a layman's thoughts ~ Roman Catholicism, the West and the infusion of Scholasticism and Roman legalism

  Glory to God!



    In reading some history on the Church of Christ and the schism, it seems to me that the idea of a papacy over the Church or the addition of the filioque was something that the early Church did not have in its understanding. The only authority in the Church can only be the Holy Spirit. This same Holy Spirit has been leading the Church from its inception. It is a Living big "T" Tradition or the life of the Church. Can a Pope have supreme rule over the Church in this sense?

    If we look at the end of the Roman Empire in the West around 476A>D> if memory serves. We see the influx of Germanic philosophies come in and slowly begin to change the theology. The filioque was not part of the original Creed. So we have to ask why was it inserted? Philosophies like Platonism and Augustianianism might seem sound in the scholastic sense, but the Church is not any old institution. It is beyond any category that man can create or beyond any rational understanding. It simply is a transcendent mysterion or mystery. If we try to define it, we will minimize it. And if we minimize it, we are not maximizing it as it should be, something eternal and transcending of our reason. Church is not a social hall for Jesus nor any old assembly hall. It is a hospital for the spiritually and physically sick, which incorporate themselves within the Body of Christ. We can't make the Church a top 10 list or "These are the essentials of our Church" because the Church is not a top 10 essentials idea. If anything it is from 1 to infinity, that would be a more correct list. The Church cannot be minimalistic.

   Anytime we bring any schema into the Church or view it through any particular philosophical lens, we make it earthly. We make it a fallen institution, which it cannot be. We are fallen as members, but not the Church. As the Church in Heaven is whole and undivided so is the Church on earth. Yes, its earthly members may be divided as people, but there can be no idea of a fragmented church. That is what we call denominationalism or fragments. The Early Church did not know of such a thing. It was whole and in need of nothing. It could never be fragmented. This is a human invention. It still is so today as Christ said that gates of Hades would not overcome it.

   So why the filioque and why the papacy? As a broken empire, the Roman Church was coming out of an influx of new philosophies (Germanic/barbarian) and the Roman legal system. To redefine the church under these new ideas does not sound very crazy, it may have seemed quite logical at the time. In the East there was one Roman Empire remaining, it was secure and stable until its fall in 1453. This did not happen in the West. And with this new influx came a new definition in the Roman Church. Additions were made that were not well theologically thought out, at least, this was a novel scholastic theology. And a juridical conceptual idea from Roman Law and government especially the idea of Pope as a kind of Emperor of the kingdom of the church. This would lead to some strange ideas of God's justice or to salvation itself. Does God need to be satisfied by some legal Roman concept? Is salvation internal or external? Can there be two bishops over the same Church without one of the bishops becoming the vicar of the other? Pope and the local Bishop? Can the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son? What proceeds from the Holy Spirit? Is not the Holy Spirit co-equal? Is it not better to say that spiration or coming forth belongs to the Father alone? The same way that water proceeds from the spring or thought from mind. It is the water that proceeds from the spring. The same way that it is the thought that proceeds from the mind. Therefore spring and mind have the quality of giving forth.

   Theology in the East was considered mystical, an experience of God via His 'uncreated' energies. It was the transcendent experience of God and not scholastically studied or of man's reason or conjecture on God. Not that reason is bad, but reason no matter how well studied can never scale what is not explainable. God is above this and we are better describing God in what He is not rather than what He is... apophatic Theology or negative theology. The Early Fathers did not rely on their thoughts or trust them when it came to things about Him, but spoke of God by communing with God. They received these answers by their nous and not by their thoughts and logic. Man's logic only fixes things for a short time, the solution is temporary, always, and will not last. This is why man's thoughts and logic are not eternal and why God is eternal.

   We also should not base our theology on any human conception or "ism" and especially on any one or two particular isms. Too much or sole emphasis on any one saint or philosopher will lead in the wrong direction. The Church has posted road signs as to lead us to God, but the road signs should never be considered as ends in themselves. The purpose of dogmas, canons, Creeds, Liturgy, sacraments, etc. has been to lead us to God in Christ, to commune with Him in His Body. These have never been meant to replace God or as a goal in themselves, but only to their purpose--- Communion with God.

Even the Saints are not an end in themselves but only to Whom they point to. This is crucial to an understanding of the Church. Theology is not conjecture or of the imagination or feelings, but something much higher. Any feeling we may have no matter how strong should not be trusted without good discernment. We would be wise to not trust our feelings or our logic when it comes to matters of divine importance and The Church. History has shown us this lesson of the flighty nature of feelings or passions. It has proved over and over again that man's logic is only a temporary fix and solution to the problems of the world. We would be wise to remember our own history.

  So the West and its novel ideas, Germanic philosophies, scholastic, humanistic ideas, etc., would now begin to shape and define the church in the West. It would cease to be connected to its Mother and move off in a different direction and understanding. With this, we would begin to see the Protestant Reformers like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others move to re-shape it into what, in their idea, it used to be, but as if from a fuzzy painting and 16th century philosophy and tradition and not from the Tradition of the early Church as lived by the Saints, the Church Fathers, and the Apostles.

   P>S>

Note:

The Eastern Orthodox Church recognizes no man-made "Isms" and has been very careful to keep these separate from The Church of Christ. The Orthodox Church has always regarded herself as pre-denominational.


I would like to thank:
Clark Carlton
Jordan Bajis
Father Photios
Lawrence Janic
and others...

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And the intercession prayers of the Theotokos, Saint Peter, St. Demetrios Myrrh streaming, St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain and all the Saints. And for a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ. Glory to God!

St Herman of Alaska SUPERNATURAL GIFTS FROM GOD

SUPERNATURAL GIFTS FROM GOD

Herman dedicated himself fully for the Lord's service; he strove with zeal solely for the glorification of His Most Holy Name. Far from his homeland in the midst of a variety of afflictions and privations Father Herman spent several decades performing the noblest deeds of self-sacrifice. He was privileged to receive many supernatural gifts from God.
In the midst of Spruce Island down the hill flows a little stream into the sea. The mouth of this stream was always swept by surf. In the spring when the brook fish appeared the Elder raked away some of the sand at its mouth so that the fish could enter, and at their first appearance they rushed up the stream'. His disciple, Ignaty, said, "it was so that if 'Apa' would tell me, I would go and get fish in the streaml" Father Herman fed the birds with dried fish, and they would gather in great numbers around his call. Underneath his cell there lived an ermine. This little animal can not be approached when it has had its young, but the Elder fed it from his own hand. "Was not this a miracle that we had seen?" said his disciple, Ignaty. They also saw Father Herman feeding bears. But when Father Herman died the birds and animals left; even the garden would not give any sort of crops even though someone had willingly taken care of it, Ignaty insisted.
On Spruce Island there once occurred a flood. The inhabitants came to the Elder in great fear. Father Herman then took an icon of the Mother of God from the home where his students lived, and placed it on a "laida" (a sandy bank) and began to pray. After his prayer he turned to those present and said, "Have no fear, the water will not go any higher than the place where this holy icon stands." The words of the Elder were fullfilled. After this he promised the same aid from this holy icon in the future through the intercessions of the Most Immaculate Queen. He entrusted the icon to his disciple, Sophia; in case of future floods the icon was to be placed on the "laida."
At the request of the Elder, Baron F. P. Wrangel wrote a letter to a Metropolitan - his name is not known - which was dictated by Father Herman. When the letter was completed and read, the Elder congratulated the Baron upon his attaining the rank of admiral. The Baron was taken aback. This was news to him. It was confirmed, but only after an elapse of some time and just before he departed for St. Petersburg.
Father Herman said to the administrator Kashevarov from whom he accepted his son from the font (during the Sacrament of Baptism), "I am sorry for you my dear 'kum.' It's a shame, the change will be unpleasant for you!" In two years during a change of administration Kashevarov was sent to Sitka in chains.
Once the forest on Spruce Island caught fire. The Elder with his disciple, Ignaty, in a thicket of the forest made a belt about a yard wide in which they turned over the moss. They extended it to the foot of the hill. The Elder said, "Rest assured, the fire will not pass this line." On the next day according to the testimony of Ignaty there was no hope for salvation (from the fire) and the fire, pushed by a strong wind, reached the place where the moss had been turned over by the Elder. The fire ran over the moss and halted, leaving untouched the thick forest which was beyond the line.
The Elder often said that there would be a bishop for America; this at a time when no one even thought of it, and there was no hope that there would be a bishop for America;this was related by the Bishop Peter and his prophecy was fulfilled in time.

"After my death," said Father Herman, "there will be an epidemic and many people shall die during it and the Russians shall unite the Aleuts." And so it happened; it seems that about a half a year after his passing there was a smallpox epidemic; the death rate in America during the epidemic was tremendous. In some villages only a few inhabitants remained alive. This led the administration of the colony to unite the Aleuts; the twelve settlements were consolidated into seven.

"Although a long time shall elapse after my death, I will not be forgotten," said Father Herman to his disciples. "My place of habitation will not remain empty. A monk like myself who will be escaping from the glory of men, will come and he will live on Spruce Island, and Spruce Island will not be without people."

(This prophecy has now been fulfilled in its entirety. Just such a monk as Father Herman described lived on Spruce Island for many years; his name was Archimandrite Gerasim, who died on October 13, 1969. This monk took on himself the responsibility of taking care of the Chapel under which at first was buried the Elder Herman. Metropolitan Leonty soon after his elevation to the primacy of the Russian Orthodox Church in America made a pilgrimage to Spruce Island, and the grave of Herman.)



Source:

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/st-herman-alaska.htm

 

By St Herman of Alaska

THE SPIRIT OF FATHER HERMAN’S TEACHING

In order to express the spirit of Father Herman's teaching, we present here a quotation from a letter that was written by his own hand.

"The empty years of these desires separate us from our heavenly homeland, and our Love for these desires and our habits clothe us, as it were, in an odious dress; it is called by the Apostle 'the external (earthy) man.' (I Cor. 15:47). We who are wanderers in the journey of this life call to God for aid. We must divest ourselves of this repulsiveness, and put on new desires, and a new love for the coming age. Thus, through this we will know either an attraction or a repulsion for the heavenly homeland. It is possible to do this quickly, but we must follow the example of the sick, who wishing for desired health, do not stop searching for means of curing themselves. But I am not speaking clearly."



Source:

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/st-herman-alaska.htm

Jordan Bajis ~ Infant Baptism

Infant Baptism

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Jordan Bajis

"Should I be baptized again?" Many renewed Orthodox Christians have asked themselves and others whether they should be baptized as adults. I readily understand why this question is asked, for I myself must admit that I did not always feel comfortable about the Orthodox Church baptizing infants. I asked myself several other questions as well: "How can an infant 'believe and be baptized'?" "Where in Scripture does it show an infant being baptized?" "Is not the baptizing of infants the reason why the contemporary Orthodox Church has a need for renewal and re-evangelization?"
These questions were so significant to me that I refused to actively support or encourage the practice of infant baptism until I was able to get some satisfactory answers. On one occasion, I even rejected the honor of being the best man at a close friend's wedding unless he was willing to absolve me of the accompanying responsibility of being the baptismal sponsor for his first child. Only after he agreed to my request did I consent to become his best man.

Knowing that as a committed Christian I could not refrain indefinitely from making a decision on this matter, I embarked on an intensive study of Scripture and early Christian history. I resolved that I would not finish my study until I had settled the issue in my mind and in my heart. Surprisingly, the area was much more complex than I first envisioned it to be. I must admit that at the outset, it looked as though the argument for infant baptism was about as valid as the theory that the earth was cigar-shaped. However, I uncovered many facts that are usually unknown to the common layman and which I think will prove helpful for those who are now in a doctrinal dilemma similar to the one I was in previously. I can now say, after having looked into the arguments of some of the most respected scholars on this subject, that there is a very strong case for the baptism of infants of Christian parents.

Before I begin to share some of the things I discovered, I think it is important to note that, although I have dedicated months to the thorough study of this subject, I do not pretend to be a theologian, professor of Church history, or Greek scholar. I am not an expert on the subject; I am a student of the subject. It is also important to note, however, that the evidence and arguments I produce here are mainly, not my own but rather a synthesis of research and conclusions distilled from several noteworthy scholars. It is not my purpose to be overly technical, to illustrate the minute peculiarity of each counter-argument's counter-argument, or to take the reader back to study the original documents in order to discuss grammatical controversies surrounding the texts. It is not that I consider these types of investigations unimportant, but I simply restrained myself from doing this because I do not think it is very profitable for the average layman. The scholars are much better qualified than I to define and explain these more exacting details, in any case.

Given this preface, let me get to the point of the article. How is it that I can now recognize infant baptism as a valid practice whereas before I was highly distrustful of it? I will record a number of reasons for this below in as straightforward and direct a way as I know. Some facts will require a bit of explanation, but many will consist of only a sentence or two. At the close of the list, I will offer some concluding thoughts and insights about infant baptism. I have categorized the evidence supporting the practice of infant baptism into three main sections: Scripture, History, and the Fathers of the Early Church. I recognize that each argument may not be able to stand on its own, but taken together, they present a conclusive picture.

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SCRIPTURE

Peter's Sermon

The first time the Gospel was ever proclaimed was on the day of Pentecost by the Apostle Peter. In his Spirit-inspired sermon, he made it clear that the blessing and promise of salvation was not just for adults, but for children as well.
"And Peter said to them, 'Repent and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God shall call to Himself." (Acts 2:38, 39)
It is also interesting to note that this quote from Peter's Pentecostal sermon does not merely state "...the promise is for you and children," but "for you and your children," which makes it clear that the children mentioned here were young enough to still be considered under the protection and authority of their parents. This is underscored when one understands that it was common for women and men to marry at the very young ages of twelve and thirteen, respectively. From this it becomes reasonable to assume that these children to whom Peter refers were young juveniles or, at the very least, in their preadolescence.

The Baptism of Households

Although this is only indirect Scriptural evidence, the fact that the Bible mentions that entire "households" were baptized does make it seem probable that children and infants were included. "Now I did baptize the household of Stephanas..." (1 Corinthians 1:16) An angel spoke to Cornelius saying, "Send to Joppa, and have Simon, who is called Peter, brought here; and he shall speak words to you by which you will be saved, and all your household." Later, when Peter arrived at Cornelius' household, "...he ordered them to be baptized."(Acts 11:13b, 14; Acts 10:48a) "And when she [Lydia of Thyatira] and her household had been baptized..." (Acts 16:15a) "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you shall be saved, you and your household...and immediately he was baptized, he and all his household." (Acts 16:31, 33b) We know that the Greek word "oikos," translated "house" or "household," has traditionally included infants and children in its meaning for several reasons. There is no evidence of this word being used either in secular Greek, Biblical Greek, or in the writing of Hellenistic Judaism in a way which would restrict its meaning only to adults. The Old Testament parallel for "house" carries the sense of the entire family. The Greek translation of the original Hebrew manuscripts (completed in 250 B.C.) uses this word when translating the Hebrew word meaning the complete family (men, women, children, infants). Similarly, we know that the phrase "he and his house" refers to the total family; the Old Testament use of this phrase clearly demonstrates this by specifically mentioning the presence of children and infants at times.

No Baptism of Older Children of Christian Parents Recorded

If the baptism of infants was not acceptable during New Testament times, then when does Scripture mention the alternative-the baptism of the children of Christian parents once they have matured out of infancy? The Bible never gives one example of the baptism of a Christian child as an adult. It is important that Scripture also does not speak of an "age of accountability or reason" (which many pinpoint at 13 years) when a child's capacity to believe the Gospel is developed enough so that he can receive baptism. Neither does the Bible state that every child is in a "suspended state of salvation" until they have reached this age, which one would have to believe if he held to the "age of accountability" theory.

The Saving Power of Christ's Presence in Holy Baptism

Although an opponent of infant baptism, Dr. Jewett, in his book Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace, makes a very logical conclusion about baptism if it is understood to be a release of supernatural power:
"...one believes that baptism washes away the guilt of eternal sin, so that any one departing this life without it is in danger of eternal damnation, he will have good reason to conclude that infants should be baptized. In fact, the question of infant baptism can hardly be raised without such a sacramental theology, since an affirmative answer is a foregone conclusion."
Certainly if there were a taint of sin upon each who is born in this world, there would be a need for every person to be cleansed from this impurity before leaving the temporal life. The Bible's "sacramental theology" states that there is such a need since "...through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men." (Romans 5:12) For this reason, "...there are none righteous, not even one" (i.e. not infants). (Romans 3:10) How are these young ones saved from the sin they have received from Adam's race? They are saved through the regenerative power of baptism and the faith of the Church (i.e. the Christian faithful):
"He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration (baptism) and renewing by the Holy Spirit." (Titus 3:5)
"Repent, and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins." (Acts 2:38)
"Jesus answered, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.'" (John 3:5)
"...when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water, and corresponding to that, baptism now saves you." (1 Peter 3:20, 21)
Baptism is not just a symbolic testimony of what God has done in the heart of an adult believer, but is in itself a dynamic means of actually effecting the power of the Gospel (the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ) in a life (Romans 6:4). Christian baptism is the means whereby we encounter and identify with Jesus Christ Himself. This is one of the reasons why Paul explains baptism as the manner in which we genuinely "put on" or "clothe" ourselves with Christ (Galatians 3:27). This is not just a metaphor; the Lord actually transforms a person through his baptism.

The Old Testament Symbols of Salvation and Baptism Include Infants:

1. Circumcision, the sign of God's covenant between the people of Abraham and Himself, was performed on every male child who was eight days old (Genesis 17:12). Many see a direct parallel between circumcision and Christian baptism in Scriptural passages such as Colossians 2:11, 12: "And in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism..." If baptism is the "New Testament circumcision," there can definitely be no objection to "sealing" the infant of a consecrated Christian family in Christ's New Covenant.
2. Moses' leading his people through the Red Sea is seen as an Old Testament foreshadowing of Christian baptism. The following New Testament passage clearly points to this: "For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them, and that rock was Christ." (1 Corinthians 10:1-4) It is worthwhile to note that "all were baptized" through Moses' leadership in crossing over the Red Sea. He did not leave the infants or children on the shores of Egypt to become prey to the angry armies of Pharaoh because they were not old enough to believe in the promise of the Old Covenant. Rather, entrusted to the arms of their parents' faith, they were carried through the "baptism of Moses."
3. The saving of Noah's entire family by the ark can also be seen as a prefigurement of a baptism which includes infants. All that needs to be said, as in the case of Moses' passing through the Red Sea, is that the entire family was on board the ark. Why should we leave infants out of the ark of baptism?

Secular Philosophy Redefines "Faith" and "Personhood"

Larry Christenson, in his pamphlet "What About Baptism?", quotes Edmund Schlink (author of The Doctrine of Baptism) as stating that the rejection of infant baptism was based on the secular philosophy of the sixteenth century, which assured man's individuality, and was not the result of a new Scriptural inquiry:
"Belief was seen in rationalistic and volitional terms, as an act of the mind and the will. 'Because an infant cannot think or decide, it cannot have faith, and therefore should not be baptized.' To this day, that is the only argument raised against the validity of infant baptism. One tosses off the sentence as though it were self-evident truth: 'A child can't believe.' But that 'truth,' upon examination, is neither self-evident, nor is it Biblical."
As Christenson goes on to say, faith is not merely a product of reason but relation. It is a relationship of love and trust, a relationship which is not limited to the mind. Some Scriptures which support the possibility of an "infant faith" are these:
"Yet Thou art He who didst bring me forth from the womb; Thou didst make me trust when upon my mother's breast." (Psalm 22:9)
"And whoever causes one of these little ones who believe to stumble, it would be better for him if with a heavy millstone hung around his neck, he had been cast into the sea." (Mark 9:42)
"For behold, when the sound of your greeting [Theotokos] reached my ears [Elizabeth], the baby [John the Baptist] leaped in my womb for joy." (Luke 1:44)

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CHURCH HISTORY

• Polycarp stated at his martyrdom (167/8 A.D.) that he had been in the "service of Christ" for eighty-six years. Other recorded dates from Polycarp's life make it likely that eighty-six years was his age from birth. Joachim Jeremias, in The Origins of Infant Baptism, concludes the following from these facts: "This shows at any rate that his parents were already Christians, or at least were converted quite soon after his birth. If his parents were pagans at his birth, he would have been baptized with the 'house' at their conversion. But even if his parents were Christians, the words 'service of Christ for eighty-six years' support a baptism soon after his birth rather than one as a child of 'mature years'...for which there is no evidence at all."

• Jeremias supposes something similar for Polycrates of Ephesus. In 190/91, when writing to Rome concerning the dispute over Easter, Polycrates states that he is "sixty-five years in the Lord." Since this reference to his age is made "because of his concern for his long unimpeachable Christian standing," Jeremias postulates that his baptism "took place soon after birth, rather than that there was an age limit for baptism."

• Justin Martyr gives still another testimony to the practice of infant baptism by stating that many old men and women of sixty and seventy years of age had been disciples of Christ from childhood.

• No incident is recorded in the earliest of Christian history which gives evidence that baptism was forbidden to any person on the basis of an age limit, or that the right of a Christian parent to have his children baptized had ever been challenged or renounced.

• Although several examples exist from the third century of the children of Christians being baptized as infants, in all of the literature and collections of inscriptions from that century there is not a single example of Christian parents delaying the baptism of their children.

• Neither the Ebionites, Novatians, Arians, Donatists, Montanists, nor any other early heresy refuted infant baptism; many were even noted as practicing it.

• A significant parallel exists between Jewish proselyte baptism (when pagans were converted to Judaism) and early Christian baptism. The contacts between early Christian baptism and proselyte baptism, with the similarities in terminology, interpretation, symbolism, and the rite itself, are especially notable. What is of greatest interest, however, is that the baptism of the early Church followed that of proselyte baptism, in which children and infants were baptized with the convert's family. This is especially significant when one realizes that the very early Church was made up primarily of converted Jews.

• There is no evidence of anyone being against infant baptism in the early Church on the grounds that you must first "believe" and be baptized. Tertulian (160-230 A.D.) was the only one who questioned infant baptism. The bulk of his objection, however, was due to his heresy that sin after baptism was almost unforgivable.

• Cyprian, a leading bishop of North Africa, convened a synod of sixty-six bishops at Carthage to discuss whether or not they felt that infant baptism should be delayed until the eighth day after birth instead of the usual second or third day. Their unanimous decision upheld the universally accepted practice which they had always followed.

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EARLY CHURCH FATHERS

• A very early Christian teacher, Irenaeus (120-202 A.D.), wrote the following:

"He came to save all through Himself-all I say, who through Him are reborn in God-infants, and children, and youths, and old men. Therefore He passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, sanctifying infants; a child for children, sanctifying those who are of that age, and at the same time becoming for them an example of piety, of righteousness, and of submission; a young man for youths, becoming an example for youths and sanctifying them for the Lord."

Here we read that Jesus Christ came that all might be reborn in God. "How can an infant be reborn if he cannot believe?" a person may ask. I ask in return, "How can an infant be reborn if his Christian parents have refrained from baptizing him?" Is a child who has not reached the "age of accountability/reason" not reborn until he reaches the age of thirteen when he then needs to be reborn?

• Origen's (185-254 A.D.) view of baptism is direct and transparent:

"For what is sin? Could a child who has only just been born commit a sin? And yet he has sin for which it is commanded to offer a sacrifice, as Job 14:4ff and Psalm 51:5-7 show. For this reason the Church received from the Apostles the tradition to administer baptism to the children also. For the men to whom the secrets of divine mysteries had been entrusted knew that in everyone there were genuine sinful defilements, which had to be washed away with water and the Spirit."

In his Homily on Luke, he again states his beliefs on infant baptism:
"Infants are baptized for the remission of sins. What sins? Whenever have they sinned? In fact, of course, never. And yet: 'No one is free from defilement.' (Job 14:4) But defilement is only put away by the mystery of baptism. That is the reason why infants too are baptized."

• Hippolytus' (170-236 A.D.) perception of infant baptism is clear and straightforward as well:

"And first baptize the little ones; and if they can speak for themselves, they shall do so; if not, their parents or other relatives shall speak for them."

• There is not one Church Father who denies or even questions the validity of infant baptism. It was in no locality and at no time viewed as something that was created after New Testament times.

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SOME FINAL COMMENTS AND CONCLUSIONS:

The evidence I have so far presented I believe merit attention by themselves. I would like, however, to make a number of random yet significant comments and observations about the area of infant baptism before I close this article.
Many times, the debate regarding infant baptism is a defensive one; those who propose that adult baptism is the only valid form challenge those who practice infant baptism to prove that it is an acceptable practice. What if those who exclusively favor adult baptism were interrogated? What answers would they give to questions which up until now have been virtually unaddressed? Questions such as these:

• If infant baptism is a later invention, when did it begin and who began it? Where did it originate?
• Why are there no protests against the validity of infant baptism from anyone in the early Church?
• Where is anything found in Scripture that expressly forbids the baptism of infants or children?
• How is it that God established a covenantal, corporate relationship with the tribes of Israel in the Old Testament, but you interpret the New Testament as abolishing the faith of an entire household with the father at its head in favor of a solely individualistic faith?
• Where does Scripture prescribe any age for baptism?
• Even if there were a special age when someone's faith reached "maturity," how could one discern that? Doesn't faith always mature? When is faith mature enough for baptism and when is it not? Who can judge?
• Where in Scripture does it say that children are free from the effects of the Fall simply because they are not old enough to believe? (Even creation is under the curse of mankind's fall-Romans 8:19-21.)
• What about the many Biblical meanings and early Christian understandings of baptism other than the one defining it as a visible sign of inward repentance, meanings such as the sacrament of regeneration (Titus 3:5), a grafting into the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:13), a passage from the reign of Satan into Christ's authority (Romans 6:17), the expression of the manifestation of God (Luke 3:21, 22), an admission into God's covenant (Colossians 2:11), the Lord's act of adoption and our putting on of Christ (Galatians 3:26, 27)? Why should these things be taken away from the small child of a Christian family?
• If it was the norm to baptize children at a later age, why is there no evidence in Scripture or early Church history of instruction given to parents on how to help their adolescent children prepare for baptism?
• If it is granted that baptism is for the remission of sins, why would the Church ever want to give baptism to infants if there were nothing in the infants which needed remission? Would not the grace of baptism, in this context, seem superfluous?
• In essence, laying aside all the polemics and prejudices and academic intricacies, what Scriptural principle is being violated if a child is baptized and matures in his faith?

There is a good reason why these questions are hard to answer for those who exclusively advocate adult baptism: infant baptism is not an innovation, it is the practice of the Early Church.
Over and over again, I am told that it is incorrect to allow infants to be baptized because the Scriptural order is to first believe, and then to be baptized (Mark 16:16). The error in this thinking is not that it is incorrect to have an adult believe before he is baptized, but that one cannot apply a command intended for adults to infants. The Bible was not written to infants and is therefore not going to direct them to do anything. They are under the care of their parents who can hear, understand, and believe. Additionally, there is an important distinction to be made between baptizing an infant and an adult believer-one has the need to repent, the other does not.

It is also important to recognize that the New Testament records the beginnings of the Christian people. This accounts for it reading like a missionary diary in a number of places. I am certain that were I to begin an apostolic work in a totally heathen country, and to write to the people there or to record my progress in preaching the Gospel to them, I would not mention infant baptism even once.
Some may ask why Sts. John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nanziansus, Basil the Great, and Jerome were all baptized as adults, even though they had at least one Christian parent. The earliest evidence that Christian parents refrained from having their child baptized immediately after birth is in the middle of the fourth century (Gregory was the first example of this in 360 A.D.). None of these men postponed their baptism because of faith, however. Surely Gregory and John Chrysostom at 30, Jerome at 20, and Basil at 27 (at which ages they were baptized) had reached the "age of reason" and individual faith long before then. They postponed their baptisms on the false premise that they could better assure themselves a place in heaven if they minimized the times they sinned after baptism. None of these men ever challenged the validity of infant baptism.
Baptism in and of itself, of course, is not enough. It must be accompanied by genuine faith. No parents should be allowed to baptize their infant if they themselves have not made an expressed commitment to serve Jesus Christ and raise their child in accordance with God's Word. As adults, we are called to accept the challenge of our baptism and live dedicated lives for Christ. If we do any less, we have rejected Christ and the gift of salvation He has made available to us since our birth.

Going full circle, I now end this article with the question with which I began it: "Should I be baptized again?" Given that our infant baptism is valid, the Scriptural answer to that question is clear: "There is...one Lord, one faith, ONE baptism." (Ephesians 4:4, 5) If you have been baptized once, there is no need to be baptized again. Let us then determine to bear witness to the truth of our baptism by living for Him who died and rose for us.
Copyright: © 1990-1996 Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America


Source of article:

http://www.goarch.org/ourfaith/ourfaith7067
 

a layman's thoughts ~ More on the Old Testament and Anthropomorphism and God

Glory to God


   I have thought so much about the Old Testament and how tough it sounds, especially to our "new" world sentiments today. Many have thought about this, many have quoted about it both believer and non-believers. Statements from Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins come to mind about God being "petty" and an "Ego-Maniac." Others say how could this god be the same God that we see walking around in the New Testament. These are tough questions. But as Fr. Photios once told me... there is no way to understand the Old Testament without the New Testament. Or the New without the Old. The books come together for a reason as one whole revelation.

    In reading the Old Testament we see God as different, sterner more like a totalitarian dictator raising-up fear and trembling. Then we see God walking the earth in the Person of Christ and we see acts of mercy and love unparalleled throughout history. Who is God exactly? Let's attempt to answer this a bit.

   God is spirit. God is love. God is never angry for that would change love into anger and God does not change. God is not jealous for that would change love into jealousy. God does not change. What should God be angry about? Does he lack anything? Does He need anything. Is he lonely that He needs man's love that He should be jealous? Remember that God is love and love by itself is in need of nothing. Love casts away fear. The Godhead is complete in a communion of love for eternity. The Godhead needs nothing. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father; The Father loves the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit loves the Father; The Son loves the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit loves the Son. God is and stands in need or in fear of nothing, no thing, no creature, etc.

   With this understanding comes the teaching style of the Old Testament. The Old Testament does not describe God nor cannot it describe God with human terms. The terms are used to teach, to teach in a human way or even how man sees God, but not how God REALLY IS. For there is no man-made word in the universe that can capture God, except to that which the Spirit can teach intuitively, at the nous level or through experience--- theosis. So if God is complete how could He be jealous? If God is love how can He get angry? Is God like man that He has these emotions? Love and jealousy in the same being is conflict. Love and justice in the same being is conflict, two opposite poles. Surely, is it wise to say these things about God? I think definitely not. If we make God in our image, we make God into an idol or mythology like Zeus, Saturn or the many other gods of man's imagination who were petty or more like man than divine.

   Let's step back in trying to rationalize God, reason Him out, or try to know Him from the Old Testament or from any man made words. Let's instead see Him in the eyes of the Apostles who walked with Him. Even here we can't fully know the divine, but we get a glimpse of what He is like as He walked among us. Only through experience can we know God via the nous (our heart), God's Uncreated energies. Any intellectual way or literal way will be anthropomorphic at best. God can share His 'energies' with whom He pleases at any time, The "Spirit blows where it wills." This is not by man's power or intellectual abilities (his reasoning faculties aimed at understanding God by letters or imagination) but by God's good pleasure. "Not of the letter but of the Spirit.1"

   So God is spirit and is known in spirit. Being there is no word or set of man-made words that can describe God in anyway. We are left to interpret those Old Testament words a bit differently, to see them as didactic, a teaching instrument that aims at a purpose for man so he may begin to know God more fully, but never to derive from the words or manner of words anything but a God of love. Never to let the words shape any framework for God's nature but only to lead men to Him in the way the Old Testament person could understand: remember this is not the words we use today in our world, but it was the choice of the people then and we have to understand those words set within that time-period in history, a warlike world of warrior gods made so by their victories in battle, the crushing of their enemies. Remember in your studies of the Old Testament who the audience was for these words and adjust accordingly. And remember that God transcends any human concept or lexicon of Him, he simply cannot be contained in any earthly form of expression, nor will it ever satisfy. He could not be contained in all the books of the universe even if every word in those books was specifically about Him.


1    (2 Corinthians 3:4-6New King James Version (NKJV))
⁴ And we have such trust through Christ toward God. ⁵ Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, ⁶ who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit;^[a] for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

  
However, when it comes to dealings with mankind and the creation, God does in fact act in very real terms and not just words or metaphor. Man feels God's love or God's anger in real terms but in the Godhead these realities of anger and jealousy do not exist. In the world of man and creation, they are real things. We must be clear that these are not just ways of speaking. We must also not over-emphasize one point of view and error in making fairy-tales of other realities. We can be too one-sided and affirming that one side at the expense of the affirmation of other things. In other words that other affirmation needs also to be affirmed so we do not fall to error as Church history has shown. Man has felt God's anger. It was real. But we must remember that the wrath of God is always for the purpose of correction, advancement in virtue and the goal of man becoming like-God unto eternal life and never for madness or purposeless vengeance. We would say the same to our earthly children about making your earthly father angry, which is true, you can change the state of your earthly father from peace to anger. Here the adjective modifies the noun; however, with God, there is no man-made adjective than can modify God who IS and always will be. But for the sake of pedagogy and the teacher/student dynamic and the history of teaching mankind, God condescends Himself to be spoken of in "human terms" --- but the words are exhausted rather quickly attempting to ascend that which is not ascendable.

...Since at least the time of Anselm's Cur deus homo, Western Christianity has been saddled with the notion that man's sin somehow affects God—it insults His infinite honor and calls forth His wrath. Such anthropomorphic notions are unacceptable to Orthodox theology, however, because they violate the first principle of theology, namely that there is no analogy of being between God and man. God is impassible and unchangeable. He has no pride to wound. Sin, therefore, does not affect God's ability to relate to man (as if God were an upper caste Hindu prevented from coming into contact with an Untouchable); it affects man's ability to relate to God.

the above posted on this blog:
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7389188445839022522#editor/target=post;postID=5390527568632566986;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=20;src=link



The law of non-contradiction by Aristotle does not apply to God, to Father, Son and Holy Spirit being One (unity) and plural (diverse). It has no meaning there. God appears to the creation in what would only appear in contradiction. We must remember that God is beyond all definitions and beyond categorization.

... and the Pseudo-Areopagite, St. Dionysius, in his Mystical Theology, would even say that there is real differentiation in the Godhead itself. On the one hand, God is beyond all change and is perfectly one, but the one is perfectly plural and the plurality is perfectly one. The many is real and the one is real, and in God those contradictions in created order are overcome, because God is not a creature and He is completely different.

We have to affirm both things. On one hand, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, one of the great theologians of our time, quoting Cardinal Newman, a Roman Catholic, said, “Theology is a saying and an unsaying in a positive effect.” You say one thing, and then you negate it by saying something else, and both are true in different contexts.

It is almost like in modern science, when people ask, “Is electricity a wave, or is it a particle?” Well, it is both. Sometimes it is better to speak about it as a wave, and that is truer to what you are trying to talk about, and other times it is better to speak about it as a particle, because it is true to what you are trying to talk about. If you are trying to talk about God in God’s self, then you use all the super-duper-duper apophatic language. God is beyond everything transcendent, unknowable, inconceivable, ineffable, supra-non-knowable, and that is true. But when God acts, God speaks, God creates, God relates to creation, then you have to say that He really acts in such a away that His actions are real. God really does get angry. God really does forgive. God really does show mercy.

quoted from:
http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_wrath_of_god_-_part_2

online source of quote:
http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/darwin_and_christianity_-_part_6


moreover from Thomas Hopko on The Wrath of God part II:
Source:
radio and transcript:
http://ww w.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_wrath_of_god_-_part_2

transcript:

We reflected upon the wrath of God, and we said that the wrath of God is a reality, that the scripture is very clear that God gets angry with us, His wrath is upon us, He is not pleased with us, and He expresses that wrath upon us for the sake of our salvation, for the sake of our good. We said that the wrath of God proceeds from His very love, that God is love, that God loves us, and when you love someone and they do stupid things and foolish things and act wickedly, then it is very appropriate to be angry.
So we have in Scripture, again and again—anyone who would read the Bible cannot fail to see—the wrath of God. In fact, there are two words for it that are used in Scripture. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew text, you have two Greek words, one is orgi and the other is thymos.
Orgi simply means anger, or wrath. Thymos is a word that translates as wrath or anger, but actually, in Platonic literature, that was a quality of human beings called the irascible, the zealous, the fiery, that there is a kind of fiery element, a thymos that is within human beings, and in the Scripture this is applied to God himself, that God has this kind of fiery, we might even say, impassioned, relationship to us that is expressed in wrath, or in anger, or in delight, or in pleasure. These things are spoken about in the bible and they are spoken about very realistically.
Some of the folks who have emailed me about what I had to say about the wrath of God on the radio found some objections to it, particularly in some of the Church Fathers, where you have the teaching that anger and wrath do not really belong to Divinity, as such, that God is perfect, that God is unmoved, that God is impassable, that God cannot be acted upon, and that certainly within the Divinity itself, these kind of qualities have no meaning whatsoever. In fact, they simply do not exist. There is a sense in which that is definitely true, and I think that if we took the Bible and how the Church Fathers interpret the Bible, we would see that within Divinity itself, within the Godhead, within the persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there is no anger, there is no wrath, there is no passion, there are no emotions in a human sense.
But we have to be very careful here, because there is one sense, where folks would say that none of these things exist in God and they are not real for God at all, and they are not even real when God seems to show them to us. They base their idea on a Platonistic or Hellenistic view that a static, impassable, unchangeable, uncaused, pure being is perfection, and is perfection even for God, so that God then, is supreme being, that God is perfectly One, that God is unmoved, that God is impassable, and that comes from the Hellenistic tradition, reflecting philosophically on things, and coming to the conclusion that the perfect being would be immutable, impassable, unchanging, perfectly one, and this led to some very bad results for Christianity.
Namely, it led some people to claim that in the Trinity itself, in the Godhead itself, there is only the one God, and even Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are somehow ways of speaking about the one God who is perfectly one in Himself, that there is only relationship in God, but that the unity of God is so perfectly one that, even St. Augustine said in his book, De Trinitate that we only speak of three persons in the Godhead conventionally. We only speak about that because of the ways revelation speaks to us, but that God, in Himself, is not Trinity at all, He is perfectly one, and that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three modal expressions of the one God who is perfectly, arithmetically one, and so on.
Another bad result of this Hellenistic tradition was to just take all the elements of creation and to take being as opposed to becoming, unity as opposed to multiplicity, unchanging as opposed to change, immutable as opposed to mutable, and then saying God is the being, the one, the unchangeable, the immutable, the impassable, and that is divine perfection.
According to Christianity, following the Bible, that is just plain not true. The Christian view, and it had to be worked out over centuries, and perhaps it was only completely worked out in the 13^th century, 1300 years after Jesus, in the great controversy of St. Gregory Palamas with the West about the reality of the divine energies and the divine actions, which St. Gregory and his confreres, and the Councils that are accepted by the Orthodox Church as true and universally received and accepted, is that the actions and the operations of God toward us are as divine and are as real as anything we can possibly say.
When the Bible speaks about God being angry or being wrathful, or being delighted in us, or grieving over us, or taking pleasure in us, those are realities, when it says that God shows and reveals His glory, His power, His wisdom, His truth, His might, His goodness, His beauty. Those are realities, those are true things. They are not just analogies, they are not just metaphors. They are saying something really true, and the saints have experienced these things. The saints have experienced the love of God, the power of God, the beauty of God. Saints have even experienced the wrath of God. They have experienced God’s chastening upon them. So the claim is that these are real, and that they are as divine as whatever God is in His own divine realm, in His own divine existence and being.
And the tradition of the Church, following the Bible, that speaks about the holiness of God, the incomparability of God, the God who is totally different from anything in heaven and on earth, they would say, and certainly St. Gregory Palamas would say this, I’ve said this on the radio before, that if you say God is, or God is being, even that is somehow not true in relationship to God in God’s self. God reveals Himself to us as existing, but existence is a category that does not, strictly speaking, apply to divinity as such. God is beyond being, He is beyond existence, He is beyond being and becoming, He is beyond change and non-change, He is beyond mutable and immutable.  You cannot say he is immutable and not mutable.  You cannot say he is being and not becoming. God is none of those things. He is completely beyond them all.
You could ask the question, “How can you say this, how do you know this?” The answer would be, “We know this because God has revealed himself to us. God has shown Himself to us. He has acted in our world, and we know His divine actions, and we know these actions are really divine.”
But when we experience these actions, for example, when we experience God’s wrath, or when we know God’s beauty, or when we come to commune in God’s wisdom, and God’s knowledge, and even God’s power, we know that our very experience makes us confess that we know that these are the ways that God reveals himself to us which are truly divine, they are accommodated to us, they are made adequate to us, but they lead us into the conclusion that God Himself, in Himself, is beyond all of these things, that He is none of those things.
Probably, in the tradition of Christianity, one of the most memorable sentences that I can think of in my readings over the last 50 years or so, is a statement of St. Maximus the Confessor. I am sure that St. Maximus would have agreed totally with St. John Chrysostom’s liturgy that we serve in church, that God is ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, but God is also ever-existing and always the same, in the sense that He is not changing, and one day becoming one way, and one day becoming another, and being fickle, but that when you notice incomprehensible, unknowable, inconceivable God, what you know is that God is beyond everything. St. Maximus said, “When it comes to divinity, the best that we can do, the ultimate that we can do is to say that God is supra-non-knowable.” He is even beyond non-knowing. He is not only beyond knowing, He is beyond non-knowing. He is supra-non-knowable, and he can only be supra-non-known. You cannot know God, but you can supra-non-know God.
In other words, you could have this contact with God, this astonishment and awe and wonder, where you say God is even beyond unknowing. He is beyond knowing and unknowing both. God is the supra-non-knowable who can be supra-non-known through an act, as Maximus said, of supra-non-knowing, supra-non-knowledge. That is a quality human beings are capable of, that is, experiencing God. This was beautifully formulated by Dr. Gregory Palamas in the 14th century. All of the fathers would say, we know these things because we experience God, and it is really God that we are experiencing. When we claim to know God by experience, by vision, by reality, for example, in Palamism, the uncreated light of God, we would say that uncreated light is really divine. It is not like human light at all, it is not like created light at all. We call it light, but it is beyond light, because we do not have the words to speak of it, but we would still insist that it is real. The Western tradition, that really was Platonistic, Hellenistic, like Anselm of Canterbury, even like Thomas Aquinas, like the Council of Trent, they said no, these things are not real, that God is uncaused, He is supreme being, He is beyond everything, He is beyond passibility, He is incomprehensible in Himself, but what we have to say about Him is that He is the unmoved mover. He is the uncaused cause. He is the pure unity. There is no plurality, there is no dynamism, there is no action at all in God that is real—you just cannot say that.
As Anselm interpreted, he said every time the bible speaks about wrath, or about anger, or about delight, or about beauty, or about glory, or about wisdom, this is only metaphor. These are just metaphors, these are just analogies, they do not really exist in reality. So, the Barlamites attack the Palamites in the 14^th century by saying, you guys are nuts. You cannot really experience God. You cannot claim that you really know the light, and the beauty, and the glory of God. That is impossible. God cannot do this because God cannot change. God cannot act in that way. He is pure act. He is actos puros, he is pure act. And all this multiplicity is just analogy, or you could possibly say, that is just different ways of speaking about what in reality is one and the same thing.
So, the immutable, impassable God is sometimes experienced by us as love, sometimes as anger, sometimes as beauty, sometimes as power. But these are only our different ways of speaking about something which in and of itself is one and exactly the same thing. They are not really different. The point would be, there is no differentiation in the Godhead at all. There is no action or movement in the Godhead at all, and when we say that there is, we are only speaking in a metaphorical or analogical way.
The Palamites, and Orthodoxy now, as the universal Church, says that is not true. We endorse Palamism and say that St. Gregory Palamas is a saint, and we endorse his interpretation of earlier church fathers, like Maximus, like Gregory the Theologian, and like Gregory of Nyssa, particularly, who was very Hellenistic. Gregory of Nyssa, whom someone who emailed quoted, speaks about God having no anger and no wrath, because He is impassable and Immutable, and anybody who knows theology, at least a little bit, would say, well sure, that is true. God in Himself is beyond all of these things.
You still have to affirm though, that when God acts toward creation and acts in creation, the creation that He made and wants to be in real communion with, He acts toward us in these ways and these ways are real, and they are really divine, and they really come from God, and they do not destroy the unity and the simplicity and the impassability of God. They do not. They are expressions of it, but real expressions of the living God, who is not a Platonistic idea, but is really an I am, is a living God, who acts and breathes and speaks, and the claim is, following the bible, the church fathers would say, ultimately, that these things are real.
A word about the Church Fathers. Not every Church Father says everything absolutely correctly. And a lot of the earlier Church Fathers had to be corrected by later church fathers. For example, when you read about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the earliest patristic literature, it sounds like they do not really believe in the Holy Trinity as being absolutely divine in exactly the same way. They speak of the Son as a lesser God, or a second God. All of that had to be corrected, and it took 400 years to correct it, and even then it was not totally corrected, because there was an argument again about how the Holy Spirit relates to the Father and the Son, and this goes on forever in some sense.
The story is never over, but at the same time, we have to know that that happens. St. Maximus the Confessor, whom we just mentioned, wrote a whole treatise called De Ambigua, On the Ambiguities. He was straightening out the ambiguities in St. Gregory the Theologian. And we know that Gregory the Theologian, himself, was straightening out the ambiguities in the teaching of Basil the Great.
So you have this mutual correction and growth and development in theology through the centuries, and there is a sense in which you could say, this issue of how God can be, on one hand, and in one aspect, in Himself, supra-non-knowable, completely beyond, absolutely transcendent, not like anything in heaven and on earth, that you can only be totally silent in front of, and only be in astonishment and wonder and you cannot speak, and if you would speak about it, as Gregory of Nyssa said, quoting Psalm 116, every man is a liar. What you are saying is just plain not true.
On the other hand, you have God in action, you have God revealing Himself, God showing Himself, God manifesting Himself, God relating to His creation, and He does so in many different forms and in many different ways, and in fact, even Gregory of Nyssa said, every day God appears different to us and in some sense, He really is. There is real multiplicity, real differentiation, and the Pseudo-Areopagite, St. Dionysius, in his Mystical Theology, would even say that there is real differentiation in the Godhead itself. On the one hand, God is beyond all change and is perfectly one, but the one is perfectly plural and the plurality is perfectly one. The many is real and the one is real, and in God those contradictions in created order are overcome, because God is not a creature and He is completely different.
We have to affirm both things. On one hand, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, one of the great theologians of our time, quoting Cardinal Newman, a Roman Catholic, said, “Theology is a saying and an unsaying in a positive effect.” You say one thing, and then you negate it by saying something else, and both are true in different contexts.
It is almost like in modern science, when people ask, “Is electricity a wave, or is it a particle?” Well, it is both. Sometimes it is better to speak about it as a wave, and that is truer to what you are trying to talk about, and other times it is better to speak about it as a particle, because it is true to what you are trying to talk about. If you are trying to talk about God in God’s self, then you use all the super-duper-duper apophatic language. God is beyond everything transcendent, unknowable, inconceivable, ineffable, supra-non-knowable, and that is true. But when God acts, God speaks, God creates, God relates to creation, then you have to say that He really acts in such a away that His actions are real. God really does get angry. God really does forgive. God really does show mercy.
On the one hand, the Bible will say, God has spoken, He will not change His mind, and on the other hand, you see God interacting with people like Hezekiah, where He told him he was going to die, and then He repents of it, and he does not die. Or Jonah, when He tells him to prophecy against the Ninevites, and then He forgives them. That is how a living God acts. We would say, in and of Himself, in Himself, none of this is contradictory.
Of course, what we would really say when we know God through Jesus Christ and in God’s revelation, is that the wrath of God and the anger of God is an anger and wrath that is appropriate to God. It is an anger and wrath that comes out of love, that comes out of truth, that comes out of care for us, and concern that we would be chastened, that we would learn, that we would grow, that we would not be fools. So we would say, yes, there is a real wrath of God and you have to say that it is really and truly real, but you can never say that it is in any way sinful. God even says in the Psalm to human beings, “Be angry, but do not sin” (Psalm 4:4).
Well, that would be a good definition of God. He is angry, but He does not sin. He does not do evil. The anger of God is never evil. God is never evil. It is real. It is chastening. It is for our salvation. It is an expression of love. It is ultimately even overcome in the crucified Christ, whose righteousness removes the wrath of God upon creation, upon humanity. Christ brings a new humanity, a purified, righteous humanity to the world, that we can believe in, and by grace we can participate in. And even if we sin against it and repent, God will forgive us every single time for the sake of Jesus. But at the same time, this wrath of God is the wrath of love, and it is never, ever evil. It is never punitive. It is never cruel. It is never vindictive. It is certainly not sadistic.
I had a friend once who said to me, “You know, Father Tom, in my opinion there are only three possibilities: One is that there is no God and all this is just total nonsense, and everybody is killing each other all over the place, and we all end up cursed and dead and rotten in the tomb, and I can’t accept that. The world is too beautiful, I have a sense of meaning, I can imagine a perfect world, and I can’t believe that all this is just for nothing.” But then he said, “But another possibility is that this world is a play-thing of God, that God is, in fact, a sadist, He is cruel. He lets Tsunamis come and smash all kinds of people. He delights in brimstoning Sodom and Gomorrah. He plays around with people. He lets their kids die.”
I just saw two very moving films. One was about an Ethiopian Christian boy who was going to be killed, but the Ethiopian Jews were being saved by the Jews and taken to Israel, so the Christian mother makes her little boy go with the Jews and he has to pretend that he is a Jew so that he does not lose his life, and it is so sad, I mean when this boy leaves his mother, and he is weeping. 
And then there is another movie about a little boy in Poland who, while hiding under the bed or somewhere, sees Nazi soldiers come in and shoot dead his father and his mother and drag off his 15-year-old sister to rape her, and he has to live with that his whole life. Some people would look at that and say, like Ivan Karamazov, said, “To hell with this world. God is God, but this world is impossible, and if God really made it this way, He is just a sadist, He is cruel, and if He is organizing everything, if He is directing everything, how can you possibly believe in that kind of a God? It looks like nothing means anything, everything is stupid and we are all just suffering for no good reason, and God is making it all happen, if there is a God.”
But then my friend said, there is a third possibility, and that is that God had no choice. If he was going to have a human world, he had to have the suffering and therefore His anger had to come into it; he had to show his wrath toward sinners, and ultimately, he had to act to save the world through Jesus Christ, who takes upon Himself the sin of the world, and assuages the wrath of God by His total righteousness, even in the most horrible situation, when He is forsaken by God and man and hanging dead on the cross.
So either there is no God, or there is a monster God, or there is Christianity. That seems to be the three choices, and unless you are just some spiritualist and say, “Well, the material world and my body means nothing anyway, I have an immortal soul, and it is going to go off into…” and that is Hellenism, that is even Hinduism. It is even, in a sense, Buddhism.
But anybody who would affirm history, and would affirm the material world and would look out the window, like I am looking out now at the beautiful fall colors of the leaves of the trees, and could weep over this Jewish boy who saw his family killed and his sister dragged off, you have to say when you are looking at that, you cannot just believe that all this can happen and, and this little boy has an immortal soul and he will be happy in his soul, and what happened physically and materially to his poor sister and his family didn’t mean anything. That would be absolutely ridiculous.
So the answer is Christ crucified, still. But if you believe in Christ crucified, and therefore you get involved with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the God of Sodom and Gomorrah, the God of the Babylonian captivity, the God of the Bible, then you have to say that this God is the real God., and He is interacting with the real world.
And then his wrath, his anger, his mercy, all these are realities—his joy, his beauty—and we would even say as the Palamites say, that there is a multiplicity of divine actions and energies, all adequately shaped and formed to each individual person on earth, and to each moment in history, each second of time—are real. The experience of God in those conditions is real, and therefore the wrath of God, the anger of God, always an expression of God’s goodness and love and beauty and truth, is never cruel, vindictive, sinful or wicked in any way.
Still, that wrath is absolutely real. So what you have to do is affirm both things. You have to affirm the supra-transcendent God, who is not simply impassable, or undifferentiated, or perfectly one and perfectly unchanging, that would be Hellenism. But you have to affirm the God who is beyond all of those things, who is really supra-non-knowable, beyond them all, and then you have to say, when that God creates a world and reveals Himself to human creatures who have a mind, and who have freedom, and who can understand, and who can see truth, and who are made in the image and likeness of God, then you have to say that when we speak about God toward us, yes, we would say, God cannot be acted upon against His own will, that you cannot harm God, you cannot make God suffer.
But on the other hand, you have to say, in His love for us, God is pained, God is angry, God is sad, and these things are really real, and they have to be accepted as real. The saints who have experienced them, they confess that this is real. When we know God, we know that these things, in fact, are real, and they are true.
We could add one more point here, thinking again about the wrath of God, and insisting, again, that it is an expression of God as good, God as loving, God as ultimately merciful. We can see the wrath as appropriate to God’s love and even as an expression of His love because He cares about us, and even as a tool in His hands to purify us, but we have to see, ultimately, that it all has to be completely and totally solved, we have to be saved from that wrath, and we are, in the crucified Christ.
We can look again at Jesus, and it is very, very important that we do so. When we look at Jesus, we remember that according to the Christian faith, Jesus is revealing God to us in human form. He really is revealing God to us in human form. And here we want to insist again, and I would like to insist on, just because of some of the emails that I have just received, that we really have to take seriously the incarnation, and I am afraid that some of us do not. We are so insistent that Jesus Christ is a divine Logos and He is absolutely divine and that He is God, that we do not believe, really at the same time, that He is really human. And here, again, following the fathers, and especially Cyril of Alexandria and all of them after, we have to say that Jesus’ humanity is as real as His divinity and we have to affirm both. And Jesus really is human.
As some person wrote to me and said, “Well, I can quote some Church Fathers who said Jesus as God was omniscient and He knew everything, so when He didn’t know, it was only kat economia, according to the economy, or for pedagogical purposes, and so on. Well, I would say, be more careful in the reading of the Church Fathers, and read all of the Church Fathers, not just some, and read those who directly, consciously address this particular issue.
For example, Cyril of Alexandria, who himself had to be corrected, was very clear. He would say that, in as much as He is God, Jesus is supra-non-knowable, beyond everything, and His divinity is exactly that of the Father and Spirit, as Nicea and the early Fathers said, those before Cyril.
But Cyril insists on the reality of the incarnation, so that when the Logos becomes flesh and really becomes a human being, then He suffers, He dies even, the famous Theopaschite formula. He hungers, He thirsts, He weeps, He grieves, and He gets angry. He has all the human qualities, and humanity is limited. So He is a Jew and not a gentile, He is a man and not a woman. He lived in the first century, not the 21^st. He knew certain things and did not know other things. He did not know Russian, for example.
You could say, well, as God he knew, as man He didn’t. Well, if you want to say that, fine, and that is the way some of the earlier Fathers spoke, but that had to be explained a lot better, and it is not even explained well enough, in my opinion, to this present day, though people have tried to do that through the centuries.
But there is a truth there. The simplistic truth is, yes, if you are God you know everything, and if you are man, you don’t. And Jesus is both. So in some sense He is omniscient, and in another sense, He is not. And the Fathers would say, in the economia, he is not.
But he really is not. He really is limited. He really is circumscribable. He really is contained. He really is in the body. He really has a human soul. Gregory the theologian fought for that against the Apollinarians. He really has a human will and human freedom. Maximus the Confessor was mutilated for holding that teaching.
So the same way that when we speak about God, when we say certain things about how God is in God’s own self, in God’s own divine realm, and how God is in acts toward us, and both are real, we have to say the same thing about Jesus, that in as much as He is divine, we affirm certain things, and in as much as He is human, we affirm certain things, and we hold together the mystery, and it is a great mystery, but nevertheless it is a truth. And the truth of the matter is, if you really believe in the incarnation, and really believe that Jesus is a real man, and the Council of Chalcedon insists on this.
By the way, speaking about the Council of Chalcedon, following St. Cyril in the Council of Ephesus, the Nestorians’ whole problem was that, they being Hellenistic, said that God is unchanging, and therefore God cannot become a man, even. They denied the reality of the incarnation on the basis of the immutability and impassability of God. So they said, the immutable, impassable, unchanging God can unite Himself to a human person, namely Jesus of Nazareth, but He cannot really become the human person, Jesus of Nazareth. That was rejected as heresy, and it really was heresy because they tried to make a Church on that basis, it wasn’t just a mistake.
And here, by the way, having been accused lately of heresy myself, I would like to say something. You have to be careful if you call someone a heretic. A heretic is a pretty great person who divides the Church and makes up a false church and opposes the true church. That is a heretic. And I would say, I’m not a heretic, that is for sure. I may be dumb. I may be stupid, I may be wrong, I may be mistaken, I may be incorrect, I may not understand things properly, but I’m certainly not a heretic. But I have to try to articulate the mystery, too. And I may not do it right in every case. And neither did any of the Church Fathers, by the way. I don’t want to put myself in their category.
Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that in some of their articulations, they were incorrect, or as my professor Verhovskoy used to say, the holy fathers are not holy spirits, they could be incorrect at times. And the professor used to say, also, that sometimes they are correct, but they are one-sided. He liked that expression, you can be one-sided. What you say may be correct, but if you just affirm it, while not affirming other things, then you deform it.
And that is what people did about God. If they just affirmed that He is one, and uncaused, and unchanging, and immutable, and impassable, and do not also affirm that He can really reveal Himself, and really show Himself, in many diverse forms, like angry, grieving, sad, merciful, then you are affirming one thing, but you are destroying the truth of it, because you are not affirming the other thing that also has to be affirmed.
When we look at Jesus and we affirm that He is both God and man, and that He is revealing divinity through His humanity, when it comes to the issue of wrath, we see that Jesus got angry. There are several places in Holy Scripture where Jesus clearly got angry.
In St. Mark’s Gospel in the third chapter, Jesus is getting angry. This is what it says in St. Mark’s gospel. It said, “He,” Jesus, “entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand, and they watched Him to see whether He, Jesus, would heal him on the Sabbath day, so that they might accuse him” (Mark 3:1-2). You see, they wanted to accuse Jesus. That is very important. They didn’t really want to understand, they just wanted to accuse.
And I am afraid we have a lot of that today in the Church. We don’t really want to understand each other, we just want to accuse each other. I don’t know, we may listen to Ancient Faith Radio to find out what mistakes are being said by the speakers, because we have a tendency and a desire to accuse, rather than to understand—“Oh, that’s not of God, that’s just of the devil.”
But it said they wanted to accuse him. “And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come here.’ And he said to them, ‘Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good, or to do harm, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent.” They couldn’t answer Jesus—they just remained silent.
“And He looked around at them,” and it says, “with anger.” And then it says that he, “grieved at their hardness of heart.”  (it says in Greek—grieving). So Jesus is angered, and he is grieving, at their hardness of heart. And then He says to the man, “stretch out your hand, and He heals him, and the Pharisees go out immediately, hold counsel with the Herodians against Jesus, how to destroy Him, how to put Him to death.” (Mark 3:3-6)
What we want to see here is that, it says He spoke with anger, met orgis, that He spoke, grieving. And we know that Jesus grieved, He wept. He wept over Jerusalem, He wept over Lazarus, He wept in the Gethsemane garden.
We will talk about that again on the radio, Jesus’ weeping. In fact, some mystical writer said once, “God became man in order to weep”—that God, in himself, is beyond weeping, but he himself, in creating a world that He loves, not only gets angry, but he weeps. And Jesus shows the weeping of God in his humanity. He shows the anger of God in His humanity.
And of course, we know how Jesus spoke against the Scribes and the Pharisees and the lawyers and the hypocrites in St. Matthew’s gospel. He says in St. Matthew, ten to twelve times, “Woe to you, woe to you, woe to you.” He calls them all kinds of names. He calls them whitewashed sepulchres and hypocrites and all kinds of terrible things and that could really mean that He was kind of hot. He had a thymos.  A thymos was a zeal, an irascible quality. The claim is that God, Himself, has that quality, vis-à-vis creation, there is nothing for God to be irascible or angry about within the three persons of the Divine Trinity, but there is plenty for Him to be angry and irascible and wrathful about relative to creation, especially because He loves us.
Then you have the quintessential example of Jesus’ anger when He takes a whip, goes into the temple, knocks over all the tables of the money-changers, and with His whip, chases them out and says, “This temple is supposed to be holy, a place of worshipping God, and you make it a place of business and commerce” (e.g. Matthew 21:12). So He got really angry.
We know that in Jesus’ anger He never sinned. He didn’t sin. He didn’t do anything wrong. And he wasn’t just beating up on people for fun. And he wasn’t doing it because he enjoyed sadistically causing them pain. And he certainly didn’t do it just to be punitive and to punish them. Why did he do it? He did it to teach. He did it to show. He did it to reveal God’s will. He did it so that we would be purified, so that we would learn, that we would change.
The wrath of God is an instrument in his hands for our salvation, for our good. That is how Christians would understand the wrath of God. And it is absolutely appropriate, it is absolutely necessary. If God did not get angry against wickedness, what kind of God would He be? We would even accuse a human being, if they saw horrible wickedness, if they saw soldiers killing a little boy’s parents and dragging off his sister to rape her, if you weren’t angry and if you weren’t sad, there would really be something wrong with you, it would just be impossible. And we feel that way in human reality, and so we understand the same thing relative to God.
But our issue for today is, is the wrath real? Is the anger real? And are the other actions of God described in holy scripture and experienced by saints, for example when Moses says that God’s anger was kindled against him—was that really real? Or was just something happening that Moses was imagining but wasn’t really coming from God? We would say, no. So what we want to affirm today is that all the actions of God, all the qualities of God that we know in His action toward us, that we know through Jesus, even through the humanity of Jesus, are applicable to God. So orgi and thymos, anger and wrath, really belong to God. They are a part of divinity.
Within the divinity they are never expressed, because there is no need for them to be expressed. What kind of anger or wrath would exist between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit? But once God creates a world knowing that it would be evil and wicked, and knowing that you have all the horrible things that we have among humanity, then you can say that it is totally fitting, proper, and befitting the very nature of God, as far as we know God, that He would act this way.
So we could even say that the wrath of God is a reality and, of course, the final point always has to be, that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, who is really God, Himself, became a real, actual human being. And in his humanity, he revealed God and he expressed anger and wrath, and sadness, and all those things.
But we also want to say that Jesus of Nazareth, because of his righteousness, because he does not get God angry at him at all, because there is no reason whatsoever, for God, His father, to show any kind of wrath or anger toward Jesus in any way—just the opposite: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” it says in Scripture (Matthew 17:5). And God is well pleased in His Son, Jesus, because the Son takes upon Himself the sin of the world, and assuages divine wrath and redeems humanity and saves creation, so that in the end, in the age to come, we would definitely say the following:
The wrath of God is removed from all of humanity for the sake of Jesus, and for those who believe in that, and who love it, and who pray to God to have it be for them, they are saved and redeemed and God’s wrath is off them. And those who do not accept it, do not want it, in some sense, the wrath of God remains upon them. But even those people are forgiven and mercy is shown on them because of Jesus. And therefore, their torment, their suffering, is not from the wrath of God, as much as it is from the mercy of God, for it is from the wrath of God that God, Himself, wanted to overcome by His own mercy, you might say.
This is not contradiction within God, this is just the way reality is and the way the truth is, and God is truth. Christ is the truth. This is the truth. So what we want to affirm more than anything today, and there are plenty of things to affirm, but today we really want to affirm both things, that in Himself, in what God is we cannot even imagine, but when God reveals Himself to us, we know that what He is in Himself is beyond anything in the created order, but what we want to affirm, as well, is that when He relates to the created order, his actions toward us are real. And among those many, countless actions and operations and revelations of God toward creatures as a whole, and toward each individual human being, and even each bird, each rock, each everything in creation, each moment of time, that those actions of God are real, and among those actions, at certain times, is the expression of divine anger, and divine wrath.

Glory to the Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. With the intercession prayer of the Theotokos, St. Peter, St. Demetrios myrrh streaming, St. Paisios of the holy mountain and all the Saints. And to a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ to life eternal. Amen.

Once again thanks to:
The Church Fathers
Fr. Photios
Dr. Clark Carlton
Jordan Bajis
Lawrence Janic
and others I have forgotten... please forgive me.

Quote by Nigerian Proverb

However far the stream flows, it never forgets its source.

Nigerian Proverb

Quote by Albert Einstein

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

 

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Papal Reformation and the Great Schism: III

Welcome back. In the previous segment of this episode on papal reformation and the Great Schism, I discussed the papal reformation of Pope Leo IX. Leo was the most ambitious pope to reign for two centuries, since the time of Nicholas I in the ninth century, and his pontificate gave expression to the desire for many in Western Christendom to see an end to simony, the sale of Church offices, and what was called Nicolaitism, the continued practice of clerical marriage. Traveling throughout the West, Leo had convened synods where his reforming policies were enacted, but in the summer of 1053 the papal reformation was suddenly and unexpectedly called into question. Leo IX decided to take up arms against the Normans of southern Italy, and in the battle of Civitate that followed, his entire army was defeated and he himself, the pope of Rome, was taken prisoner. By the end of 1053, he was held as a prisoner in the city of Benevento, unable to continue his reforming travels throughout Western Christendom.
And it was exactly at this moment that a new challenge to the papal reformation appeared before Pope Leo’s mind, and this challenge came not from the West but from the East. In this final segment of the episode, I would like to turn to the events that came to be known as the Great Schism of 1054. In order to do that, it would be valuable to review some of the controversies that existed between Rome and Constantinople which would play out in the confrontation of that year.
One was jurisdictional. There was a jurisdictional controversy connected to relations between Rome and Constantinople, relations that were highlighted by Leo’s policy in southern Italy. What was the jurisdictional controversy? Well, it stretched all the way back to the beginnings of Church history. Rome and Constantinople had both developed distinct understandings of jurisdictional relations. Rome had come to identify with St. Peter who, of course, settled in Rome and died there as a martyr in the first century, though he had also spent time at Antioch, though no patriarchs of Antioch had historically made the claims that the popes would later on.
Well, Peter, who died in Rome, was seen as being one of the very earliest leaders of the Roman Church and provided it with a status of primacy in relationship to other centers of Church administration. Peter himself, of course, had been first among the apostles. One of the gospels lists all of the apostles, and then the author comes to Peter and states, “And then there was Peter, and Peter was first,” “primus” in Latin. Primacy comes from that word. So there was a kind of Petrine primacy that was visible in the New Testament, but nowhere is that primacy defined in a jurisdictional sense; nowhere does Peter clearly exercise any kind of authority over other apostles.
As a matter of fact, the only model of apostolic authority that’s really offered in the New Testament is that found in Acts 15, when a council of the apostles is held in Jerusalem. This principle, which becomes the dominant principle in the East, especially at Constantinople, is often called conciliarity, and in Acts 15 all the apostles come together and they make a decision about a heresy, something troubling the Church, the practice of circumcision, and they resolve, all of them weighing in, Paul included, but also Peter, who speaks against the requirement of circumcision there, they all weigh in and agree that circumcision is not required. The apostle who stands up to issue their statement, significantly, is not Peter, who was first among the apostles, but James, who seems to have exercised some sort of jurisdictional authority at the Church in Jerusalem at this time.
So Petrine primacy was certainly in the New Testament record, but it was never defined. Peter was never shown to actually exercise authority over the other apostles. Even the famous statement where Peter answers Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” correctly in Matthew 16, even at that point when Peter receives the keys to the kingdom and [is] told that what he binds and looses will be loosed accordingly in heaven, well, the same authority is given to all the apostles in John’s gospel, chapter 20, when Jesus breathes on all of the apostles. So Petrine primacy was there, but never defined; conciliarity was there and was described or defined in the New Testament.
But the fact is that in the life of the early Church, as the centuries passed, Rome was always assigned a primacy, being first among all the other centers of Church life, and this primacy consisted both of honor, namely that he was, because he was the descendent of Peter, first among the others, and also administrative centrality: Rome simply was, for three centuries, the capital of the empire in which the early Church grew and flourished. When Constantinople was founded, known as “New Rome,” it was assigned a status similar to Rome, at least by Eastern Christians at such Ecumenical Councils as Chalcedon. New Rome, Constantinople, was seen to be virtually equal to old Rome in its authority, though this was contested by such Church leaders as St. Leo the Great.
Then finally, in terms of this kind of history of jurisdictional tension or controversy, there formed by the fourth century a group of five patriarchs in the Church known as the Pentarchy, the rule of five, and this included Rome first, Constantinople second, and then the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Significantly in the time of Pope Nicholas I in the ninth century, this understanding, so cherished in the East, was repudiated when Nicholas I rejected, probably on very sound historical grounds, that any apostle had actually founded Constantinople, the Church there, and that furthermore, since the other three Eastern patriarchates—Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—had all fallen under Arab and therefore Muslim domination, Nicholas I claimed that Rome was the only so-called apostolic see that was left in the jurisdictional life of the universal Church.
So there was, in other words, a kind of legacy, then, of East-West estrangement that was connected to jurisdictional controversies. Another important controversy that affected the outcome of Pope Leo IX’s Latinization of southern Italy in the eleventh century was an ecumenical controversy, that is to say, a controversy over the title in Greek “ecumenical,” which can be translated either as “pertaining to the civilized or inhabited earth,” as it literally means in the Greek language from which it comes or, in Latin translation, as having relevance for the universal Church, “ecumenical” sometimes being translated as “universal.”
Well, the title “Ecumenical” first became an issue in the sixth century, when the patriarch of Constantinople, John the Faster, declared himself to be “Ecumenical Patriarch.” This title was translated as “Universal Patriarch” into Latin, and was immediately challenged by Rome, whose pope at this time was St. Gregory the Great. Interestingly, we just commemorated Gregory the Great yesterday on the calendar of the Orthodox Church. I have a son named Gregory who’s named after him, so I take note of these things.
In any event, Gregory the Great objected to John the Faster’s use of the title, noting that Peter himself was never called a “universal apostle,” so how could any of the successors to the apostles claim to be a “universal apostle”? It’s quite interesting in this lively debate between the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople in the sixth century that St. Gregory the Great’s corollary to this argument was that any universal title should be rejected. He actually even rejected the title of “Universal Pope” for himself when one of the other patriarchs of the East, Patriarch Evlogius of Alexandria, called him that, and I can quote Gregory the Great whose statement about this is quoted by John Meyendorff in a book called Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450-680 AD, and this is what Gregory said, writing to Patriarch Evlogius about what he considers to be the unacceptable title of “Universal Patriarch” and “Universal Pope.”

I beg you (Gregory wrote), never let me hear that word again, for I know who you are and who I am. In position you are my brother, in character my father. I gave therefore no commands but only endeavored to point out what I thought was desirable. I said you ought not to use a title such as “Universal Bishop” in writing either to me or to anyone else, yet now in your last letter notwithstanding my prohibition, you have addressed me by the proud title of “Universal Pope.” I beg Your Holiness, whom I love so well—(It’s so beautiful how Gregory writes there, so gently)—not to do this again. (Very stern as well, right?)
I do not consider that anything is an honor to me by which my brethren lose the honor that is their due. My honor is the honor of the universal Church. My honor is the united strength of my brethren. Then and then only am I truly honored when no one is denied the honor which is justly his, but if Your Holiness calls me “Universal Pope,” you deny that you are yourself that which you say I am universally. God forbid! Far from us be the titles which inflate men’s pride and deal a wound to charity.

So a very beautiful and very powerful corollary is drawn there by St. Gregory of Rome, pope in the late sixth, early seventh century, in reaction to claims about universal jurisdiction by any single leader, patriarch, pope, or otherwise, of the Church.
So that was a kind of controversy over the title of “Ecumenical” and the status of “Universal.” And then one final third controversy that came into play when Leo IX began to Latinize southern Italy was the controversy more recent of the filioque. Of course, I reviewed this controversy in the episode entitled “Frankish Christendom and East-West Estrangement.” The patriarchs of Constantinople, along with their other Eastern patriarchs, steadfastly and consistently rejected the interpolation of the word filioque into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and were joined by the popes of Rome in this much of the time. Leo III had made silver shields on which the Creed, without the filioque, was inscribed and placed in St. Peter’s Basilica in the early ninth century. Later in the same century, Pope John VIII had likewise resisted the interpolation of the Creed and sent delegates to Constantinople who met at the Fourth Council of Constantinople in 879-880, known sometimes as the Eighth Ecumenical Council by some Orthodox authorities.
By the early eleventh century, as we saw, the papacy finally admitted the use of the filioque in the Creed, and this can be dated to 1014, when Emperor Henry II was crowned by the pope, Benedict VIII, in St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Creed thereafter included the filioque. That aggravated tremendously the relationship between Rome and Constantinople. Even a few years before that event, the popes of Rome had begun using the filioque when writing to the patriarchs of Constantinople, and that provoked, in the year 1009, a decision by the patriarch of Constantinople to remove the pope’s name from the diptychs, and that is the liturgical list of patriarchs throughout the Church that Constantinople recognizes. This removal of the pope from the diptychs did not represent a schism; there was still sacramental union East and West, but it showed that the patriarchs of the East were increasingly frustrated with the papacy’s decision to add to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
So that brings us, then, to the case of Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who was patriarch of Constantinople from 1043 to 1059, a contemporary of Leo IX of Rome and his counter-part in the East during the event known as the Great Schism of 1054. The first thing to say about Michael Cerularius was that he had a very remarkable character. He was Leo’s equal in ambition for reforming the Church. He in fact had undertaken efforts to reform the Armenian Church in the East that was partially incorporated into the Byzantine Church as a result of the expansion of the Byzantine Empire to the East. He proved to be Leo’s equal in ambition, but Humbert’s equal—Humbert being Leo’s papal advisor—in disdain for others and rudeness and temperament.
And when he, Michael, learned of Leo’s decision to begin Latinizing the Greek churches of southern Italy, he retaliated by Hellenizing the Latin churches in the Greek East. There were a number of Latin churches in Constantinople, and in the year 1052, Michael ordered the closing of those Latin churches in Constantinople as an act of retaliation against Pope Leo and his policy of Latinizing the Greek churches of southern Italy. He also commissioned a letter to be written to Leo IX by an associate bishop of his, Leo of Ochrid, attacking the Latin practices that were behind Leo’s Latinization. These practices included the introduction of unleavened bread, the origin of which I discussed in an earlier episode; fasting on Saturdays; and the exclusion of the “Alleluia” during Lent. Furthermore, Patriarch Michael, never one to show sensitivity toward other bishops, even the very pope of Rome himself, revived the title of “Ecumenical Patriarch.”
How would Pope Leo IX respond to this provocation? Leo’s papal reformation had hinged upon the conviction that the pope of Rome is the supreme head of the universal Church. Such had been the statement made at the Council of Rheims, the very year Leo came to power. Now, with Patriarch Michael of Constantinople reviving the title of “Ecumenical Patriarch,” translated into Leo’s Latin as “Universal Patrariarch”—and by the way, in his captivity, Leo actually undertook lessons in the Greek language, but historians think that he couldn’t possibly have advanced far enough really in just a few months to grasp the distinctions between the Greek “ecumenical” and the Latin “universal”—so probably he read the word exactly as his predecessor, Pope Gregory the Great, had read it. Like Gregory the Great, he rejected Constantinople’s right to use the title “Ecumenical,” but unlike Gregory, he now asserted Rome’s right to use the title “Ecumenical” or “Universal.”
And how could the papal reformation continue in the face of such a challenge? Enter Cardinal Humbert. Humbert had been promoted at the papal court in the first year of Leo’s pontificate and had become Leo’s leading advisor. He had been elevated to the cardinalate by Leo in 1051 and appointed papal secretary in 1053. He was an uncompromising advocate for papal supremacy over the entire universal Church. I can quote here an author named Tom Holland who wrote a book called The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West who writes the following about Humbert and his character and his vision of papal supremacy:

“The royal priesthood of the holy Roman See constitutes an empire both heavenly and earthly.” This vaunting claim (and he was quoting here Humbert) was made by a man renowned not for excitability but rather for his emotionless, indeed chilly, powers of reasoning. Humbert of Moyenmoutier was a monk from the same region of Lorraine in which Leo had served as a bishop, and the two men had long been confidants, summoned to accompany the pope to the Lateran (that’s the palace in Rome where the pope worked). The haughty and brilliant Humbert had soon emerged as his effective number two. Boldly he set about pushing Leo’s claims to leadership of the Church to ever more potent extremes. Stitching together musty precedents with a lawyerly dexterity, the Donation of Constantine not the least, Humbert found himself able to demonstrate with great conviction a most momentous conclusion: that the papacy had an ancient entitlement to rule the entire Christian world (all of Christendom).
Yet even that was not the limit of where his logic led him. For such is the reverence among Christians for the holder of the apostolic office of Rome, Humbert coolly insisted, that they preferred to receive the holy commandments and the traditions of their faith from the mouth of the head of the Church rather than from the Holy Scriptures or the writings of the Fathers. Here was justification in effect not merely for papal weight-throwing but for permanent revolution.

In this quote of Humbert which includes a statement that the pope of Rome actually has authority at least equal to if not preferred over the Scriptures and the Fathers—those are his words—listeners may hear an echo of the very thinking that accompanied arguments by Frankish theologians in the ninth century that the papacy of Rome had an actual right to alter the Creed, to add to it in the case of the filioque, by virtue of the fact that Rome had a supreme relationship to other patriarchates of the Church, of the universal Church, so that even Ecumenical Councils were not equal to the authority of Rome in making decisions about the content of the Creed.
Listeners will recall that it was a Frankish theologian named Ratramnus of Corbie whom I discussed in an earlier episode who actually asserted at the very commission of Pope Nicholas I, who broke communion with Patriarch Photius in the ninth century, Ratramnus actually asserted on behalf of Pope Nicholas I that just as the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381 had had the authority, as he put it, the right to add the clauses that it did to the Nicene Creed, so also did the pope of Rome, for, as Ratramnus argued, this same right was given to the Romans.
And, in fact, Cardinal Humbert asserted that the interpolation of the filioque in the Creed, which, as we know, dated to just about a generation earlier, 1014—of course, this time we’re talking about right now, Leo IX’s captivity is 1053—1014, just a generation earlier, and only then had the filioque been adopted by the papacy at Rome, and Humbert, though this had been done very recently, asserted that it was legitimate insofar as it was the decision of the universal pontiff, the pope of Rome. And that, he thought, settled it.
So Humbert was committed to the principle of papal supremacy, and that conviction now dominated what was left of the papacy of Leo IX. As papal administrator during Leo’s confinement, Humbert was given great authority to direct the affairs of the papacy. And it was he, Humbert, who received Bishop Leo’s letter, commissioned by Patriarch Michael Cerularius, during a tour of southern Italy in 1053. And he translated this letter, and his translation of this letter for the pope exaggerated further its uncompromising tone. Michael himself was, like Humbert, a very uncompromising person, and Humbert only magnified this in the translation he presented to the pope.
So Leo IX, languishing in his captivity, languishing as he was as a prisoner of war, decided to issue an ultimatum to Patriarch Michael Cerularius. In 1053 he wrote letters to Michael that asserted the superiority of Latin practices when they differ from Greek ones. He was probably ignorant of the fact that unleavened bread and the use of the filioque were in fact recent Western innovations, but nevertheless he asserted their superiority over the use of leavened bread and the absence of the filioque in the East. Leo also asserted papal supremacy, very much like how Humbert had framed it. And emphatically, in his letter to Michael Cerularius, Leo cited the Donation of Constantine. This is the very first known use of the Donation of Constantine to assert papal supremacy in history.
Having written these letters to Michael, Leo dispatched Humbert to Constantinople, ordering him to compose and to deliver there his ultimatum to Patriarch Michael Cerularius, early in the following year. And then, with Humbert’s embassy to Constantinople having departed Rome, in April 1054, Pope Leo IX died.
So we come finally to the event known as the Schism of 1054. There had been earlier excommunications between Rome and Constantinople in the history of the Church. Listeners will recall the Acacian Schism and the Nicolaitan, or known in the West as the Photian, Schism, but these were always healed. The Schism of 1054 was never healed.
In April 1054, the embassy of Cardinal Humbert arrived in Constantinople. It included not only Humbert but Frederick of Lorraine, who would become Pope Stephen IX later on. Arriving there, Humbert presented a letter that he had been commissioned to compose on behalf of the pope, a letter to Michael Cerularius. This letter asserted papal supremacy; it rejected the legitimacy of the title of “Ecumenical Patriarch” for Michael; and it defended Latin liturgical practices as being superior to Greek ones. Humbert, interestingly, also presented a letter to the emperor of Byzantium, Constantine Monomachos—he ruled from 1042 to 1055—in which he, Humbert, challenged the legitimacy of Michael as patriarch.
It is significant that this embassy, within days of arriving in Constantinople, lacked any canonical or legal legitimacy. It had become null and void as a result of Leo IX’s death. Nevertheless, Humbert, driven as he was to fulfill Leo IX’s commission, continued the embassy’s work. We know for sure that he knew of Leo IX’s death—[it] had been reported to him immediately—but he ignored it. It’s also interesting that the new pope, Victor II back in the West, was unaware of the details of the embassy as it was playing out in Constantinople and the letters that were being composed there on behalf of the pope. He may not even have known of the embassy’s very existence.
But what Cardinal Humbert found in Constantinople was a very confusing situation. On the one hand, Emperor Constantine Monomachos welcomed him and gave him a very warm reception in the capital. Michael, predictably and obnoxiously, refused even to meet him, and simply ignored his presence there. Patriarch Michael kept Humbert and the embassy waiting for many days, which was a great insult to their dignity as legates of the pope of Rome.
As the days advanced and Humbert’s temper grew more and more sour, a monk from the Studion Monastery in the capital (a monastery known for its long history of supporting the papacy, often against the heretical tendencies of not only the emperors of the East but also patriarchs who supported them), named Nicetas Stethatus composed a letter to Humbert which sought to soften and elaborate Constantinople’s concerns with Leo’s policy of Latinization, but in this letter written by Nicetas Stethatus, the same criticisms of Latin practices from a Greek point of view were repeated. Humbert’s response to it, rather than being placated or assuaged, was contempt and fury. He translated Nicetas’s second name, Stethatus, into Pectoratus, which means a “beast that crawls on its belly,” and he declared that the monk must not have come from a monastery but a brothel.
So having rejected any grounds for a compromise with this limited effort at compromise with Monk Nicetas Stethatus, Humbert continued to await Michael’s response, but sadly it never came. Patriarch Michael Cerularius himself was in no mood for charity. Michael continued to ignore the presence of Humbert, so finally Humbert had had enough. On July 16, in the year 1054, he organized a final confrontation with the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, at none other than the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, and just as the clergy were preparing for the Divine Liturgy, Cardinal Humbert marched into the church, up to the altar table, and hurled down upon it, the very altar table of Hagia Sophia itself, a papal bull of excommunication. He turned, and he marched out of the cathedral.
He was chased by a Greek deacon who pleaded with him at the entrance to reconsider, telling him that such an act may have unexpected, unintended consequences and may be very difficult in the future to heal. Nevertheless, Humbert was unmoved by the deacon’s pleas and appeals to the principle of charity, and, shaking the dust from his feet, in allusion to Christ’s orders to the apostles to turn their back on cities that refused to accept the Gospel, Cardinal Humbert and his entourage returned to Rome.
Join me next time, when I begin a new episode in the rise and fall of Christendom by exploring the consequences of this event, what might be called Eastern Christendom’s and Western Christendom’s parting of the ways, or, how the excommunication of 1054 became great.


Thanks to Source:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/paradiseutopia/papal_reformation_and_the_great_schism_iii