Here is another excerpt from ‘The Critics of ‘Being as Communion”, Alan Brown chapter’s in Personhod and the Church: The Theology of John Zizoulas, due to appear at the end of this year:
“Baptism is a new birth in which the human being is newly hypostasised in the mode of being of Jesus Christ. This ontological re-constitution and in-corporation is not, however, a re-constitution and in-corporation into a separated and individualized hypostasis, but rather one into the hypostasis of the one who is the only-begotten of the Father, existing in and only in an absolute perichoretic reciprocity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. As such, the communion of the Church is a participation (an already eschatological participation) in the mode of divine being itself, the mode of catholic, koinonetic love. Consequently, for Zizioulas, it is not possible to ‘project’ the mode of being of the Church onto the divine being, since the mode of being of the Church already is the mode of being of divine being;
For Zizioulas, there are not ‘two communions’, one divine and one human – rather there is one divine communion, in which humans participate, this participation being the ecclesial mode of being that is the Church.”
