re: #8 SanFranciscoZionist

I was being a little sarcastic.

St. Augustine the Blessed of Hippo is an eminent Doctor of the Church, and considered one of the greatest Christian theologians of all time, if not the standing great in the field. He’s about as orthodox as it gets, to many Christians.

I think that your characterization of the beliefs of orthodox Christians, above, gives a little too much credence to the beliefs of some specific Protestant groups.

St. Augustine not highly regarded by the Eastern Orthodox Church and the above I wrote is more in line with what the eastern Orthodox churches preach.

See: desertwisdom.org
“The world is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them the passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honour which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancour and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it”

‑ St. Isaac the Syrian

So from the eastern Orthodox perspective which is closer to the Christian Church fathers (the small “o” I was talking about) they would never have had this crisis of faith presented in the movie above. Why? Because they expect evil to happen on earth against them. To the orthodox Christian, they view themselves as ‘insurgents’ in Satan’s kingdom (earthly world).

To the Jews in this movie, their crisis of faith comes from the fact that God is not acting to save them in the earthly world per the covenant. To the orthodox (small and big “O”) they expect to die for Christ. They expect to be persecuted for Christ. The purpose of a Christian is to witness for Christ and to witness involves living as a Christian and to be killed for Christ. The martyrdom of course is to show the humans under Satan’s rule what the glory of Christ is like by showing contempt for death because as martyrs for Christ they expect to live again when Christ returns and overthrows the reign of Satan on earth.

So the question of ‘why do bad things happen to good people’ is nonsensical to orthodox Christians. They expect, as part of their faith in Christ while living in Satan’s world for bad things to happen to them.