothy Furnish continues to shine the light of knowledge on the foul darkness of the Islamic State Caliphate (formerly ISIS) and its apocalyptic dreams.

See also: Muslim cleric justifies Islamic State beheadings: “Islam is a religion of beheading”

by Timothy R. Furnish, Mahdi Watch — August 21, 2014

The “Islamic State” [IS], formerly the “Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” [ISIS or ISIL—the latter if one prefers “Levant”], ended Ramadan 1435/2014 with another issue of its propagandistic “Dabiq” magazine. (Issue #1 thereof, which had come out at the beginning of the Islamic holy month, I dissected here.) 

This second issue is book-ended with apocalyptic references: p. 2 repeats the Abu Mus`ab al-Zarqawi (who went to meet the huris, 2006) quote—adduced several times in issue #1—about the spark that had been lit in Iraq eventually burning the “crusader armies in Dabiq;” while the final page excerpts a hadith foretelling the Muslim conquest of Arabia, Persia, Rome and the defeat of the Dajjal (the “Deceiver,” the Islamic antichrist figure).  IS’s flagship publication also brags that the group is coming for Palestine and, as per another hadith, that it will “fight the barbaric jews and kill those of them hiding behind the gharqad trees…” But the second installment of “Dabiq,” unlike the first, does not obsess about the End Times breaking into today’s Middle East; rather, it focuses like a Bond supervillain laser beam on two related topics: the Biblical/Qur’anic flood, and the Islamic practice of mubahalah.  

Islamic Sharia Law in America: An Orthodox Christian Perspective (AUDIO)

Not integrating well into Western Civilization. Notice the black flags of jihad.

This is a very challenging talk by Fr Josiah Trenham, providing an in-depth look at Islam and sharia throughout history and in America today. Fr. Josiah also contrasts the threat from sharia with the threat from secularism, homosexualism, etc.

Though I agree with much of what Fr. Josiah says, including his warning that we are facing these threats because we have allowed ourselves to be co-opted by the world, and have become too interested in our own comfort and prosperity, I most adamantly disagree with his belief that we can partner with Muslims against the pressures of secularism, and that the United States should enable the implementation of Islamic sharia law for religious matters. Sharia never stops at merely "religious matters," as can be seen in the implementation of sharia courts in the UK.

Terry Mattingly: The West Struggles to See Threat to Eastern Church

"Americans are open to seeing religion's role in the politics of the region, but they just cannot seem to see the Christians there... The idea that these Christians have been there for 2,000 years just doesn't register." —Philip Jenkins

by Terry Mattingly, uexpress — August 20, 2014
h/t Fr. Alex

At first glance, there was a bizarre gap in the proclamation Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi issued as his forces rolled to victory after victory in their rush to rebuild a caliphate in Iraq, Syria and beyond.

The modern world, he said, in a July 1 statement circulated on Twitter, has "been divided into two camps and two trenches, with no third camp present: The camp of Islam and faith, and the camp of kufr (disbelief) and hypocrisy -- the camp of the Muslims and the mujahidin everywhere, and the camp of the Jews, the crusaders, their allies and with them the rest of the nations and religions of kufr, all being led by America and Russia, and being mobilized by the Jews."

Missing from this list were key groups immediately impacted by the rise of the Islamic State -- the region's ancient churches. In one stunning blow, ISIS forces seized Mosul and other Nineveh Plain communities that have sheltered Christians since soon after the faith's birth. Jihadi militiamen burned churches, or turned them into mosques, and marked Christian homes with "n" for "Nisrani" or "Nazarene."

Thus, believers with 2,000 years worth of local roots were declared foreigners -- Nazarenes. They were ordered to convert to Islam, to flee as refugees or face execution, perhaps by crucifixion. Baghdadi called them "crusaders," with other Western infidels.

ISIS: Apocalypse...How?

ISIS "is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated."  — Chuck Hagel, US Secretary of Defense

by Timothy R. Furnish, Mahdi Watch — August 27, 2014

And we thought Scuds were bad when Saddam had them! 

Last week the senior leadership of the US Defense Department publicly acknowledged that Islamic apocalyptic thought is playing a prominent role in modern Middle Eastern conflicts. The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, in a press conference with his boss, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, said the following:

"This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated."

How extraordinary! The top-ranking American military commander adduced Islamic eschatology as an important issue.  Perhaps my eight years of warning about Mahdism on this site has finally been heeded by certain folks.

Sec Def Hagel and General Dempsey also said several other things worthy of note and examination:

Icon of St Innocent of Alaska Weeping Myrrh

Perhaps St Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow, Missionary to Alaska and Enlightener of the Aleuts, is weeping due to the construction of a Mega-Mosque in Alaska, a sign of the growing global jihad, and of the pressures against Orthodox Christians in so many areas around the globe. The ongoing spread of what St John of Damascus called "the superstition of the Ishmaelites, the forerunner of the Antichrist" should make all Christians weep. And the phenomenon of weeping icons are given us by the Lord to inspire us to deep repentance.


Icon of St Innocent of Moscow Weeping Myrrh in Khabarovsk
Pravoslavie — August 22, 2014

On August 20, 2014, in the house church of the Khabarovsk Theological Seminary, the icon of this educational establishment’s patron-saint, Holy Hierarch Innocent of Moscow (Veniaminov; 1797-1879; a great missionary in Siberia and north America, later Metropolitan of Moscow), began weeping myrrh, reports the Khabarovsk Diocese’s information department.

The unusual phenomenon was noticed by the seminary aspirants who came to take entrance examinations.

“The streaming myrrh was noticed by our seminary entrants who remained at the evening prayers. When we were informed about it, we saw drops on the eyes of the Holy Hierarch Innocent of Moscow and stains from them. This is an icon of our patron-saint so we performed a prayer service at once,” related the pro-rector of the Khabarovsk Theological Seminary Bishop Ephraim of Bikin. “When the icon was opened to make sure that it really was shedding myrrh, the church suddenly was filled with fragrant aroma. In order to document the fact that the icon started shedding myrrh, the seminary has drawn up a special record”.

ISLAMIC STATE JIHADISTS PREP FOR TAKEOVER OF SPAIN

New ISIS poster campaign follows video from Islamic State jihadists in which they vow to “liberate” what they call Al-Andalus from non-Muslims... and  "conquer Israel, Rome and Spain.”

by Bob Unruh, WND — August 18, 2014

ISIS message in front of Aljafería Palace in Zaragoza

Jihadists inside Spain have begun prepping for a takeover of the nation by ISIS, also known as Islamic State, the terror army that has been marching across Iraq, destroying Christians and evidence of their faith and imposing the extreme control of Islam’s Shariah law.

According to a new report from Soeren Kern, a senior fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute, there have developed more frequent and more strident statements regarding Spain being ruled once again by the violence of Islam.

Muslims, known then as Moors, occupied that region of the world from 711 until 1492.

“Clearly Spain forms part of the strategic objectives of global jihad,” Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz is quoted in the report. “We are not the only ones but we are in their sights.”

St Kosmas of Aitolia (Aug 24) - Equal to the Apostles, Holy Neo-Martyr under the Muslim Turks

- Life, Teachings, and Significance of a Modern-Day Apostle -

"The impact Father Kosmas had on the people-both lay and clergy-was such that he was considered a saint many years before he was cruelly put to death by the Turks. The secret of his great success was due, above all, to the fact that he not only preached the Gospel but lived it in such a way that many who heard him were moved to follow in his footsteps."  (Nomikos Michael Vaporis, Life of St. Kosmas Aitolos together with an English Translation of his Life and Teachings, Source.)

St Kosmas of Aitolia

During these early years of the Third Jihad, where Christians from Africa to the Middle East, and from Central Asia to Indonesia, are being just as viciously persecuted by Muslims as Christians were in previous centuries, we must turn for sure and salvific guidance to the lives and teachings of the Holy Confessors and Neo-Martyrs under the Turkish yoke, as well as those under the first wave of jihad in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the second jihad in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. This is why I feature posts on the saints of the Orthodox Church, who balance bold refutations of the false religion of Islam with pure Christian catechism, and who witness to Christ by their very lives.

So it is with St. Kosmas Aitolos, who embraced the call of missionary to the Greek people, strengthening them in their faith and through his patient preaching, teaching and establishing of Christian schools, rallied the Christians to resist the pressures exerted on them by their Muslim overlords:

Kosmas had made up his mind to do missionary work, and he could think of no better place to do so than in his homeland, particularly in the remote corners of the rugged peninsula where the lack of churches and flight from persecution had dimmed the light of Christianity. He was determined to revitalise the Christian spirit of every isolated village of Greece and to bring back to the forlorn the age-old Hellenic pride which the Muslims had ground into the dust. (Source)

At the same time, St. Kosmas taught his Christian flocks to love and forgive their enemies with the love of Christ Himself:

"We who are pious Christians, should love our enemies and should forgive them. We should feed them. We should give them drink. We should pray to God for their souls and then say to God: 'My God, I beg you to forgive me as I forgive my enemies'. But if we don't forgive our enemies, even if we shed our blood for the love of Christ, we'll go to hell." (Source)

The Muslim Jesus?

In the post below, Robert Spencer ably refutes a sly article which seeks to assimilate Jesus Christ into the Islamic tradition. I'd like to augment Mr. Spencer's comments with a few of my own:

The main absurdity in the Philip Jenkins article (reproduced below following Mr. Spencer's comments) is that the author presents supposed sayings of Jesus taken from non-canonical Christian sources, mixed in with supposed sayings of Jesus taken from Islamic sources. Jenkins states:

This degree of similarity is amazing given the chronology. All the Christian examples date from the second or third centuries, none of the Muslim examples is recorded before the ninth century. Yet they breathe exactly the same atmosphere.

Actually, there is nothing amazing about such similarity at all. In a very real sense it is the comparison of fabrications and heresies in order to imply a link between Islam and the real Jesus. The non-canonical "Christian" texts are non-canonical for very good reasons. Yet the unwitting Jenkins appeals to their ancientness, dating them to the second and third centuries. That puts them anywhere from 100 to 250 years older than the Gospels in the New Testament, and rejected by the Christian Church as outside the Apostolic tradition. (Spencer has more to say on this below.)

Further, Jenkins and the Muslim author he is deriving his thesis from appeal to similarities between sayings of the Islamic Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels:  "In perhaps 30 cases, the resemblances to the Synoptic gospels are overwhelming."

But such "overwhelming similarities" in no way help his thesis, as one can also find tight parallels and even direct links between the Quran and Zoroastrian texts, or between the Quran and the Jewish Talmud.

Such similarities rather reveal the Quran as a syncretistic patchwork of snippets from numerous spiritual traditions. When one looks behind Jenkins' assumptions, one finds that Islam is a fraud, Muhammad borrowing for the Quran from whatever struck his fancy. This also explains why the Quran so completely scrambles every Old Testament character and event which it recapitulates (most famously confusing Miriam the Mother of Jesus with Miriam the sister of Aaron, even though they are separated by centuries).

In filling in the gaps of his incomplete understanding of the Hebrew scriptures and traditions, Muhammad made things up, or rather, the demon which attended him fed the illiterate "prophet" lie after lie, distorting and confusing every Biblical account, from the Creation to Abraham to Noah to Moses to Jesus and so on. When subsequently rejected as a false prophet by the Jews and Christians of his day for his incoherent fables, Muhammad turned in pride and fury on them, accusing them of corrupting their scriptures, and unleashing the global jihad which continues to this day.

Significantly, Jenkins resorts to the thoroughly discredited "Q Theory" to make his case:

Scholars agree that the earliest records of Jesus took the form of sayings, or sequences of sayings, with very little of the narrative that we know from the canonical gospels. One such (hypothetical) sayings collection was “Q,” which was a critical source for both Matthew and Luke.

Actually, scholars "agree" on no such thing. For an in depth discussion of the post-modernist "Q" theory and the related question of early Christian oral tradition, all of which applies to Jenkins' exercise in mythmaking, see my 2013 article:  Refuting Reza Aslan’s ‘Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth’. 

Ultimately, the question, posed by Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, remains unchanged: "Who do men say that I am?" Since Peter's divinely inspired response, the Church has been established on the rock of his confession that Jesus is "the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Those who deny Jesus Christ, or seek to twist and appropriate Him for their own agenda, will use every subterfuge, academic "proof," and sophistry to do so. Some even resort to claiming direct revelations from God. We are never surprised nor thrown off balance by the deceits of the enemy of mankind. For we know that our life is in Christ, and that "no one comes to the Father but through Him."

_______

The Muslim Jesus?

by Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch — July 1, 2014

Another exercise in mythmaking.

Aleteia has published an extraordinarily irresponsible piece by Philip Jenkins, entitled “The Muslim Jesus.” Jenkins is the politically correct professor who has claimed to have found that “the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.” In this new piece he claims that the Islamic tradition has preserved some sayings of Jesus that could be authentic — basing his argument on the fact that they sound rather like other sayings attributed to Jesus, particularly in their exhortation not to value this passing world. He produces six sayings to support this, three from Islamic tradition and three from Christian non-canonical sources, claiming that the impossibility of distinguishing them from each other supports the authenticity of the Islamic sayings.

This is, of course, palpably absurd. Otherworldly sayings can be found in all manner of non-Christian traditions. The fact that they’re otherworldly doesn’t mean that Jesus said them. What’s more, his own argument cuts against itself, for he says: “Such words would have been treasured by Eastern Christian monks and hermits, in lands like Syria and Mesopotamia. We also know that from earliest times, some Christian monks and clergy accepted Islam. The Koran reports how their eyes filled with tears, as they prayed, ‘We do believe; make us one, then, with all who bear witness to the truth!’” If such words were treasured by Eastern Christian monks and hermits, and only some but presumably not all Christian monks and clergy accepted Islam, why is there no trace of these sayings in Eastern Christian traditions? It just happened that all the Christians who had preserved these sayings converted to Islam?

And even if these are authentic sayings of Jesus that have been preserved only in Islamic tradition, what are we supposed to get from that? What is Jenkins’ point? There is nothing in the supposed Islamic sayings of Jesus that he quotes that adds anything to our understanding of Jesus, or to the font of the world’s wisdom. Also, significantly, Jenkins does not bother to inform his readers that the Qur’an says that those who believe in the divinity of Christ are unbelievers (5:17, 5:72), or that Jesus was not actually crucified (4:157), or that those who say Jesus is the Son of God are accursed (9:30), or that Muslims should wage war against Christians until they submit to Islamic hegemony (9:29). He makes no mention of this notable hadith:

Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah’s Apostle said, “By Him in Whose Hands my soul is, son of Mary (Jesus) will shortly descend amongst you people (Muslims) as a just ruler and will break the Cross and kill the pig and abolish the Jizya (a tax taken from the non-Muslims, who are in the protection, of the Muslim government). Then there will be abundance of money and no-body will accept charitable gifts. (Bukhari 3.34.425)

Breaking the cross and killing the pig signifies abolishing the false Christianity, the Christianity that holds that Jesus was crucified and does not keep food laws. By abolishing the jizya, this Muslim Jesus is destroying the dhimma, the “protection” that Christians have when they submit to Islamic rule, thus leaving them with the choices only of converting to Islam or being killed.

This supremacist and violent vision is at the heart of the Islamic idea that Christianity in all its forms, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, is a twisting and hijacking of the original religion of Jesus, which was and is Islam. This is replacement theology par excellence, and renders all current forms of Christianity renegade and illegitimate. This idea is at the core of the Muslim persecution of Christians worldwide, from Nigeria to Libya to Egypt to Syria to Iraq to Pakistan to Indonesia. But Jenkins makes no mention of that escalating persecution, either. The thrust of his piece appears to be that sure, they’re killing Christians and dismissing Christianity as a mutant version of the teachings of Jesus, but look, they have some of Jesus’ original sayings! It thus appears as if his article is designed to render Christians uncritical and complacent in the face of the advancing jihad.

The Muslim Jesus: Jesus sayings we never thought we had

by Philip Jenkins, Aleteia, June 30, 2014:

Around the year 1600, the Indian emperor Akbar built a splendid ceremonial gate at Fatehpur Sikri, and on it he inscribed words attributed to Jesus, son of Mary: “The world is a bridge: pass over it, but do not build your house upon it.”

It’s an evocative saying, one of many attributed to Jesus in the Islamic tradition. But is there any chance that such words might have any authenticity, any connection with the historical Jesus? Actually, the chances are greater than you might think, and like a good professor, I am going to illustrate that with a short quiz.

The Koran includes a good deal of material about Jesus. [None of it accurate.] More relevant for present purposes are the many stories and saying gathered by Muslim sages over the following centuries, which have been collected by modern scholar Tarif Khalidi in his book The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature. Khalidi argues that together, these constitute a whole Muslim Gospel.