Category Archives: Eastern Orthodox Theology

J. Kameron Carter on the Politics of the Visual

Posted by on October 4, 2010 28 comments

J. Kameron Carter has recently posted an extremely interesting piece on the roots of the modern racial and political imaginary in Christian iconography. He draws on Mondzain’s Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, which looks to me to be a must-read. Of course, taking on icons is certainly not an enterprise that quasi-Catholics and Christian Hipsters (also now receiving some renewed attention around the interwebs) will much care for, but it seems to me to be very persuasive. A segment:

To put the central objective of the book in terms of my own work on the origins and unfolding of the racial imaginary that our world yet remains in the throws of (claims to post-raciality notwithstanding) and how the racial imaginary arose from within a certain kind of Christian theological and ecclesial practice, Image, Icon, Economy examines how the economy or logic of the icon entails a logic for the conquering of space and from here time and history. This logic works through the visual, which then gives rise to thought or power as knowledge.

In Mondzain’s own words:

To attempt to rule over the whole world by organizing an empire that derived its power and authority by linking together the visual and the imaginal [or the notion of the ‘image’] was Christianity’s true genius. (151)

Or to put it yet another way, the theology of the icon, as it arose out of late patristic Christological formulations founds an “iconocracy,” an “empire of the gaze and vision ” (152) or what may otherwise be called a political theology of and through the visual. Within this theo-political regime of the visual, according to Mondzain, we find the basic structure of “the Universal,” that is to say, the structure of “Catholicism.” It is this structure that would provide a framework for the modern/colonial world, as founded in European imperialism, and that arguably continues to provide the inner structure of the global/postcolonial present.

Carter goes on to note how the fundamentally ideological move that is created in the icon is the carving out of a visual imaginary of the beautiful that cannot ever lapse into idolatry. The contemporary sentimentality about icons (especially as I’ve observed it among non Eastern Orthodox Christians, though I think the implications are broader) certainly needs a chastening of the sort that Carter offers via Mondvain.

In the same article, Carter has some choice critiques of John Milbank and David Bentley Hart as well, with which, as you might guess, I am in significant sympathy. Carter is very helpful in reminding us of what the recent comments Milbank made about Islam and “lamentably premature” collapse of Western colonialism made quite clear: the deeply Eurocentric and racist logic of the political project offered by radical orthodoxy:

We must remember that it was a form of theology that called itself orthodox (in fact, it was in significant measure Thomist in structure) that gave birth to the modern/colonial/racial world in the 15th and 16th centuries, which then perfected itself in the 19th and 20th centuries when modern knowledges were consolidated as Wissenschaften. How do we explain the rush, then (and this is the real issue confronting theology today), mainly among theologically minded young white males for the most part, to return to this stuff vis-a-vis what Radical Orthodoxy is peddling?

Again, the question isn’t my dear teacher, John Milbank, as such. It’s what he socially signifies at this moment of Empire and what the attraction to him on the part of many who are struggling with all their intellectual might to retrieve “the Christian tradition,” socially and theologically signifies at this  moment.

That is the question indeed.

Understanding 2 Peter through Eastern Orthodoxy

Posted by on February 19, 2010 Comments Off

In light of the connection between Eastern Orthodox theology and the themes of 2 Peter, Douglas Harink argues that one must understand 2 Peter in light of the Orthodox tradition, not the other way round. The reason for this is that there is not nearly enough information in 2 Peter to get a handle on its key emphases. However, when situated within the context of the rich tradition of Orthodox worship — rooted much more widely in Scripture as a whole — then, and only the 2 Peter becomes intelligible.

A provocative claim, no doubt. Again, especially for Protestants.

2 Peter as “early Orthodoxy”

Posted by on February 19, 2010 5 comments

Should 2 Peter be seen as an example of “early catholicism”? According to Harink, maybe not. The themes of participation in the divine nature, the transfiguration of Christ, and a radical apocalyptic transformation of the world are all strikingly characteristic of Eastern Orthodox theology. Thus, perhaps we should see 2 Peter as a form of “early Orthodoxy”, the forerunner of this specific emphasis within the Christian tradition.

This also posits the possibility that the “exotic” — in Western eyes — themes of Eastern Orthodoxy have a far deeper connection to the New Testament witness than most Western Christians, particularly Protestants acknowledge.

Prayers from the East

Posted by on May 12, 2009 4 comments

I’ve recently been perusing a book entitled Prayers from the East, edited by Richard Marsh. The book is a delightful collection of prayers, liturgies, and ceremonies from the Oriental Orthodox Churches (i.e. Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Eritrean, etc.).  Some wonderful liturgical gems to be found here. Such as this prayer which forms the beginning of the Coptic Anaphora:

Worthy and just!
Now we are standing together with the heavenly choirs.
We praise Our Lord with the seven choirs of the angels and with the two choirs of Cherubim and Seraphim.
We become as the tenth choir of the heavenly creatures.

You who have give to those on earth, the hymn of the Seraphim, count us with the heavenly hosts.
As we are counted with the heavenly hosts, we ought to stand with them looking to the east; to the throne of the Sun of Righteousness.

Worthy and right, worthy and right,
truly, indeed, you are worthy and right.
You, who are Master, Lord, God of truth,
being before the ages and reigning forever,
you who dwell in the highest and look upon the lowly;
you who have created the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all that is therein.
the Father of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ,
by whom you have created all things, seen and unseen, who sits upon the throne.

You who are seated, stand.
Before you stand the angels,
the archangels,
the principalities, the authorities,
the thrones, the dominions, the powers.

Look towards the east.
You are he around whom stand the Cherubim
full of eyes, and the Seraphim with six wings
praising continuously without ceasing, saying:

Holy, holy, holy, Lord of hosts;
heaven and earth are full of your holy glory.
Glory be to you, who is worshiped by all the holy powers.

Iconoclasm and the Threefold Body of Christ

Posted by on March 18, 2009 17 comments

Peter Leithart has a good post on the Christological issues that attend the problem of venerating ikons. Definitely worth a read. Here’s a quote:

The eternal Son is still incarnate as the specific man, Jesus the Christ.  That’s true.  And it’s true also that this Jesus has specific features that we don’t know.

But Jesus has a triple, not a single, body.  His natural body is in heaven, but He has given us a Eucharistic body and a corporate body on earth.  He’s left behind His body as food, and His body as the church.

The second of these is particularly important.  When Jesus separates sheep and goats, the standard of judgment will be what each one did to the least of Jesus’ brothers, which is something done to Jesus.  We feed Jesus, clothe Jesus, visit Jesus, minister to Jesus, by serving the least of these.

Because Christ is the totus Christus, His face is not unknown to us.  We see His face in the face of His brothers, our brothers.  And that means that we can depict Jesus with any of the faces that are in fact His face to us.  And this justifies, too, the practice of depicting Jesus in culturally specific ways.  Jesus can be depicted as a black man (or an Asian, or a South Sea Islander), because  some of His brothers are black.

None of this, however, justifies veneration of icons.  We are to serve and bow before images of Jesus, but the images of Jesus we are to serve are the living, breathing, stinking, often troubled and often troubling images that sit down the row from us at church.

Eucharist, Eschatology, and World in the Ecclesiology of Bulgakov

Posted by on September 30, 2008 3 comments

My own installment of the 2008 Bulgakov Blog Conference has just been posted over at Land of Unlikeness. I have re-posted it here, but please direct all comments to TOU to support the discussion over there. My thanks to Dan for all his hard work of organizing and patience with us contributors. Here is my post engaging Bulgakov’s ecclesiology.

Sergei Bulgakov is unique among Orthodox theologians, Russian and otherwise for all manner of reasons, not the least of which involves his distinctive ecclesiology. Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb provides perhaps the most innovative work in Orthodox ecclesiology in the twentieth century. In what follows, I will attempt to make a provisional exploration into the fabric of Bulgakov’s ecclesiology looking particularly at a constellation of coordinates that are operative in the shape of his thought. I hope to explore the way in which Bulgakov’s ecclesiological thought is a dynamic theological articulation, which circulates between the nodal points of the Eucharist, eschatology, and the world. Bulgakov’s ecclesiology is, through and through informed by a dynamic conceptual interplay between these three major foci. My aim in this essay is limited simply to the observance of some of these dynamics. I hope that in so doing I will illuminate some of the key contributions of Bulgakov to the ecumenical task of exploring the nature of the church and its place in the shape of redemption.

It should be noted at the outset that I am no expert on Bulgakov and those more knowledgeable about his thought than I will certainly be in a good position to correct any imbalances and misapprehensions in what follows. In the interest of space and focus, I am here taking my cues from two of Bulgakov’s works alone, his shorter dogmatic treatises, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist and his massive treatment of ecclesiology, The Bride of the Lamb. In both of these works Bulgakov binds together an integrated view of the redemption, originating in the Christic self-oblation of the Lamb.

The first thing to be noted in approaching this endeavor is found in Bulgakov’s treatment of “The Holy Grail.” Herein, Bulgakov engages in a form of inquiry that is rightly described by the translator as “mystical lyricism” (The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, p. 9). Here Bulgakov attempts a “dogmatic exegesis” of John 19:34 which recounts Christ’s side being pierced by the spear of Longinus and the blood and water flowing forth from the wound. Bulgakov recounts the standard legends of the Holy Grail, which culminate in the Arthurian poems of the Middle Ages, but then goes on to theologically reimagine the idea of the Holy Grail from a radically different point of view. According to Bulgakov, the Holy Grail is not a chalice, which caught the blood and water from Christ’s side, but rather is the world itself into which Christ’s shed blood and water flowed.

The blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side on the cross of course represent Baptismal water and Eucharistic blood in Bulgakov’s view. However, he makes a radical point of distinction here. There is a crucial difference between Christ’s poured-out blood and water and the elements of the Eucharist and the waters of Baptism shared in in the church. The differentiation is not a substantial one, but a differentiation of mode. For Bulgakov, “the blood and water that came out of His side were not Eucharistic in intent” (The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, p. 33). What is crucial for Bulgakov is that the blood and water which poured from the wound of Christ, though identical to the Baptismal and Eucharistic elements substantially, is different in that it is not offered to the faithful for communion, but rather is poured out into the substance of the world as such (see The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, pp. 34ff). The blood and water that are poured out into the Holy Grail, the world, are not given “for the communion of the faithful but for the sanctification and transfiguration of the world” (The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, p. 34).

Here is Bulgakov’s key point, the Eucharistic and Baptismal elements, Christ’s blood and water are poured out on the cross and remain in the world. Bulgakov insists that this outpouring of Christ’s wound on the cross indelibly alters the fabric of the world, binding it forever to Christ, sanctifying it and preparing it for its final transfiguration at the parousia. For Bulgakov the very metabolism of the world, its cosmological fabric is transmuted by the flowing forth of Christ’s water and blood into it. There is a real sense for Bulgakov that Christ’s own human substance remains diffused into the world through his self-oblation. The world, in Christ’s outpouring is “Christified”, permanently bound to Christ, united with him and impelled on by this union towards its eschatological transfiguration by the Spirit. Indeed, for Bulgakov it is the fact of Christ’s blood and water pouring into the heart of the world that even makes it possible for the earth to sustain, to bear the Pentecostal coming of the Spirit whose eschatological epiphany is recounted in radically apocalyptic terms. The biblical images of the sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood in the day of the Lord (cf. Joel 2:28-32; Acts 2:17-31) are the manifestation of this pneumatological intensity, which the world can only endure on the basis of its Christic reconstitution through being transfigured into the Holy Grail. (see The Bride of the Lamb, pp. 419-421)

In short, for Bulgakov, Christ’s passion and resurrection radically transfigures the reality of the world in a distinctively eschatological and Eucharistic manner. The world is, in a sense Eucharisticized and Baptized by the blood and water of Christ’s body in a manner that inclines it to, and sets it on the path toward its eschatological destiny. Christ imparts his divine humanity to the world itself, allowing his blood and water to remain in the earth. In so doing he binds himself to the world, making it a place upon which his presence can rest in its epiphanic, eschatological fullness. “This blood and water made the world a place of the presence of Christ’s power, prepared the world for its future transfiguration, for the meeting with Christ come in glory” (The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, p. 44). Thus, for Bulgakov, “the reception and the sending down of the Holy Spirit into the world depend upon the Incarnation, upon the profound, radical transformation of the world’s natural being”. Only thereby does “the world become capable of bearing the Pentecost, of receiving the fire of the Holy Spirit without being consumed by it.” (The Bride of the Lamb, p. 419).

What Bulgakov here presents is a vision of redemption that is at once apocalyptic and Eucharistic (see The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, p. 45). In Christ’s passion the world is constituted anew as the place of his presence, on which his Spirit rests, impelling the world towards it eschatological future, the transfiguration of creaturely reality in the union of the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem (see The Bride of the Lamb, p. 522-524). The whole shape of the world, constituted by Christ’s blood and water is Eucharistic. It is this construction of the world in and through Christ’s blood and water that make the coming transfiguration of the world into a cosmic redemption rather than a cosmic holocaust. Christ’s suffusion of the world with his very humanity renders the world a place capable of bearing the weight of the divine glory even as it transfigures the world in a purgative cleansing fire. The world is destined to “undergo a catastrophic trancensus: on the one hand, it will perish in a cosmic fire; on the other hand, it will be transformed inwardly.” (The Bride of the Lamb, p. 417) Thus, the Christic outpouring of Christ’s humanity into the fabric of the world is what renders possible the Pneumatic mission of the Spirit to renew and transfigure. “It is precisely the Holy Spirit who accomplishes the transfiguration of the universe: the energy of the Holy Spirit destroys the sinful, imperfect old world and creates a new world, with the renewal of all creation. This is the power of the Fire that burns, melts, transmutes, illuminates, and transfigures.” (The Bride of the Lamb, p. 421)

For Bulgakov this dynamic vision of the redemption of the world, which is at once Trinitarian, Eucharistic, and apocalyptic is grounded in the ecclesial reality which exists in the world, seen preeminently through the sacramental life. It is the church that is the center of God’s eschatological outpouring of purgative, transfiguring grace, which proclaims and anticipates the eschatological destiny of the redemption, the marriage supper of the Lamb. Bulgakov’s ecclesiological vision is thoroughgoingly cosmic in scope, seeing in the Eucharistic life of the church the future of the world, which was pre-accomplished in Christ’s kenotic outpouring of his humanity into the world, constituting it as the Holy Grail, the chalice of God’s grace, transfigured by the fire of the Spirit and offered up to the Father as a divine sacrifice of praise.

These observations, of course, do not sink very deep into the riches of Bulgakov’s ecclesiology, most notably they fail to explore the connection between Bulgakov’s configuration of eschatology, Eucharist, and world and his Sophiology, which begs exploration and analysis. That is a task I leave to others and to ensuing conversation.

Favorite Ikons?

Posted by on June 16, 2008 17 comments

Let’s just be honest: ikons are cool again.  We don’t know when it happened that non-Eastern Orthodox Christians began to be fascinated with the tradition of Christian iconography, but we can certainly see that it is legion today amongst Christians from nearly every sub-tradition of the faith.  Whether we are evangelicals, Catholics, emergent types, or neo-monastics, the lure of the ikon as a tool of spiritual formation is ubiquitous in the church today.

In light of this I am wonder how and to what degree ikons shape the theology and spirituality of people.  Are they used in your attempts to pray?  To write?  To contemplate?  To teach?  How is the resurgence of ikons in the global church significant to us and what are we doing with it? 

Personally, I have devoted almost no time to the pious use of ikons, and honestly I don’t really understand it and am not actually sure I agree with it.  Certainly I enjoy Rublev’s depiction of the hospitality of Abraham or the imposing visions of Christ Pantocrator (even if I’m not sure this ikon makes the right sort of Christological statements) and sometimes I even gain theological insight from them (or think I do).  However I am, at heart, something of an iconoclast, both theologically and spiritually.  Certainly this has its own share of problems, but I think there is something central to the apocalyptic gospel of Jesus that lends itself to an iconoclastic style (if you will) of theology and spirituality.

But, I digress.  The crucial question I have is how ikons are actually being used by non-Eastern Orthodox Christians.  What role are they coming to play in the life of the church and what sort of significance should we ascribe to that?

Greatest Orthodox Theologian?

Posted by on April 8, 2008 33 comments

I’ve posted a fair number of favorite theologians lists.  However, one segment of the church that often gets neglected (for a variety of reasons) are the theologians of the Orthodox Churches.  But here let us up the ante a bit.  Who do people think the greatest modern Orthodox theologian was? 

For my money the most significant modern orthodox theologian would have to be Sergei Bulgakov.  My favorite to read on the other hand would be John Zizioulas.  The most promising Orthodox theologian writing today?  David Bentley Hart, of course.

And another question on Orthodox theologians: is there any such thing as a female theologian in the Orthodox tradition?  Not sure I’ve ever come across one.

Sergei Bulgakov Blog Conference

Posted by on March 18, 2008 12 comments

Dan and Aron at The Land of Unlikeness have recently announced yet another great looking addition to the repitroire of blog conferences starting up throughout the theoblogosphere.  In addition to the Barth, Balthasar (going on right now), and Bonhoeffer blog conferences that are upcoming, we can now also look forward to the first Sergei Bulgakov Blog Conference.  The conferences is tenatively scheduled for September of this year and there is plenty of room for more submissions and ideas.  Here is the current lineup of participants:

Trinity and Hospitality

Posted by on February 15, 2008 8 comments

Most of us have seen Rublev’s ikon of the Hospitality of Abraham in which the Trinity is portrayed as three angelic persons in communion around a table.  Now, of course many of us are predisposed to immediately point out the theological problems with the ikon, the most glaring of which is its seeming portrayal of the persons of the Trinity as three separate individuals.  However, to enforce such theological specificity into an ikonic witness to the Trinity is to make a distinctly Western theological mistake, namely the mistake of thinking that we can univocally represent God in any form whatsoever, be it verbal or pictorial.  What I find more illuminating and provocative about this ikon is actually its name.  This is not simply an ikon of the immanent Trinity (how I think it is usually read), but of “the hospitality of Abraham.”  I find a couple of insights in that.

First, the ikon is making a statement about how we encounter the fellowship of the triune God.  In the ikon, we encounter the persons of the Trinity in and through the practice of hospitality to the stranger.  Abraham’s encounter with God as recounted in Genesis 18 takes place in the context of the extension of table fellowship.  The ikon seems here to be making a profound statement about where and how we are going to experience the life of triune communion.  It seems to be implied that it is in extending hospitality to the stranger, opening up one’s life to the outsider that we commune with the triune persons.

Second, the table as portrayed in the ikon is clearly eucharistic in nature.  This seems to say something about the eucharist and about hospitality.  First, it seems to say that something central about the eucharist is the reality of hosting and being hosted by the triune God.  The eucharist is an event of divine and human hospitality.  While the ikon is of Abraham’s hospitality to the three strangers, the presentation of the ikon has the front end of the table open to the reader of the ikon, beckoning the reader to see himself as being invited to the table.  The eucharist, then is simultaneously the act of God’s hospitality, of welcoming created persons into fellowship with God’s triune life and the church’s act of opening our lives to God, offering him our gifts and begging him to remain with us.  Conversely, the ikon also seems to be saying that hospitality is eucharistic.  It seems to intimate that the offer of hospitality to the stranger is itself a sacramental and eucharistic reality in which the triune God comes to meet us.  In and through the offer of hospitality and the act of eating together in peace, the reality of the Trinity is present among us in and as our koinonial and agapeic fellowship. 

What I find most compelling about the Rublev ikon is the way in which it rightly portrays the relationship of giving and receiving hospitality to the fullness of the Christian mystery.  For us to know the life of the Trinity in our midst is to live a life that embodies the traversal between the giving and the receiving of hospitality.

Why are you what you are?

Posted by on December 23, 2007 11 comments

Bob posted a question for protestants a while back inquiring about why they were not Catholic.  More recently Fr. John Fenton, an Eastern Orthodox priest has asked people to share why they are not Orthodox.  While the comments on these threads have been interesting, the discussions have been structured in a primarily negative way.  They ask the question why some one is not such and such rather than asking why they are what they are.  I would like to throw down a more positive ecclesial survey by asking readers why they are what they are.  Why do you belong to the tradition and community that you do?  How strong is your “belonging” where you are?

Zizioulas on the Father as Cause

Posted by on December 19, 2007 4 comments

One of the points on which John Zizioulas has been roundly criticized is on his insistence that the Father be understood as the arche of the Trinity.  The Father, on Zizioulas’ view, informed by the Cappadocians, is the ground of the personhood of the Son and the Spirit in a distinctly a-symmetrical way.  The Son and Spirit derive their pershonhood, their hypostasis from the Father, and particularly from the Father’s freedom as a person. 

Zizioulas is quick to clarify his view.  Clearly, the Father is never without the Son and the Spirit, they are all co-eternal.  Moreover, the personal causality of the Father vis á vis the Son and Spirit should not be understood at the level of ousia, of substance.  The Father does not bestow the divine nature on the Son and the Spirit (which would result in some sort of Arianism), but rather, personhood.  Zizioulas is clear on this point, the Father is the cause of the personal being of the Son and the Spirit, but the reverse is not the case in any way whatsoever.  The Father’s personhood, unlike that of the Son and Spirit is underived an ingenerate.

This, I think is a fundamental problem in Zizioulas’ trinitarian ontology.  His whole case is built upon the premise that personhood is ontologically ultimate and the personhood can only be rightly understood in an ontological sense as communion.  However, in making the Father the cause of the communion of the Trinity, what are we to make of the Father’s distinctive status as a hypostasis of the Trinity?  How can the Father truly be personal on Zizioulas reading?  He is clear that “a person is always a gift from someone.”  If this is truly the case, how can the Father really be understood as a person?  Zizioulas is clear that the Father does not recieve his personhood from the Son or Spirit in a reciprocal way, because, Zizioulas fears that such a statement would imperil biblical monotheism.

However, does it even make conceptual sense to deny that the Father’s personhood is constituted by his relations with the Son and Spirit?  The tradition of the church has made clear that the only things which distinguish the persons of the Trinity from one another are their relations.  Thus, the Father is the Father because he begets the Son and spirates the Spirit, the Spirit is the Spirit because he is spirated by the Father (through the Son we might add) and the Son is the Son because he is begotten by the Father (through the Spirit we might also add).  If this is the case, then the Father, as a distinct person of the Trinity does not constitute the personhood of the Son and Spirit a-symmetrically, but is himself constituted by his relations of generating and spirating the other two.  In other words, the Father’s fatherhood, which is what makes the Father a distinct hypostasis is only a reality on the basis of his relations with the Son and the Spirit.

Because the Father can never be the Father without the Son and Spirit, how can we say in any meaningful way that the Father causes the personhood of the other two, but is not reciprocally “caused” by the other two?  Clearly the personhood of the Father is constituted by his relation of fatherhood, which is dependent on the eternal co-reality of the Son and Spirit.  There seems no way to say in any meaningful sense that the Father’s personhood, his distinct nature as a hypostasis is underived, for it is contingent upon the Son and Spirit.

All of this seems to indicate the problematic nature of positing the Father as the cause of the personhood of the other persons of the Trinity.  In the first place, it imperils the Father’s own personhood and risks introducing and individualist notion of personhood into our understanding of the personhood of the Father.  Secondly, it introduces the very problematic notion of causality into the Trinity.  As such, it seems that Zizioulas’ monarchical model of the Trinity should not be embraced.  Rather than identifying the One God with the person of the Father, we must be more rigorous in insisting that the Three persons are the One God without remainder.

David Bentley Hart in one Sentence

Posted by on December 8, 2007 7 comments

Earlier today one of my housemates saw my copy of David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite lying on the table where I was reading, and after looking through it briefly asked me, “So, what’s his main point in this book?”

I responded without hesitation:  “Christianity is awesome and beautiful and everything else sucks.”

Some Theses for Ecumenically-Minded Protestants

Posted by on November 9, 2007 22 comments

1.  The breakdown of denominational identity is a terrible ecumenical occurrence and further inhibits the visible unity of the church.  For all their flaws, denominations offer structural and institutional forms which can facilitate ecumenical dialogues.  As to date there is no other protestant proposal that could fulfill this function better.  The multiplication of non-denominational evangelical churches only furthers the fracture of the protestant churches and is parasitic on the church’s call to unity and mission.

2.  Protestants came from the Roman Catholic church.  As such their primary ecumenical responsibility is to the Roman church.  Aside from very specific issues of theological conviction and conscience, protestant Christians have no business converting to Eastern Orthodoxy in order to be rejoined to the historical apostolic churches.  We are part of a very specific division in the body of Christ and we must be faithful to address that division.  Bypassing the necessary struggle with Rome by fleeing to Constantinople does not further the cause of Christian unity.  The same could be said of the recent evangelical trend toward Anglicanism.

3.  Protestant churches and Christians who remain separated from Rome must have a clear theological articulation why they must persist in their separation for the sake of the gospel.  For all protestants we must have specific theological conditions in mind which, if met would mean that we must return to the Roman Catholic church.  Given the diversity of protestantism, there is no reason to assume that these reasons would be uniform, but regardless, it is incumbent on all protestants to be able to give an honest articulation about why faithfulness to the gospel requires their ongoing separation from Rome.

4.  Protestants who believe that there are no conditions under which they could be reunited with the Roman Catholic church have become schismatics and should be treated as such.  Schism is sin and protestants must be ever-vigilant against it.

5.  That Catholicism continues to deny that protestant churches are truly churches denies the manifest work of the Spirit of Christ and falsely locates the criterion of the church’s ecclesiality in its institutional structure rather than in the grace of God in Christ.  It is prima facie false and ecumenically tragic to admit that the Holy Spirit is present in protestant communities which are vehicles of “sanctification and truth” (Lumen Gentium, 8) and yet deny that such communities are churches.  As Irenaeus said “where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and every kind of grace”. (Adversus Haereses, 3.24).  Protestants must work with all rigor and effort to manifest in the lives of their congregations the presence of the Spirit in his ecclesially-constitutive activity even as Rome continues to deny their proper ecclesial status.  We must live in hope that the tree will be known by its fruits.

6.  Protestants must continue to immerse themselves in the Great Tradition of the church and the fullness of its history.  For the Reformers, the Reformation was an exercise in ressourcement, a return to the patristic and biblical roots of the Christian faith for the sake of faithfulness to the gospel.  The ahistoricism of protestants today is unfaithful to the essentially patristic and indeed, catholic intentions of the Reformers.  To that end, the protestant church must continually read afresh the patristic witnesses to the faith, not only to help illumine and enrich current church practices and theology, but to aid in discerning ecumenical and ecclesiological reasons for persisting in separation from Rome and what criteria should be held for a full reunion.

7.  Similarly, protestants must re-engage the writings of the Reformers themselves in a new and fresh way.  Most protestants today are woefully ignorant of Luther’s works, Calvin’s Institutes, and the writings of other key figures in the Reformation.  The biblical and patristic vision of these vital theological treatises and texts are essential for protestants today to retain their reformational identity and the essential sense of historical and ecclesial continuity with the church catholic. 

David Bentley Hart on Modernity

Posted by on October 17, 2007 5 comments

Modern persons will never find rest for their restless hearts without Christ, for modern culture is nothing but the wasteland from which the gods have departed, and so this restlessness has become its own deity; and, deprived of the shelter of the sacred and the consoling myths of sacrifice, the modern person must wander or drift, vainly attempting one or another accommodation with death, never escaping anxiety or ennui, and driven as a result to a ceaseless labor of distraction, or acquisition, or willful idiocy. And, where it works its sublimest magic, our culture of empty spectacle can so stupefy the intellect as to blind it to its own disquiet, and induce a spiritual torpor more deplorable than mere despair.But we Christians—while not ignoring how appalling such a condition is—should yet rejoice that modernity offers no religious comforts to those who would seek them. In this time of waiting, in this age marked only by the absence of faith in Christ, it is well that the modern soul should lack repose, piety, peace, or nobility, and should find the world outside the Church barren of spiritual rapture or mystery, and should discover no beautiful or terrible or merciful gods upon which to cast itself. With Christ came judgment into the world, a light of discrimination from which there is neither retreat nor sanctuary. And this means that, as a quite concrete historical condition, the only choice that remains for the children of post-Christian culture is not whom to serve, but whether to serve Him whom Christ has revealed or to serve nothing—the nothing. No third way lies open for us now, because—as all of us now know, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not—all things have been made subject to Him, all the thrones and dominions of the high places have been put beneath His feet, until the very end of the world, and—simply said—there is no other god.

–David Bentley Hart, “Christ and Nothing“, First Things (October 2003).

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