This theologeumemmon looks like it addresses sins a person may be tempted to commit, not sins that are committed against you. Is this correct?
No, the various forms of the toll houses theologoumemna are about how we are accused after having died of committing various sins, but through faith in Christ we are defended against these accusations, even those which are true.
In Orthodoxy, whether one believes in toll houses or not, it is recognized we are continually tempted, but for sin to occur one must at a minimum “couple” with the temptation, that is to say, consider engaging in it, rather than rejecting it immediately. For example if a married or celibate man, or another woman, sees a beautiful woman, and considers engaging in relations w rather than rejecting the temptation immediately and focusing on fidelity and chastity, they have sinned, according to what Jesus Christ said, having committed adultery mentally if not in actuality. If one is angered at a colleague and considers, not seriously, but as a fantasy, getting revenge by murdering them or slandering them or otherwise harming them, one has sinned. We sin continually through fantasies of violence, power, sexual perversion, avarice, and indulgence, and even if we conquer these sinful passions, we are still at risk of pride, indeed even more so, for pride and delusions of grandeur are dangerous sins that monastics tend to fall into.
Now I should tell you I am not an expert concerning the Aerial Toll Houses concept (there are two slight variants of it, a more literal interpretaiton taught by the monks at St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in Florence, Arizona, which was led by the Athonite monk Elder Ephrem, memory eternal, who I did once meet and who I love very much, and a more spiritual, metaphorical interpretation expressed by Fr. Seraphim Rose, who also founded a monastery, St. Herman of Alaska, in Platina, California, who I never met but greatly admire, who reposed of liver cancer in 1980 if I recall. Both men are venerable and I expect they will be glorified as saints in the future. Elder Ephraim founded a total of 19 monasteries in the US after revitalizing a decaying monastery on Mount Athos in Greece. At any rate, I don’t know that much about the eschatological concept, and my approach is to keep my head down and pray for the salvation of my loved ones and I pray the Jesus Prayer “ Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me, A Sinner”, but am not a Hesychast, that is to say, I do not engage in the more advanced form that was taught on Mount Athos by Elder Ephrem’s spiritual father St. Joseph the Hesychast, whose relics I have venerated, but i would if I lived in a monastery or had regular access to an elder who could guide me in it, but the Jesus Prayer is a superb thing either way. I also pray, as I am able, the Divine Office.
However if you want to know more about that doctrine, you should perhaps post a thread in St. Basil’s forum and ask ArmyMatt, who is a chaplain in the US Army with the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) of which I am also affiliated, although I have been a part of congregations in other jurisdictions as well, and I have also worked with Protestants, particularly Anglicans and Congregationalists, to promote Orthodoxy and the use of Orthodox icons and prayers as a means of removing the remaining vestiges of the erroneous Scholastic theology that precipitated the schism between Rome and the Orthodox, in favor of a purely Patristic approach, which one can find in Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy (and to a lesser extent in the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, but the problem with the Church of the East is that it was so severely persecuted, it lost much of its identity and barely survived, being united around a large community of Aramaic speakers, the largest in the world, but its a bit doctrinally unstable; for example, officially they should have icons and officially they are not iconoclastic - their canons require an icon of Christ not Made by Hands, a very popular icon among the Eastern Orthodox and other Eastern churches, but in practice their churches lack icons, which they claim is because of repeated desecrations by Muslims. This might be true, but they have continued building them this way in the diaspora. Nonetheless their ancient liturgy survives and is quite beautiful, although not as beautiful as that of the Syriac Orthodox or the Eastern Orthodox. The Eastern Orthodox liturgy is also the most ornate and complex in the world.
The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches firmly believe in Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi (the rule of prayer is the rule of belief and the rule of life). Thus all doctrines are contained in the liturgy, which is the definitive source of doctrinal information. However, as summaries, we have books of Dogmatic Theology, such as the 8th century Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, part of the writings of St. John of Damascus, which also include a catalog of heresies which contains the epitomes describing the older heresies from the “Medicine Chest”, a fourth century encyclopedia of heresy written by St. Epiphanios of Cyprus (whose writing in turn quotes St. Ireaneus “Against Heresies”, a second century work; St. Irenaeus of Lyons is regarded by many as the first Scholar of Theology; St. John of Damascus however wrote original and detailed profiles of more recent heresies such as Islam and Tritheism. A more recent and accessible work, albeit still under copyright, is Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, which was translated into English by Fr. Seraphim Rose (who also wrote The Soul After Death, on the subject of aerial tollhouses).
Which gets you out of the perfectionism and the struggle for approval because you are not responsible for winning God’s approval; it is God working in you to justify, sanctify, and make you pass. Approval cannot be won; it is a gift that is given or it is not. God gives his approval as a gift, and your father will never give it.
I assume you are talking about the father of
@Light of the East ? My father reposed in 2015 and I miss him greatly and pray for him, and he was a devout Christian who helped the persecuted Serbian Orthodox community in Kosovo while being opposed to the regime of Slobodan Milosevic whose actions precipitated the crisis.
However in Orthodoxy we are to forgive those who have harmed us and to pray for our enemies. To quote an Anglican liturgy “God desireth not the death of a sinner, but that he might turn from his wicked ways and live…” In Orthodoxy we pray for the dead, and ask for the prayers of those who have reposed in Christ and have been glorified and are members of the Church Triumphant, the identities of some of whom we know, based on various things such as miracles or if they died a martyr (all martyrs are regarded as saints in Orthodoxy, unlike in Roman Catholicism, and likewise with confessors (those who are made to suffer for their faith in Christ), since Christ our True God said that if anyone confesses Him before men, He will confess that person before the Father. For those saints whose identities are not known to us, we venerate them along with all of those who are known on All Saints Day, which is the Sunday after Pentecost in Eastern Orthodoxy (because for the Orthodox, Pentecost is considered a feast of the Holy Trinity, because the God Holy Spirit descended upon the Holy Apostles having been sent by Christ our True God to serve as our Comforter and Paraclete, while the Holy Spirit sent Christ into the world by causing our glorious Lady Theotokos and ever virgin Mary to be miraculously impregnated with Him despite not having known a man, after she consented. And this was according to the will of God the Father.*
* Historically, several feasts which are now celebrated as multiple occasions in some churches were originally one occasion. For example, Christmas used to be celebrated together with the Baptism of our Lord, Theophany, and still is in the Armenian Apostolic Church, which is Oriental Orthodox, but all other churches including the Eastern Orthodox decided to celebrate the Nativity separately, nine months from the already existing feast of the Annunciation. Likewise, this feast was celebrated on the same day as Pascha by the Quartodecimians, but concerns over the change in how the date of Pascha was computed by the Jews led to Quartodecimianism becoming controversial in the second century, and the practice became disallowed at the Council of Nicea, which prescribed the Paschalion, the formula for calculating the date of Pascha, which for the Orthodox is the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ, and is also known as Easter, and the Paschalion aims to ensure that it is celebrated on the first Sunday following the vernal equinox which in 33 AD corresponded to March 25th, and the early church unanimously believed based on ancient tradition that our Lord was conceived on the same day as His resurrection. This is why the Feast of the Annunciation, in which the Archangel Gabriel saluted the Theotokos and informed her that if she consented, she would become pregnant with the Messiah, and she did consent.
