Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko, Dean Emeritus of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and who currently serves as priest to the nuns at the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, PA, gave a talk for the Orthodox Christian Fellowship at the University at Buffalo at the beginning of this past Lent discussing how we can come to know God. In it, Fr Hopko highlights a few prominent points in the Eastern Christian ascetic practice and theological method. In the West, especially with the rise of Scholasticism, theological method and prolegomena became bogged down in the study of philosophy, history, languages, etc, so that one could either produce logically deduced statements about God or exegete, by means of various historical-grammatical methods, the Holy Scriptures. ... more