Open Theism Discussion Board

V.G. (an Armenian) said...

"we moderns have lost a unified vision of the virtues and of the whole human being before God. We live fragmented lives with a multitude of roles which compete in our minds with no sense of coherence or goal. Marxism tried to rehabilitate the complete image of the ideal human being in the new Communist man. We all know better than ever as a result of the events and disclosures of our most recent contemporary political history. The ancients achieved an image of the whole and mature human being in the sage and in the Homeric hero. For Christians it was the saint. The saint was the ideal of the theanthropic human being.- the perfect practitioner of divine-manhood. In the saint, the virtues were united and gained a permanence of character through a profound love which witnesses to its divine origin and burns with a desire for a life with God. In the saint, the Christian recognizes the path to perfection to which Adam was called by God when he created the human being in his own image and likeness.

Remembering the holy men and women of the Old Testament the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says: "What a record all these men have won by their faith! Yet they did not receive what God had promised, because God had decided on an even better plan for us. His purpose was that only in company with us would they be made perfect" (Heb. 11: 39-40). It is important that Armenians today identify persons of this age who have lived sanctified lives and from whom we can take example in living the Christian life. These new saints will bring alive the old and contribute to our union and perfection in Christ.

One sure indication of the vitality of a Christian religious community is not only its capacity to produce such lives but to know how to identify them and hold them forth for remembrance and veneration. And so there is much to think about and be concerned about as to why the Armenian Church has been incapable of identifying and honoring such lives since Gregory of Datev in the 15th century. We are desperately out of practice in naming saints, leave aside giving up our lives to imitation of their lives.

The point I want to close with is that the ancient wisdom of the catholic churches which have retained the veneration of saints is worth keeping. Christians gain an understanding of salvation, of holiness, and receive instruction in good and evil not primarily from something called Christian philosophy or in bodies of ethical rules or laws but in the person of Jesus Christ, his life, death and resurrection. On the basis of this revelation our vision extends backward to the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament who in faith waited upon the Messiah; and our vision extends forward from Christ to the proto-martyr Stephen and all the martyrs, confessors, ascetics and monks, bishops, doctors of the faith, Christian princes and queens who followed Christ's example and whom we call saints.

...or will we recapture in their lives and deaths the paschal and redemptive meaning of our Christian faith? . . . We must look for saints of ordinary life, saintly parents, lawyers, businessmen or teachers, whose lives strike us as, in and of themselves, a kind of miracle, in so far as they show in their lives a measure of heroism and sanctity not expected by the world in which we live. Let us always remember that the first mark of a saint is quite simply holiness."