July 3, 2009
As I noted above in Three Strange Days the Lutheran radio program, Issues, Etc. had a three day series of programs on Eastern Orthodoxy now about a month ago. Here I wish to go through the programs and address the arguments given by David Jay Webber and Todd Wilken. The programs are divided up into, Orthodoxy: Strength and Weaknesses, Orthodoxy Today, and The Pelagian Controversy.
In the first broadcast that I heard, Strength and Weaknesses there is the usual attempt to tar Orthodoxy with something very much alien to it, namely the Charismatic movement. The criticism made by Webber is that Charismatics and the Orthodox go to worship for the same thing, namely the attainment of a mystical experience rather than to be slain by the law and revived by the gospel. What constitutes “mystical” or “experience is really left undefined. Consequently it is very easy to mash these two bodies together. The term “mystical” is deployed to connote an experience that is irrational or contrary to reason and that the goal is some kind of absorption into God and a loss of one’s identity. The implication is that Orthodoxy and the Charismatics are modern Schwermers and are really peddling Buddhism in Christian garb.
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Augustine, Christology, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheranism, Original Sin, Person and Nature, Recapitulation, The Incarnation, Theosis/Deification | 
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Posted by Perry Robinson
July 3, 2009
For three strange days a few weeks ago (June 1-3) I listened to a Lutheran broadcast on Issues, Etc. about Eastern Orthodoxy. The person chosen for the broadcast was David Jay Webber, a Lutheran minister who has spent some time in Russian-Slav world, along with the host Todd Wilken.
Conservative Lutherans continue to blast Orthodoxy with caricature, half truths and material deployed without sufficient explanation and designed to shock the non-Orthodox, specifically into the conclusion that the Orthodox are barely Christian, if at all. Unfortunately this program was no exception. I have gone through the programs in a separate post above. Here I use some space to give some advice to all of the Lutheran critics.
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7 Comments | 
Eastern Orthodox, Lutheranism, Protestant | 
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Posted by Perry Robinson
June 13, 2009
Often in discussions of the Filioque clause, it is pointed out by Catholics that Rome does not require Eastern Catholics to recite the clause. From this it is either argued directly or implied that Rome takes a more tolerant and somewhat charitable position in contradistinction to the Orthodox who do not permit its recitation at all. (Adrian Fortescue exemplifies this in his Rome and Constantinople, 23)
But this is not in fact the case. Rome has directly imposed the recitation of the Filioque on Eastern Catholics and attempted to do so with the Orthodox and the Orientals on a good number of occasions.
Pope Nicholas III for example imposed the recitation of the Filioque as did Martin IV and Nicholas IV. Eugenius IV imposed the Filioque on Armenians when they were received by Rome. When Callistus III sent Simon, O.P. to Crete as an Inquisitor he bid him to make sure that the Greeks recited the Filioque. Even Eastern churches in traditionally Latin geographical locations have been required to employ the Filioque. (See Allatae Sunt, sec. 30-31)
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9 Comments | 
Eastern Orthodox, Filioque, Papacy | 
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Posted by Perry Robinson
May 13, 2009
“The Eastern Church was held by the fathers of the English Reformation in respectful veneration. The Book of Common Prayer bears traces of the influence of Eastern liturgies. The Thirty-Nine Articles, while unhesitatingly affirming that the Churches of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch and Rome have erred, expressly omitted any such allusion to the Church of Constantinople. The Apology of the Church of England constantly refers to Eastern practice and doctrine, in refutation of the assertions of the Bishop of Rome that is the head of the Church or that he and the clergy and laity under his rule alone form the Holy Catholic Church, or that communion with the See of Rome is essential to the unity of the church.
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5 Comments | Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Papacy, Protestant | Permalink
Posted by Perry Robinson
May 6, 2009
Fr. Jean Miguel Garrigues has an interesting article on Latin Trinitarianism relative to the Filioque. Here are some sections that I thought expressed well a major problem. Hat Tip to Bekkos.
The Arian crisis and the reaction of the orthodox fathers would not fundamentally change the Latin theology of the procession. In the East, Arianism, in its radical version with Eunomius, in fact quickly situated its denial of trinitarian consubstantiality on the metaphysical level of the Godhead; marked by Neoplatonic theories of hierarchical participation, Eunomius postulated that any multiplicity of divine persons could only be possible under the form of subordinated participation. That obliged the Cappadocian fathers to confess in God one principle of personal multiplicity, irreducible to any order of essence: the hypostasis. In the East, the natural theology of Eunomius obliged the Cappadocian fathers to profess, in all its irreducibility, an authentic theologia of the Living and Threefold God distinguished from all order of essence, even from that of the economy. But at the same moment the Latin fathers were running up against a more unpolished, less metaphysical Arianism, which was content to deny the divinity of Jesus and of the Spirit in considering them concretely in their economic mission upon the earth. For the Latin fathers, therefore, it was not an issue of defending the possibility of a plurality of persons within a unique divine essence, but of showing that the consubstantial procession of the Son and of the Spirit was prolonged even at the point where they “left the Father” in order to come on their mission into the world. Not needing to confront Eunomius’s philosophical Arianism, the Latin fathers were able to continue their deepening trinitarian reflection in continuity with the economic theology of their third century predecessors. For them, it was a matter of showing that the mission of the Son and of the Spirit “outside the Father” is rooted in the order of their consubstantial procession from him, an order which is revealed in the economy. In this task, they were aided by an assimilation of vocabulary between the verbs proerkhomai (Jn 8:42) and ekporeusthai (Jn 15:26) — the most ancient translations of the Gospels and, following them, St. Jerome’s Vulgate translate these two different Greek verbs by a single Latin verb: procedere…
St. Hilary, nevertheless, influenced by the Eastern notion of ekporeusis (he wrote book VIII of De Trinitate in exile in the East) presents a distinction between the procession of the Spirit from the Father (Jn 15:26) and his reception of divinity in the Son who holds this from the Father (Jn 16:14-15). Evidently reserving the verb procedere (in the sense of ekporeusthai) to signify the relation of the Holy Spirit with the Father alone, he nevertheless sees the Holy Spirit as a manifestation of the full trinitarian consubstantiality which he receives from the Father and the Son:
“‘All that the Father has is mine; that is why I told you, “The Spirit will receive from what is mine and will announce it to you” (Jn 16:15). He receives, then, from the Son, he who is sent by him and who proceeds from the Father. And I ask if it is the same thing to receive from the Son and to proceed from the Father. If one thinks there is a difference between receiving from the Son and proceeding from the Father, it is certain, contrariwise, that it is one and the same thing to receive from the Son and to receive from the Father…” (De Trinitate, VIII, 20; PL 10, 251A).
Leaving open the possibility of a specific sense of the procession of the Holy Spirit as ekporeusis from the unique personal principle of the Father, St. Hilary directs his attention above all to the Spirit’s reception of divinity from the Father and the Son. Under this more scriptural term of “reception,” he takes up again, as his own, all the teaching of early Latin tradition concerning the Holy Spirit’s consubstantial procession as seal of the divine plenitude.
“The Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father, and the Holy Spirit receives from both of them (accipiat ab utroque), given the fact that the Spirit expresses the inviolable unity of this Holy Trinity” (PL 10, 656B).
Unfortunately, St. Hilary’s distinction between procession and reception was too hesitant to have had a decisive influence upon a Latin tradition which, for more than a century, had already fixed the sense of processio as derivation of the triune consubstantiality from the paternal source. It was seen above that St. Ambrose of Milan took up again St. Hilary’s accepit ab utroque (receives from both) in formulating this as a Patre et Filio procedit (proceeds from the Father and the Son)…
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15 Comments | Augustine, Filioque, Person and Nature, Trinity | Permalink
Posted by Perry Robinson
April 27, 2009
“As with St. Ireneaus, there is an ecclesiological and sacramental dimension to the doctrine of Recapitulation. Baptism is an essential component of the mystery and for the spiritual life, since the believer must recapitulate that which Christ Himself fulfilled and repeated in His own Recapitulation. As was the case with Sts. Ireneaus and Athanasius, one cannot separate the divine and invisible nature and therefore one cannot separate water and the Spirit into two separate baptisms or events, as this would be a kind of sacramental Nestorianism.
Ftnt. 37 This point cannot be lingered over too long, since many Evangelical Christians make just such a separation. For the Fathers, such a separation always indicates a distorted and incorrect understanding of the Incarnation. It is on the christological basis of recapitulation that infants are baptized, since not to baptize them until they reach the ‘age of reason’ or ‘accountability’ implies that communion between God and man is impossible at this stage of life. If this principle were pressed into the Incarnatin itself, it would mean that Christ only became God subsequently to His conception. Likewise, the Church’s condemnation of abortion is rooted in the recapitulational principle, since this stage of human life was united indivisibly and unconfusedly with God the Word. It is therefore contradictory to maintain at one and the same time that infants cannot be baptized, and yet to argue against abortion on the basis of an abstract principle of the ’sanctity of life’ divorced from its Christological basis.“
Joseph P. Farrell, Introduction, The Disputation with Pyrrus of our Father among the Saints Maximus the Confessor, p. xvi.
57 Comments | Christology, Farrell, Maximus the Confessor, Nestorianism, Person and Nature, Recapitulation, The Incarnation | Permalink
Posted by Perry Robinson
April 17, 2009
“He who clothed Himself with light as with a garment, stood naked at the judgment; and received blows on His Cheeks from the hands which He had fashioned. When the lawless people nailed the Lord of glory to the Cross, then the veil of the temple was rent, and the sun went dark, unable to endure the spectacle of God blasphemed, before Whom all the universe trembles. Him let us worship.
10th Antiphon
2 Comments | Atonement | Permalink
Posted by Perry Robinson
April 12, 2009
Turretinfanhas taken some shots at some Catholic apologist regarding icons and John of Damascus. I don’t know this particular Catholic apologist andI am not particularly interested to know or how legitimate his particular arguments may or may not be. What I do find worth noting is Turretinfan’s arguments defending the heresy of iconoclasm by proping up the iconoclast council of Hieria(754) as somehow out manning John of Damascus. As an aside, I highly recommend Amrosios Giakalis’, Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council, Revised Ed.Brill, 2005. It is a very short book and quite expensive, but it is probably one of the best pieces of secondary literature I have to date come across. It is a good one stop shopping point for reading on the subject. What follows are some of my notes.
Eucharist as the only acceptable form or figure. What is at play here is the notion of a figure. Christ uses lots of images for himself in the Gospels-Vine, lamb, Son, etc. so strictly speaking the Eucharist isn’t the only acceptable image. What is important though is the notion of a figure that the iconoclasts are using. They are averse to any created “shape” and it is precisely because they take the Eucharist to transcend shape or created form that they deem it acceptable. Read the rest of this entry »
24 Comments | Calvinism, Christology, Church Fathers, Essence/Energies, Gnosticism, Icons, Nestorianism, Origen, Person and Nature, Platonism, The Incarnation, Theophany, Theosis/Deification | Permalink
Posted by Perry Robinson
April 9, 2009
Protestants of the Classical Reformation variety think of Augustine as their historical anchor. When responding to the objection that such and so doctrine was unknown prior to the Reformation, the first name to fall off their lips is Augustine. Such is not the case with justification. Augustine didn’t adhere to the doctrine of Sola Fide.
To be clear, the doctrine is quite specific. Sola Fide is the idea that faith as a virtue is worthless in and of itself before God. It cannot please God, but what it can do is function as a conduit for the transfer of moral credit. Faith then is the means or the highway by which moral credit travels from Christ to me and my demerit travels to Christ. The respective merit and demerit are extrinsically applied and related to their subjects. That means that the merit applied to me is not grounded in my character, actions or nature or my demerit in the person or natures of Christ. This is because my character, actions or nature cannot produce moral credit that is complete and at best only partial. But justification is glossed as an all or nothing deal so that divine justice requires a complete righteousness. So I cannot participate in my own justification. Hence Christ’s righteousness that he merits during his earthly sojourn is applied to me as a label. I am classed as righteous even though I am not so. And because it is complete, justification and its merit cannot increase or decrease.
This merit it should be noted is earned by Christ. It is not the righteousness Christ has by virtue of being the divine person he is. The relation qua righteousness or rather the material relation between Christ and the sinner is therefore contingent. It may be an eternally planned for righteousness or justice, but it is not an eternal righteousness. In this sense this merited righteousness is a created grace and as such it is appropriate to human nature that was created intrinsically righteous or with natural grace. The righteousness on the schema of Sola Fide then that is applied forensically or taxonomically to me is a created intermediary between me and God. That in sum is the doctrine. And that doctrine is taken by Protestantism to be the Gospel so that if one rejects that idea, one is rejecting the Gospel.
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82 Comments | Augustine, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Predestination | Permalink
Posted by Perry Robinson
April 7, 2009
“A third simile of the ancient church is that of the soul united with its body. Justin gave this to the ancient church even before it was used by his age. Athanasius explains it this way: ‘Just as a rational soul and the flesh make up one man, so God and man are the one Christ.’ And Cyril in his Conciliar Epistle says ‘The Logos made a habitation for Himself in the assume nature in the same way that the soul of man is believed to have its own body.’ Augustine says of this simile: ‘Although it does not correspond perfectly, yet it is a good simile, excellent for explaining a matter which is difficult but necessary for our understanding; for it uses things which are easy and familiar to our minds.’ And from this figure we have come to use as equivalents the terms essence, nature or person (υποστασις or υφισταμενον) with reference to the incarnation of Christ.”
Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, 90.
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14 Comments | Lutheranism, Person and Nature, The Incarnation | Permalink
Posted by Perry Robinson
