A summation of "Progressive" Christianity beliefs.

[FireDragon76]

CS Lewis was a High Church Anglican

It depends on what you mean by "High Church". He was not an Anglo-Catholic, unlike T.S. Elliot.

I don't think Lewis fits into any particular Anglican party, like a great many typical Anglicans. He seems closest to William Law in terms of his spirituality. A kind of proto-Methodism.

who preferred to attend Said Services of Holy Communion that started at 7 AM at a parish some distance from Oxford, where he would ride with his brother every Sunday. They would depart immediately after receiving the Eucharist and not wait for the benediction. This being said CS Lewis has a number of ideas which are highly compatible with Orthodox theology, and very useful in explaining certain concepts; I rather like his remark that the gates of hell are locked on the inside. I also greatly admire his nightmarish book about the people in Hell being offered an escape to Heaven but mostly deciding to return to Hell, The Great Divorce. And Mere Christianity is probably the most accessible work of dogmatic theology ever written.

I never thought of Mere Christianity as being a work of dogmatic theology, more like apologetics.

The more I learn about Owen Barfield, the more I see similarities with my own religious sentiments. He was the original and last Inkling, a friend of Lewis but he was far less of a rationalist, and more influenced by German idealism and romanticism.

 

[The Liturgist]

It depends on what you mean by "High Church". He was not an Anglo-Catholic,

Some people say he was; if he was, he would clearly fall into the category of a Prayer Book Catholic who was opposed to any changes in the liturgy because of the disruption they cause to the laity, a viewpoint I am extremely sympathetic towards, but whether or not he was an Anglo Catholic I don’t have enough information to assert, but it is clear he was High Church, at a minimum, which puts him on the same continuum of churchmanship as the Anglo Catholics. And clearly he moved in the same circles as actual Roman Catholics such as his friend Tolkien, but given the lack of information I am not going to try to decode his churchmanship, and I think CS Lewis himself would object to us trying to decode his churchmanship to such a degree, since he tended to object to what I would regard as analogous approaches to literary criticism.

Rather, what we can say is that he was high church, and within the high church continuum, he may or may not have been a Prayer Book Catholic but we just don’t have enough information one way or the other. But we can rule out him being particularly low church, insofar as the style of service he attended, that being the early morning Said Service of Holy Communion, has much more in common with a traditional Catholic Low Mass than it does with a typical Protestant Sunday service of the 1950s, as nice as those were, with the organ music and hymns and so on, but the Low Churchmen of his era tended to gravitate towards that, or else embrace certain unusual liturgical practices relating to the BCP, for example, said Matins. Which now survives mainly as a high church thing.

These days there are also Anglicans who historically would have been considered Low Church who now call themselves High Church in order to separate themselves from the Evangelicals and the Broad Church and Liberal Catholic segments.

 

[The Liturgist]

I never thought of Mere Christianity as being a work of dogmatic theology, more like apologetics.

I would say its both, which is what makes it unique. It is a work of apologetics which takes the approach of Dogmatic Theology to Christianity, or perhaps it might be better to say it is a work of Dogmatic Theology based on the shared doctrine of all normative Christian churches, to be as ecumenically acceptable as possible, optimized for use in the context of apologetics.

 

[The Liturgist]

In rural Africa and in places you don't find beautiful cathedrals and architecture and the language of the old king James.

Well, you do in Egypt, Ethiopia and Eritrea, which last time I checked were part of Africa…

But with regards to the less developed area, there a different approach is taken by missionaries such as my great uncle, memory eternal. But now that Christianity has taken root and become the predominant religion in Africa, the continent is on a cathedral-building boom. And it is those cathedrals which will allow the indigenous religions such as Voudon to be obliterated, because who in their right mind would want to go to a smelly fetish market to buy supposedly magical animal guts when one could instead be spending that time in a cathedral with the sent of incense and the glory of Christ made present iconographically?

 

[Reasonably Sane]

Well then in summary, the baggage of the word Trinity is much more desirable than the baggage of not having it, considering how Trinitarians were brutally persecuted by Arians following the Council of Nicaea, until the reign of Emperor Theodosius, and then as Rome collapsed, the Ostrogoths and Visigoths who had been converted by Arian missionaries massacred more Christians, and many Visigoths converted to islam, which also stridently rejects the Trinity. In more recent times, we have a slew of unpleasant non-Trinitarian cults ranging from LDS to Jehovah’s Witnesses to the non-Trinitarian Adventists (as opposed to SDA), to the Christian Science people and the Oneness Pentecostals, and of course the Unitarian Universalists. Indeed with almost all cults, the first thing they jettison is the Trinity.

Meanwhile, the baggage of the Holy and Life Giving Trinity consists of thousands of beautiful churches, monasteries and cathedrals named for the Holy Trinity, the beautiful icon “The Hospitality of Abraham” by St. Andrei Rublev, and the Orthodox approach to soteriology, which is entirely Trinitarian. Since the Trinity consists of a family of three coeternal persons united in perfect love and sharing the divine essence of the Father, it represents the ideal model for human relations, so our vocation in the Orthodox church is to make ourselves an icon of the Trinity in our relationship with our family, with our neighbors, with other members of the church, and with society as a whole. Given that, at the carousel of the dogmatic airport, I will take the baggage of the word Trinity, which is filled with priceless treasure, over the baggage of even a nominal non-Trinitarianism, which is filled with dung, any time.

I try not to add all that baggage to a word that is basically used as shorthand to describe three entities basically being the one entity. It's shorthand for "God in three persons". Ever since I first became a Christian in 1981, I've always found the strained "explanations" for the trinity to be interesting and, frankly, sometimes comical. There is the egg, water, etc. The way I see it is much simpler. God is one. And the father, the Son, and the holy spirit are all God. They are one. But he details are much harder for us to understand than quantum mechanics or how a multiverse actually would exist. So I don't get wrapped up in the weeds arguing it. And if someone doesn't like the word, "trinity", I don't use that word. After all, it is not in any of our scripture - even 1 Enoch or all the books in the Septuagint.

And thanks for sumarasing.

 

[Reasonably Sane]

The problem there is that you cannot win someone to Christ by arguing with them. Not in any stable or sustainable way, at any rate. Rather, the conversion process involves the grace of the Holy Spirit, and attracting people to Christianity through exemplary conduct, and through the use of liturgical beauty, such as the architecture of church buildings, to stimulate the curiosity of prospective converts, and through the grace of the Holy Spirit, they walk inside, and are received warmly, and things go from there.

Now, with YouTube and other forms of Social Media, the opportunity exists for people to stumble upon the unspoiled beauty of Orthodox Christianity and related varieties of traditional liturgical Christianity, such as Evangelical Catholicism and High Church Anglicanism, in a number of forms, styles and places.

This may expose why I feel about it the way I do. That is, it becomes a source of arguments between believers. And several years ago I started taking seriously, regarding secondary issues, Paul's warnings about useless arguments. It's why I don't get into end times discussions much any more, though I was a fanatical arguer about it for at least two decades.

 

[The Liturgist]

Ever since I first became a Christian in 1981, I've always found the strained "explanations" for the trinity to be interesting and, frankly, sometimes comical. There is the egg, water, etc. The way I see it is much simpler. God is one. And the father, the Son, and the holy spirit are all God. They are one. But he details are much harder for us to understand than quantum mechanics or how a multiverse actually would exist.

The “explanations” you cite tend to be heretical, due to modalism or the dividing of God into parts. It is sufficient to say that the Trinity is one God in three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who are co-equal, and proceed from the Creed.

That is, it becomes a source of arguments between believers.

All Christians believe in the Trinity and the Incarnation. Really, this is the definitive way of separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The J/Ws, Swedenborgian New Church people, Moonies, Mormons, Christian Science, non-Trinitarian Adventists and Oneness Pentecostals, among others, all reject the Trinity. Even Islam was initially an anti-Trinitarian heresy, until Muhammed shifted focus away from converting Arabian Jews and Christians and towards converting the Pagans of Mecca, which he symbolized one morning in Medina by initially leading prayer facing Jerusalem as per the Jewish custom that he had followed, before changing to face Mecca. Nonetheless, Islam was classified as a heretical form of Christianity for several centuries, by such thought leaders of the early church as the extremely pious and learned monk St. John of Damascus, from the celebrated Mar Saba monastery in the Holy Land (which along with St. Catharine’s Monastery in Sinai, St. Anthony’s Monastery and the Syrian Monastery in Egypt and other related Coptic monasteries such as those in Scetis, the convent in the Aramaic speaking town of Maaloula which was occupied by Al Qaeda, the Syriac Orthodox monasteries in Tur Abdin, and the Greek Monasteries on Mount Athos and on the Island of Patmos and the Meteora valley, are the most important surviving Christian monasteries in the Eastern Mediterranean area.

Whereas all normal Christian churches that are generally recognized by other churches as Trinitarian accept it, and baptize people in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost based on Matthew 28:19, and also accept and teach the doctrine of the Incarnation as found in Luke 1-2, Matthew 1-2, and John 1:1-18.

So if anyone, while believing in the doctrine referred to by the word Trinity, which is a prerequisite to being a Christian, argues with me about the name, I will dismiss that argument as at best quibbling over a nominal value, and more seriously, as offensive to the millions of Christians who since the time of the early Church have died at the hands of non-Trinitarian heretics who have persecuted us, such as Arians and Muslims.

Also you know the Nicene Creed is part of the Christian Forum Statement of Faith, so one never needs to worry about having to argue with a non-Trinitarian here. Likewise the Statement of Faith also bans denying the Apostolate of St. Paul and also separately the site rules ban arguing for the KJV only position, which was implemented shortly after I joined, and I think the mods did that simply because the KJV only people would not leave us alone and were utterly impossible to reason with, with some even going so far as to insist that ancient Greek manuscripts be discarded in favor of translations from the KJV owing to its status as an inspired revelation, which is of course ludicrous. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the elegant Jacobean English prose of the King James Version as much as anyone possibly could, but those people were unbearable regardless of whether one liked the KJV or didn’t like the KJV.

 

[The Liturgist]

I don't think Lewis fits into any particular Anglican party, like a great many typical Anglicans. He seems closest to William Law in terms of his spirituality. A kind of proto-Methodism.

Well, speaking from an Orthodox perspective, we tend to find much of what he wrote extremely useful, and as you may know there were both direct and indirect connections between Eastern Orthodoxy and Methodism (just as there was also an indirect connection between Oriental Orthodoxy and Lutheranism, which I love, in that those two denominations are particularly known for their competent use of communicatio idiomatum and their correct opposition to Nestorianism).

One thing I particularly like about the liturgy of the Epworth Chapel on the Green, which unfortunately I can’t enjoy watching on YouTube at the moment because their audio recording system has been malfunctioning more and more for the past year, so that the sound has become unbearably scratchy, and I intend to contact them about it today if i have time, as a matter of fact, is that their liturgy incorporates the Trisagion from Eastern Orthodoxy in addition to much BCP content. And John Wesley instructed Methodists to fast on Wednesday and Friday, and desired that the Litany be said on those days, and Epworth comes as close as anyone to doing that by having a prayer service on Thursday evening, which liturgically is of course Friday, since the liturgical day starts with Vespers (which interestingly enough is the case regardless of when you celebrate Vespers, so for the Orthodox, Pascha, or Easter Sunday, starts midway through the Vesperal Divine Liturgy on Holy Saturday, specifically the point in the liturgy where in the Slavonic tradition the black paraments of Good Friday are removed and replaced with white Paschal paraments, and the clergy change vestments*, until around midday on Sunday when Agape Vespers are served. Although this is theoretical of course, and also it doesn’t really matter because Holy Monday is a feast day with the same relaxations on fasting et cetera as Pascha.

*Interestingly, in some Russian churches, mainly those associated with the MP and the OCA, there is another vestment and parament change to red that happens during the Paschal Divine Liturgy at midnight, whereas ROCOR and the Serbians and other Slavs insist on using white vestments throughout, which strikes me as more likely the older custom, and it also parallels what is done in the Greek and Antiochian liturgies and in the Roman, Lutheran and Anglican liturgies.

 

[Reasonably Sane]

The “explanations” you cite tend to be heretical, due to modalism or the dividing of God into parts. It is sufficient to say that the Trinity is one God in three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who are co-equal, and proceed from the Creed.

The “explanations” you cite tend to be heretical, due to modalism or the dividing of God into parts. It is sufficient to say that the Trinity is one God in three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who are co-equal, and proceed from the Creed.

I certainly would not ccall it heretical, since "trinity" literally means there are "three parts". But again, the rest of my post explains why this is sort of a pointless argument. It's like a couple of average 4 year olds trying to argue the benefits of ICE vehicles vs EV's. They are only parroting what they have been told and don't understand it.

I just realized where the real problem, at least in my opinion, is: It's the old analogy, arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Quite pointless. I'll just take what the bible says and prayerfully interpret with input from other believers and then move on. Sometimes I refer to the trinity, and sometimes I don't. It all depends on the context of the discussion. I'm not really for or against it since it is not in the bible as a "word".

 

[The Liturgist]

I certainly would not ccall it heretical, since "trinity" literally means there are "three parts"

No, it literally does not. The word is a portmaneu of “three” and “unity” coined by Tertullian. And it is absolutely heretical according to the dogmatic definitions of the Early Church as accepted by every major denominations to say that God is divisible into parts or is a compound entity (specifically, it is Partialism).

Here is an amusing video my pious and excellent friend @MarkRohfrietsch likes to link people to that explains Christological Orthodoxy in a fun and silly way:

 

[Rose_bud]

Well, you do in Egypt, Ethiopia and Eritrea, which last time I checked were part of Africa…

But with regards to the less developed area, there a different approach is taken by missionaries such as my great uncle, memory eternal. But now that Christianity has taken root and become the predominant religion in Africa, the continent is on a cathedral-building boom. And it is those cathedrals which will allow the indigenous religions such as Voudon to be obliterated, because who in their right mind would want to go to a smelly fetish market to buy supposedly magical animal guts when one could instead be spending that time in a cathedral with the sent of incense and the glory of Christ made present iconographically?

You make a compelling point about the cultural and religious dynamics in Africa, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, where Christianity has a long history. Not all African areas has Voudon as a religion. It's a lot more complex. YouTube won't do it justice.

Great that your great uncle had an opportunity to share the gospel in Africa. Missionaries has done a great deal for African areas, but where they have failed is to consider the people they have come to "save". This has led to a limited understanding of the gospel and its application, often prioritizing Western perspectives over indigenous experiences.

It's crucial to recognize the value of indigenous religions and their significance to local communities, rather than dismissing them as "smelly fetish markets" or "magical animal guts."

Missionaries will be much more successful in their approach if they promote mutual respect and understanding.
Rather than... this is not like "me", it must be "wrong". This type of arrogance has made it difficult to bring the simple message of the gospel to African areas.

Initiatives that foster dialogue, cultural exchange, and respectful engagement can ensure that the purity of the Christian message is not compromised. But this requires humility and patience.

With a background in civil and building engineering I can appreciate a beautiful building/cathedral and a clay hut, but God is often times missed in the simple things.

 

[The Liturgist]

By the way, reading the asinine anti-Trinitarian comments some random guy trolled in that video makes me really thankful Christian Forums banned anti-Trinitarian debates. Otherwise we would be thoroughly infested with undercover J/Ws and other heretics.

 

[The Liturgist]

You make a compelling point about the cultural and religious dynamics in Africa, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, where Christianity has a long history. Not all African areas has Voudon as a religion. It's a lot more complex. YouTube won't do it justice.

Great that your great uncle had an opportunity to share the gospel in Africa. Missionaries has done a great deal for African areas, but where they have failed is to consider the people they have come to "save". This has led to a limited understanding of the gospel and its application, often prioritizing Western perspectives over indigenous experiences.

It's crucial to recognize the value of indigenous religions and their significance to local communities, rather than dismissing them as "smelly fetish markets" or "magical animal guts."

Missionaries will be much more successful in their approach if they promote mutual respect and understanding.
Rather than... this is not like "me", it must be "wrong". This type of arrogance has made it difficult to bring the simple message of the gospel to African areas.

Initiatives that foster dialogue, cultural exchange, and respectful engagement can ensure that the purity of the Christian message is not compromised. But this requires humility and patience.

With a background in civil and building engineering I can appreciate a beautiful building/cathedral and a clay hut, but God is often times missed in the simple things.

Normally i am respectful of local religions, but with the Voudon religion as practiced originally by the Yoruba tribes in Benin, which later spread to Togo and Nigeria and even to the Akan peoples in Ghana, and which also spread to the New World where it formed the basis for various derivative religions called Voodoo and also the Louisiana Voodoo, Hoodoo and Juju religions in New Orleans and the lower Mississippi river, I have to draw a line. It’s basically a satanic belief system that is thoroughly disgusting, one of the most repulsive religious systems on the planet.

Some indigenous religions are worthy of respect and some are even related to Christianity in some respects. For example, the Zoroastrian religion of Persia, or the ancient Egyptian religion which had the idea of a God-man, but misidentified that person as Pharoah rather than as Jesus Christ, but which nonetheless helped the Coptic (Egyptian) people be open to the idea of a Theandric savior, which in turn enabled their embrace of Christianity. I also have great respect for Shinto, Taoism, the indigenous religion of Korea, Sikhism, some forms of Hinduism and Jainism, the non-violent varieties of Islam, particularly the Mevlevis and the crypto-Christian Alevis and Bektashis, and the Kurdish Yazidi and Yarsani religions which appear to be descended at least partially from an heretical form of Syrian Christianity called Ophitism.

And likewise some indigenous African religions are beautiful. I like that of the Bantu people. But Voudon is just a filthy religion, which results in the needless death and suffering of animals, many of which are sacrificed not for food consumption but for other purposes, and also represents a major public health risk in terms of the contact it promotes between people and the decomposing parts of dead animals. And it is not native to most of the areas in Africa and the Carribean and United States where it and derivatives thereof are practiced; it is native only to Benin, where it must have appeared as a result of demonic activity (much like the origin of Islam appears to be the result of Muhammed being misled by a demon impersonating St. Gabriel the Archangel).

I would list Voudon together with Scientology, Christian Science and a few other cults as something that should be banned for reasons of public health, and the only reason why I don’t advocate this in the US is my desire to protect the absolute status of the First Ammendment. But in other countries that lack our free speech protections, and which have an established church, like England, Greece, Finland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the former Soviet Socialist Republics such as the Baltic States, I would positively support a ban on this religion, just as some countries have very properly banned Scientology.

 

[FireDragon76]

The problem there is that you cannot win someone to Christ by arguing with them. Not in any stable or sustainable way, at any rate. Rather, the conversion process involves the grace of the Holy Spirit, and attracting people to Christianity through exemplary conduct, and through the use of liturgical beauty, such as the architecture of church buildings, to stimulate the curiosity of prospective converts, and through the grace of the Holy Spirit, they walk inside, and are received warmly, and things go from there.

Now, with YouTube and other forms of Social Media, the opportunity exists for people to stumble upon the unspoiled beauty of Orthodox Christianity and related varieties of traditional liturgical Christianity, such as Evangelical Catholicism and High Church Anglicanism, in a number of forms, styles and places.

Does the supposed beauty of churches really attract people? I am skeptical of this argument. I can't see much evidence it does in the US, at least. The only churches that are really growing in the US are Pentecostal churches, not known for their beauty.

 

[The Liturgist]

With a background in civil and building engineering I can appreciate a beautiful building both a beautiful cathedral and a clay hut, but God is often times missed in the simple things.

Voudon is specifically documented at the beginning of Part 3 of Around the World in 80 Faiths presented by Fr. Peter Owen-Jones of the Church of England, and i should warn you, this video is not for the squeamish, as it depicts the particularly disgusting practices of pointless animal slaughter that they engage in, but if you view this, and then compare it with the other religions of Africa depicted in this video, such as Ethiopian Orthodoxy which the video concludes with, or even the silly Rastafarian religion, you will see why I am so adamantly opposed to Voudon and its derivatives.

Be advised, this video is NSFW and exceedingly gross, but this is the reality of what Voodoo worship is. A bizarre blend of Paganism and Shamanist superstition combined with the theurgical practices of the occult. I placed the link in a Spoiler container below:

Spoiler

 

[The Liturgist]

Does the supposed beauty of churches really attract people? I am skeptical of this argument. I can't see much evidence it does in the US, at least. The only churches that are really growing in the US are Pentecostal churches, not known for their beauty.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, we get a lot of traction from this, and the Anglicans and certain of the better looking Roman Catholic cathedrals also get traction from it, so yes.

And the Orthodox and Continuing Anglicans are growing, the TLM communities within Roman Catholicism are growing despite Pope Francis trying to kill them off, largely due to birthrates, the Assyrian Church of the East is growing, and furthermore, the Episcopalians are managing to replace in some of their better-looking urban parishes those members alienated by liberal theology or that have reposed due to the attrition factor from those elderly members who just do not want to change denominations despite the fact that the Episcopal Church has embraced doctrines they otherwise could not tolerate, with walk-ins, people attracted to services in their more elegant buildings, particularly services such as Evensong and Compline. St. Thomas Fifth Ave in New York and St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle have had great success with these programs.

Of course, the Episcopal Church made the mistake in the 1970s and 80s of selling a lot of their beautiful downtown churches in small and midsized cities and replacing them with ugly suburban churches. For example, in Chico, in Northern California, they replaced their lovely downtown church with a nearby building in a more suburban neighborhood, insofar as Chico could be said to have suburbs, which it really doesn’t, but it does have a downtown and neighborhoods which are not downtown but which are much newer, and they have very poor attendance. Their old church spent a few decades as a Chinese restaurant before the Anglican Province of Christ the King rescued it around 1994, and they manage to fill it up every Sunday. I attended high school in Paradise, the city which was destroyed by the Camp Fire, although they are working on rebuilding it, but that recent fire last week in Oregon was quite a scare, so these churches in Chico are very dear to my heart.

I should add I feel lucky that I was able to spend enough time in the UK and elsewhere not to get stuck with the unusual North Valley accent of California, which is a most interesting accent in that, along with the Central Valley accent, it has some features which are otherwise only found in the Canadian accent. As a teenager I recall watching kids’ shows produced in Canada on Nickelodeon in the very early 1990s and being surprised to see the “made in Canada” logo pop up in the credits (which one could watch in full back then, unlike with TV of the present, since this was so early in the 90s that usually the network announcer did not even talk over the credits, or if they did, it was brief. Those were the days…

 

[dzheremi]

In rural Africa and in places you don't find beautiful cathedrals and architecture and the language of the old king James.

The Spirit of God is present in the natural beauty that surrounds and in the beat of a drum. You appeal through the Creator God and take it from there.

There is a certain awe and beauty I can appreciate in the liturgical setting but when you have heard God being worshipped to the beat of a drum in a clay hut, it is just as awe inspiring and humbling.

While I can appreciate what I'm reading here, I think there might be a certain danger in this way of thinking that separates the relatively more simple rural church from the cathedral and makes one into a fundamentally different experience than the other. In Africa, just like literally everywhere else on the planet, most Churches have both humble parish churches and grand cathedrals, and churches of various sizes or with various different layouts and architectural designs, depending on what is traditional to them. Since Africa was one of the incubators of the Christian faith (our apostle and master St. Mark being by birth and culture a Hellenized Libyan Jew; the 70 translators to whom we owe the particular form of our Old Testament being from among the learned Jewish community at Alexandria in the time before the incarnation of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ; etc.), some of these particular physical and liturgical forms of church are incredibly old and well-attested, as is the case with regard to the Orthodox Tewahedo of Ethiopia and Eritrea, or their mother Church, that of the Egyptians/Copts.

Everything that follows from the interaction of the western Christian and the peoples of Africa is, if I may be so blunt, just as much (if not more so) a reflection of the western Christians' presuppositions about Africa and Africans as it is anything to do with actual African Christianity. I personally greatly dislike the term "hut" due to the conjuring in the western mind of a sort of primitiveness when African Christians and African Christianity are anything but primitive (e.g., the Orthodox Tewahedo of the Axumite Empire of East Africa were worshipping Christ our God together with His good Father and the Holy Spirit when the ancestors of a great many European-descended people, including myself, were still worshipping rocks and trees; NB: the first English king to accept baptism, Æthelberht of Kent, did so c. 601 AD, nearly three centuries after the conversion of Ezana of Axum, c. 330), but since the reference has been made to clay huts as places of worship, it should be noted that the Orthodox Tewahedo are known for their unique round churches with thatched roofs, as you can see in this video (together with other types of construction):

They are just much rightly known for ornate cathedrals such as the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa:

If one of these is better, or more humbling, or more authentic or whatever then the other, that's not something I've heard from any of the actual African Christians I've ever worshipped with (and this is as a member of the first Church to ever be planted on the African continent) -- not just Ethiopians and Eritreans, but also people from Sudan, Togo, Tanzania, and surely elsewhere that I am not remembering.

 

[dzheremi]

Does the supposed beauty of churches really attract people? I am skeptical of this argument. I can't see much evidence it does in the US, at least. The only churches that are really growing in the US are Pentecostal churches, not known for their beauty.

Sorry to interrupt, but why wouldn't it? People appreciate aesthetic beauty, and even more so when it is tied to something beyond just looking nice for its own sake. I think what we see in the US is more of a symptom of a kind of anti-Church 'churchiness' that pervades in the minds of people for whom theology does not really have much importance or maybe even real existence, due to the stranglehold that "four bare walls and a sermon" thinking has on many people's approach to Christianity in this country, especially when it is tied to a relentless search for 'authenticity', as I just attempted to deal with in a roundabout way in my response to Rose_bud's observations about Christianity in Africa. Near as I can tell as an outsider to this religious culture, it is somehow seen as more authentic and therefore better to worship God 'simply', by which these people rarely if ever mean "without distraction or need to be seen by others" (y'know, "go into your closet"), than to do so surrounded by beauty. Beauty thus becomes distraction (or worse), rather than a manifestation of our attempts to offer our first fruits unto God.

I admittedly don't 'get' it, so I'm sure there will be much to disagree with in what I've written here, but nevertheless this is what I am seeing when I interact with non-Orthodox/non-Catholic/non-High Church Protestant people, both here and in real life. It's almost never "Why do you have the icon/the prostrations/the whatever?" (something that invites an exploration of exactly that), but instead "Why do you have to have...?" (something that invites a complaint, namely that the most ancient forms of Christianity ought to look and behave like something from the Azusa Street revival of 1906, or whatever other thing the complainer has in mind). It's as though people of this tendency have everything better to do than to engage with and in their own religion and worship of God. (Recall our earlier conversation in another thread wherein you very rightly observed that most people don't want to truly engage with or in Christianity. That is sadly the truth.)

Not much I can say to that tendency while remaining irenic other than Kyrie eleison. Only God can give us a new heart, and transform us by the renewing of our minds.

 

[MarkRohfrietsch]

Does the supposed beauty of churches really attract people? I am skeptical of this argument. I can't see much evidence it does in the US, at least. The only churches that are really growing in the US are Pentecostal churches, not known for their beauty.

I have taken people through our Church and too the time to explain the significance of the architecture and the mean of the art and symbols. Such things as crucifixes, Icons and art can be very intimidating without explanation and understanding. Most recently, two Muslim brothers who have toured some great cathedrals in the east and recently Notra Dame de Montreal here in Canada had never had what they saw explained to them. In mour humble little church, my explanations helped them understand what they had seen in these other Churches, and has intrigued them enough that they want to come to a service with their families. Who knows what will happen from there?

We could take a lesson from this video:

 

[The Liturgist]

I have taken people through our Church and too the time to explain the significance of the architecture and the mean of the art and symbols. Such things as crucifixes, Icons and art can be very intimidating without explanation and understanding. Most recently, two Muslim brothers who have toured some great cathedrals in the east and recently Notra Dame de Montreal here in Canada had never had what they saw explained to them. In mour humble little church, my explanations helped them understand what they had seen in these other Churches, and has intrigued them enough that they want to come to a service with their families. Who knows what will happen from there?

We could take a lesson from this video:

Splendid! And this is precisely my point. We want our churches to be so beautiful as to be overwhelming and to prompt a sense of mystery, so that people will ask questions. Because when they ask questions, people like you can explain the rich theology to them, and in that manner spread the faith. And the thrilling thing is that your explanation will have a cumulative effect in concert with their visits to some of the splendid cathedrals in the East of Canada, since you are able to explain that architecture.

It is also for this reason that I really want to promote understanding of Eastern Christian architecture to Western Christians and vice versa, since in Orthodoxy we have the Antiochian Western Rite Vicarate, and conversely there are Eastern Catholic and even some Byzantine Rite Anglican groups. The main reason I want to do this is so that if a liturgical question from any church gets asked a question that pertains to any other liturgical church within the area of shared theological overlap as defined by the Creed and the creedal canticles such as that of the Apostles, and St. Athanasius, and confessional hymns such Te Deum Laudamus, Ho Monogenes, Haw Nurone and others which we can regard as foundational insofar as they define the doctrine of the Incarnation, the nature of the Trinity, the status of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Theotokos, and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which are the four points where Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Anglo-Catholics, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Catholic Lutherans, Old Catholics, and other liturgical Christians can agree.

There was a wonderful now-defunct website posted by a ROCOR monk, Fr. Aidan Keller, who I think may have reposed, which is fortunately archived entirely on the WayBack Machine, which contains this extremely useful set of glossaries of Eastern Orthodox and Western Orthodox (Anglican/Lutheran/Catholic/Western Rite Orthodox) liturgical terminology:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120926064907/http://www.allmercifulsavior.com/Liturgy/Glossary2.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20120926065102/http://www.allmercifulsavior.com/Liturgy/Glossary.html

Of course we could still use such glossaries for East Syriac, West Syriac and Coptic liturgical terminology, which is extremely important in the history of the Church, and also Armenian and Ethiopian terminology, despite the fact that it is somewhat more obscure.

@dzheremi your post by the way on this subject was absolutely exquisite; perhaps at some point you might feel so inclined to type out a glossary of Coptic Liturgical Terminology or perhaps help me draft up a sort of spreadsheet or table comparing the terminology?