Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Chp 17: The Cross of Christ

How can suffering and even murder become a symbol of freedom and love and victory? Metropolitan Hilarion draws from the Epistles of Paul and early Christian practices of venerating the cross as examples of how worship, crossing oneself, and private prayers focused on the cross. The ancient Romans understood that peace came through war and sacrifice; they invented crucifixion to enforce the law of the empire and they ushered in Pax Romana, a long peace for the known world. Dr. Timothy Patitsas remarks in his writings that the opposite of war isn’t peace per se but love through self-sacrifice on Christ’s Cross.  Jesus Christ went willingly to this imperial death row for the peace and salvation of the whole world so that reconciliation would be achieved at all levels of life. History shows us, however, that peace can be a violent measure. Various cultures have sought health, philosophy, war, economics, science and knowledge to bring about lasting peace, and often times these come at the expense of other people. The cross gave humanity everything that we need and desire, and it shows us complete love and it builds a true foundation of saving knowledge. The cross is very powerful; Christ heals mental and physical illnesses, drives away demonic influences, and overcomes magicians, drugs, and addictive habits. Christ’s Cross gives us the symbol of power that renders the powers of this world powerless, and it is the only symbol that will remain in the end, John Chrysostom teaches. Many of the Old Testament names of God are understood through the cross such as: mighty, glorious, lamp, light, redeemer, victorious, and savior. The fathers of the Church teach that because Christ died outside of the city walls, he purified all of creation and he made all places suitable for prayer. John Chrysostom spoke of the cross as the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and he repeats this question in one of his homilies, “Can you see how that by which the devil gained victory has now itself been conquered by that very thing?” In this mystical way of seeing, our death and human suffering become our symbols of victory through Christ’s Cross. He also teaches that the cross gives people “true knowledge” and that the might of the cross is linked to the names and energies of God, and it even gives us “a precise knowledge of the Creator.” Civilizations seek science and power, but there is no analysis that can bring us true redemption like the Cross of Christ, which took him to the one place where all people were entrapped – Hades. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Chp 16: The Passion and Death of the Savior. The Dogma of the Redemption

The two united wills, natures, and energies of Christ points us to a crucial reality: there is one saving plan of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There were no illusory, temporary, debatable, separable natures of Jesus Christ; He willingly and freely took flesh and suffered. God has been “murdered,” wrote Melito of Sardis from his poems On Pascha. Cyril’s antagonists couldn’t accept the idea of a suffering god, called theopascha. They kill the very plan of salvation by rejecting the teaching that Christ was crucified. Sin and death are closely tied together so much so that there are no human solutions in history. The tragic situation of humanity is that civilizations and individuals tend to make sacrifices of life for the sake of perpetuating life; we seek to avoid our destiny of death and to save our own lives by killing and harming others. Death and murder, then, become justifiable ways of survival, and our desires for revenge are also legitimized. Metropolitan Hilarion describes the end of our violent situation and continuous scapegoating as, “Christ broke the flogging circle of sin and death.” The Greek word for redemption is lutrosis. It means setting free, loosing free. The eternal, tragic cycle of violence is ended with the freedom of Christ through His Cross. Theologians in the East and West began to reflect on Christ the Redeemer with questions like, who receives the ransom and who gives the ransom? In their writings, Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil the Great leaned toward the idea that the ransom was paid to the devil and we escaped God’s just anger. John Chrysostom and Gregory the Theologian rejected this reasoning because of its dissonance with the texts of liturgical worship, and how it could distort the divine economy. Isaac the Syrian wrote that the son came to take back “his race by love to his Father.” Anselm of Canterbury and Cyril of Jerusalem thought of God becoming man as a way to not only save humanity, but also to “calm” God the Father’s wrath through bloodshed. In the Orthodox liturgy, on the contrary, God is both sacrifice and priest, a bloodless sacrifice, a willing offering. Wrath isn’t a force that compels God to offer unwillingly. Satan couldn’t ever receive God, according to the fathers of the Church, as a ransom. Metropolitan Hilarion describes redemption as a “cleansing” of the whole world that “unites all people into one man, and [He] puts us into the heart of the one Godhead” through the Cross of Christ.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Chp 15: Two Natures, Two Energies, Two Wills

The faith of the first Christians was founded on the knowledge of Jesus Christ who is revealed as both God and man. This union was the first plan of the Holy Trinity from the beginning of time. Jesus Christ is both God and man “at the same time,” and this mysterious way of being still confuses philosophers, teachers, and the educated. In the 5th c. AD, eastern theology focused around two major schools of thought. The school in Alexandria stresses the oneness of Jesus while the school in Antioch stressed the distinctions of Jesus’ nature, human and divine. Both Christian schools tended to agree with each other in general. There were, however, extreme positions on both sides. Eutychius thought of Jesus’ divine nature as “swallowed up” by his human nature so that there were two natures before Christ’s incarnation, one that was left afterward. Nestorius took issue with terms that described the Most Holy Virgin Mary as bearing God in her womb (Theotokos); he could not believe that divinity was held within her. Both extremes broke the true unity of Jesus Christ as simultaneously God and man. The Theotokos (the god-bearer) bore Christ the God and man at once. 

For philosophers and pagan religions, duality was not hard to accept, and even obliteration of dualities sometimes was an easy route to take, as in some Hellenistic and Buddhist philosophies. Hellenistic, Celtic, Roman, Hindu, many indigenous and pagan religions could accept dualities, whether in conflict or in harmony, or even pluralistic and animistic stories of the universe. But the real, beautiful coming together of man’s nature and the divine in Christ Jesus was a revelation of knowledge that became highly controversial and a crushing cornerstone of Christianity that would either break or pulverize the wisdom of the world. St. Cyril of Alexandria teaches against the Arians that because the fall of mankind affected our whole nature, Christ took on our whole nature, without inheriting sin from the flesh, or our body, so that we can worship Jesus Christ as “one Godman.” Orthodox Christians worship the incarnate God Jesus Christ, not just a “deified man,” as some have argued before. Apophatic theology, then, became a way to correct Christians who went too far in their teachings about Jesus Christ’s nature. Underlying these debates seems to be an uneasiness about accepting the incarnation and its full implications, that God truly loves and truly became a man like us, and that He only seeks to preserve creation and all creatures. 

Deliberation and exploration are activities of the human mind. The will of Jesus is at one with His Father. We need those activities daily, often corrupted by passions, because our human thinking doesn’t encompass the world rightly, and it’s not unified with God. The will of the Father are at one with Jesus: to save man by dying on the cross and rising from the tomb. There was no doubt that the Holy Trinity willed for our salvation through the Lamb and the Cross. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Chp 14: Christ, the Second Adam

The second Adam is Christ, the Word Incarnate. Adam is the first man; Christ is the second man. Metropolitan Hilarion teaches that the early Christians understood that Christ was incarnate because of God’s unchangeable plan, because of the unshakeable loving-kindness of the Father to unite us all with Himself and all creation, and to free us from passions that only pull us toward doing evil things, which is slavery to the passions and the Evil One. Christ reversed our fallen nature and all creatures who had to fall with mankind unwillingly. The full lifecycle of each human being is made holy again; that’s the message of recapitulation in the second Adam. This total reversal of our direction in life is called recapitulation by the church fathers, recapitulatio in Latin, because it refers to going back to the heads of a book, or main points of a chapter. This chapter restates, as if written in stone, that we are not meant to die, creation and mankind is good, and we are meant to dwell and glorify the Holy Trinity forever. With Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, He turned our passions (pathos), our tendency to fall, around and He wholly destroyed the corruption (pthora) plaguing all of human history by His Cross. There are sinful passions and natural weaknesses. Thirst, tiredness, grief, and hunger are natural weaknesses. A passion (pathos) can be unforgiveness, lying, lust, pride, gluttony and greed. The church fathers taught that Christ took our human weaknesses listed above and even became “sin” for us so that we could conquer death through those very limited ways of life on our bodies through His strength on the Cross. Christ didn’t inherit the sinful passions, especially since no male seed was involved in conception. and He is the Word of God. As odd as it may be, the incarnation was not primarily to deal with sin, as later Latin theology tends to emphasize, but to restore our whole nature into Christ and to show His love in its fullness. Without taking love as the starting point for Christ becoming the second Adam, other theories and ideas begin to take root in our understanding of this great mystery. Why couldn’t God destroy everything and every person the moment evil and sin entered the world to start the world over, might be an hypothetical question that results from not beginning with the loving-kindness of God. St. Isaac the Syrian teaches that God’s first plan was to show His love wholly to us. Then, we begin to see that there is no divine wrath working behind the scenes against mankind, except the Evil One and our own anger from passions. The will of the Holy Trinity in “mystical coexistence” was, and is, and ever shall be unwavering in the plan of our whole salvation. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Chp 13: The Incarnation

The beautiful evidence of Jesus Christ’s divinity and oneness with God, the Father, is seen through Jesus’ actions as we read about them in the New Testament. Metropolitan Hilarion explains that the incarnation, or enfleshment, is the goal of the Holy Trinity for all mankind whether or not Adam and Eve sinned and were exiled from Paradise. God wants us to be in communion with Him, and that is part of his divine economy. That idea also has implications for how we participate in His glory and grace, since we are all images of God. In the patristic tradition, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, St. Isaac the Syrian, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Symeon the New Theologian all outline the importance of this teaching about God’s salvific plan from the beginning through the incarnation of God. Western theologians, like John Duns Scotus, wrote about salvation similarly to the east; but overall, they tended to theologize based on alternative universes, theories of free will, and philosophical speculation. Eastern theologians, however, were not so concerned about those issues in general. They spoke about God’s saving plan, his economy, based on revelation within the Christian tradition as a whole as the starting point. Jesus Christ become man so that He could deify and save every specific stage of growing up in our human experience, from infancy to adolescence to adulthood, and by extension with mankind, all creation will be saved too. The Eastern Fathers understood that human development was being deified and would continue to deify in the world or worlds to come. 

The idea of free will plays a role in discussion of salvation. Sin is not a permanent obstacle to becoming one with God, but our desires can prevent us from loving God freely. Metropolitan Hilarion ends with the firm idea that God does not force us to love Him. His love is completely free. We are not able to earn it. God made ready the Kingdom of Heaven. It is far better than the earthly pleasures, even after mankind was expelled from Paradise. God is all-powerful in succeeding in His mission, victory and making us all kinsmen of his flesh; but our love must be free like His. There is no “coercion” because we cannot be brought to salvation by speculation or behavioristic principles based on animal experiments, which are all used by professionals to shape humanity into being good in hopes of achieving a Walden Two kind of world. History has shown us that forcing people to be good often creates a lot of evil. God only asks for our searching, our desire, our love, however strong those may be within us. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Chp 12: Man 244-259

This second part of the chapter focuses on what fell away from mankind: the God-given light that clothed our bodies, the closeness and warmth of living in light, the dialogue and knowledge of God, our ancestral home in the garden of Eden in the East. On earth there is a mysterious mixture now of good and evil people, fortune and misfortune, beauty and ugliness, dignity and shame in our experience of being human. 

We’ve learned already that God and His goodness is personal. Likewise, evil and its consequences are very personal too, and evil is not an abstract entity, but it always has a name behind it. Man’s beginning wasn’t entirely perfected. St. Melito of Sardis wrote a poem from On Pascha that goes, “a clod of earth may receive seed of either kind, the man was susceptible by nature of good and evil.” Neither Adam or Eve ever got the idea from themselves that they should go to, look at, touch or eat from the forbidden tree. They fell into a lie about what appeared to be “fair” from the Devil by their own weakened sight and desire and inattentive as new creatures. The traditional story about Adam and Eve is that they fell out of disobedience and pride, and so God came up with a new plan that would have never been unless sin entered the world. But the fathers of the church and the scriptures describe how mankind fell out of weakness from desire and out of the Devil’s envy who saw what the plan of God was from the beginning. Just as Satan was cast down to the earth to roam about, so too the serpent was cursed and crawled on its stomach because he couldn’t handle seeing that flesh and blood would be united to the highest Light in heaven, Christ Jesus. In our genesis, it seems to be the case that the Devil envied human destiny to become like God through Christ Jesus. The Devil himself was the first-light bearer and guardian set over the earth. Without this triangulation of desirous envy and man as the last piece of creation planned to enter into God’s Light and God to enter into our nature, it would be difficult to explain how desire arises in the first place unless one of these two different creatures, man or angels, were aware one another’s plan and purpose from the beginning. 

We also learn from Metropolitan Hilarion that the Devil’s lies could only be taken by mankind if they were covered with false sweetness and beauty. At the heart of humanity is our experience of nakedness and shame at all levels of development.  Shame is universal to all people. Man cannot exist by knowing both evil and good because it perpetually divides and disintegrates individual lives and groups of people; knowing what is good and evil personally destroys the natural bonds of humanity and our bond to God. In Eden, our nudity was sweet with God’s grace. But by denuding that supernatural grace, we introduced shame and more shameful events in the world like a bad seed. Shame is a loss of communion with beauty through matter and spirit. St. Melito of Sardis also says that, “what was marvelously knit together was unraveled, and the beautiful body divided.” Man’s sin, then, isn’t missing the mark, as if we just needed better aim; sin imprisons us for life without any way of escaping to see light again and that experience is described well with the saying, “As deep as the roots go so high do the branches grow.” Our deepest spiritual and physical roots have been affected, as St. Gregory Palamas teaches about the governing parts of human nature we all have, namely, the appetitive (desiring/our devotion), incensive (anger/our determination), and rational (reasoning). These parts of us used to work together as one in our nature. Our desires, intellectual pursuits and anger get out of control easily, and so even our ability to make right decisions comes with struggling and our will is scattered. St. Anthony the Great teaches that we have “two minds,” meaning, one desires what is good toward God and the other is evil toward the Devil. Mankind is mixed with crooked and honest people living side by side, some are misfortunate while others are fortunate. The only way to heal our mind, body and soul is to have God become Man, and that is best followed in practice in the Holy Orthodox Church. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol II, Chp 12: Man 219-244

By Mike Brown.

In his small book, Becoming Human, which is a meditation on Christian Anthropology, Fr. John Behr quotes St Irenaeus, who says,

“The work of God is the fashioning of the human being.

— Indentifying Christianity

As Jesus faces Pilate, just before being crucified, Pilate says of Jesus, “Behold the man.”  Jesus is the first true human, observes Fr. John. He continues his meditation by recalling Jesus’ words on the cross! “It is finished.”  The work of God, the fashioning of the true human being has been completed in the obedience of Jesus, the second Adam.

In this chapter on Man in Metropolitan Hilerion’s book, Orthodox Christianity, he notes that Patristic tradition speaks of man in three aspects: 1) primordial man; 2) fallen man; and 3) redeemed man.  In this chapter, the Metropolitan addresses the first two.

Why is it so important that we know the truth of man?  Listen to the world around us, the language now used to describe mankind.  We once talked of heterosexual and homosexual people. In the recent past, that distinction was supplanted by LGBT, to be more inclusive.  Most recently, the most inclusive language is LGBTQIA, but even that excludes the “mainstream” heterosexual population.  Undoubtably, we need additional letters to describe us all.  It has been said that all thought takes place in language; change the language and you can change the thought.  With the continued addition of letters to define us came another change in language, now equating one’s desire to be one or more of the letters with the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.  And changed thoughts followed.

We have also moved away from the biblical language of “personhood.”  As the language of “made in God’s image and likeness” fades in our culture in favor of humanist language, ideas change and now we have at least one legal case to have an ape declared a person.

We are immersed in the changing language and ideas of the nature man.

How has this all come to be? Through the powerlessness of God. Yes, His powerlessness.  M. Hilarion quotes Russian theologian V. Lossky, who says:

“The height of the divine all-powerfulness hides within itself as if it were a weakness of God…God becomes powerless before human freedom, he cannot constrain it because it proceeds from his power…The will of God will always submit itself before the prodigals, the deviants, and even to the rebellious of the human will, in order to bring it to free concord.  Such is Divine Providence.

— The Mystical Theology of the Orthodox Church

Of course, we know that God saw it all coming.  Jesus, St John the Theologian tells us, is the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of creation (Rev 13:8).

And we also have a role. We must speak of man using “Kingdom language,” the language of God.  Perhaps no one will be able to understand us as the world darkens around us, but we must use God’s language, the language spoken by those who are the body of Christ. We must speak it to ourselves to help inoculate each other from the onslaught of Satan’s lies of who we are.

We must know the language of who we are in God’s reality; we, the Church, the Body of Christ, are here, after all, for the life of the world.  To quote Fr. A. Schmemann:

“But it is the Christian gospel that God did not leave man in his exile, in the predicament of confused longing. He had created man ‘after his own heart’ and for Himself, and man has struggled in his freedom to find the answer to the mysterious hunger in him. In this scene of radical unfulfillment God acted decisively: into the darkness where man was groping toward Paradise, He sent light. He did so not as a rescue operation, to recover lost man: it was rather for the completing of what He had undertaken from the beginning. God acted so that man might understand who He really was and where his hunger had been driving him.

— For the Life of the World