Bishop Ware: If, then, Christ is to be our Saviour, he must be fully and completely God. Secondly, salvation must reach the point of human need. Only if Christ is fully and completely a man as we are, can we men share in what he has done for us.

Tom: All Ware means is that God must assume the kind-essential properties of human being. He doesn’t mean that since Christ had no non-divine “person” in addition to the “person” of the Logos that the only way we can then say the Christ was completely human “as we are” is for us to agree that none of US is a human “person” either. Christ possessed a human nature. We each possess a human nature. THAT'S the needed similarity. That this human nature is possessed by a divine person in Christ's case and by human persons in our case is incidential. I can show that this is all Ware means. Here’s Ware:

Palamas envisages, then, three levels of union. First, there is union “according to essence,” such as exists between the three persons of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But the mystical union between God and human beings cannot be on this level. On Palamas’s presuppositions, if we were to participate in God’s essence, then we should become God in a literal sense, in the same way the three divine persons are God. But theosis (deification) is not to be understood in such a crude and unqualified way; for, although united to God, the saints do not become additional members of the Trinity.

                Second, there is union “according to hypostasis,” such as occurred at the incarnation, when Godhead and manhood were united in the single person of Jesus Christ the Theanthropos. Once more, the mystical union cannot be of this kind, since the hypostatic union brought about at the incarnation is altogether unique. It is indeed our vocation to become “sons in the Son,” to use a phrase of Eckhart. But this does not mean that we and God constitute a single person, as in Christ’s hypostatic union; for in the mystical vision, face-to-face, the saints still preserve each their own individual identity.

                There remains, then, the third possibility: the mystical union is a union “according to energy.” The human person in such a union is made one with God, yet is not absorbed or annihilated. Each of the saints, although “deified” or “divinized”—filled, that is to say, with the life, glory, and power of God—nonetheless continues to be a distinct personal subject. God is “all in all” (1Cor 15.28); yet, in the words of the Macarian homilies (fourth century), “Peter is Peter, Paul is Paul, Philip is Philip. Each one retains his own nature and personal integrity, but there are all filled with the Holy Spirit.” In the “I and Thou” relationship between God and the saints, the “I” still remains an “I” and the “Thou” still remains a “Thou,” however close the two approach in mutual love.

I don’t know what else to say. Ware disagrees with you, agrees with me, but you’re quoting him in support of your view of the sort of divine-human unity Ware says is NOT the case?

Bishop Ware: The third Council (Ephesus 341) stated that the Virgin Mary is Theotokos, "Godbearer" or "Mother of God". Implicit in this title is an affirmation, not primarily about the Virgin, but about Christ: God was born. The Virgin is Mother, not of a human person united to the divine person of the Logos, but of a single, undivided person who is God and man at once.

Tom: I have issues with calling Mary the Mother of God unqualifiedly. I’m happy to say she’s the mother of the God-man, of God-incarnate, that she’s the God-bearer. But just straight up “God’s Mom”? I don’t think so. Anyhow, what’s the point?

---------------------------------

D: This is what I'm hearing from you, Tom. God's desire is for NON-DIVINE persons to exist.

Tom: Right. Except that desire of God's isn’t the ‘end’, it's the 'means’. God’s end desire is to be and show love to us and have us love in return. Our being personally distinct from God is just the necessary means to the enjoyment he seeks. That’s most glorifyingly reflective of the sort of person God is and it’s most satisfying and fulfilling for us.

D: God wants to experience Godself relating to NON-GOD persons.

Tom: Yes.

D: This means that God wants our eternal self-understanding (as creaturely, human persons) to be such that we fundamentally believe that we are (and we will always be) personally distinct from the God the Logos, our Divine Center. As a human person, my deepest inner self-understanding should be...

Tom: On a relational ontology, no one’s deepest self-understanding rests solely on what he is NOT, but on what he IS, on the relationships that constitute him. So I’m uncomfortable with saying that our deepest self-understanding is just to go around affirming to ourselves that we are not divine persons—“I am not God. I am not God. I am not…” for all eternity. Like all healthy interpersonal relationships, we don’t consciously bring this fact into play. People who go around focused on what they’re NOT aren’t able to enjoy what the ARE. What we’re not is there and we live out of the distinction, yes, but we don’t go around contemplating it.

So if it’s true that we’re non-divine persons, it’s not the whole truth about us. We also subsist in the divine energies of God, which means that we derive our personhood from the ultimate person even if we are distinct persons. This underlying unity and utter dependency upon love and grace is as much a part of our deepest self-understanding as is the fact that we’re non-divine.

D: Actually...for any human to say that they ARE the same person as God the Logos (through the enhypostatic effect of epicletic/perichoretic indwelling in the Person of the Logos) ...or...that the Logos actually WAS the subject of their human action...or...that that were NOT a distinct person from the Logos...they are lying to themselves and blaspheming about God. Isn't that right, Tom?

Tom: No, I don’t think that follows Bro. I think people can be sincerely (not maliciously) wrong about a good deal of metaphysics and still experience love and intimacy with God. Thank God! God doesn’t require us to be panentheistic metaphysicians before we can enjoy him. If this were not the case, and if you were right, then you (and the few who agree with you) would be the ONLY persons on earth experiencing unity with God and WE’D all be blasphemers. But God’s not like that. So I imagine that however accurate our self-perception needs to be for us to experience the fullest unity God intends for us, a few software updates during glorification will take care of that and we’ll hardly notice or mind the adjustment. If the metaphysical case turns out to be as you describe, we’ll all embrace it and party. If it’s not what you describe, you’ll embrace it and party.

When I described your view as a kind of “refusal” to be the person God created us to be, I wasn’t imagining a blasphemous fist being raised in God’s face. I was thinking more along the lines of how we’ve sometimes described determinism as a refusal to be what God’s created us to be, an academic refusal. Right now I’m refusing to buy into your view, which has to mean that on your view I’m refusing the truth about God and myself; I’m refusing to give up being something YOU feel only GOD is or can be. But you don’t think I’m a blasphemer do you?

Tom

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Of THIS...

http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/jul1970/v27-2-bookreview9.htm

 

Christ In Eastern Christian Thought
By John Meyendorff
218 pp ashington and Cleveland, Corpus Books 1969 $7.95

Professor Meyendorff writes in the conclusion of his book that it had been fundamentally conceived as a historical study, the goal being to chart the mainstreams of christological thought in Byzantium. The crucial point in the complex development of Orthodox theology is of course the dogma of Chalcedon, once universally accepted in the churches of the catholic tradition, but which, more recently, has lost some of its popularity in dissident theological circles, due to prejudice, or to a scanty evaluation of the textual evidence. Indeed, the Council of Chalcedon, which the author rightly regards as "the most perfect example of conciliarity," needs no rehabilitation, but, all the same, the present book goes a long way toward providing much needed information and dispelling unreasonable prejudices.

One of the major obstacles which the church had to overcome in formulating her doctrine was the total lack of an adequate theological language. Her borrowing Platonic and Aristotelian categories should not deceive us. These categories had to be re-thought fundamentally, and if such terms as essence, potency, energies, and the like, sound much the same as before, they would, in the writings of the Greek Fathers and in conciliar formulae, refer to authentic Biblical, Christian, "engaged" notions. The so-called Hellenization of Christianity remained largely nominal.

A case in point is the key concept of hypostasis, which the author follows in a succession of chapters in which the development and fluctuations of christology are analyzed and appraised from Chalcedon to the Palamite controversy in the fourteenth century. The etymology of hypostasis and the use of this term in Hellenistic philosophy are little useful, if at all relevant, for understanding what the Byzantine theologians meant by it. Chalcedon marked a major breakthrough, with its unambiguous distinction between hypostasis and nature (physis). In the light of this distinction, hypostasis, as the translation of Pope Leo's persona, a term which St. Jerome regarded as slippery, replaced the totally artificial, insufficient, and Nestorian or Nestorian-flavored prospopon tes henoseos of the Antiochians. In the sixth century, according to Leontius of Byzantium, hypostasis designates the individual, the "someone." Leontius of Jerusalem, a much neglected author, defines hypostasis "a nature with characteristics," physis meta idiomation; this implies that the hypostasis of the Logos, while retaining the characteristics of the divine nature, has acquired, through the incarnation, human characteristics; its from-then-on composite character is further analyzed in St. John Damascene's definitive synthesis.

The progress of patristic studies has enabled the author to throw light on Leontius of Byzantium and to cut to size his contribution to post-Chalcedonian theology. Leontius of Byzantium built his christology on the basis of an Origenist scheme originating principally in the De principiis and condemned by the fifteen anathemas of the fifth Council (Constantinople, 553) and by the Letter to Menas of Emperor Justinian: pre-existence of the souls; diversification and materialization of the human beings a sequel to "the fall"; pre-existence of the human soul of Christ, the only one not overcome by sin and worthy of being eternally united with the Logos (henosis kat' ousian); and finally, wholesale reintegration of the spiritual world. The author remarks incidentally that the formal condemnation of Origenism makes it difficult to hold Harnack's theory of Byzantine Christianity being nothing else than Hellenized Christianity, a theory which lingers inexplicably on many Western theological campuses.

The Origenism of Leontius of Byzantium should qualify his statements about a union according to the hypostasis, henosis kath' hypostasin or hypostatike, and, a fortiori, the celebrated enhypostaton. it takes to read Leontius' theory out of its Origenist context, in order to be able to regard his enhypostaton as a suitable amendment to the Chalcedonian anhypostaton. The latter needs no amendment, but merely to be understood in its original intent, which was to circumscribe and express as far as is humanly possible the mystery of the incarnation and the resulting doctrine of salvation. This was the chief aim of the Byzantine theologians, who were little concerned with the improbable task of figuring out what the consciousness of a God-man could or could not be.

The communicatio idiomatum, that is to say, the interchangeability of the characteristics of either nature by reason of their subsisting in the hypostasis of the Logos, which has always been the acid test of a theology of Christ and was subjected to a variety of interpretations, is in the foreground of the author's concern. He makes it clear that it goes beyond the nominal stage, or any metaphoric usus loquendi, or any conception of the hypostasis as a mere logical bracket holding together the divinity and the humanity of Christ. The communication is in depth and affects the hypostasis. It would enable Theodore the Studite, in the time of the iconoclastic controversy, to speak of the hypostasis of Christ as describable (Perigrapte), and this is most likely why the Byzantine icon painters inscribed ho on in the cruciform halo of Christ, for in him the invisible Deity was made visible.

An entire chapter is devoted to the formula "God suffered in the flesh," by no means a Monophysite exclusivity. It expresses the fundamental reality implied in the epithet of theotokos applied to the Virgin; it is an essential part of Cyrillian doctrine, and it was re-affirmed by the sixth-century Chalcedonians, as they feared that the definitions of Cbalcedon, directed as they were against Eutychianism., might seem to soften the Ephesian condemnation of Nestorianism. The author remarks appropriately that the controversial addition by Peter the Fuller of the words "crucified for us" to the Trisagion, needs not be regarded as formally heretical as long as the Trisagion, "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal," is understood as a prayer to Christ and not as a hymn to the Trinity. Less ambiguous, of course, is the Alleluia verse which we sing as antiphonal refrain in the Divine Liturgy of the Holy Cross: "O Son of God, crucified in the flesh, save us who sing unto Thee: Alleluia!"

The author is certainly right in thinking that the passibility of the flesh thus predicated of the Logos kath' hypostasin challenges the thesis of God's immutability as stated by the Thomists and a majority of the western schoolmen. Aquinas' notion of God as the Actus Purus, his insufficient distinction between hypostasis and nature, make God a prisoner of himself and should, in rigor of logic, preclude that communication with the world of rational and spiritual creatures which faith implies. Christian theology ought not to start from a philosophical abstraction, nor explain the divine persons merely as relations subsisting within the incommunicable essence. There is, if not an inconsistency, at least an unresolved tension between the First Part of the Summa Theologiae and the Third Part. The latter reflects the christological dogma formulated at Ephesus and Chalcedon. Aquinas, in order to justify why and how the passion affects hypostatically the Second Person of the Trinity, quotes as authorities the twelfth anathema in St. Cyril's Capitula, and several passages from the homilies of Theodotus of Ancyra (IIIa P., qu. 16, art. 4; qu. 46, art. 12).

To this "open" conception of the hypostasis of Christ-a felicitous expression coined by the author-corresponds an anthropology equally open to the intimate, effective, participation of man in the divine life. For man is not conceived as a mere composite of soul and body; in fact, he is not really human as long as he is not actually animated by the Spirit. Such a motion is not merely subjective, nor is it due to some extrinsic grace falling from the blue, like the donum superadditum of the Augustinians. Byzantine theology ignores a theoretical state of "pure nature," and sees man, created in the image of God, yet fallen and forgiven, as striving toward a perfect likeness, "unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

The Orthodox concept of deification, which unfortunately Western theologians, Catholic and Protestant, do not readily accept, makes it possible to integrate fully, not only dogmatics and morals, but also the spiritual doctrine of the mystics. This had been established in the author's former studies on St. Gregory Palamas, and it is being confirmed today from another angle. The importance of this excellent book is not to be measured by volume, and it justifies what may appear to be a disproportionally long review.

Georges A. Barrois
Princeton Theological Seninary
Princeton, New Jersey

http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/the-fullness-of-the-cross-of-christ/

 

The Fullness of the Cross of Christ

In writing about our union with Christ I offered the following as the response to a question. It seemed to me, worth a posting of its own, though it be short. I have, however, added a few thoughts to it.

There are many ways of which to speak of Christ’s work on the Cross, all of them, of course, seeing it as central. In some ways, it is the whole of the Old Testament in a single moment. Which image of sacrifice is not fulfilled in that Great Sacrifice, and yet there are many images? Christ is also the Paschal Lamb, which itself is not part of the normal sacrificial system and yet it is in the Cross as well.

Nor does the sacrificial system make much sense except by some aspect of union with that which is offered. But on the Cross, Christ completes His union with us, if I may be so bold, by assuming even our death that by death He might trample down death.

The mistake too easily made is to think of the Cross as only one thing. The Cross is everything. All things are summed up and completed by Christ on the Cross, just so, everything is summed up and healed in His resurrection from the Dead. On the Cross He is the serpent lifted in the wilderness. On the Cross He is the Lamb of the Passover. On the Cross He is the Offering of Atonement. On the Cross He is Moses’ staff stretched over the waters of the Red Sea. On the Cross He is the arms of Moses stretched out at the destruction of Amalek. On the Cross He is the ram in the thicket that God gave in place of Isaac. On the Cross He is Blood poured out on the Mercy Seat. On the Cross He is the love of God made manifest in its utter self-emptying. On the Cross He is the Bridegroom now come for His bride to bring her back from the dead. On the Cross He is man in His alienation from God and God in His union with man.

All of these are part of the fullness of what it means to be forgiven, and I have only barely touched the edge of it. God has reconciled us to Himself through the Cross of Christ. This is not to say one thing - it is to say everything.

We’ll have read my writings wrong if it is seen that I have offered “the” explanation of the Cross. The Cross is the explanation of everything else, while no one other thing can explain the Cross.

This entry was posted on August 30, 2007 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox Doctrine, Solidarity, Union with Christ, atonement, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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10 Responses to “The Fullness of the Cross of Christ”

1.  Joseph Says:
   August 31, 2007 at 10:13 am

Father Stephen,

Thanks for the reply. It seems to me that, given this emphasis on the recapitulatory work of Christ with healing being our guiding metaphor, that something like the following makes sense: Since forgiveness always has in mind a restored relationship and not some legal reparation, the fact that we could not receive forgiveness without the Cross was due to our own captivity to corruption and not some problem that was God’s to deal with. We simply could not keep falling away, so there could be no true reconciliation as long as we were prone to sin. Just like if a husband were unfaithful to his wife, forgiveness would only make sense if he were to discontinue his sinful behavior and be reconciled with his wife, so too our forgiveness only makes since if we can truly be deified. Christ’s incarnate economy provided the healing to our nature that would allow us to stay in communion with God. Your thoughts?

1. fatherstephen Says:
   August 31, 2007 at 1:21 pm

   The first thing that I immediately agree with is the the problem of forgiveness “was due to our own captivity to corruption and not some problem that was God’s to dea with.” Particularly when atonement accounts make the problem to rest within God’s justice (such that it must be satisfied, etc.) it becomes problematic, mostly for what it says about the nature of the problem and where the problem rests.

   Forgiveness only makes sense if it means we can actually be changed (deified, if you will) and conformed to the image of Christ. Christ’s incarnate economy (well put, by the way) indeed provided healing for us (I would have to think more about the use of nature here) that enabled us to be healed and to remain in communion with God. Yes, indeed.

   My hesitancy on the nature language, is because of the language of total depravity or even fallen nature that some use. Nature is a very loaded word - both from Christology and later Maximian Anthropology - so I’ve never quite known what to do with it. Meyendorff’s Christ in Eastern Christian Thought is about as thorough a treatment as I know, but I’d have to memorize him to get it right. So I tend to use language that is a little less loaded.

2. Joseph Says:
   August 31, 2007 at 1:44 pm

   Sorry about being sloppy with the language. I agree with your assessment. I meant it more in the sense of our nature being liberated, not that nature itself had changed or needed to be. I should have said “condition” or “mode of existence” or some such language (not that these can’t be thorny either!).

. . .

I had never been satisfied by the notion that the Chronicles were a mish-mash, and I think I have stumbled upon their secret, governing, imaginative scheme. Let me provide three important contexts for the large claim I wish to make.

The first context is Lewis’s characteristic presentation of Christology. When he thought of Christ, he typically thought of him not as something “out there” in Nature or “up there” in Heaven or “back there” in History or “in there” in the Bible and the Eucharist.

Lewis typically thought of Christ (in the words of Colossians 1:17) as the one “in whom all things hold together.” He paraphrased that verse in Miracles, rendering it thus: “Christ is the all-pervasive principle of concretion or cohesion whereby the universe holds together.”

The universe included Lewis himself and his own understanding of Christ. His very thoughts about Christ were themselves held together by Christ. He could not in that sense step outside Christ and look at him as if from some external spectator’s point of view. And this put him, as it puts all of us, into something of a predicament, which he expressed in Miracles:

The fact which is in one respect the most obvious and primary fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is most easily forgotten—forgotten not because it is so remote or abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious. And that is exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten.

Throughout his writings, Lewis points out this natural human tendency to be oblivious to the obvious. In Mere Christianity he writes: “Since that [divine] power, if it exists, would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it.” In Letters to Malcolm he writes: “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”

Lewis’s belief in the “overlookability” of God should be kept in mind when we consider the apparent planlessness of the Narnia Chronicles.

 

http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20-10-022-f

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Kallistos Ware. The Orthodox Way. Essence and Energies. Pg 21-23

------------------------

To indicate the two "poles" of God's relationship to us--unknown yet well known, hidden yet revealed--the Orthodox tradition draws a distinction between the essence, nature, and inner being of God, on the one hand, and his energies, operations or acts of power on the other.

"He is outside all things according to his essence," writes St. Athanasius, "but he is in all things through his acts of power." We know the essence through the energy", St. Basil affirms."No one hear ever seen the essence of God, but we believe in the essence because we experience the energy." [Spirit's Note: This could be like how we use the Casmir Effect to talk about Zero-Point Energy] By the essence of God is meant his otherness, by the energies his nearness. Because God is a mystery beyond our understanding, we shall never know his essence or inner being, either in this life or in the Age to Come. If we knew the divine essence, it would follow that we knew God in the same way as he knows himself; and this we cannot ever do, since he is Creator and we are created. But while God's inner essence is forever beyond our comprehension, his energies, grace, life, and power fill the whole universe, and are directly accessible to us.

The essence, then, signifies the radical transcendence of God; the energies, his immanence and omnipresence. When Orthodox speak of divine energies, they do not mean by this an emanation from God, an "intermediary" between God and man, or a "thing" or "gift" that God bestows. On the contrary, the energies are God himself in his activity and self-manifestation. When a man knows or participates in the divine energies, he truly know or participates in God himself, so far as this is possible for a created being. But God is God, and we are human; and so, while he possesses us, we cannot in the same way possess him.

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The ultimate effect of this dynamic Incarnation is the redemption of the world. In the expansion of the divine sociality to essentially include the man Jesus, the process of the Trinity expands to include the process of the world (Jn. 17:24ff). The ceaseless achievement of the expression of God’s deity in the Trinity will now eternally include the expression of beauty of the non-divine order, and all of this through Christ. This is the Good News of the New Testament.

Moreover, Jesus is "homoousias" with all human beings through his full human nature. (Chacedonian Creed) Therefore, we cannot say that Jesus had a DIFFERENT "logos" with respect to his human becoming than any of the rest of human nature.

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