On the Fall, a Teaching from Kallistos Ware, and the Books That Shape Us
A Note from Me
Almost fifteen years ago I was driving Gary Moon—a psychologist who also founded the Renovaré Institute—to the airport. Just before he shut the car door, he leaned in and suggested I read a book. It was The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware.
That one recommendation sent me down a path I didn’t expect. If you were to flip through it now, you’d see that almost every page is starred and underlined.
Up to that point, much of my Christian understanding had been framed in transactional terms: do this, get that; fail here, pay there. Ware’s writing—a more ancient and Orthodox version of Christianity—offered another vision. One that was older, deeper, and more transformational. One that didn’t reduce sin to a debt ledger but described the Fall as a wound we carry, something we suffer and then pass along to others.
That shift mattered. It made Christianity more viable to me, more honest, more beautiful.
I’ll always be grateful for Gary’s passing word in the car that day, and for how God used it to turn me toward a broader stream of Christian faith. A book can become a doorway. A conversation can redirect a whole life. Maybe you’ve had something like that too—a person, a word, a book—that helped you see differently.
A Voice from the Christian Tradition
“For the Orthodox tradition, then, Adam’s original sin affects the human race in its entirety, and it has consequences both on the physical and the moral level: it results not only in sickness and physical death, but in moral weakness and paralysis.
But does it also imply an inherited guilt?
Here Orthodoxy is more guarded. Original sin is not to be interpreted in juridical or quasi-biological terms, as if it were some physical “taint” of guilt, transmitted through sexual intercourse. This picture, which normally passes for the Augustinian view, is unacceptable to Orthodoxy. The doctrine of original sin means rather that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men’s suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being.
And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin.”
—Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
A Question to Carry
Who in your life has pointed you toward a broader stream of Christian faith?
Thanks Gary,
—Jon
