VIDEO: Hieromonk Gabriel – Orthodoxy & Social Justice

28 thoughts on “VIDEO: Hieromonk Gabriel – Orthodoxy & Social Justice”

1. As an aside: social justice, in the common definition, is a ready platform for injustice, ironically.

2. I'm Muslim, and even though I disagree that Christ is God the Word, or in Orthodoxy, the only Christianity, & one could argue the original Christianity, that I respect is Orthodox Church.

   The rest of them seem to have submitted themselves to modernization, westernization, & liberalism. Christianity is not present there. But in Orthodoxy, I see the beauty & authenticity. I see the real Christianity, those who don't bend for anything, except God. Allah S.W.T spoke about in the Qur'an about these Monks & Christians, & that they're greatest affection & commonality to us. God Bless All.

3. To put it simply,if everyone tried with all.his might to follow the teachings of Christ there would be no social problems or injustice.

4. I need to listen to this every day.

5. As a lifelong social worker and Christian, I have struggled with the world's attempt to put a bandaid on the world's hunger, poverty, injustice and wounds. Your message brought such clarity and confirmation to what I have tried to identify in my struggle with is topic. Thank you and bless you!

6. Modern social justice turns coveting into a virtue.

7. Enjoyed this interview!

8. Orthodox Christianity isn’t necessarily the greatest example of Social Justice.

9. Well said! Reminds me of St Seraphim of Sarov’s Acquisition of the Holy Spirit text

10. "Social Justice" is just outsourcing virtue to the state.

11. David Bentley Hart's introduction to his translation of the New Testament and Michael Hudson's book Forgive Them Their Debts are useful here

12. It seems to me this is like anything else in the Christian Faith: a balancing act guided by the Holy Spirit. To go to either extreme in this is wrong. One one extreme: to place so much emphasis on "the soul" or "feeding people spiritually" while ignoring or even condoning injustice and human cruelty at one end: a sort of neo-Platonism that denies the God given worth of the human body AND soul and thus denying the Incarnation in a way. And the other extreme: a materialism and lack of recognition of the Infinite life of God for which we were made. It is not an "either/or" problem: loving and caring for each other and speaking out against injustice and evil of all types. But like most mysteries, we can often fail to hold the tension as one.

13. Holy holy holy

14. amen

15. An Excellent Reminder that we as Orthodox Christians truly are not of this world.

16. When a simple monk in West Virginia has more theology in his little finger than the so called bishop of Rome…

17. Though it is strange that he doesn't mention the effect of doing something about social ills on oneself. Matthew 7:19-24, Acts 4:32-35…

18. Suffer now cause there's pie in the sky.

19. You had you'r 3000 years to show what you can do as christian,you failed.

    Everything what christians have left spitting petite borguouasi sentimentalism

20. Excellent, thank you.

21. This has been troubling me. First, Byzantine Tsar Romanos I saw that the Aristocracy was impoverishing the freeholding soldiery by extorting them of their land through debt in times of tough farming, and issued a couple of novels (Byzantine laws) to prevent this. A couple centuries later, the empire reached its peak under Basil II. Then the aristocracy found ways around the laws to extort and impoverish the common freeholder-soldiery, leading to a switch from the original military model to one more of less-effective hired mercenaries. Besides, the aristocrats' wealth increased at the expense of the state, which soon came face to face with 1204 (epic suffering and a temporary acceptance of the pope) and its eventual erasure. Events closely followed the declarations of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, be just unto the poor or suffer God's wrath in the form of rapacious foreign invasion and domination: Catholics and Turks instead of Babylonians and Persians.

    Second, I feel like it's too easy to twist this line into a reason not to be as openhearted as we could. Weird SJW crusades based on the latest ideological mutations descending from the American, French and Russian revolutions may be a leading pathology of the West, but finding excuses to cling to our wealth and not be as openhearted as we should be is the timeless pathology of the Christian. Am I really to say, here there is real suffering or systemic injustice that I could alleviate, but, Christ would hold back in his response lest the sufferers cling too much to this world and forget of the hereafter, and so should I. Plus I better only alleviate it while waving my Jesus flag in the sufferer's face just so they know, this wasn't just any old mercy and charity. It's not enough that Christ and I know that I did his work, the recipient must know (but what about Matthew 6:3-4?). This all sounds like something out of high Anglicanism to me: Another week of taking the eucharist and sleeping easy without following Acts 4:32-35. Sure, this is a fallen, imperfectible world, full of misguided zealots, hypocrites, heretics, the greedy, the tight-fisted and hard-hearted (In all of whom, I think, we must never forget first and foremost to try to see the potential for repentance) but I have a hard time seeing the Christian message being one of charity restrained.

22. Thank you for covering this topic. God Blessing!

23. God came to my house
    and asked for charity.
    And I fell on my knees and cried,
    'Beloved, what may I give?'
    'Just love,' He said.
    'Just love.'

    – St. Francis.

24. In the end, nothing we do or say in this lifetime will matter, as much as the way we have loved one another.

    – Daphne Rose Kingma.

25. Thank you brother, for the most humbling lesson of the century. 🙏

26. The problem is the modern social justice movements aren't what they appear to be. They are about control and the diefication of man. Take for example BLM, until recently they had on their website one of their goals is "disrupting the Western prescribed nuclear family." So all the Christians who marched with them, marched against a church sacrament without realizing it.

27. Thank you. I needed this. Matthew 22: 36-40 is a big help for me to begin to clear my head. I can't remember how old I was when I read a newspaper article that lamented about there not being enough tension about justice that existed in the 1960s. I think it was close to 30 years ago, but there was actually an article about the need to "educate" the public about being less content with life. Another fact is how the local news isn't really local anymore. Corporations such as Nextstar Media Group Inc. speak with a single voice while outwardly appearing to be from different sources.

28. We aren't discussing people gaini g whole world and losing their souls though unless we are discussing the rich. This is about people who don't have human needs, living under human oppression, and you did invalidate their pain with a false equivilency that their aid is gaining the whole world. It shouldn't be hard to support equitable power systems as Christians, but you speant this time saying the afterlife matters more, than addressing the need for action in fighting and rejecting evil. Poor representation. Our role to be an example of God's love is fighting for oppressed, and you just bypassed everything needed to support justice and made a single undermining point we should help yet remember after life matters, as if opposing points only and they're not.

Comments are closed.