From a news story written by a professor who teaches at St. Tikhon’s in Russia.
The biggest publishing news of recent years has been Everyday Saints (literally translated, Unholy Holy People), in which Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), head of Sretensky Monastery and reputed spiritual counselor to President Putin, offers a series of vignettes about his journey from Marxist atheism into Orthodox monasticism. In contrast to Orthodox “getting things right” books,Everyday Saints depicts the Church as people with warts and flaws through whom God nevertheless works for good. Though six hundred pages long, the book has sold 1.5 million hard copies, making it one of the ten best-selling titles in Russia since the end of communism. It has been marketed not only in religious bookstores but also in supermarkets and the Russian equivalents of Barnes and Noble. Everyday Saints, which continues to sell well, is by any measure a popular book that has penetrated popular consciousness.
The book is available here. I have not read it yet, but is has received good reviews. I do like the theme that is carried out in the book, and that is that Christians are unholy holy people. We do not know who we are until we recognize that we are the unholy holy. We are holy. God dwells in us. The Holy Spirit empowers us. We have been saved by Jesus Christ himself. Yet, we are also sinners. Frequently we do unholy things, we say unholy things, we think unholy things. What a paradox! We are holy. We are unholy. Both statements are absolutely true. We do what is good and holy. We do what is evil and not holy. We are holy unto God. We are wholly into ourselves. It is no wonder that non-Christians consider so many of us hypocrites. And, they would be right, for so we are. It is no wonder that we have been considered saints. And that is also true, for so we are.
In spite of this contradiction, as Archimandrite Tikhon says, God still work through us for good. As Saint Paul says, even when we are faithless, he is faithful because he cannot deny himself and the promise that he has made to us. I am looking forward to reading this book.
this was a great book.
On the surface, from reading this blog post, it sounds kinda like what Luther taught. From an Orthodox POV, the truth is, I am in Christ, I am being saved by Christ, and while I may be in the process of becoming holy, I am not holy, and will not be holy unless I endure to the end and, with the power of God, succeed in “putting to death the deeds of the flesh”.
Of course, the good news (which gets forgotten when the implicit doctrine of salvation is Anselmian) is that God the Blessed Trinity wants me to become holy, wants to make me holy, wants to finish the process of salvation that has been started so that, in the end, I might enter into eternal, complete and unmediated communion with the Divine Persons together will all the Saints. Again, I say: the good news is that the Blessed Trinity wants to save me infinitely more than I can even want to be saved.