The Telos of the Creation

I'm currently rereading Al Wolter's Creation Regained (Eerdmans, 2005; second ed.), as it is a textbook in a class I'm teaching.  I chose it specifically because it was so instrumental in my becoming a Neo-Calvinist (or Reformational) in college and grad school.  I was a card-carrying Dooyeweerdian, fighting for the end of dualism, especially in theology (which, to tow the party line, was beholden to Platonic dualism or one sort or another).  Now that I'm teaching, I knew this was one book I wanted my students to read: it had been so formative for me, how could I resist?

You can never go home again.

Maybe it is the intervening years, maybe it is the changes that I went through in seminary, maybe it is my ever-deepening reading of the Fathers of the Church, I don't know.  But I find myself, over and over again, disagreeing with Wolters.  Some things I can heartily affirm: creation is good, even despite the ravaging effects of sin.  However, after that, things get dodgy.  Part of it goes to some of the tacit (worldview?) assumptions that go unexamined throughout the book.  One is that creation, as it stands, is meant to largely run as we experience it (not in its corruption from sin, but in its creational structure).  However, this opens Wolters up to the charge of an incipient deism, especially once we reach his thoughts on "salvation as restoration."  As he puts it, "redemption means restoration -- that is, the return to the goodness of an originally unscathed creation and not merely the addition of something supracreational" (69, emphasis original).  Redemption functions as a reset button, as it were, on creation.  However, this ignores the fact that the original creation was meant to run on "the addition of something supracreational," that is, God's Life.  God, who promises to be "all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28, Eph. 1:23, etc.), pours Himself out into His creation "deifying" it, to use the Patristic term.  Creation was meant to be filled by God from the beginning.  Salvation, then, cannot be about merely restoring the creation and then developing it along human lines (which is where Reformational thinking goes about its "culture making"); rather, salvation is about restoration and glorification.  Certainly, we can and should develop the creation to its potential, but if we do not realize that the point of its potential, the telos of its telos, is union with God, then we miss the point entirely.

I wonder, although I cannot prove this so do not take it as a rebuke or accusation, if all this might be the effects of the crypto-Nestoranism that plagues much of Reformed Christology (going back, some argue, to Calvin himself -- I cannot judge one way or the other).  In classical Nestorianism, the person of the Word takes on human nature without changing it or fulfilling it.  It is a "union of wills," at best.  Human nature is not raised up into theosis, or deification, or glorification (whatever you want to call it), but remains untouched by the indwelling of the Logos.  This means that, while Christ restores nature (for how could sin negatively affect His human nature after the resurrection), He does nothing else with it.  It is not a true, Chalcedonian union.  Rather, classical Christianity has held that creation is fundamentally incomplete -- and tends back to the nihil as both Sts Athanasius and Maximus the Confessor argue -- without the vivifying presence of God "everywhere present and fulfilling all things."  Creation is not enough; that doesn't mean it isn't good -- acknowledging creational limitation built into its very structure by God is not Gnosticism.  Restoration is not enough.

This gets to the second assumption that I must disagree with: sin is what is wrong with the world.  Don't get me wrong, though: sin is a problem.  But it is more of a symptom to the real problem, which is the corruption of death.  Again, St Athanasius speaks on this much more powerful than I can in his On the Incarnation.  God is Life, so to be separate from Him is to be in a state of death.  Mere biological existence (which is in line with the structural norms given by God) is now necessarily in death; something does need to be added back, which is God.  Now, death is brought into the world via sin, but, as St Athanasius says, you can repent of sin, you can't repent of death.  Christ, in His Incarnation (which includes the Cross, Resurrection, Ascension, and Session) not only defeats sin, but death as well.  It is only through His full union with human nature that this can be accomplished for us.  Death is the real problem.  Culturally, this means that mere "development" along the lines of redirected creational structures isn't enough; every discipline, every cultural endeavor, and so on must go through the Cross.  Each aspect of creation must partake of the death of Christ to be freed from the corruptive effects of sin and death.  This means that we will not, and cannot, "bring in the Kingdom" by our efforts, nor will we reach a sort of "principled pluralist" utopia.  Rather, we remain faithful in all aspects of life, bringing them again and again to the Cross, so that they might be raised on the last day (which is itself the fullness of the Crucifixion).  I haven't fully worked through the implications of this -- but it has changed the way I interact with cultural goods and norms.  One thing I know now, though, is that the fullness of the Kingdom will not be realized culturally or socially until Christ comes again -- I have officially left post-millennialism for a robust amillennialism.

More, of course, needs to be said and written.  But this brief introduction will have to suffice for now.

Brief Thoughts on Christian Ethics

The point of the Christian life is not to become a better, more moral person.  The end, the telos, is to become Christ: not just to be like Him, but to participate in His Life and His Body.  If we think about this, though, this precludes all moral striving.  No matter how hard we work, we will never be filled with the Holy Spirit and so share in the divine nature.  Hence the necessity of faith, not just as rational (or even moral) assent, but coming under the authority and obedience of the King who offers the grace (Himself) so to do.  To become Christ is the goal: who is Christ?  He is the theandros, the God-Man, one who in His Person as the Word indivisably and unconfusedly unites the divine and the human natures.  How are we in any way to attain to Him?  We are human persons, who through faith in baptism are filled with the Holy Spirit who shares His nature with us.  This is why the Spirit rested on Christ in His baptism; this is why our Lord did nothing without the Spirit in His sojourn; so that we might, as sons of God remade in the pattern of the Son of God, might be joined with the Spirit for our salvation.  To acquire the Spirit, then, is the goal of the Christian life.  To acquire the Spirit is to become Christ; to become Christ is to become divine, glorified, theotic.  Here is where the central importance of the Tabernacle cultus and liturgy, detailed in the middle of the Torah, becomes so key: the Law was never about becoming moral, it was about becoming a Temple: pure, undefiled, holy.  A place for God to dwell.  The whole point of the commandments of God is not to make Him happy, as if our Lord needs that emotion (the One God dwells in blessedness of which happiness is but a pale shadow), no, the point of the commands is to be prepared for God's residence within us.  But, just as the unclean always threatened the sanctity of the holy courts, so sin, death, Satan, and the disordered passions threaten Christ's Holy Temple, His Body, the Church.  This makes the Law not about ascent to God to curry favor, but about guarding sacred ground: ethics, then, is priestly work.

This is why St Silouan the Athonite's dictum that "My brother is my life" is so important: the priests are not doing an individual task, but the collective work of protection and sanctification of the Church.  I cannot do my work as a priestly guardian without reference to my brothers and sisters, nor without their constant aid and intercession so for strength and forgiveness of sins (which, to digress briefly, is why the communion of saints is so vital).  All are saved together, none are saved alone.

It is worth noting that in the cultic regulation there are two categories of defilement: sin and symbols of death.  Sin is, in Levitical terms, the conscious breaking of the Torah, which leads to death (whether as a consequence of the action, i.e. murder or the death penalty, or on the social level, i.e. adultery shredding families apart).  The symbols, though, are those things that are not inherently sinful, but still reference death, especially as inherited through Adam.  An example would be the regulations concerning childbearing (Lev. 12): after a woman gives birth, she must go through a period of ritual purification after the flow of blood dams.  Then she must, if she is to readmitted to the Temple, offer a "sin offering."  Why?  Has she sinned?  No, rather the term is better understood as "purification offering" (cf. Milgrom's commentary on Leviticus): since Eve, childbearing has been a sign of both hope ("your Seed shall crush the serpent's head...") and the consequences of death ("greatly will I increase your pains in childbearing").  A birth symbolizes the curse on Eve, but it is not insurmountable: there will come One who will save all women through being born by a virgin.  This second category, the symbols of death, are fully dealt with by the destruction of death through the Resurrection.  No longer do menstruations or child bearings make women unclean and disallowed from worship of the true God (one has only to reach in faith for the fringes of the Lord's garment to be fully healed!).  Sin, however, remains as a defiling agent; here is why St Paul, for example, speaks of various actions, attitudes, and lifestyles as defiling or polluting the people of God.

To return to the main point, we know that the power of sin is strong enough, compelling enough (why else would our first parents even countenance the serpent?), and pervasive enough that we cannot resist it.  Here is where our brothers and sisters come in, especially those who have had their passions healed and purified ("saints"): they can offer us forgiveness.  Now, some might say, only God can forgive sins!  True!  God is the only One who forgives sins and He deigns to do it through the intercessions, through the rebukes, through the gentle and stern corrections of others.  The root of forgiveness, which is often lost in our overly legal culture, is release: the Church, as the Body of the Christ, undoes the bonds that hold us tight.  And the Lord promises (and warns) that if we forgive the trespasses of our brother and sister, our own trespasses are forgiven as well.  We are set free as we set others free.  This is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, the forgiveness of the world.  This is, not morals and ethics, but entering the Cross, actualizing baptism, becoming the body, sharing the One Loaf, salvation.

Theosis in John 1

Theosis or "Christification" is what I've come to believe is the end-game of salvation: to be united with God and so be restored in His image and likeness. St Athanasius summed it up by saying, "God became man so that man might become divine." He didn't mean that we cease being creatures, but that we take on God's "communicable attributes": we partake of and participate in God's righteousness, holiness, immortality, wisdom, etc. The only way to do this, though, is through Christ -- the ever-incarnate Lord. In other words, this isn't an escape from our mode of existence into some Platonic Form, but rather it is becoming what humans were always meant to be: "Because of the great love which He has for us, Christ became what we are so that we might become what He is", as St Irenaeus put it. Our union with God is only possible insofar as He becomes (and we remain) human. I've done a paltry explanation of what theosis is here, but I hope the main gist has come across. Just as God became human, so we, as humans, are given God the Holy Spirit to restore and, to use St Paul's language, glorify us (alongside all the Creation).

In John 1, we have this spelled out, but often gloss over it in favor of more standard readings of the text. (Brief caveat: I'm not denying the standard readings, nor trying to modify or change them. I'm noticing that the Scriptures are deep, as deep as the infinite Christ they speak of, and so can bear multiple, non-contradictory readings.) Looking at the first verse will suffice:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

The term used for "Word," famously, is Logos, a Greek term that has a rich history in the Septuagint and in Greek philosophy (especially that of the Stoics). It has a wide range of meaning, from a word to the logic of a thing to the reason or telos of something's existence. St Maximos the Confessor uses this last meaning to talk about how the Son, the eternal Logos of the Father, frames all things and draws all things to Himself: the many creational logoi are the one Logos. In other words, the reason/goal/end/telos of all created things is Christ Himself. It is this last meaning that I wish to explore today.

"In the beginning was the Purpose, and the Purpose was with God, and the Purpose was God."

It reads strange, but there is something excitingly biblical about it. Let's unpack it, starting from the final clause.

"the Purpose was God"

The Son will, even as His Kingdom has no end, hand over the Kingdom to the Father, so that "God might be all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28). Indeed, as St Paul says in Ephesians 1:23, Christ already is "all in all" and the Church is the fullness of Him (a verse worth chewing on and chewing on). All of this "all in all" language is the summary of what God is accomplishing in His world, "And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment--to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ" (Eph. 1:9-10). The whole of creation is to be brought into Christ, the one who in His union of natures brings heaven and earth together: His divine nature "divinizes" the Creation. It brings it into participation with God's uncreated Glory, just as the earthly body of Christ shared on Mt Tabor.

Note that this, again, is not an eradication of the created, but rather a participation in which there is no "confusion, change, division, separation" (The Definition of Chalcedon): God remains essentially God, the creation remains essentially created, but now the creation shares in God's "energy" (to use the term of the Cappodocian Fathers and the Palamite). To share in God's glory is what we were created for (Rom. 8:30), what we've fallen short of (Rom. 3:23), and therefore what God won't share with our idols (Is. 42:8).

It is worth noting, as well, that this Glory is the Glory of the Crucified One. To become like God (to share in His image and likeness) is not "knowing good and evil" in the intellectual sense, but in the sense of being crucified to evil with the Good One. There is no "health and wealth" in theosis.

"the Purpose was with God"

The standard reading, of the Son being the Word, comes out most clearly here. The Purpose -- that of uniting all things to Himself -- was "with" God the Father. It was, to be a bit more literal with the Greek, "before" Him or "in His Face." Ephesians 1, which I've already quoted, looked at this. Here also is where predestination properly comes in: "For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren" (Rom. 8:29). Whatever else predestination might mean, it means that the Purpose -- God indwelling His world and transfiguring it -- was with God in the beginning. Even the presence of sin and death and corruption works, somehow and paradoxically, into God's Purpose being fulfilled. All the Apostles, in all the Epistles, speak of similar things like this: the Christ was with God, as His Purpose, since He is "the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last" (Rev. 1:11).

"In the beginning was the Purpose"

Working backwards, this one almost needs no argument: we were created, as seen in Romans 8:30, for glorification (and woe to those who don't attain to it by faith!). There is no thought here that God meant for something different, but got sidetracked by Adam's rebellion. Rather, Christ "slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8) meant to bring all things to Himself, things in heaven or on earth (Eph. 1:9-10).

God's purpose is to fill all the world with knowledge of Himself "as the waters cover the sea" (Is. 11:9), knowledge not being an intellectual exercise, but rather a share in His unending Life (Jn. 1:4): "for this is eternal Life, to know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent" (Jn. 17:3).

Theotic Politics

I was talking to a friend tonight about the sad state of local politics here in Beaver Falls. I won't go into details, for they are already well known to any observant local here. Things do not change with any ease. One of the features, though, that stuck out in our discussion is that the goal or telos of government (local or otherwise) is quite murky as of late. Possibly, although I am no expert or pundit on matters political, this is the reason that I have seen neither Obama nor Romney signs in peoples' yards: the finish line being represented by either of those candidates is chilling.

I digress, though. When speaking of ends, or goals, we are necessarily speaking theologically, for a goal assumes a structure, and a structure assumes an Architect (I am aware that this is a controversial thing to say, however the chaos of modern Evolutionary theory is self-referentially incoherent, so I have no reason to countenance it as a viable option). The telos of all life, whether we are speaking of the specifics of "the art of living together" or not, is to be united to God, to have God's Life work in and through us: to be filled with His light and love to the utmost brim. In a word, theosis. We are to be by grace what Christ Himself is by nature. I have argued that elsewhere on this blog. While I initially chaffed at the doctrine, I have come to see that it is the Chestertonian "Golden Spike" that fits the hole in the world, perfectly.

If theosis is the ultimate goal, that God might be "all in all" (I Cor. 15) for Christ "fills everything in every way" (Eph. 1) already, then that has political implications, especially at the structural level. Our "art of living together" is supposed to work towards the filling of our social and civic life with God's Life. Our societas is to be an outpouring and indwelling of the holy Spirit. All levels of government, from the basics of self-government (ascesis) to magisterial government, are to be oriented (and Romans 8, I think, can be argued to assert that they are already oriented: "predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son") towards this telos.

The cash out of this (and I do realize that I am painting with broad brush strokes -- this is a blog, after all) is that our local life together here in Beaver Falls is oriented wrongly. It is not theotic. And if something is not theotic, not oriented towards filling the world with God's Life, then it is oriented towards death. There is no other option. Death, certainly, doesn't happen in a day at the civic level, but I think it would be hard -- if not impossible -- for any denizen of Beaver Falls to argue that we are not in a state of civic death. Part and parcel of this must be the realization that holding onto the past, the "good old days" of steel mill prosperity and abundance, must stop. They were not "good old days" because they were not theotic: they partook of human avarice (let us not forget that greed is still a capital sin), a debasement of the human person via industrial drudgery, and a destruction of the necessary natural capital of the area (the water, the air, and the land still bear scars and are choked with poisons of various sorts). If Beaver Falls, and anyplace, is to be full of life, it must be full of Life. Our old way of life, that life that pines for material prosperity at any cost, must be put to death on Christ's cross. God forgive us for not doing that as of yet.

The first rule of theotic politics is "love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind and strength"; the second is like unto it, "love your neighbor as yourself." How shall we love God and neighbor politically? It involves putting our political aspirations, both individual and corporate, to death: do we want the "good old days"? This dream must be forsaken. Instead, we must "do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God." We cannot bring Beaver Falls to life, or to Life; God must do that through His Body, the Church. However, the politicos and concerned citizens can take two concrete actions for that to happen: join the Church and clear away the impediments to the Church's work. In the midst of that, they will see that taxes do not need to be what they are, nor do we need to kill business proposals through a thousand qualifications, but rather we must trust that the Spirit is working in our political freedoms to start businesses, to raise families, to clean up our environs, and to worship God.

Theosis does not happen in a day, it is a constant struggle: but we are called to nothing less.

The Real Presence of the Christ

This post is somewhat a response to Mr. Robert Arakaki on Orthodox Bridge, a usually delightful site of Reformed-Evangelical and (Eastern) Orthodox dialogue (with, naturally, an emphasis on some prosyletism towards Orthodoxy). Since seminary at Trinity School for Ministry I have developed an interest in the possible connections between the Reformed tradition and Orthodoxy. I realize, after having many conversations both on the internet and off, that there are some unbridgeable parts between the two. Yet, hope springs eternal. I continue my quest to "rethink it all," albeit with a twist. I have changed -- dramatically -- since I started working on this train of thought. The problems that started it still remain (people my age leaving the Church -- this weighs always heavily on my heart and my mind), but my view towards many issues has, hopefully, matured. Part of that (possibly the majority of that) comes from a relatively recent rejection of cynicism. My own words from another journal aptly capture this:

I do not wish to be cynical any more. There is nothing more blinding than to believe that we see clearly when we assume that all operate only under the terms of power, sex, and wealth, or that all but we are ignorant. It is we who are blind and mad for the passions -- Christ is the Other under whom we must submit and learn, whether that Other manifests himself as poor, or woman, or black, or sexual sinner. "He came in the likeness of sinful flesh" to make our bodies like unto his glorious Body...

In other words, when I am cynical, I am enslaved to a point of view that blocks off the world: I can only see what my eyes see, believe only what my rationality leads me to, and so on. It was a logical outcome of my original hyper-Biblicism: I could only believe what I could see in the Bible. In other words, I could only believe at the level of my (paltry) rationality, which given the Reformed emphasis on the noetic effects of sin, led me to despair and cynicism. I remember one day (I shall never forget it), when I shouted out to my wife in despair, "Either God has abandoned His Church since the Apostles died or He has abandoned me!" Turns out, thank God, there were more paths than the dialectic rut I had carved (as I've related elsewhere).

When the scales fell off my eyes and I was allowed to read the Church Fathers sympathetically, I started to notice that many of the things I read in them were, yes, the same that I was finding in Scripture. There was (and is), as it were, a regula fidei, a [T]radition, behind the text that spoke volumes in these few recorded words. However, this has made me an ill-fit as a representative of the "Reformed tradition" (whatever, exactly, that may entail). As much as I long for institutional continuity and support, I am both a Protestant and an academic, which means that where I see the Reformed tradition as being in error, I must take exception (this strikes me as eerily familiar to the position I had previously concerning an over-rationalism: this gives me some food for thought). So, when Mr. Arakaki connected me to the Reformed tradition, and the possibility of Platonism lurking in the background of it, I was taken aback a bit. The branch of Reformed theology that I am most closely allied to, the Amsterdam School of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Dooyeweerd, views Platonism as the ultimate insult to any thinker. This has caused me, as all criticism (hopefully) should, to rethink and return to my own thoughts. Everything posted here at Withdrawals should be understood to not be a hard-and-fast dogmatic ruling (for I have no such authority), but rather meditations that I pray God will forgive me for -- they are meant for His glory, but are presented in decidedly earthen vessels.

Allow me to go through my own train of thought:

If, as Paul seems to say (and I've argued in my Chalcedon series) and Irenaeus definitely asserts, "Christ became what we are, so that we might become what He is," then we must ask what He is. While it took me years to come to and understand, I must confess that he is both man (that is, he has a full human nature, including a will, passions, a mind, a body, etc.) and God (everything that belongs to the essence and nature of divinity He has). However, we cannot stop there, because we would miss what he has become because of his sojourn among us. It is obvious from John's Gospel that the humanity which Christ assumed at the beginning of the Incarnation is transformed (or, better yet, transfigured) via the Resurrection: he can pass through walls, he has no need of eating, he can appear and disappear at will, etc. This is not "normal" humanity. It has gone "beyond" in some way, even if how is hard to conceive or describe. Paul, I think, sums it up nicely in his discussion of the "heavenly body" (I Cor. 15): certainly still a body, still corporeal, but suffused with the Glory and Life of God to such an extent that it breaks up our normal categories (just as the Kingdom itself does). It is a fully saved humanity. This assumes, though, that salvation is more than having sins forgiven (although that certainly is a part of it, thank God); rather salvation is a conquering of death, of misguided passions, and a sharing or participation (and I realize that is a Platonic term -- the use of a term or many terms does not equate with an endorsement of a system, one only has to sympathetically read the Cappadocians or Athanasius to understand that) in the Life that is Jesus Christ the Word of God (John 1 -- "in him was Life and that Life was the Light of the world). The body that Jesus has is the body that we shall get at our own Resurrection (Come quickly, Lord Jesus). But how do we share in this Life now and into the future?

Certainly here is where Paul's doctrine of justification of faith comes in. We enter Christ's Life by swearing our allegiance to him. However, there is more. To share in his body we must share in his Body. We must contextualize that allegiance in the life of his community, the Church (Cyprian and Calvin were right to say that there is no salvation outside of the Church, although I would qualify that a bit to allow for the mysterious and altogether merciful movements of the Spirit). We enter the Church, get ingrafted into the Body (Romans 11), through baptism, and once we are in, we can partake fully of Christ through the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the height of Christian sanctification, then, since we are sharing in the sacrifice of the Son, once for all completed, but always effectual and on offer for us. But there is more. This too easily can be seen as a social club (and, alas, in all parts of Christianity this often seems to be the ruling assumption) that magically guarantees us a "Get out of Hell free" card. How can we start living the Resurrection Life of Christ now? We partake of his Life through his Body, that is, through the Bread and Wine. We must eat Christ if we are to be his Body the Church and if we are to live in the "newness of life" that Paul talks about. For this to happen, it is a necessity that the Bread and Wine be more than mere symbol or "mystical feeding," but rather the Bread and Wine must be the actual, real resurrected and glorified Body and Blood of Jesus Christ himself. "What is not assumed by God is not healed," one of the Gregorys said, yet what is not partaken of cannot heal us. "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no Life in yourselves" (John 6).

I don't, at this point, find anything particularly un-Reformed about this: certainly most Reformed (probably a large majority) have viewed the supper as either entirely symbolic or as entirely spiritual, whence comes "mystical feeding." The problem often seems to be "how can Christ's humanity be present in more than one place at a time?" However, this is only if we understand heaven as a "place" and not as a state of existence (and I am guilty of this confusion -- I have difficulty thinking outside of my own creaturely constraints): Christ, in his theoanthropic unity, "fills all things" (Eph. 1) so it is very possible for him to transform (how this happens, I do not care to know) bread and wine into Bread and Wine, Body and Blood. His humanity, while still being created by God, is a different sort of humanity not constrained by time and space. However, we are. That is why, in the reality of worship, we are transported to the heavenly state, which does transcend creaturely limitations without obliterating them (for which I am thankful). Our worship, then, is a mirroring of, and I would argue a participation in, what Christ is, the union of Creator and creature, while still maintaining the proper distinctions. There is, in my mind, nothing particularly Platonic about this: rather it respects the Creator-creature distinction while leaving room for true unity: the principles of that unity are the holy Spirit (Christ's Life) and the glorified flesh (Christ's Body and Blood).

This may sound different than what I posted in the comments section over at the OB. Certainly, it is. I've had time to think and read the Scriptures and see why it is so necessary for us to partake of the actual humanity of Christ (the question has been piqued because of recent sermons I've heard about how to live the Christian life -- I don't think it is possible without having Christ's Life regularly in us, which happens during worship -- although the Spirit, His Life, is always with us -- a mystery I cannot explain, but I also cannot avoid it). Reformed folks who don't think like me, though, aren't necessarily in danger of Nestorianism, as I (and, by extension, the whole Reformed community) was accused of. If we are in heaven, in the state of existence where Christ theoanthropically dwells, the question of "localized presence" becomes a non-issue. Even if Christ's humanity cannot leave heaven (which I'm not arguing for -- God forbid), our presence there in worship means that we feed on that humanity "whenever we do this".

This has not been a point-by-point response to Mr. Arakaki. I do apologize for that, but I thought it would be more helpful to just lay all the cards out on the table. It is not particularly scholarly either, even though that was what Mr. Arakaki presented for me. Again, I apologize, but the constraints of creaturely existence (time and space) necessitate a more personal and stream-of-consciousness approach.

Implications of the Incarnation

The Incarnation, God's taking on of created matter in the body and soul of Jesus, means that Christianity is inherently an anti-dualistic faith (St. Irenaeus was right, in other words, to fight so ferociously against Gnosticism). That is, Christianity not only sees the created order (the kosmos) as essentially 'good' (Gen. 1), but as reestablished in its goodness due to Christ's coming "in the flesh" (I Jn.) and the eschatological work of the Spirit in the Church (Rom. 8).

This can be seen, firstly, in the interaction between Christ and the woman with an issue of blood (Mk. 5). In the Levitical standards, if a person comes into contact with someone who is 'unclean' (breaks the blood boundary, e.g., not necessarily a 'sinful' person), then they become unclean themselves. However, notice that Christ not only does not become unclean, but rather cleanses this poor woman. He, in the flesh, has brought healing and holiness to this woman. Her flesh is made clean by coming into contact with Christ (notice, as well, the role of allegiance or faith in the encounter -- her faith was an active faith).

More can be said, though. Some of the seemingly insignificant details of the Gospels become radiant when viewed through the Incarnation. When Christ goes down into the waters of the Jordan, his presence blesses all waters: the holiness of God has been brought down to the mundane level. Because of this reality, we can be thankful for all waters. When Christ eats with his disciples after the Resurrection, even though food was not technically necessary, he blesses food and eating forever, which we receive with thankfulness. When he is crucified on a tree, he blesses all trees, for which we can be thankful. Christ restores the world to its wholeness and fulness, even reversing the curse on the ground (Gen. 3) by wearing the thorns upon his blood-sweat brow and by being entombed in the earth.

The Incarnation, then, is the foundation for an ecological ethic: if Christ has made the whole world holy, then we must treat all things as such. All things have meaning in relation to God, especially as God has revealed Himself through the Incarnation. This is why the Apostle Paul might tell us that the whole creation eagerly awaits its release into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Christ, by his coming, has brought Jubilee -- the whole world has reverted to its rightful owner, the Lord Himself, and we are His tenants and stewards of this great, awesome, and mysterious place that has been cleansed for God's Presence by the body and blood of Christ himself.

Hallelujah.

Christology and Soteriology

Another thing that should go without saying: whatever your Christology is (your beliefs about who Jesus Christ is, how he is related to God the Father, how he is related to mankind, what he has done, etc.) determines what your soteriology is (the teachings about what 'salvation' is).

I've been reading, in fits and starts, through R.P.C Hanson's "The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God" about the early 4th century Arian controversy. One of the problems he brings up, as he is detailing the history of interpretation, is that often scholars have assumed that Arius had no soteriology, that is, he was concerned only with the oddly impenetrable philosophical dogmas concerning the immutable, Platonic/Aristotelian High God (the Father) and the lesser, "second," mutable god (the Son). However, looking at the Patristic preoccupation with the "economy of salvation" (how God is working to save His creation in time -- often translated, interestingly enough, by the word Incarnation), it is hard to believe that Arius and the Arians could have made a sufficient splash into the turbulent theological waters of the time without a rival soteriology -- a rival economy to the pro-Nicenes.

I won't go into details of what that rival economy is, Hanson does a much better job than I could. The main point that I want to explore is: what soteriology does classical Christianity, that is, Christianity bounded by the creeds, produce? The Creeds, as is well known, are concerned either with the relation between Father and Son (Nicene, for example) or the relation between the Divine Person of the Word/Son and the assumed human nature in the history of Jesus the Messiah (Chalcedon, for example). That these are implicitly soteriology is not always obvious to those of us who aren't Eastern Orthodox, but they are. For the Trinitarian creeds (the first category), the assumption is that only God can save us, Jesus Christ saves us, therefore Jesus Christ must be God. The form this takes is the (seemingly still) controversial homoousias -- Jesus, the Word/Son, is of the same substance as the Father (the East would take this in a different -- and I think better -- direction than the West: God the Father is the Monarch from whom the Son and Spirit are respectively generated and spirated, instead of a (seemingly) autonomous and impersonal substance in which all three are implicated). The Christological creeds, then, take this soteriology further: certainly only God can save us, but mankind (humanity as such) must be brought by this action from death to life, so the Son must assume a full human nature (complete with body and soul: will included) that is brought through death to life, both in the fact that God has assumed it (the effects of the Divine Person of the Word on the body in the Incarnation) and the cross/resurrection event. If this does not happen, then we cannot be saved in the fullest sense: we cannot have a real union with Christ through the Spirit, who is the Life of God Himself (it is important here to remember that Patristic theologians never forgot that spirit can also mean "breath," that is, the very principle of life in an animate being: God's Spirit is His Life which He shares with us who are joined to Christ through faith and baptism.

This means that the concept of 'salvation' needs to be carefully explained. Certainly there is not an emphasis on salvation as a one-time event/experience of being "born again," as we find in modern evangelicalism broadly. Instead, the one event of salvation is that of the Incarnation (broadly conceived to include everything from the "incarnation proper" -- the miraculous conception of the Lord -- to his death, resurrection, ascension, and Session at the right hand of the Father) that, as both a historical, time-bounded reality and as the eternal reality of God as Trinity (see my post The Reality of Worship on this) is much broader and inclusive and objective than a subjective "born again" experience. 'Salvation,' as far as the human believer is concerned, entails being brought into the worshipping community of God (this is the real import of justification), and being conformed to the image of the Son progressively (sanctification or theosis). It is, then, a "once for all" event that reverberates throughout every moment of creational history: 'salvation' must be both entrance into the Church and growth into sainthood.

The creeds, by and large, assume the first aspect of salvation: Jesus Christ has come, he has died, he has risen, he will come again. The second aspect, the theotic aspect, is what they are concerned to safeguard. Our union with Christ, the progressive submission of our wills to the will of God (hence why monothelitism was such a threat!), must be maintained. If Christ is to not only be our Savior, but our model ("walk as he walked" as John says), then his humanity must be full and we must be conformed to that humanity. The 'how' of that I've attempted to explain in my Real Predestination series: the Spirit works in us and we work with the Spirit (asceticism and God's work are closely united). So man, by both the work and the hypostatic union of Christ, is brought to conformity with the Son in his glorified, resurrected humanity which must, if it is to overcome death and corruption, be united to God Himself through the indwelling of the Spirit.

The Reformed tradition, for the most part, does not make much of theosis. However, if we are to call ourselves orthodox, we must wrestle with the implications of the creeds we claim to profess. Part of the reason, it seems to me, that Calvin and his successors are often accused of Nestorianism is because we have not, by and large, connected our Christology to our soteriology.

The Reality of Worship

I've had the opportunity over the last two weeks to direct my sight to the Kingdom of God, in ways which either I hadn't for some time or never had at all. The more I learn, I find the less I know (in that infinity keeps getting bigger). We turn towards the Kingdom and find entrance through Jesus Christ, whom the Church witnesses to (even in our failure -- the essence of the Church is forgiveness and healing). This led to the following set of thoughts about what exactly it is that the Church does when it gathers for worship. (This will build off the Chalcedonian theology series that I have been steadily adding to, yet go in a significantly different direction).

God is the creator of all things, including time (Gen. 1:14). That means, regardless of how unfathomable it is, God dwells outside the constraints and bounds of time. He is truly eternal. Eternal, though, often is understood in terms of time: I recently heard a pastor speak of "eternity past," which -- while an interesting heuristic device -- does not a whole lot of sense; eternity cannot be past, present, or future. It just is. So God, dwelling in an eternal 'now' (getting deeper than this has taxed Christian theologians for centuries, for example Boethius in the early "medieval" period -- I have no desire to go beyond the bounds of Scripture, nor of received theology, so I will stay shy of such speculations), operates His Kingdom always in its fulness. Being that we are in time, and not yet in the fulness of His eschatological purposes, means that we cannot always perceive this reality (Jn. 3:3). However, when we speak of the Kingdom, we are speaking of this very present reality: a reality that is not "becoming" or "progressing," but simply is. Yet we are supposed to enter it, indeed enter it "born of water and the Spirit" (Jn. 3:5), that is by baptism and by faith. So this reality, this Kingdom, can only be entered via the mediation of the body of Christ -- which Christ acts through in time and space -- the Church. My contention is that in the regular worship of the Church we transcend earthly, time-bound reality and enter into God's Kingdom in the fullest way current possible -- indeed, Paul says that we are even "seated with Christ in the heavenly places" (a good question to ask that is often not asked: where is Christ seated?) (Eph. 2:6).

This really gets to the nature of the Church and its worship. God had said through Amos that "Surely the Sovereign LORD does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets" (Amos 3:7). Moses hoped that "all the LORD's people were prophets and that the LORD would put his Spirit on them" (Num. 11:29), which was prophesied by Joel (2:28ff.) and fulfilled at the day of Pentecost (Acts 2). All the Lord's people, who have been born of water and the Spirit, are prophets. But what is a prophet? We often think of prophets as those who receive messages from the Lord. While this is true (and we still do receive messages through the reading of the Scriptures which remain active, living, and powerful even today), the role of the prophet is greater than that: they are counsellors of God, like Abraham the prophet was (Gen. 20:7), who intercede for others (the ministries of Moses and Jeremiah are key in this regard). More on this anon.

Another aspect that must be considered is the role of the Church qua Church: an ekklesia, a called-out assembly, was a ruling council of the city-state in which it was found. Christ's ekklesia is part of his basileia (kingdom/kingship) and hence functions as his ruling-council, interceding for whatever Babylon the individual/metropolitan assembly happens to be in (this is the basis of local ecumenicity)--this is the kingly aspect of the Church. This dovetails nicely with the prophetic/intercessional role of the Church (the priestly, that is, the teaching role of the Church, will not considered here). We, the prophets/counsellors of the Lord, who intercede for the world, enter God's throne room (cf. the book of Revelation) to do the work God has called us to do, equipped us to do, in the world -- the work that He is already at work doing, but remember He does nothing without first consulting His prophets!

This means that whenever we enter into worship, we are entering the timeless, eternal state of the Kingdom for the very purpose of interceding for those in time. This makes much more sense of, say, the doctrine of predestination, as we in worship enter the realm of God's decree and intercede, saying (hopefully): "Lord, save all mankind (1 Tim. 2:1-4); may we be accursed from Your presence that some might be saved (Rom. 9:2-4)." Certainly, we do not make the decision for God (He remains sovereign -- notice that the word now has concrete meaning in the action of the deliberative royal council), but we cry out, knowing that "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective" (James 5:16).

This also has implications for our Eucharistic theology. Christ the Lamb, "slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8 -- some translations refer this phrase to the writing in the book of life), is the one we partake of in his eternal enthronement. So when we partake of the Eucharist (or communion or the Lord's Supper or whatever), we are partaking of the very event -- which is both eternal and time-bound to ca. AD 30. Christ is slain, Christ was slain, in the Kingdom means the same thing. This would go a long way to resolving the ongoing debate between memorialists, consubstantionists, and transubstantists: we are speaking of the same eternal reality with different language (I'm still not convinced that Aristotelian categories, such as in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions are particularly helpful, but that is neither here nor there): liturgical extension takes ourselves, our bread, our wines, our "one loaf" that is the Church, to the very event where Christ is present both as Victim and Victor.

It is important to note that although I am speaking of worship as an entering into an eternal state, I am not suggesting a magical suspension of time happens: time still passes for us for we are created beings not yet attained to the resurrection of the dead (Come quickly, Lord Jesus). It is precisely this interaction of the eternal and the temporal (in an hypostatic union, maybe?) that is the theatre of God's work: we leave the public worship of the Church, where we hear God's Word, partake of the Word, and speak the Word back to God so that we might bring the Life of God (the Spirit) to a dying world. To direct that world to the Kingdom of God, to see and to enter through "water and Spirit," so that the kingdoms of this world might become the Kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. And He shall reign forever and ever. Amen.

What Use are the Creeds?

Here is a draft of the second chapter of this short meditation. The chapters aren't meant to be long discourse, but are modelled after the brief remarks given by Bonhoeffer in his excellent little book on the Psalms.
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What Use are the Creeds?

Following, then, the holy fathers, we unite in teaching all men to confess the one and only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. This selfsame one is perfect both in deity and in humanness; this selfsame one is also actually God and actually man, with a rational soul and a body. He is of the same reality as God as far as his deity is concerned and of the same reality as we ourselves as far as his humanness is concerned; thus like us in all respects, sin only excepted. Before time began he was begotten of the Father, in respect of his deity, and now in these "last days," for us and behalf of our salvation, this selfsame one was born of Mary the virgin, who is God-bearer in respect of his humanness.

We also teach that we apprehend this one and only Christ-Son, Lord, only-begotten -- in two natures; and we do this without confusing the two natures, without transmuting one nature into the other, without dividing them into two separate categories, without contrasting them according to area or function. The distinctiveness of each nature is not nullified by the union. Instead, the "properties" of each nature are conserved and both natures concur in one "person" and in one reality. They are not divided or cut into two persons, but are together the one and only and only-begotten Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus have the prophets of old testified; thus the Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us; thus the Symbol of Fathers has handed down to us.
(The Definition of Chalcedon, AD 451)

The mistake that I made early on, an easy mistake to make, is that the Creeds act as a definite proclamation of theology. Rather, they are guide-rails, meant to keep us on the right path by showing what is not the road. Note in the Definition given above that the two natures are not positively defined, but negatively: united, yet not confused, not transmuted, not divided. The only positive statement, essentially, is “one and only Christ – Son, Lord, only-begotten.” The union is proclaimed, but the mechanics of such is not, nor can it be. This frustrated me early on, but now I see it as necessary – not all of God’s knowledge is for us, but “the things revealed belong to us and our children forever that we might be careful to do all the words of this torah” (Dt. 29:29).

The Creeds, then, are meant to be summary grammars of Scriptural teaching. Instead of being positive contributions – revelations of the character of God – they are signs of the paths we should avoid. Avoid, then, the Arian god Jesus, who is a lesser being that cannot save derived from a greater being that cannot love. And so on. That way dragons lay. Creeds, in the end, are not stand alone documents able to bring us to salvation, for “faith comes from hearing, hearing by the Word of God” (Rom. 10:17). The Church Fathers, in general, can helpfully be read this way. The Creeds only make sense and are only used properly when they are reflections on what has been called from ancient times the “economy of salvation.” The economy is God’s act (comprised of His many acts in both Old and New Testaments) to bring salvation to the world through Word and Spirit. The Scriptures bear testimony to this event, whom we know as the Messiah Jesus.

In my own experience, maybe it would be proper to compare the Creeds to Balaam’s ass. The donkey faithfully tried to warn its rider of impending danger, yet Balaam (the true ass) refused until God knocked him down.

In the case of Chalcedon, which this meditation seeks to understand, how might this guiding work? The key is that the mysterious two natures of the Christ – the truly human and the truly divine – are in full union with one another; there is no conflict or discord. While they might still be distinguished (they are not confused or collapsed into one another), they work together so well as to be understood as one Person. In other words, Jesus is not schizophrenic, nor has multiple personalities. Remembering Paul’s assertion that we are being conformed to the image of the Son (more on this anon) and Irenaeus’ contention that “Christ became what we are so that we might become what he is,” we can posit that we – human beings in faith – are Chalcedonian by created nature. That is, we have our human natures, but God also gives us His nature, His Life, His Spirit and joins us in union to Himself. We don’t become God, of course, but we are united with Him (here, again, we are in the realm of mystery and can only define negatively – the practical applications of this mystery, though, are immense). The goal of Christian life is the ever-deepening union with the Spirit of God that makes us more and more like the Messiah here on earth.

When we view the life and ministry of the Lord Jesus, then, we can read it profitably not just as an historical record, but as giving us hope and direction for our lives. While our union with Christ is not perfect (our human nature often giving fits), we can start to see how that Chalcedonian union gives power to the Christian life. Consider the temptation narrative found in Matthew 4.

Here we see Christ being tested as to his resolve to follow the Father in all things. Christ responds, not with assertions of deity, but by doing what every believer united with the Spirit can do – he lives out the Scriptures, proclaiming them as his own. While we are not yet perfect in our union with Christ, certainly we can follow his example – Word and Spirit to overcome sin and evil and even death.

This reveals something important for us who are traveling down this road. While biological growth cannot be stopped, spiritual growth can. Our union with the Spirit – even though it is predestined to be accomplished (Rom. 8) – can stagnate and shrivel. Our human natures can, by reason of sin and disobedience, push the Spirit out. Remember how King Saul and Judas both lost their places of honor and responsibility. Our union progresses as we are constantly connected to both Word and Spirit, since they are the path to the Father. This gives us reason, not only to be learning the Scriptures, but to be memorizing them, to be living them. “Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…” (Philippians 2). How, though, can we be connected with the Spirit? In a word, worship.

When believers gather together under the one Head, Jesus the Messiah, especially when they celebrate Eucharist (or communion) with him, they act as the one Body of Christ. Our human natures are joined to, and changed by, his human nature. At the same time, through the Spirit, God joins Himself to the community that is praying. This is especially true when the Psalms are being recited/chanted/sung, for they are the prayers of Christ to the Father. This joins the divine (God in the Spirit) to the human (God in Christ), creating a moment of union in the daily life of the Christian community. This moment, especially when pursued in the morning-evening pattern, gives a redemptive framework to the day: all that occurs between the moments of special union with God is offered up to God. It is in the context of this communal celebration that we have the opportunity – the privilege! – to hear God’s Word to us as a community. Instead of the individualization that often happens in our readings of Scripture, here we can join in union with Word and Spirit so that our common life might look more like the life of Christ. Think of how the earliest Church functioned in Acts, sharing all things so that the Word might be proclaimed.

The Creeds bring us to a way of reading – a hermeneutic – for the economy of salvation. Notice that this guidepost, though, doesn’t offer us a dispassionate, “objective” reading of the text, but one that fully takes the divine nature of it (its inspiration) along with its human nature (our contemporary application) seriously: the Word is living and active, as Hebrews tells us. Here is a Christ that is not far off, but as close to us as the confession of our lips (returning to Romans 10).

“Open my lips, o Lord, that my mouth might proclaim Your praise” (Ps. 51:15).

The Faith of Chalcedon

Here is a first draft of an introduction to a proposed book on Chalcedonian faith. They say to "write what you know," so this is intensely personal. May God use it to give strength to those, who like me, have gone through the dark night of the soul and feel lost and forsaken.
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There is no such thing as dispassionate theology. Theology, like all branches of human endeavor, is necessary connected to the whole person. Yet, this particular branch, much maligned and much abused, has an even stronger claim to be passionate. It is born out of and returns, always, to worship. We ask questions about the God we meet in worship; theology helps us to make sense of that experience. Good theology, passionate theology, grows out of that experience and leads us back to it. This is one of the reasons that theology is for everyone, not just trained professionals and clerics: we engage in what is called “primary theology” whenever we pray communally or individually, whenever we sing, whenever we are overcome by the strange ineffability of the divine who works in history. But theology is passionate in another sense: it is necessarily connected to the Passion of the Messiah Jesus. That is, all thinking about God is anchored in what God in Christ did on Golgotha – this is true whether we are speaking of the “Old” Testament, the “New” Testament, or the history of Christian life and thought. Theology is passionate because it reflects on Christ’s Passion, when he reconciled the world to the Father. That unspeakable grace is given words by theology, so that we might worship the God who enacted them.

This is a theological meditation. As such, it is passionate. I am not interested in a dry, academic treatment of my Subject – to do so would be to worship another God, not the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are other reasons as well. When I was much younger, I decided to do a project for my (public) school about the history of the Christian Creeds. While I quickly became disabused of the notion that a high schooler could adequately tackle the topic (I chose, instead, to do a preterist interpretation of the book of Matthew), it forever changed my course and my path. In my preliminary background reading, the theory (which I accepted as absolute truth) that the Church Fathers had gotten their idea of what it meant for Christ to be the “Logos” (Word) of God from classical, philosophical paganism was presented. This is a fairly common – and always disturbing to Protestants – claim about the development of doctrine (teaching) in the early Church. Being of a very conservative theological background, I had grown a distinct disliking for all things Greek (except the language): Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics were all evil men who had maliciously attacked the Bride of Christ and stolen her doctrinal purity. Once the linchpin of understanding John 1 was taking away, I did not know what to think. I was a follower of Jesus, but who was He? Or he? I wanted to tackle the question of the relationship between Jesus and the Father (as I often put it) with intellectual honesty and vigor. When I told my pastor this, he responded (in words I can never forget): “That’s fine, but if you come to a conclusion other than that he was fully God and fully man, we will know you have apostatized and left the faith.”

Left the faith. Damned. Accursed. But if the foundation is Greek philosophy and not Biblical religion, how could the Christological building stand? How could any of it stay? Left the faith. Damned. Accursed.

Here started the decade of Hell.

St. John of the Cross described – beautifully – my Dantean descent into the “dark night of the soul,” in which the Christian is stripped bare so that he might be fit for the Master’s use. During that time, I wandered spiritually, growing ever more confident in my emerging unitarian beliefs, yet growing ever more fearful of my own damnation. How could I see, in Scripture, what so many countless others had not seen? Was I to ascribe it to the episcopal “will to power”? Did the Catholic and Orthodox Church hold a conspiracy to trap men’s souls for their own gain and sovereignty? I certainly could look at the abhorrent behavior of many Church leaders, whether Roman, Eastern, or Protestant, for confirmation of some sort of this thesis. Invoking ‘God,’ as many atheists and unbelievers alike point out, is an easy way to gain your own earthly desires. There was a fear that grew in me at that point, since I could no longer trust any teacher in the Church – to question the Trinity would be to question their vested interests. Still the nagging question of how so many could be so wrong for so long dogged me.

The Creeds continued to be witnesses against me. I’d excuse myself from the assembly when we would say them (we didn’t say them very often which helped to cloak my growing separation) – I couldn’t say “of one substance with the Father.” I instead developed a liturgical bent that emphasized the grammar of the Scriptures over the grammar of theology. I dove deeply into Biblical Theology and despised Systematics. I was being stripped – no part of me was to be left untouched. A new foundation had to be laid before anything could be built. It is strange to be thankful for heresy, but it is necessary.

While Nicea perturbed me, Chalcedon absolutely infuriated me. Here, indeed!, was the acme of Plato’s takeover of the Church: one Person (I still have not received a good definition of this), two Natures undivided, yet distinct; different, yet united. Surely there was nothing – nothing – in Scripture to back this up. Surely it was the final straw that made Christianity pagan. I could not, would not, have anything to do with it. Instead, foreswearing theology, I would read the Scriptures and only them.

For me, the Creeds and theology acted as a strait-jacket. I have since learned to see them as kindly guideposts, apophatically leading me away from theology as rationality to theology as worship. But to get to the full sense of what is happening, it is important to see what I thought of the heritage of the Church. It was rubbish. I had separately myself from the community of the faithful and stood alone.

And yet, in that loneliness there was a fresh Wind, a Breath from God.

I saw, in Paul’s epistles, a recurring theme: what God has done in Jesus, He intends to do in the whole human creation. I had, without fully knowing it, stumbled across the foundation I had been looking for and avoiding. This confirmed, in my mind, the full humanity of Jesus – the necessary humanity of Jesus. Much of my frustration with Church teaching was its implicit Docetism – Jesus became the Christ, the Pantokrator, the far-off and aloof God. Since his presence was no longer close, no longer that of a brother or a friend, but rather a Dread Sovereign, something was needful to fill that emotional gap: enter Mary and the Saints. Jesus, for me, had been rescued – what God had done in Jesus, He intended to do in the whole human creation. Jesus was close. Jesus was close.

Paul also led me to another important point. Whenever God the Father (or, as I liked to refer to Him, the Father, God) is mentioned, in the same breath Jesus and the Spirit are mentioned. I did not know what to make of it precisely, but there was something inescapable about the identity of God: He is forever connected to Jesus and the Spirit. They exist – in some way I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to admit – always in union, even if just linguistically. God is never separate from Jesus or the Spirit. And, if John is to be believed, then Jesus is somehow equated with God’s Word (albeit not Platonically); this means that God has always been linked, somehow, to Jesus as the Word and the Spirit. For God speaks and breaths always.

I had done the impossible (or, at least at that time, I thought that I had done it): I had become a Biblical Trinitarian. I did not want to go to the ontological level – I would never bow to Platonic metaphysics. I still needed some confirmation that this is where the Spirit was leading, but I knew I was on the right track.

In the midst of this I had reluctantly started seminary. This was a dark time. One day, as my wife and I sat in our empty coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon I lost it. I screamed in a voice and in a way I did not know possible. The dark night had done me in: I was naked and I was afraid. The words of Psalm 22, of Christ’s Passion, were extended to me. I screamed, “Either God has abandoned His Church since the 2nd century or He has forsaken me!” Not even the moon or stars gave their brightness. All was lost. In the darkest part of the night, all that remains is the promise of the dawn.

Two days later, in my Church History class, I was saved. That is an intentional word. Looking back over my journals and blogging, I had slowly stopped calling myself a Christian and was now only a follower of Jesus. He had the words of life, and I could not seem to leave him, but I couldn’t quite trust him. We read that day these words from Irenaeus, a 2nd century bishop in France: “Christ became what we are, so that we might become what he is.” What God has done in Jesus, He intends to do in the whole human creation. I cried, as I cry now, with a heart that was both broken and healed. The naked and bare Adam was given, not a coat of skins, but the garment of the Messiah – that adornment for a wedding feast. And he gave me a greater gift, one I had never had before, the Spirit of God filled me head to toe, enlivening me, freeing me, causing the tormentors of persistent sin and degradation to flee at the sign of the Cross, as Antony of the Desert counseled.

It is my firm contention now, dear reader, to take you further on this journey with me. It is a short step, I assure you, from this place to Chalcedon – to find reconciliation of the Scriptures with the Creeds. And it pertains to this mystery of Father, Son, and Spirit – not in a detached way, but the way in which they work, even now, to bring you and me into conformity to the image of the Son; to bring us into union, the divine Spirit and our created selves, body and soul, that joins us truly and wholly to the body of Christ.

Come and see.

More on Chalcedonian Life

Given the various comments and discussions generated by my first post on this topic and some new developments of thought, I'd like to expand on what I said towards a more practical appropriation.

Part of the difficulty is that whenever we speak of the "two natures" or "hypostatic union" of Christ, the discussion quickly gets railroaded by philosophical problems. What is the "divine nature"? What is "human nature" (this one is especially tricky now that the NIV -- amongst others -- has unhelpfully made the flesh to be the essential 'sin nature' of man: another reason to avoid that translation, I suppose)? How does these things relate to discussions of "substance"? In the life of the Church, important as these questions may be, many believers' eyes roll into the backs of their heads and they wonder how Christian doctrine can be so (1) boring and (2) impractical. In the last post, I tried to spell out how our union with Christ (our own "hypostatic union" as it were) is effected and made actual through common worship. The question was raised: what about the time we aren't in common worship? This is where a discussion of nature is helpful.

Whatever else "nature" may be, it is the record of action. A human is what a human does. God is as we see Him working in creation and redemption. So, if we are becoming more and more "conformed into the image of the Son" (Rom. 8), it means that we are doing the work of the Son. This is vitally important. We often act and believe as if Christ did his work on earth and ascended and basically is done working until the Second Coming. However, if we believe that the Father and Jesus share the Spirit, and that the Spirit has been poured out on "all flesh" (Joel 2 and Acts 2), we believe that God through the Son and Spirit is still working -- in fact, He is the primary actor in history (even today), and we join His work. All our work, whether the work of worship (we join in the worship by the Son to the Father; the Father blesses the Son and all those united to him) or our daily vocation, is the work of Christ: he is building his Kingdom, he is beautifying his Creation, he is bringing peace and release from all the effects of sin. So, whatever our work is, should be patterned after the work of the Son: we are, after all, "seated" (that is, enthroned) "with him in the heavenly places" (Eph. 1). This can give us great comfort, that we are not only not alone, we are not the instigators of the work, Christ is. However, if our work is to be a function of his reign, then our work -- whatever it is -- needs to take on the character of his action (or nature). What is Christ's nature? The Gospels make it clear: he is the compassionate One, the One who seeks out the poor, the lame, the blind, the outcast, the leper, the sinner and calls them to repentance and cleansing. He is the One who confronts power and privilege with the Gospel of self-giving, calling all the rich and comfortable to share with those who are united to him, building up one Man, one humanity that differs from the old, adversarial way of being (Gen. 3).

Is our work, our daily theosis (whether this be a "job," raising a family, being a student, etc.), following this pattern? Or are we "conformed to the world" whether it is in needing the right pay-scale or the proper amount of vacation days, or even being too far away from parish or home to be of any service to the poor, outcast, or sinner in our midst? The reign of Christ will change us (remember, it is his work!), but he has graciously called us to repent of the old forms of life, whether outright pagan or the "American Dream," so that we might join him in his work freely. So, it is not just common worship, but our common life in our everywhere places that show forth this active work of God's Spirit (His very Life!) and how we look, from glory to glory, more like the Son who has saved us and is redeeming the world.

The Chalcedonian Nature of Common Prayer

When believers gather together under the one Head, Jesus the Messiah, especially when they celebrate Eucharist (or communion) with him, they act as the one Body of Christ. Our human natures are joined to, and changed by, his human nature. At the same time, through the Spirit, God joins Himself to the community that is praying. This is especially true when the Psalms are being recited/chanted/sung, for they are the prayers of Christ to the Father. This joins the divine (God in the Spirit) to the human (God in Christ), creating a moment of theosis in the daily life of the Christian community. This theotic moment, especially when pursued in the morning-evening pattern, gives a redemptive framework to the day: all that occurs between the moments of special union with God is offered up to God. The creation, instead of being negated, is rightly ordered and given its full meaning in the economy of worship found in the Trinitarian structure of God's work in the world.