Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ

by Justin Popović

Popovich, Justin, Gerostergios, Asterios

Genres: Christianity, Theology, Religion

247 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1994

About the author

Saint Justin (Serbian Cyrillic: Jустин Поповић) was an Eastern Orthodox theologian, archimandrite of the Ćelije Monastery, Dostoyevsky scholar, anti-communist, a writer, and a critic of the pragmatic church (ecclesiastical) life. On the April 29, 2010, Fr. Justin was canonized as a saint by the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Reviews

[Surit · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know of no other author/preacher who preaches simple and profound spiritual truths and yet knows exactly what is going on with the secular human-centered ideology that is pushed onto us. Read this book if you want to break free from the liberal dialectic of the modern secular world and have the same mind as that of the theanthrophic God-man Christ Jesus.

[Seraphim · Rating 5 out of 5]

St Justin is probably the most important contemporary writer of the Orthodox world. This book highlights perfectly his knowledge and love of Christ.

There are three books that every man needs to read: the Holy Bible, Brothers Karamazov, and Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ.

[Silouan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Orthodoxy, as the single vessel and guardian of the perfect and radiant Person of God-human Christ, is brought about exclusively by this exertion of virtues by grace, through entirely God-human Orthodox means, not through borrowings from Roman Catholicism or Protestantism because the latter are forms of Christianity after the pattern of the proud European being, and not of the humble God-human being.
This mission of the Church is facilitated by God Himself because among our people there exists an ascetic spirit as created by Orthodoxy through the centuries. The Orthodox soul of our people leans towards the Holy Fathers and the Orthodox ascetics.

Ascetic exertion, at the personal, family, and parish level, particularly of prayer and fasting, is the characteristic of Orthodoxy. Our people is a people of Christ, an Orthodox people, because as Christ did-it sums up the Gospel in these two virtues: prayer and fasting. And it is a people convinced that all defilement, all foul thoughts, can be driven out of man by these alone (Matth. 17:21). In its heart of hearts our people knows Christ and Orthodoxy, it knows just what it is that makes an Orthodox person Orthodox. Orthodoxy will always generate ascetic rebirth. She recognizes no other.
The Ascetics are Orthodoxy's only missionaries.”

[Cam Erskine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somehow St Justin makes every page gold while saying the same exact thing on every page.
He did the same thing in “Man and the God-Man.”
And yet if you were to ask me to describe any of the concepts from either book to you, I would probably just open my mouth halfway and skip my eyes from the wall to the ceiling and back to the wall a few times and wrap up with a “I mean like, dude like you just should really, well you, well, it’s”



“We are the body of Christ”
“We walk in Christ”
“We are united to Christ”
“We live in the power of Christ”
“We are the temple of the Holy Spirit”
“Christ is in our midst”
“We are one in Christ”


I’m gonna sound like a snob, but I’ve been sitting on my couch for an hour trying to think how to make this sound not snobby, but Leif is about to wake up and vomit and piss everywhere and I NEED TO HURRY UP and continue to get my patristics/saints fix in so here it goes:

None of these churchy slogans can be understood properly apart from the concepts presented in this book. I also think that such things should be said to remind each other to have the fear of the Lord before our minds and hearts, not to be stamped on the back of a t-shirt.


Gotta run!

[w gall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very Christ centered. As the Godman, the lynchpin of Orthodox Christology. Through Him, with Him, in Him, we become godmen through Him, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. St. Justin never strays far from this message. Except when he is excoriating Roman Catholic, Protestant, and secular-atheistic Europe, which he does in extremely sharp terms. He makes clear points to that effect, but unlike this monastic father, Orthodox Christians who live in a European-American ethos see some good among the junk in the non-Orthodox Christian world, and are surely called to speak to them in a kinder fashion than St. Justin does in these diatribes.

[Goines]

re-read st. isaac the syrian's theory of knowledge. middle of book