The Word

We all just want to be heard. Our whole life is expression. Whether it be music, writing, acting, even working, we all want to give expression to the life in us and we all want to be heard.

There is a 'voice' inside of each of us that wants to come out. 'Communication' is the word often used for this but that doesn't go deep enough. That just expresses the concept.

Instantly, Scriptures come to mind giving some semblance of voice to what it is I am struggling to put down in words (and I do the quote, comment, quote, comment thing which has always driven me crazy; irony indeed).

"That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." (John 1:9) (KJV)

Or:

"There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man." (NASB)

Basically the same idea.

From Paul:

"...the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." (Romans 8:23)

From deep within us, something is trying to get out or, better, through. 'We' are trying to express ourselves, we are trying to be heard. But as the human person is an infinite mystery, there something deeper still, something in us we just can't get to, something we seek to understand, to give voice to.

All the religions point in this direction. Even philosophy and, arguably, science ends up here. The voice, eternal vibrations, energy always moving. Nothing is still. Perhaps our purpose is to allow "this" to move through us and not just "through" us but moving toward some final fulfillment, a purpose.

This isn't end times thinking nor is this purpose in the 'destiny' sense of the self-help and self-centered hope of much of the Church world today and endless self-help, motivational and cultish groups. No, purpose is much higher than that.

The unification of the body, recapitulation, the world as Eucharist, is the only thing I can immediately think of within the context of my studies. Buddhism has the Sangha, Islam has the umma, Christianity has the Body of Christ. I'm sure there are others. It's this sense of purpose, unity in diversity and diversity in unity, a common purpose and goal.

Much of the Christian world has lost this and the purpose has become individualistic which, ultimately, leads to a self-centered distortion of that purpose.

Jesus didn't come to save us so we could have more stuff.

Worship Songs and Theology...Again

Decided to listen to some worship songs this morning, the ones that we sing at the church we currently attend. And I listen, I wonder who the 'You' and 'the Lord' we are singing to is.

I follow the trail by typing in the artist name and 'Oneness' and find a link to a Oneness Pentecostal website and conference page with the artist.

To the best of my knowledge, our church subscribes to the AG statement of belief. However, we are singing a song rooted in Oneness theology. Is this 'In Essentials Unity, In Non-Essentials Liberty' and I'm splitting hairs or have we lost our way and are following strange gods? Are we within the 'bounds' of doctrine or are the naysayers correct about historical Church doctrine and this is truly a 'new' move of the Spirit unfettered from institutional control?

Maybe I'm getting old but...

Random quotes in need of synthesis...

This point is further developed by Clement: "In other words, in the human being the person is not identifiable with the body or the soul, or the spirit. It arises from another order of reality...The person, says Lossky, is 'the irreducibility of the individual to his human nature.'" (Ivana Noble, The Gift of Redemption, p. 54n14)

"While Anselm develops a theology of the expiating merit of the death of an innocent victim, Lossky turns to the notion of divine-human cooperation and what would seem from his passing comment as the destruction of nature (cosmic and human) is linked more closely to the rest of the Christian teaching." (p. 55)

"Furthermore, although this Pauline juridicial image dominated how the memory of redemption was passed on, it was never the only image of it. Lossky shows that in the Scriptures, as well as in the Fathers, we find the 'bucolic' image of a good shepherd, the military image of a strong man being overcome by an even stronger one, the biological image of triumph in nature corrupted by sin, the victory over hell, a diplomatic image, where divine wisdom deceives cunning evil, a medical image, where sickly nature is given salvation as an antidote to poison, These images co-exist. Each of them interprets a partial experience and offers a partial vision of renewed relationships with God and in them also with the rest of creation. But none of them is an exhaustive explanation of its mysterious nature." (p. 59, emphasis mine)

"Schwager goes back to Maximus the Confessor, according to whom Christ on the cross altered the 'use of death'. Instead of a punishment visited on human nature for sin, on the cross death becomes a means of salvation from sin." (p. 61)

“All these things, indeed, become clear by experience [τῇ πείρᾳ]” (Triads 2.2.9) ("Florovsky's 'Mind of the Fathers' and the Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Dumitru Staniloae," Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 69: 1-4 (2017) 32)

For example, Stăniloae says it “is not an apophaticism pure and simple” but “a positive vision and an experience in a reality superior to any knowledge” (SO 299, ET 350), not an ignorance “due to the absence of knowledge, but because of its superabundance” (SO 195, ET 236; commenting on Gregory Palamas, Triads 2.3.17). 

The problem was that the Basilian hypostasis, defined as the ousia with the idiomata, could not avoid two hypostases in Christ. This it had to be refined and expanded for usage in Christology: hypostasis was no longer understood only as the ousia with idiomata, but also as that which “exists by itself” (καθ᾿ ἑαυτήν). Hurtado notes that Paul’s use of κύριος for both God and Jesus is something he inherited from Aramaic speaking Christian circles, not Gentile ones. Thus Jesus’ divine status was already established before the very first New Testament writings, not later when it encountered the Gentile world, as Bousset claimed (Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, pp. 108-118). 

"Just as the perichoresis of the Holy Trinity presupposes the unity of nature, so human perichoresis113 presupposes the re-establishment of the unity of human nature.114 The unity of human nature, however, necessitates asceticism, which removes the sinful inclinations (gnome) and egotism that have fragmented it.115 Once removed, human nature becomes “transparent” for interpersonal communion.116 Being consubstantial with us, the incarnate Son of God is a catalyst from within human nature itself for the reestablishment of its unity in many hypostases.117 

Hurtado (Lord Jesus Christ, pp. 4, 7, 2) stresses the idea that “the origins of cultic veneration of Jesus have to be pushed back into the first two decades of the Christian movement” and that the high Christology implied by this early Christian binitarianism “began amazingly early”, “astonishingly early”, “phenomenally early”. 

The later difficulty of articulating a trinitarian monotheistic doctrine was therefore not the result of Hellenization, and not the fabrication of second-century writers like Justin; it was rather “forced upon them by the earnest convictions and devotional practice of believers from the earliest observable years of the Christian movement” (Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, p. 651).

"Does this account of the deification process imply, as Florovsky believed it did, that any personal relationship with Christ is negated, since his work is limited to the deification of human nature, but has to be achieved by the work of the Holy Spirit, on a personal level?...Florovsky is wrong when he supposes that according to Lossky, our relation to Christ is only a natural one through the sacraments...But this is not the Holy Spirit's role. He makes us personal beings, not super-individuals; and the person is not the completion of the individual, but her negation. Whereas the individual exists only for himself, and separated from others, the person is but a witness to someone else...

It is the Holy Spirit, not Jesus Christ, who allows us to be personal beings (while the Son allows us to be personal beings with a deified nature)...[According to] Lossky, being a person means precisely having a personal relationship with Christ. In other words, what the Holy Spirit adds is nothing but the personal relationship with Christ." (Anthony Feneuil, Becoming God Or Becoming Yourself: Vladimir Lossky on Deification and Personal Identity, p. 49)

Quotes

I cannot read self-help books (in general but this is a specific sub-topic from within that genre) that pull random quotes from wherever and use them not so much as reinforcement for but as a springboard toward their message. Eisegesis not exegesis. 

I struggle with the same when it comes to general Christian-y books that quote Scripture, comment, quote Scripture, comment as these too tend toward self-help books with a Jesus stamp and end up in the dustbins of your local Goodwill.

They arguably serve a purpose if they edify believers but they also lead to cultish followings and book after book after book being written about as many subjects as possible - heal the mind, lose weight, save your family, you name it by authors elevated to 'celebrity' status (when everyone knows good as good, this is not good...).

Recently, I came across one that was "Christian" based that pulled a quote from H.P. Lovecraft. That in and of itself is fine but I was curious if the author even knew who he was and/or had a specific reason for a quote from that particular author as the quote itself was nothing profound specific to that author. As I suspected, the quote fit, there was no context and he was not aware of Lovecraft's views. It reinforced my irritation with this method.

However, I have softened on this stance as lately I am realizing that in my pursuit there are statements, those 'aha' moments, that put into words clearly what it is I am trying to grasp mentally. When a statement is written that succinctly summarizes the gobbledygook in my head, I too have fallen prey to the same. So I have chilled on the stance. Won't be reading those books but I am working on being less judgmental (and arrogant) of the same.

Examples specific to my pursuit as of late:

As Florovsky wrote to Bulgakov in the mid-20's: “I believe in your case, too, Solov'ev long hindered you in your search for the main thing. For the road to discovering it lies through Christology, not through trinitology [sic], since only with Jesus Christ did the worship of the trinity become reality." («Theology Reasons» – in History: Neo-Patristic Synthesis and the Renewal of Theological Rationality, Matthew Baker, as quoted in Klimoff, 75).

Context: trying to get 'beyond' (or is it 'through') Jesus to the Trinity.  'Jesus' is so very much humanized that far too often he often feel more like a superhero or when we say 'God' we just think of Jesus (i.e. that empty statement 'Jesus is God'). This then leaves the question of what the Father and Holy Spirit are exactly and we head into the morass of non-Trinitarian variants: Oneness/Sabellian/Modalist, Binatarian or Arian/Unitarian. 

To quote another Matthew Baker article:

'Christians apprehend first the Person of Christ the Lord, the Son of God Incarnate, and behind the veil of His flesh they behold the Triune God." (The Eternal 'Spirit of the Son': Barth, Florovsky and Torrance on the Filioque, p. 403, quoting Florovsky)

It is this that I've been missing. My church stops at Jesus. It's truncated, the CliffsNotes version of the story. God sent His Son to die for you. What does that even mean? In essence, cynically perhaps, it is a guilt relieving mechanism (often referred to as the Holy Spirit) that gets someone through the door. But is that salvation? Is that really "the Gospel"?

I suppose a couple of Bible quotes would do the trick (John 3:16, for example). But God 'sending His Son' is intermixed with 'to die for you' (1 Corinthians 15:3). Unfortunately, the fuller part of the Corinthians passage, verse 4, is often left out of this pitch which makes 'God' (or the Father) sound so vindictive. So we run around conflating two separate passages into one 'pitch' and walk around thinking it is plain as can be.

For those of us who, for whatever reason, have made the leap and have staid the course, are we called to go 'further' with this or is our clarion call to recruit believers, er, share our story and introduce them to the goodness of God, or Jesus, or the Father or the baptism in/into/of/for/through the Holy Spirit? Forget about knowledge, save people?

I can't be the only 'believer' (or am I not really a believer?) who is totally confused (or just frustrated) with this. I suppose Sunday morning isn't really the time for high theology but I, perhaps naively, assume that throughout the year the more faithful in the EO or Catholic traditions have theology imparted into them in the liturgical cycle whereas in modern Protestantism it is up to us to pursue this in relative isolation.

So I am just as 'guilty' as those whom I accuse. We are all on the journey, all of us trying our best, let's be a part of the flow and not a dam.

Nesotrius Was Not Nestorian, Was Arius And Arian?

The deeper I dig in to this stuff, it seems as if many of these 'heretics' were but props, 'types' against which doctrine was defined and in the politics of the times I'd imagine persecutions over the years off and on put this in context in which we have little understanding as to the machinations used to ensure 'true' doctrine was entrenched.

I think we're seeing this played out on a different scale today when one person's text, tweet, whatever, is taken out of context (there is no time for context in our instant world) and blown to extremes whether or not the meaning is what it is said to have meant.

The logical extension of the 'worst' of Antiochene thought led to the accusations Cyril railed against Nestorius; it didn't necessarily matter whether or not he actually believed what was said. Ditto what was said about Cyril.

It is probably the same way with Arius. What is left of Arius' beliefs is found primarily in Athanasius. Not exactly an unbiased source of information. 

They became props against which doctrine was delineated and defined.

We do the same thing today with the various denominations when in reality we seem to have lost what the 'Trinity' actually means. Truthfully, when I read the Oneness arguments I think they are trying to say the same thing about the mystery. There are differences, obviously, such as the fact that the pre-existent 'Jesus' was in the mind of God and not a pre-existing Word that became man. Significant difference, certainly, from 'orthodox' thinking but in truth, when we drill down, we are trying to take the Biblical witness and put words to the mystery.

I will revisit this but I believe as Christians we are more united than we are divided and we spent more time infighting than we do trying to show people the beauty of the Christian faith.

I became a Christian spontaneously and it took me almost 20 years to want to be one.

Datums

There is absolutely no way we will ever come to complete agreement on this Christian thing. Never.

Never have, at least not all the way (whatever that means), never will. Can we all agree to disagree? 

Is there any common core?

It's not the Bible. KJV? NASB? Douay? EOB? Apocrypha included or not?

Who decides? Who translates? Who interprets? 

Can we really say 'Jesus' is what we have in common? Divine? Man? God Man? Virgin Birth? Son of God? Pre-existent? After all, every split within the body of believers called church has been around him and who he is.

Even the term God is fraught with difficulty. Trinity? Father alone? Jesus is God. Jesus is 'divine' but not God?

The bigger question is this: can we live with this not knowing? 

So many questions, so few answers. Each answer has more questions. 

The more I think and the more I talk and the more I study, the more I want stillness. Silence. Having traversed high and low, the realization is that we come to a place where there is nothing but mystery. It is ok to not know. This is not denial or absence of understanding but the realization that words, concepts and intellectual frameworks ultimately will fail in the light of this mystery.

"Is it not evident that the Father accepts the sacrifice, not because he demands it or feels some need for it, but in order to carry out his own plan? Humanity had to be brought to life by the humanity of God ... we had to be called back to him by his Son ...Let the rest be adored in silence." (Clement, p.45, quoting Gregory of Nazianzus)

"To progress in thinking about creatures is painful and wearisome. The · contemplation of the Holy Trinity is ineffable peace and silence." (Clement, p. 232, quoting Evagrius) "How has he been begotten? I re-utter the question with loathing. God's begetting ought to have the tribute of our reverent silence." (Gregory of Nazianzu, Oration 29)

The power, I am being to learn, is that we can experience it. We can bathe in it, swim in it. We just can't contain it or define it or box it in. This 'unknowing' is something we come to through a tradition, not in denial of the same or picking and choosing whatever it is we want to accept which makes us then the absolute standard of Truth; it confirms what we believe, it does not transform us.

Even the tale of Laozi being a scholar and keeper of the archives before he walked away indicates that he went through it and came out on the other side; the Buddha did something similar. Jesus, theologically debatable of course, went through his tradition. To get "there" you must journey through. It is the journey that provides the framework which leads you ultimately to silence.

I suppose in some sense then the 'silence' at the end of the journey will be different at the end because of the ocean in which you swam. 

Where I'm Stuck

This theology stuff is, dare I say, fun. I like where it takes me and how it moves me. But is it true?

I recently stumbled across one of the more thorough and detailed anti-Trinitarian websites and was quite mesmerized but the content. All the arguments are ultimately grounded in the Bible and the logic is quite sound.

However, it left me wondering:

1) The very same Bible that is being questioned is the very same Bible being used to prove that it is not what the Church, by and large, has historically said it says. Is that not a tautology?

2) If in fact that what he says is true, I am left puzzled as to what the big deal is about the Jesus he presents. Sure I may have my 'theological' lenses on and can't see what he sees but I don't know how this Jesus would have survived for 2,000 years or, at the very least, how this Jesus would have been more than just one option among many and may even have potentially just fizzled out our became amalgamated into some other religious stew.

3) When he says not to call him a Modalist, an Arian or a Unitarian I am left with the question (and I too hate labels, cf. Dao De Jing 32 for reference) what is it we are left with? How is he not a denomination of one amongst the hundreds, even thousands, of other denominations? Or is his point that that is the point: work out your own salvation? Otherwise, his denomination is a denomination albeit an apophatic 'anti-Trinity' version (rather than a cataphatic theology such as Oneness or Unitarian).

He is coming from being immersed in the Trinitarian universe for most of his life and he has come out of it and is sharing his discovery. I'm in the opposite boat; I've fought it for most of my life and have come to 'rest' in it at this point though of course I am still wrestling with it. Obviously.

However, as I've come to learn in my studies from an EO perspective, the Trinity tends to be more experiential than it does rational or intellectual and it is in this that some of the difference resides.

Perhaps I'm looking for the high of such a 'mystical' approach but this overly rational approach leaves me a bit cold and wondering what the big deal is should it be the truth.

Still on the road to discovery. 

Breakthrough...

So I'm (is it annoying to start a sentence with 'So I...'?) listening to Kari Jobe's Majestic album (with DVD version of 'Forever' inserted which I'll get back to in a minute) and the issue I have with modern worship songs hit me.

I have frequently questioned, even called into question, their theology. This album is no exception. In fact, from the song above when I heard the line 'Heaven looked away' it was like a record (yes, a record, showing my age) scratching. There is a theology out there that the Father turned His back on Jesus when He was on the cross, that He couldn't look. That always sounded to me a bit schizophrenic. Still does. So this verse troubled me. I was able to somewhat temper this by noting that the verse says 'Heaven' and not 'the Father' and so, I suppose, there could be something in that. But I haven't considered what heaven looking away actually means.

The album, along with Jobe's modern Christian voice pattern, resonates well on an emotional core. It 'feels' really powerful. And then I realized: that's it, that's what both bothers me and moves me. It is the emotional content. 

I'm currently reading about a particular Orthodox view of the Spirit and they clearly link the Spirit and the Son together inseparably. One without the other is just not possible. A critique by some of Western theology is that the Spirit and the Son are often parsed and pursued separately and several of the songs on this album sing to the Spirit. Yet in those same songs they throw 'God' in there and talk about His (God's? The Spirit's?) presence. Here is the verse in question:

"Holy Spirit You are welcome here
 Come flood this place and fill the atmosphere
 Your Glory God is what our hearts long for
 To be overcome by Your Presence Lord."

Spirit, God and Lord are all throw in there in what sound to me like a convoluted stew. Is this a Trinitarian verse? We are often so 'Jesus' focused that the theological language such as those in the song above veer either into a quantum type of theology where we are asked to hold any such questions in a superposition of unknowing or we veer rapidly toward a Oneness theology where it's all Jesus.

But the songs 'feel' really good. And our experiences, whether individually or corporately, are often projected into these songs and their emotional import and we conflate the 'spirit' with 'emotion' and when these emotional highs happen, especially when they occur collectively, there is a 'move of the Spirit' in the church.

I'm an old raver so understand the fever pitch of when a club is lit and the DJ builds that story into the perfect crescendo and you 'feel' it and the energy is unmistakable. And this is often the high we (or is it me?) seek when there. I cannot say this is necessarily a bad thing as it can unify and bring people together. Jesus is quoted as saying that where two or three are gathered in His name there He is in the midst. So in that regard, is it really so bad? 

After all, these are some musicians - not theologians - who wrote a worship song.

In the context of the argument that the Western churches often separate the Spirit from the Son, there is some validity to that argument. Many songs cry out to the Holy Spirit. Is it worship to the Spirit or is it a rallying cry to the church for focus and sensitivity to the fact that if we are calling on Jesus as Lord the Spirit is already in our midst? 

"From the filioque Protestantism has at times deduced a separation of the Spirit from Christ and, consequently, having preserved the idea of the transcendence of Christ, it has substituted the presence of the Spirit for the presence of Christ." (Theology and the Church, p. 108)

On the flip side, these churches are actively seeking the Spirit so the critique about the Magisterium - primarily Catholic though often in the more staid Protest Churches as well - being set up in place of the Spirit it throws some cold water on that argument as many in the non-denominational (or post-denominational) church would agree about the 'dead' churches for whom the Spirit has been stifled and this pursuit of experience, pursuit of the Spirit, is a response to that longing.

This is where Tradition has become a caricature and is a negative word equated to being spiritually cold and dead. If it is an emotional high that is sought then absolutely this appears dead. But if willing to absorb the 'Tradition', not in a negative way, but as passed on for hundreds, even thousands, of years because it is a carrier of Truth than perhaps we're all missing the mark.

We all have the same vision, no matter how splintered we are as a human community and no matter how much the language we use is different and no matter how much we struggle to communicate this truth and no matter how much our selfish desires to be 'right' interfere.