May 4, 7534
“Justice, justice shalt thou seek,that thou mayest live, and inherit the landwhich the Lord thy Godgiveth thee” (Deut. 16:20). “And to receive and profess the holy symbol, as the holy and God-bearing fathers at the First Ecumenical Council, which was in Nicaea, and at the Second Ecumenical Council, which was in Constantinople, wrote in Greek:…
Part 1 V.V. Buzhinsky Two thousand years have passed since the Nativity of Christ, and a thousand years since the Baptism of Rus’. And the Lord has removed the delusion — the godless regime collapsed, doomed and with hardly any resistance. As has often been the case, we did not perceive what had happened as…
By Metropolitan Innokenty (Usov) Preface Only that faith or church is true and salvific which was founded by Christ Himself and the Apostles and which continues uninterruptedly until the last days. All other faiths, confessions, churches, sects, or religious societies are nothing but delusions or human inventions, even if they are based on Holy Scripture,…
1. Attitude Toward Nonbelievers in the Old and New Testaments The Lord Jesus Christ, as He imparted His words to His disciples, who in turn passed them on to others, instilled in them a pure teaching—a teaching of the salvation of the soul and of a righteous life lived in love and peace with others….
In the life of a believer, prayer occupies a central place. Prayer is a conscious turning of a person toward God and His holy saints. It is founded upon the certainty that God exists, that He hears those who call upon Him, and that He is able to respond to their prayers. Christian prayer is…
In ancient times, reading the Lives of the Saints was one of the favorite activities of all layers of the Russian people. The readers were interested not only in historical facts from the lives of Christian ascetics but also in the profound instructive and moral-ethical meaning. Today, the Lives of the Saints have taken a…
A nachotnik is a man well-versed in sacred texts. Every Christian ought to be a nachotnik— that is, one who knows his confession, is capable of defending his belief, and therefore must be well-read, first of all in the Holy Scriptures, and then in all other ecclesiastical writings.— Fyodor Yefimovich Melnikov “Sanctify the Lord God…
In the fourth chapter of the Gospel according to John, we are given an example of how, from living water—the Holy Ghost, the incorruptible seed—the words of the Lord, a new spiritual man is born. The Lord converses with the Samaritan woman at the well. “Give Me to drink,” He says to the woman. “How…
The literature of Ancient Rus’ is divided into translated and original works. Translated literature appeared in Kievan Rus’ with the adoption of Christianity and had Byzantine and South Slavic (Bulgarian) origins. First and foremost, this included the biblical books of the Old and New Testaments, apocrypha, lives of the saints (hagiographic literature), religiously infused historical…
For centuries, it remained a persecuted body of literature. On the one hand, this meant that its authors were not subject to state censorship and therefore enjoyed a high degree of creative freedom; on the other hand, it also meant they had to pay a very high price for the ability to write in accordance…