Learning Our Faith From the Greek Fathers of the Church — 20160828

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Saint Maximos the Confessor Преподобный Максим Исповедник Μαξίμου του Ομολογητού

Saint Maximos the Confessor
Преподобный Максим Исповедник
Μαξίμου του Ομολογητού

I truly realize that this is truly a “heady” article. It is this for three reasons: (1) the subject matter is truly complex and, in some ways, very academic mixed with spirituality; (2) the Fathers were highly educated men who mixed theology, philosophy and spirituality; and (3) the topic is a mystery and it is important that my readers have a sense of the struggle that our Church has gone through in order to come up with the truths in which we believe.

The central message of the Alexandrian theology of Athanasius and Cyril had been that the salvation of the world is not being accomplished by any created mediation, but by the Son of God, who makes himself accessible to human beings, sharing his own life with them by assuming humanity in his personal existence as a human being. In this perspective, however, theological consistency and spiritual experience require that Christ be fully human, for, indeed, to use the celebrated phrase of Gregory of Nazianzus, “what is not assumed is not healed, and what is united to God is saved.” Salvation understood as communion with God, or deification, implies that the fullness of humanity – not a part of it – be the object of God’s love, and Maximus described that fullness as including specifically the “movement” or dynamism of created humanity: human will, human freedom and human creativity. All these were assumed by the person of the incarnated Logos and became part, through his death and resurrection, of his eschatological new creation.

The last and, perhaps, the most decisive episode in the debates concerning the identity of Christ came with the so-called iconoclastic crises in the Byzantine world (715-843). Quoting Old Testament prohibitions against graven images and idolatry, the iconoclasts objected to images of Christ: since he was God, his image was also, necessarily, an image of God and, necessarily, an image of God and, therefore, an idol. Against this position theologians John of Damascus, Theodore of Studios, Patriarch Nicephoros,, affirmed the reality of Christ’s humanity, which was historical and therefore truly “representable” and seen with human eyes. However, since Christ’s personal identity is that of the Son of God, an image of Christ is an image of God, who makes himself visible as man.

Christ’s humanity allows us to image Him and, therefore, image God.

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20160828

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Ladder of Divine AccentI would continue sharing ideas about the 24th Step of John’s Ladder, which is Meekness/Simplicity. One could say that spiritual simplicity is a one-track mind. That may sound negative to many, but by this it is meant that it is the virtue by which we have shut out all evil thoughts and desires in a single-minded pursuit of union with God. It is also equivalent to one of the Lord’s Beatitudes which is: Blessed are the single-hearted, for they shall see God.

St. John writes that Simplicity is an enduring habit within a soul that has grown impervious to evil thoughts. In other words, this 24th Step of spiritual development is reached when we acquire the mind of Christ – we have the habit of always asking ourselves: What would Jesus do – how would He think and act!

A wonderful example of simplicity is St. Anthony the Great. He was an illiterate peasant, but that kind of simplicity does not concern us here. Intellectual simplicity is neither a vice nor a virtue. It is his spiritual simplicity that is an example to us.

The first time Anthony ever heard the gospel was in church. The reading was the conversation between Christ and the rich, young ruler, in which the young man asks Christ what he must do to gain eternal life. Christ tells him, If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me. With his heart set on fire by that simple command, Anthony obeyed, gave everything away, and retreated into the wilderness to become a monk. He did not think it over; he did not seek an allegorical meaning in the reading; he did not consider how this could apply to him. Instead, he heard Christ commanding him personally, and immediately he obeyed. This is the kind of simplicity John is referring to in the Ladder. I am sure this frightens many when they hear it. Indeed, simplicity is a childlike innocence. Think about this!

The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God — 20160828

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Mystical Supper

Mystical Supper

In the last issue of the article I challenged my readers to think about what they understood to be God’s Divine Plan for them and others? I shall not yet share my thoughts about God’s Divine Plan but, rather, continue with the Anaphor prayer I was parsing in the last several issues, the prayer to the Father that transitions into the actions of the Son when He literally gave us the means to experience His real and true presence with us, namely Holy Communion.

The prayer tell us that Jesus took bread and wine and declared to His disciples that, when they remembered what He did and repeated it, He would truly be in their presence.

In the Eastern Church we do not believe that the transformation of the gifts happens just when we remember the words of Jesus, when He said that the bread and wine were His body and Blood. We refrain from expressing when the gifts are transformed into His presence. We only know that when we pray to our Heavenly Father, remember the words of Jesus, and invoke God’s Spirit, that miraculously the gifts are changed (An aside. The Western Church has a different understanding of when this miracle takes place). We refrain from trying to pin-point the actions of God. We only believe and know that He is true to His word and that the miracle takes place.

Although the bread and wine that we pray over, in imitation of what Jesus did during His last meal with His disciples, truly become His Body and Blood, they become much more than that. They become, in a real way, Him, present in our midst. A living person is more than just their body and blood. Their spirit, their person and their essence makes them who they are. Our Eastern approach is beautifully summarized in one of the prayers that we say later in the Liturgy, and that is that we do not bow to flesh and blood but to You, our awesome God.

We truly believe that our awesome God, in the Person of the Son, is truly present with us and that He truly gives Himself to us if we are joined with Him.

We are joined with Him in several different ways when we: join Him in worshipping God; and put Him on by voluntarily acquiring His mind, His way of thinking and behaving. His gift to us in Holy Communion is His real presence to help us transform ourselves, living and thinking in a way that imitates the way that He lived and thought.

Reflections on the Scriptural Readings for this Weekend — 20160821

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pentacostAs we complete this fourteenth week after Pentecost, we first hear words from St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. Paul reminds us that Jesus is absolute truth, who in his life and work brought to fulfillment the previous divine promises. The goal of God’s revelation is divine glory manifested through us. Only by His grace are we moved to give God glory.

Then Paul writes these profound words: God is the one who firmly establishes us along with you in Christ; it is He who anointed us and has sealed us, thereby depositing the first payment, the Spirit, in our hearts. The “seal” was the personal mark placed by an owner on his property; the “pledge” was a down payment signifying that the rest of the payment would be made; here the pledge is God’s Spirit. The fullest possession of messianic bounty is yet to come.

We are called to believe that God has placed His seal on us and has pledged that, if we make an attempt to grow in the likeness of Jesus, we will have the fullness of life. The down-payment that He, God, has given us is the indwelling of His Own Holy Spirit.

All those who are probably reading this, I suspect, have been baptized into Christian life. This means that God has placed His seal – His mark – on you and has given you a pledge of greater things yet to come. We are all called to believe and not doubt this wondrous truth! Search your own mind and heart and ask yourself if you believe this. Believe and don’t doubt!

Our Gospel reading relates the Lord’s parable of a wedding banquet. It appears only in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. The dissimilarities in detail between the two gospels are so great that there is room for doubt that both were using the same source. But the evidences of extensive rewriting in Matthew are clear. Instead of a dinner Matthew has a royal wedding feast. Also, in addition to the guests’ excuses presented in Luke, Matthew introduces a violently discordant note in the killing of the messengers and the ensuing war.

We have been invited to God’s banquet by our initiation into the Church. He has sealed us and given us His Spirit but we have free-will and can make excuses for not truly making every effort to grow in the likeness of Jesus. God has been generous to us. What is our response? Making excuses for not embracing wholeheartedly the Way Of Jesus only results in our cheating ourselves of the wondrous things pledged by God.

Acquiring the Mind of Christ — 20160821

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christ_iconAs I ended the last issue of the article, I suggested that besides embracing the mind of Christ as seen in how He prayed, we need to embrace the mind of Christ as seen in how He behaved, namely in how He treated others. We can come to this understanding by looking at the Gospels and seeing how He acted.

The Gospels tell us that the only persons that He directly confronted were those who professed that they were the leaders of the Jewish faith but who were hypocritical, that is they did not live in accord with the faith that they professed. However, even those people, if they reached out to Him for help, He helped them. He even attempted to teach those who were critical of His behavior – criticizing Him for curing people, for example, on the Sabbath – by showing them that their religion was meant to first have compassion for those who were suffering instead of judging them to have offended God in some way.

We see in the Gospels that He did not turn His back on any of those that His society had scorned because of what they believed, who they were, or what they were suffering. Recall that He accepted the Samaritans, the lepers, the Romans and the disabled. These were all people that the leaders of His faith rejected and judged. It must be remembered that His society was formed around His faith.

This is not necessarily true in our modern society. We see that our society judges and rejects certain groups of people. Some very right-winged Christian factions also reject certain groups of people. All of this is not in keeping with the mind of Christ. He didn’t even reject the adulteress when others wanted Him to agree to her stoning.

So if we put on the mind of Christ we must be ready to accept all persons, even if they don’t live in the manner that we accept as our way of living. The only person that we should be willing to judge is ourself! We must only ask this important question: How am I living up to the teachings of Jesus, Who I believe was and is my God incarnate. I do not judge others! Why? Because only God alone can judge and, interestingly enough, He chooses not to judge but only to love.

Our society is so filled right now with hatred and anger that we have to make a special effort to put on the mind of Christ and make an effort to live as He lived.

Learning Our Faith From the Greek Fathers of the Church — 20160821

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Maximos the Confessor

Maximos the Confessor

In the last issue I shared with my readers that fact that deification “in Christ” is necessarily the result of a freely accepted new birth in the Spirit and that Jesus himself, according to Maximus, has taken this choice in his humanity. Having reminded his readers that, according to the Genesis account, the man was first formed from clay in his physical reality and that afterwards God breathed the Spirit into him, Maximus recalls the birth of Christ in Bethlehem and then the descent of the Spirit at his baptism by John. Both of these two births were assumed by Christ. “The Incarnation,” Maximus writes, “took first the form of a bodily birth because of my incompleteness, but it was then accompanied by a birth in the Spirit at baptism, so that I may be saved by grace, so that I may be recalled, or, more clearly, so that I may be created again.”

Free human decision and free conversion, sealed by the Spirit at baptism, are therefore the conditions of a synergy between human freedom and divine grace, which makes deification possible through the sharing of that humanity which, in Christ, was assumed by the Logos, deified, and made present in the church through the Eucharist. That encounter and that sharing are effected by the Spirit – the Spirit which came upon Mary, which descended upon Christ in the Jordan, which was sent by Christ upon his disciples after the resurrection, which is invoked by the church in the Eucharistic mystery, and which effects the equally mysterious encounter between God and each human soul. Thus, “through His flesh”, writes Maximus, “the Son has manifested the Father whom humanity was unable to truly know, and through the Spirit He led to the Father those whom He had joined with Himself.”

In Christ, the two natures – divine and human – were united into the single personal existence of the incarnated Son of God. Both were dynamic realities, expressed in the two wills of Christ. But theirs was not a simple alliance or juxtaposition between concurring wills, but a communion, in which there was a real communication of properties, a true and real penetration of divine energy into humanity with the free acceptance of deification by Christ’s human will, effected through the Spirit. And it is the same Spirit that effects the union of those who freely choose to be “in Christ” with the deified humanity of the New Adam.

The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God — 20160821

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Mystical Supper

Mystical Supper

In the last issue I began sharing my thoughts about one of the main prayers of the ANAPHORA of our Divine Liturgy. It begins as a prayer to the FATHER and then transitions into remembering what the SON, Whom the Father sent, did for us. The next words of this prayer are:

Who [the Father] so loved Your world that You gave Your only-begotten Son that everyone who believe in Him should not perish, but should have life everlasting ….

These words specify the Father’s intent in becoming enfleshed in the Person of the Son – so that we might have life everlasting. Think about it! God so loves us that He came in the Person of Jesus to show us how to live and, therefore, gain the fullness of life or life everlasting. I don’t know about you, but these words are so very, very uplifting for me. To be assured that the God Who created me loves me so much that He came Himself to show me how to live, is truly up-lifting.

Further, to also think that these words were written in the fifth century is truly amazing! The insight that the early Christians had about the Church should inspire us to want to achieve the same understanding.

The remainder of this prayer then goes on to articulate what the Son did while on earth. It is critical that when we hear these things prayed, that we mentally affirm our belief that this is what happened in history and continues to happen in our present time and experience. Christ is doing this for us right now. The prayer says:

Who [Jesus Christ], having come and having fulfilled the whole divine plan concerning us, on the night when He was betrayed, or rather, when He surrendered Himself of the life of the world ….

One of the key phrases in this part of the prayer is: having fulfilled the whole divine plan concerning us…. I wonder how many of us actually think about the fact that God had and has a divine plan concerning us? I also wonder how many of us have any kind of idea about what the divine plan is?

There is so much theology and revealed truth packed into our Divine Liturgy which, I suspect, we don’t even think about while celebrating it. In order, however, to make the Liturgy our personal and communal worship of God, we need to reflect upon what we pray and do! I would encourage you to think about what you think God’s divine plan – what He has planned for you – is for you and, if you would, share them with me.

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20160821

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st_john_of_theladderI would continue thoughts about St. John’s 24th Step on the Ladder that he created to teach his monks about spiritual development. The 24th Step is Meekness/Simplicity. Many think of simplicity as simple-mindedness and ignorance, but this is not what it means. Learning and education are not to be shunned. The intellect is not an enemy of faith. While it is certainly true that these things are not necessary for one to acquire virtue, it must be said that for someone who has been endowed with intelligence and a capacity for learning, it is wrong to spurn this gift, as though God wanted only our hearts and not our minds also. As C.S. Lewis put it, God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. It is true that clever people are usually more prone to self-conceit than are simple folk, but there are many saints who were highly educated but, notwithstanding their remarkable intellect, acquired the virtue of simplicity. Furthermore, simple people can be just as proud as clever people. St. John wrote:

If knowledge can cause most people to become vain, perhaps ignorance and lack of learning can make them humble. Yet now and again you find men who pride themselves on their ignorance.

The virtue of simplicity is not measured by one’s IQ, education or intellectual potential. Simplicity is guilelessness, honesty and integrity. Often simple-minded people are more advanced in this virtue than others because they have the gift of single-mindedness: instead of sitting there thinking things over, they simply focus all their attention on one simple thing and go for it. Perhaps this is why our Lord said, I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes.

I truly believe that we all do well to take time and reflect upon this 24th Step. Simplicity is truly, in many ways, next to Godliness.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20160821

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I have been sharing in this article various thoughts about the driving force underlying the creation of the writings of Sacred Scripture. The word that is usually used to signify this driving force is inspiration. As I have already shared, there have been many different understandings about inspiration. What is the relationship between the divine and the human in the origin of Scripture? Although our Catholic doctrine recognizes that in the origin of Scripture there is both a divine and human factor, it also insists that these two factors are not on the same level, but that there is an instrumental subordination of the human factor to the divine. The pattern for this relationship is to be found in Scripture itself in passages such as Acts 4:25 where God is said to utter the words of a psalm through the mouth of David. The verse in Acts is:

Sovereign Lord, who made heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them, you have said by the Holy Spirit through the lips of our father David your servant….

This instrumental subordination of man to God in the production of Scripture is emphatically and frequently expressed in the patristic comparisons used to illustrate the role of the human authors in composing the sacred books: They are the mouth, finger, minister, or deacon of God. The idea implicit in these images for the divine-human relationship was put philosophically and abstractly in the Middle Ages in such statements as that of Thomas Aquinas: The principal author of Sacred Scripture is the Holy Spirit; man was the instrumental author. Even though this instrumental subordination of man to God was an assured result of medieval speculation on Scripture, it did not play an important role in later theological thought until it was revitalized in the 19th and 20th centuries, under the influence of Leo XIII, Benedict XV and Pius XII.

Interest in the nature of inspiration is an aspect of theological speculation that has been developed only in modern times, as a result of the gradual discovery of the complexity of the literary artifact that is the Bible. It was not until true Biblical study and criticism developed, that the Church really began to think about the true nature of inspiration as it is applied to the Scriptures. What is the relationship between God and Man in the production of these sacred writings? I will continue sharing history and ideas.

Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church — 20160821

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theotokosIn the last several issues of this article, I presented concrete ideas about Sacred Tradition. The first idea I presented was that Sacred Tradition includes the faith set-forth in the Seven Ecumenical Councils which serve as the RUDDER for our Church. The two weeks that followed my presentation on the Councils of the Church, were devoted to two of the major feasts of our Church, the Transfiguration of Our Lord and the Dormition of the Mother of God. The feasts of the Church flow directly from Sacred Tradition. These are but two of the 12 major feasts in our Church – 8 celebrating events in the life of Christ and 4 celebrating events in the life of Mary, the Mother of God.

These twelve major feasts were developed over the first seven centuries of the Church and integrated into our yearly, liturgical calendar. As one author (i.e., Rudolph) maintains, the original purpose of these feasts was not to commemorate events in Christ’s life but rather to put forth theological and ultimately political propositions in an accessible and convincing form. These feasts truly amplify our understanding of our faith. They are a part of Sacred Tradition. The services that have been composed to celebrate these feasts present a great deal of our theology.

Many of the modern Western Christian denominations have eliminated all of but two of these feasts. They disregard the more than seven centuries that the Church spent developing these feasts and the prayers that are used to celebrate them.

Our Church maintains these twelve feasts because they have been handed down to us and preserved by the Sacred Tradition of the Church. To disregard these feasts means to disregard a great portion of the history of Christianity. To celebrate them places us in the mainstream of Christian history.

So we see that two main streams of Sacred Tradition are the statements formulated by the Church during the first eight centuries in the foundational Councils AND the liturgical life of the Church which is amplified by the inclusion of not only twelve major feasts but also a whole calendar of commemorations of various persons (i.e., saints) who have showed us how to live our faith.

There are yet other elements to Sacred Tradition which I shall share in the coming weeks.