Maximus in Portland: The War of Ends


We shouldn't be impressed by our sociological descriptions. “Progressive,” “traditional,” “inclusive,” “rigid”—these are newspaper adjectives. We should ask a more embarrassing question: what is the end—what is the telos—being served here? The Church isn't a well-meaning association that happens to pray. It's an engine of transfiguration. Liturgy isn't the community expressing itself at divine altitude; it's the world being re-ordered so it can become capable of God.

So we should read the conflict as a battle not over words but over desire. What do these prayers train the heart to want?

There’s a terrible gentleness to worship: it kneads the soul the way bread is kneaded—slow pressure, repeated gestures, familiar sentences—until our craving for small harmonies is converted into hunger for communion with the living God. That's why the liturgy must remain stubbornly given. Not because God is a fan of archaic phrasing, but because our desires are professional liars.

They always insist that what we want now is what we were made for.

The moral-therapeutic parish, as I would diagnose it, isn't simply “too progressive.” It’s chosen a smaller horizon. It’s mistaken pastoral calming for spiritual healing. It treats worship as a means of managing the emotional weather of the age—reducing shame, smoothing conflict, affirming belonging. These aren't contemptible aims. They're merely inadequate. They aim at harmony within time, not participation in the life that defeats time.

This is a subtler form of the Fall: not rebellion, but downsizing.

That's because salvation isn't chiefly the improvement of behavior. It's the re-making of nature by grace—the slow, terrifying elevation of the human person into divine life: theosis (glorification). And theosis isn't an add-on to Christianity for mystics with free evenings. It's the point. If we're not being drawn into God, then religion becomes what every age already invents: a moral therapy, a cultural glue, a ritualized version of whatever the decent people currently find decent.

It's here the Nicene Creed becomes more than a doctrinal checklist. It's a grammar that protects the possibility of deification. There's a kind of mercy in its hard edges: the creed refuses to let Christ become a mascot for our projects. “True God from true God… consubstantial with the Father…”—these aren't scholastic ornaments. They're guardrails on the road to glory.

Why? Because only if the Logos is truly God can He be the ground of the inner meanings and ends of all created things. If the Logos is reduced—even politely—then creation loses its anchoring. The world becomes a heap of facts plus our preferences. And once the Logos is no longer the luminous center, the inner meanings and ends of all things dissolve into our moral intuitions, our therapeutic needs, our politics with incense.

So the move from Nicene “difficulty” to simplified “accessibility” is more than a pastoral choice. It risks becoming a metaphysical demotion: from worship as ascent into divine reality to worship as reassurance within the age.

We shouldn't deny that language can be clarified. We should welcome good catechesis: teach “consubstantial,” don’t hide it. But we should be suspicious of the instinct to remove what resists the age. “The age” isn't neutral; it has a direction—and not a good one.

It's pulled by the passions—by fear, vanity, resentment, and the longing to be approved. To adapt the liturgy to the age’s comforts is to let the patient prescribe the medicine.

And then there's the deeper irony: when the liturgy becomes primarily therapeutic, it begins to flatter the very self that must be surpassed. It tells the worshipper, in effect: “You're already the measure. God's here to help you feel whole.” But we should insist on the opposite: God is the measure; you are here to become real.

Even the tug-of-war over titles—Our Father versus Our Mother—should be read through this lens. We shouldn't treat it first as a culture-war skirmish. We should treat it as a question of disclosure. Does prayer name God as He has disclosed Himself in Christ, or does it rename God to match the psychic needs of a particular moment?

One path places desire under revelation; the other places revelation under desire. Only one of those can end in deification.

If the Logos is the ground of creation, then the liturgy isn't ours to “improve” the way we improve signage in a public building. It's a participation in the cosmic Christ: the One in whom all things hold together, and toward whom all things are being drawn. The liturgy is the world learning its true grammar again. Alter the grammar enough, and you may still have beautiful sentences—but you can no longer say what must be said.

To put it bluntly:
  • When theosis collapses, ethics expands to fill the vacuum.
  • When participation in divine life is forgotten, morality becomes the highest hope.
  • When God is reduced to a patron of harmony, salvation becomes good citizenship in the spirit of the age.
So I would ask, if quietly, the question that terrifies modern religion:

Do we come to church to be consoled by a community, or to be consumed by God?

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