Category: theology

The Church looks conservative only because the Church is the only public place in which the issues of what is worth doing, and so of truth and goodness – which previous generations used to talk freely about – get a public hearing. Because the Church is not in as much of a panic about time as the world is, the Church has the patience to host discussion of how to be human. No particular moment seems the right moment to get into a long discussion. It is always more convenient to carry on assuming that we all already know what is worth doing, how to live well, and that we don’t need to talk it all through again.

The Christians re-enter this discussion every Sunday when they line up behind the Son of Man, who is God’s own definition of life lived well, and they sing along with him back to God.

So it is the Church which knows how to be properly worldly. It has a better idea of what the world is to be than this world does. The Church tells the world how best to be worldly – by asking its maker if it may join his conversation on this subject.

The best thing the Church can do for the world is be distinct from it, and so remind the world that it has not yet arrived. The world is not yet all in all. So the Church must hold out hope to the world – and point out that this time is not yet the fullness of time, but it is the time to live well and to talk life through in good company.

St. Cyril explicitly rejects the Apollinarian thesis, and stresses the complete humanity assumed by Christ into a real ‘physical’ or ‘hypostatic’ unity with the Word. Cyril associates Christ’s High-priesthood with specifically with His humanity, and makes frequent reference to the Epistle to the Hebrews in his discussion of the human soul of Christ. Against Nestorius, he writes: Christ carried up the mind of believers into the one nature of the Godhead. Cyril describes Christian worship as ‘rational’, and constantly speaks of Christ as the ‘High Priest of our souls’. For Cyril, Christ fulfills His priesthood both as one who receives and as one who offers prayer. Since Christ is not two but indissolubly one, our rational worship is offered to Him as well as through and in union with Him, and by Him to God the Father. In his third epistle against Nestorius, Cyril affirms clearly the vicarious and high priestly character of Christ’s humanity: Christ ‘offers Himself for us and us through and in himself to the Father’. He worships for he has assumed the nature that pays worship. Although the host above and the holy spirits worship him, Cyril writes, when he became as we are, he worshipped with us as a man offering as fragrant incense, himself on our behalf, and us through himself and in himself to God the Father.

Matthew Baker Logiki Latreia and the Mind of Christ

It has been one of the distinguishing marks of Western culture, from the nominalists of the late Middle Ages onward, that ‘mystery’ and ‘reason’ are continually held apart, even seen as opposed. In particular, in the development from the skepticism of the radical Enlightenment to 20th century positivism, the idea of rationality has taken on an increasingly narrowed definition, one which excludes, and is even pit against, notions of revelation, transcendence, and tradition. Yet the faith of the Apostles and Fathers is otherwise. The substance of this faith is that ‘the mystery hidden for ages in God’ and now revealed in Jesus Christ, is none other than the Logos, the infinite and uncreated Reason and Word of God. It is that this Logos assumed full humanity in the womb of the Virgin, uniting to Himself a human mind, with all its structures of created rationality, redeeming and sanctifying them, so that we might be transformed in the renewal of our minds (Rom. 12:2).

A positive and balanced understanding of the role of reason in the redemptive work of Christ and the life of the Church is reflected in the Pauline notion of logiki latreia, ‘rational worship’,which is to be found in the Orthodox liturgies themselves and in the writings of the Fathers. In Romans 12:1-2, St. Paul writes: I appeal to you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your rational worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed in the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Paul’s discussion of rational worship and the transformation of the mind comes in a context in which the role of body is given place as well. This is indicative of the wholistic anthropology of St. Paul, in continuity with the Old Testament, in which body and mind are distinguished but held together in essential unity. This holistic anthropology is important for the theology of worship as it will also become important for the Fathers’ defense of the full humanity of Christ against the Apollinarian denial of a human mind to the Incarnate Savior. There seems little doubt that in its original context of Romans 12, Paul’s concept of logiki latreia refers not to the Church’s liturgy in the narrow sense of the term, but rather to the entire ‘liturgy’ of the Christian life, lived as an offering of worship to God.

Matthew Baker Logiki Latreia and the Mind of Christ

The action of Israel that we have received in the form of scripture and liturgy topples the alternative constructions of the gentiles, and prevents the world knitting itself together into any form other than the form of Christ. It is the one action that keeps the world open, reminding us that the Messiah is not here, and that what the world presently is, is not the end. True reading produces the transformation of the readers, so hermeneutics is ethics, the reading of people into the Church.

In teaching the coherence of all things around the incarnate Word, Irenaeus was safeguarding not only the integrity of Jesus but the integrity of every particular. Whereas the gnostics saw in the redemptive work of the logos ‘the separation of what was unnaturally united,’ Irenaeus saw in Jesus the reunion of what was unnaturally separated.

Irenaeus placed heavy emphasis on the Christ-event as the climactic moment in a long history of God’s approach to man. Only after a protracted period of preparation does the Word appear among us – not as a retort to the old covenant or its deity, but as that very deity in person…. It is under their tutelage (the prophets) that we are slowly readied to receive him, for he does not come to us unannounced. When he finally does come of course a great threshold is crossed and a new age begun; under the tutelage of the incarnate one, in the communion of the Spirit, we ourselves may now advance towards God…. But we have missed an important turning if we proceed to operate on the premise that the incarnation takes place at the point where mankind as such is truly ready for God, where sacred history can therefore broaden out at last into universal history. …As Irenaeus sees it, our evolution has actually become our devolution the Son does not appear at the middle of history, then but at the end; not somewhere near the top, but at the bottom. The Son comes to offer his summing up just where it is necessary for history to begin all over again.

Douglas Farrow Ascension and Ecclesia

God’s sovereignty transcends and stands in judgment on all worldly sovereignties. Because God is God, Caesar is not God and neither are Caesar’s successors, be they kings, presidents, prime ministers, or party general secretaries. And because Caesar and his successors aren’t God, their power is limited, not absolute; in addition to Caesar’s legitimate power, there are other legitimate powers in the world.

So the state cannot be all there is. Long before Enlightenment political theorists began challenging royal absolutism with ideas like Montesquieu’s “separation of powers,” Western civilization learned the idea of “limited government” in the school of Christian reflection. When medieval Catholic thinkers insisted on a sharp distinction between “society” and the “state,” they created a vaccine against absolutism in either its royal or modern (totalitarian) form. The vaccine wasn’t completely effective. But its potency may help explain why the age of absolutism was a rather short one, as these things go in history.
Medieval Catholicism also helped plant in the Western mind the idea that “consent” is crucial to just governance. Government isn’t simply coercion, medieval Catholic political theory insisted; just governance requires consent. Consent would be forthcoming if governance were just. And who would judge the justice of a particular form or style of governance, or the justice of a particular act of state? The Church’s claim to be able to judge princes, and the Catholic teaching that “the people” have an inherent sense of justice within them, injected a crucial idea into the political-cultural subsoil of the West—the idea that “justice” isn’t simply what those in authority say it is. There are moral standards of justice that are independent of governments; we can know those moral standards, and they ought to be applied in public life. All of these ideas, fundamental to democracy, were nurtured in the civilization of the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church.

George Weigel Divine Sovereignty Letters to a Young Catholic

The resurrection of Jesus was not the general resurrection, but the provision of a longer gentler way to the general resurrection. This resurrection, that is both commenced and delayed, is the mode of God’s hidden work of holding and training a people. By the resurrection, the crucifixion of Christ was lifted from Christ and placed instead on the many who had crucified him. Their act rebound to catch them. The many have been corralled by the death that his resurrection has imposed upon them. Their death is now not at all their death, but entirely his death, the death that holds, not him, but them on whom he has imposed it. Now they can be slowly supplied, by the Spirit, with the resurrection. It can be supplied by the one who has risen from them and is therefore able to be with them, without their sin and death. The resurrected one is the Lord, the Spirit, the true and faithful servant who will not waste his talents, or lose a single member of the flock he has gathered. He has worked, and his work is united with its harvest. He has paid with his labour, and he now receives the reward due to him.