of the Genesis account of the Creation: when God completed His work of creating the universe, it is recorded, "Behold, it was very good." Christians today often lament that the world is not in good shape, but it only proves the point: they believe it ought to be in better shape. The oftenunconscious subtext of this lament comes from the tradition that the world has deteriorated from its original mint condition, because of something Christian theologians call "the Fall."
This is why Christ God came to fix the problem, in the first place. For two thousand years, Christians have believed that the problem is smaller than the solution, because the solution is the Divine Economy, the Salvific Plan, of their God. In the Christian religion, therefore, problems have solutions, Good triumphs over Evil, and fear is replaced by joy. The same cannot be said of other religions in which, as the Mourtos article pointed out, reincarnation (and consequently the dominance of fate) is a central belief. The same cannot be said of secular systems that dismiss the supernatural (Marxism or Confucianism, for example), in which the destiny of Man is delimited by the end of earthly life, or is unknowable. The same cannot be said even of religions which may be Abrahamic in lineage, but in which the main manifestation of God is His power, but not His love.
The Christian religion also has a unique approach in its teachings. Every single one of today's major religions arose in Asia. Among them, Christianity came out of Palestine and became the dominant religion in Europe. The New Testament was written in Greek, a European language. Christian teachers and thinkers from generation to generation have always had a unique approach to the interpretation and understanding of their faith. This has a lot to do with the Greco-Roman stamp and heritage of the Christian Church, which are characterized by an attitude of rationality and enlightenment. This went hand-in-hand with the affirmative attitude of the Christian faith to the universe and Creation. For the Christian religion, the Supernatural and the Holy Mysteries are not to be feared; rather, they are to be respected and venerated as a Help to Mankind. God is good, and the lover of Mankind. God is knowable, revealing Himself as the Son of Man. God is reasonable, and the teacher of Mankind.
From its earliest days, therefore, the Christian Church understood its religion in a manner that was free from irrational fear. In the fourth century, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and the dominant influence of the Hellenistic world at that time, a perfect marriage of faith and doctrinal teaching had taken place. Earlier, the pagan pantheon of Greece and Rome had run out of steam because of its amoral and shallow spiritual base, left behind by a highly developed civilization of philosophical and legal learning. This Greco-Roman philosophical and legal learning craved for something more sophisticated, which it found in the irresistible new Judao-Christian religion spreading across the Empire.
In short, when the Church grew to want to better understand herself and her teachings, Greco-Roman philosophy arrived at a point when it needed something truly profound and worthwhile to understand. It was consequently a natural marriage, and quite possibly conceived in Heaven, because its fruits have benefited Mankind to this day.
Academic theology is not enough for salvation. Read especially the ascetic Fathers. From them you will learn true theology, the right attitude of the mind and heart where God is concerned.
Pure prayer is not given to those who study a lot. In that sense, the path of academic theology is hardly effective, and can rarely lead to pure prayer.
God can touch the spirit of man and give him, directly and immediately, knowledge of Himself. There is a great difference between this knowledge and that which is acquired in theological schools. It can be very dangerous to do theology without having an existential experience of life in the spirit of Christ. One risks, in fact, turning