So how did I end up at On The Incarnation? To some extent I got tired for the 'instant salvation' based on the 'I am a worthless sinner in need of hell' as the call. While there may be truth in this it is ultimately a formula extracted to its essence which, like modern medicine, focuses so strongly on one disease that it leads to a need for more medication(s) to treat the symptoms caused by the singular extraction.
In other words, it is not an organic whole and as such is sorely lacking.
The "penal substitution" focus, that Jesus bore God's wrath, made God sound like a pissed off dictator who can't control His people. I failed to see the love of God in the way this was presented.
Accept Jesus or burn in Hell where a pissed off God will leave you in the hand of a co-equal though subservient Devil who will torture you for eternity. What kind of theology is that?
Athanasius' work was omnipresent throughout the readings of Clement and Lossky but it was the moment I read this statement when trying to understanding what the Atonement meant, with the anti-penal substitution view lurking in the background:
"Why was the blood that was shed for us...poured out...and to whom was it offered?...It was not the Father that held us captive." (Clement, p. 45)
I began to enter the mystery as mystery and not as a problem to solve. As opposed to my approach toward theology up to this point, that need to know concretely, I began to accept that there is a greater mystery toward which we are drawn. Never one to believe just to believe or believe because someone says I should or tells me what is expected, I come to this on my own volition.
The more I focus on the mystery, the less important do things "worldly" come to occupy my time. This is not a dualist anti-world view, not at all. Things "worldly" are nothing more than things that have not been imbued with the power of the resurrection, that "flame" which re-creates things anew and refines them to their purest essence revealing the illusion previously held as idolatrous.
The more I focus on the mystery, the less important do things "worldly" come to occupy my time. This is not a dualist anti-world view, not at all. Things "worldly" are nothing more than things that have not been imbued with the power of the resurrection, that "flame" which re-creates things anew and refines them to their purest essence revealing the illusion previously held as idolatrous.
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