For the Life of the World 3

The Time of Mission: Eastern Orthodoxy and the Sacrament of Time

The last few times, we have been up on the mountain in the new Jerusalem. We have been talking about the Sunday feast of the Church, the Eucharist. We have gotten a glimpse of heaven. Now we have to go back out into the world again to do mission. We have to come out of the timelessness of heaven and enter again into time.

Time. How do you view time? That's an ambivalent subject. It's a two-sided issue. Time opens up life as a possibility for growth and fulfillment. We move forward hopefully into the future. For all of this good possibility that time opens up for us, though, we all also experience time as an enemy. We're always running out of it. We're always on the clock. Time is tick, tick, ticking away. One day, the clock is going to run out for each of us. Time ultimately means death. On that unhappy note, let's begin our exploration of the Eastern Orthodox perspective on time. As our author lets us know, what Eastern Orthodoxy provides when it comes to time is not a solution but a gift.

The gift is liturgical time, the Church calendar. Fortunately, I think, Protestants are beginning to reclaim the Christian year, the feasts and the seasons and even the old liturgical cycles of prayer. The Reformers, especially Zwingli and Calvin, rejected a lot of this stuff as ceremonialism and superstition. They thought that one day was just as sacred as the next and there's also the fact that they couldn't find any mention of feast days and seasons in the Bible. They thought that these were man-made traditions that Christians were not obliged to follow. I think they were right to reject the idea that observing the days of the Church gets us points with God but I think this was a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

What is the benefit of the liturgical calendar anyway? Schmemann talks in the opening pages of this chapter about the "symbolism" of feast days and seasons. Are these just symbolic decorations or occasions for remembrance of things that happened in the past, or are we to understand them as having some other kind of significance?

Well, he thinks that viewing these times just as symbols is a problem. For him, it reflects the Christian rejection of time as having any real meaning. So, I raise the question, What do we understand to be the significance of time in our faith? Does it have any real significance? Isn't Christianity really about salvation from time? We talked a while back about the otherworldly perspective that thinks of Christianity in terms of salvation from the world. I think we see this in our attitude toward time also. We want to escape time and the world and all of the frustration and difficulty that go along with them. We want rest and relaxation. Vacation, retirement, heaven. Rest. When we think of Christianity's relation to time in this manner, the liturgical calendar is basically just a way to decorate meaningless time with beautiful symbols and colorful rituals. Do you all agree with his portrayal?

Well, Christ didn't enter time just to rescue us from it. Nor did he leave us here in time just so we could fill it up with symbols. Just as he came into the world not just to save us from the world but to transform the world and give it back to us as a means of communion with God, so has he come into time not just to rescue us from time but to transform time and return it to us as a means of communion with God. Alongside the sacramental Church and the sacramental world we have discussed, Eastern Orthodoxy has sacramental time.

The first place to start in discussing the sacramental time of Orthodoxy is in talking about the Lord's Day. Christians have always had their own special day. Of course, that stretched all the way back into Judaism with the Sabbath, but Sabbath and Lord's Day are not interchangeable. They're connected, but there's a difference. In Judaism, the Sabbath is the seventh day, but, in Christianity the Lord's Day is the first day of the week. It's also the eighth day of the week. To understand this though, we need to talk about the Jewish Sabbath first. What does Sabbath represent in Judaism? Schmemann talks about it on 50.

In the Jewish religious experience Sabbath, the seventh day, has a tremendous importance: it is the participation by man in, and his affirmation of, the goodness of God's creation. "And God saw it was good. . . . And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made." The seventh day is thus the joyful acceptance of the world created by God as good. . . . It is the active participation in the "Sabbath delight," in the sacredness and fullness of divine peace as the fruit of all work, as the crowning of all time.

There is a problem with God's good world though. It is also the world of sin and revolt against God. We aren't in Eden anymore. Because of this, the seventh day as it is in the fallen world has to point beyond itself to the day of God's triumph over evil. That's why we get this talk about an eighth day. It's beyond the limits of the seven, where death now reigns. This eighth day is also the first day because it marks the beginning of a new time—that of God's Kingdom.

This is where the Christian idea of the Lord's Day comes from. It fulfills the Jewish Sabbath. It's not incidental that Jesus rose from the dead on the day after the Sabbath. It's the eighth day of broken creation. It's the end of the old creation and the beginning, the first day, of the new creation, the day on which, in remembrance of the Resurrection, we ascend into heaven to share in a foretaste of the Lord's Banquet in the "age to come." Notice too how Schmemann says that this first day and eighth day business shows up in John's account of the Resurrection. I hadn't noticed that before.

It's also important to understand that the Lord's Day is a fixed day. For the early Christians, in addition to Sunday being the day of Christ's Resurrection, it was just one of the days of the week. I think he says that for three centuries Sunday wasn't even a day of rest. Notice how this otherworldly event of Christ's Resurrection, and the celebration of it that includes the Eucharist, which we have seen is a step out of time and into eternity, notice how, in spite of all of its heavenly significance, that it is just one of the days of the week. Sunday belongs completely to the world as well. That the Lord's Day belongs both to the world and to heaven indicates that the joy of Sunday is to spill out into the rest of the week and fill the whole week with the joy of the Lord. Every moment, every hour, every day, is to be understood in the light of the Lord's Day.

On 51 and 52, Schmemann describes it this way:

On the one hand, Sunday remained one of the days, the first of the week, fully belonging to this world. Yet on the other hand, on that day, through the eucharistic ascension, the Day of the Lord was revealed and manifested in all its glory and transforming power as the end of this world, and the beginning of the world to come. And thus through that one day all days, all time were transformed into times of remembrance and expectation, remembrance of the ascension, and expectation of its coming. . . . The week was no longer a sequence of "profane" days, with rest on the "sacred" day at their end. It was now a movement from Mount Tabor into the world, from the world into the "day without evening" of the world to come. Every day, every hour acquired now an importance, a gravity it could not have had before: each day was now to be a step in this movement, a moment of decision and witness, a time of ultimate meaning.

I think this is as far from dualism as we can get. All of time, each moment, each hour, each day becomes sacred in this sort of understanding. The Lord's Day sanctifies time, makes it communion with God. This is what makes our mission as the Church possible. It transforms each and every day into the time of mission.

The next thing Schmemann points us to when it comes to the sacramental time of Orthodoxy is the Christian year with its sequence of liturgical feasts and celebrations. The whole idea of this revolves around the joy of the feast. Schmemann has some interesting things to say about our modern skepticism when it comes to the joy of the feast. He says we are too adult and serious in our modern Christianity to enjoy what was once such a central aspect in the life of the Church. In this description, I see that Puritan work ethic creeping around that makes us feel guilty when we aren't doing anything productive or serious, when we’re partying instead of working. I am certainly prone to those Puritan moments of guilt when I'm not doing something productive, when I'm enjoying myself instead of working. What about you all? We really can't resonate with the idea that the joy of the feast is the root or even the goal of our work in the world as the Church, but that's where we are headed with the Orthodox understanding of the Christian year.

Just as is the case with the Lord's Day, for the Orthodox, the feasts of the Church and the liturgical seasons are all about filling up time with meaning and giving it purpose. In this respect, the early Christians were simply carrying on a tradition from the pagan cultures around them, in which feasts were central aspects of life. In those cultures, the feasts served to make the hard work and the fruits of that work and the natural cycles of time all worthwhile. The feasts were a source of power and meaning for the rest of life. What the early Christians did was take those feasts, as Schmemann says, through death and resurrection and made them apply to Christ. In that context, then, what the feasts did for the early Christians was to enable their mission, to give them their power to go out into the world and spread the Gospel of the Kingdom. Let's read that first paragraph of section 5 on page 55.

"Through the Cross joy came into the whole world"—and not just to some men as their personal and private joy. Once more, were Christianity pure "mysticism," pure "eschatology," there would be no need for feasts and celebrations. A holy soul would keep its secret feast apart from the world, to the extent that it can free itself from its time. But joy was given to the Church for the world—that the Church might be a witness to it and transform the world by joy. Such is the "function" of Christian feasts and the meaning of their belonging to time.

Do you all resonate with this? Are Christmas and Easter times that really excite you and encourage you to do mission? I must say that we do Christmas really well around here. It was truly a pleasure to be with you all this past Christmas and to join in all the pomp and pageantry and beauty of the Vespers service and the Christmas Eve service and Epiphany. Those were times of excitement for me. I can really see how the Christian feasts can put a fire in our bellies and give us the joy and energy to go out and change the world and people's lives for God's glory.

I'm starting to run out of time here, but, I want to take a brief look at his critique of the idea of the feasts as times of commemoration. He points out that remembering Christ's death, burial, and resurrection is always central to our mission. We don't just think about Christ's Passion during the Easter season but all through the year. In the Orthodox perspective, then, what we are doing on our special days, in some way, just as is the case with the Eucharist and the Lord's Day, is sharing in the very mystery that we are signifying. During the Easter season, for instance, we are given the gift of the very joy that Mary Magdalene and the apostles experienced on that day when they found the tomb empty and when they encountered the risen Lord. Schmemann really has a wonderful description of the Easter Vigil in the Orthodox Church. As he quotes St. Gregory of Nyssa, the night of the Easter Vigil is the night that becomes brighter than day. It is this joy that gives time its ultimate meaning and transforms the year into the "Christian year." He also talks about how the 50 days between Easter and Pentecost are given to us as the joy of the feast. I really think that we need to recover this full Easter celebration in the Western Church. I'm not sure how we do that though. At any rate, it is the joy of Easter in the Orthodox tradition that enables the Church to enter back into the world after Pentecost and carry out its mission. And he emphasizes that this mission is taxing and difficult. He calls it fasting for the world, it's effort, sacrifice, self-denial, and death. This is especially so for the Church in the places where there is persecution. It is only through the gift of Joy that the feasts bring that the Church can fulfill its mission, that we can be, as Schmemann says, "the fragrance of the Holy Spirit, the presence here in time of the feast of the Kingdom."

Finally, I'll conclude with a brief note on Schmemann's discussion of the Church and the individual Christian's relation to the time of day. He talks about the Vespers service in the evening and the Matins service in the morning. The thing to take from this is this idea of the rhythm of the beginning and end. Vespers is at the end of the day, but it is in the beginning of a new day. It is the end of life in the world of sin and death but the beginning of the evening without end that Christ will bring when he comes. Schmemann refers us to the story in Luke's Gospel of the old man Simeon, who had waited for the coming of the Lord. God had promised to Simeon that he would see the coming Messiah before he died. When Simeon saw the Christ child in the temple that day and held him and gloried in him, he was ready to depart. It was the end of his days, but the beginning of God's reign, which he was about to experience in an ever deeper way in his death. When it comes to Matins, Schmemann makes this point about how we are at our weakest and most pathetic in the morning. With the rising of the sun, we are at the end of the night of sin and weakness and death and at the beginning of the new day of the Lord's reign.

We will conclude with the thought that time becomes meaningful when we refer it to beginning and end. In this way it becomes "Christian time."

We are always between morning and evening, between Sunday and Sunday, between Easter and Easter, between the two comings of Christ. The experience of time as end gives an absolute importance to whatever we do now, makes its final, decisive. The experience of time as beginning fills all our time with joy, for it adds to it the "coefficient" of eternity.

Thoughts on the Bible 3

The Word of God under Four Heads

This spring, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted to uphold Aberdeen Presbytery's decision to ordain Scott Rennie, an openly gay man, to the pastorate of Queen’s Cross Church in Aberdeen. When the initial decision was made by Aberdeen Presbytery to ordain Rennie, Presbytery members who had voted against the ordination wrote to the body at large, objecting to its decision based on the Word of God's condemnation of homosexuality. Defending itself on this point, the Presbytery flippantly responded that "the Bible cannot be identified with the Word of God."

As interpreted by those who wish to reject explicit biblical teachings, a neo-orthodox doctrine of the Word of God seems to be a useful tool for justifying such a rejection. Indeed, history and current practice has proven this to be the case, especially if a neo-orthodox understanding of Scripture has been coupled with a rejection of biblical inerrancy. While many neo-orthodox Bible interpreters do explicitly reject biblical inerrancy, it need not always be the case that a neo-orthodox understanding of the Bible necessitates a rejection of the highest possible view of biblical authority.

That being said, I will keep my opinion regarding the ideal of biblical inerrancy in suspense for the moment, but I will presently put forward a "high" Bible, Christocentric, neo-orthodox-style understanding of the Word of God. I will do this under four heads.

1. Jesus Christ as the Word of God

I will not explicate further on this, for it needs no explanation as the Bible thoroughly and explicitly describes Jesus using this term, (see John 1) and I have already treated rather extensively Jesus Christ as God's self-revelatory Speech.

2. Holy Scripture as the Word of God

Holy Scripture is the written Word of God. The term, Word of God, cannot be used exclusively in reference to Scripture according to the Bible's own usage, though it most often does indeed refer to the Bible. In matters of authority, we must subordinate the Bible's authority to Christ's own authority, as the Bible has no authority independent from the One who breathed it into being through His patriarchs, prophets, and apostles and who continues to speak actively and powerfully through its witness. In this light, then, we must also note that the target of the written Word of God is always only the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ.

In speaking of the Bible as the written Word of God, we are also speaking of God's agency in the inspiration and writing of the original biblical documents. Though we must not overlook the human authorship of the biblical documents, God is the efficient cause of these documents, moving the human authors to testify by writing that which He willed them to by Divine inspiration.

That being said, the Word of God comes, as it were, through the earthen vessels of human authors and their thoughts and words. God speaks reliably and unfailingly through this process, even though the cultural situations and contexts of the human authors, with all of the limits these impose on the authors, condition and color the biblical documents produced by their hands. Instead of having this derogate the authority of the Bible, however, we can exuberantly declare that it is not in spite of the biblical authors and their human limitations but rather through them that God faithfully expresses and delivers His Word to His people. At any rate, through this miraculous synergy of Divine and human work, we can say that while what is written is 100% the words of human beings, it is also 100% the Word of God.

To deal with the particular question, then, that my beloved Church history professor, Dr. Calhoun, hit on in his staunch inerrantist critique of Barth and that Aberdeen Presbytery so obtusely, irreverently, and, dare I say, blasphemously answered in the negative in its correspondence with its dissenting members, the Bible, the word on the page, is the Word of God, carried though it is in the earthen vessel of human language. Perhaps a good way of describing this is to say that the Bible is an earthen vessel that carries the living water, but, in order for us to draw out that water, we need the Spirit to enlighten us.

I must also note in passing that to fail to identify the Bible directly with the Word of God smacks of a Gnostic species of doubt that God in His transcendence can accommodate His revelation to our creatureliness. If the Incarnation teaches us anything, it is that God is willing and able to make Himself small in order to reach us according to our human weakness. I must also note that to move the content of the Word of God too far from the text itself would be to place the Word of God in an undesirable sphere of subjectivity and to put the reliability of the Bible's objective content in general in doubt.

Most often, we must note that the written Word of God is secondary revelation mediated through human authors. The direct revelation in these cases is the work of God in history placed openly before God's covenant people to see, which they testify to under the unique inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the production of Scripture. Yet, we must also note that some of the biblical revelation seems to come as direct propositional revelation from the mouth of God, particularly large segments of the Torah and the words of the Savior recorded in the Gospels, though these too undoubtedly came down to biblical authors either through their own memories under the Holy Spirit's guidance and/or to human processes of preservation.

I think it would be safe to say that the written Word of God is in a category that neither of the other two senses of the Word of God I have yet to treat can be placed in. The written Word of God is normative and binding for all Christian people at all times, as it represents God-breathed revelation from the hands of the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, upon whom rests the foundation of the Church. As such, the written Word of God can neither be added to nor subtracted from.

3. Preaching as the Word of God

I include this under the Word of God because preaching is a given means for the Church by which to receive God's exhortation from His written Word. The center and goal of the proclamation of the written Word of God is the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. In the work of the Holy Spirit through the preacher, Christ Himself delivers a Word and applies Himself in an enlivening way to the hearts of the faithful to rouse them for His service or to awaken those dead in their sins to spiritual life through regeneration.

4. God's revelation in history as the Word of God

I include this under the Word of God because God's work in history is the primary revelation to which the written Word of God testifies. Christ the incarnate Word of God as mediator of God's historic covenants with Israel and the Church publishes and executes the will of God the Father through His action in the world, revealing God's loving intentions and judgment against sin for all of humankind.

Jesus Christ, as God's eternal image and self-revelation, verifies that it is God's message that is being given. If Christ declares it, we know that it is the will of the Father.

Thoughts on the Bible 2

Karl Barth, Neo-Orthodoxy, and the Bible

Karl Barth was easily the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century (arguably the greatest in all of Christendom during this time). When considering the doctrine of Scripture, I think Christians in our day and age need to spend a little time with Mr. Barth, especially since he essentially reclaimed the centrality of the Bible in Christian theology in an age when mainstream Protestant theologians had appeared to have all but forgotten the Scriptures and his most recognizable contribution to the contemporary theological landscape is his theology of the Word of God. The official statements of the mainline Protestant denominations on the Scriptures are all pretty much straight Barthian Neo-Orthodoxy.

My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA, expresses its view in its Book of Order in this characteristically neo-orthodox way: "The church confesses the Scriptures to be the Word of God written, witnessing to God's self-revelation. Where that Word is read and proclaimed, Jesus Christ the Living Word is present by the inward witness of the Holy Spirit.” Elsewhere it is stated that "... the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments...[are]...., by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God's Word to [them]."

You will notice in the PC(USA) statements on Scripture that: 1) the word "inerrant" is conspicuously absent, and, 2) there is a certain reluctance to identify the Word of God directly with the text itself. It is precisely for these reasons that many evangelicals are quite wary of Neo-Orthodoxy when it comes to the Bible. Barth rejected the infallibility of the Scriptures and, as my church history professor Dr. Calhoun was quick to point out, directed Christians not to listen to the word on the page as the Word of God but to listen for the Word of God (for you) when the Scriptures are read.

Before we dismiss Karl Barth as a dangerous liberal and begin the preparations for burning the heretics (both of us), I wish to defend him by looking at the basis for his neo-orthodox theology and what is in view in a neo-orthodox articulation of the doctrine of Scripture.

As described by church historian, Justo Gonzalez, Neo-Orthodoxy, also called "dialectical theology" or "crisis theology," is "a theology of a God who is never ours, but always stands over against us; whose word is at the same time both ‘yes’ and ‘no’; whose presence brings, not ease and inspiration in our efforts, but crisis." In other words, God is transcendent. The whole point of Barth's theology is to "Let God be God." This was a needed corrective to the Protestant theology of the early 20th century that often confused God with the very best in human nature and the Kingdom of God with purely human efforts.

With the transcendence of God in view, human beings can do nothing to bridge the gap that exists between the finite creature and the infinite Creator. For Barth, then, the sole basis for human knowledge about God is God's self-revelation in the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ. The Bible is the Word of God because it testifies to that Living Word, and, not only that, the Bible is the Word of God because Christ is present by the Holy Spirit with the words of the Bible, coming to us again and again each time it is read.

One way we can speak of Barth's theology of the Word of God is in the way he privileges one of the great Protestant Solas over another. Barth was unquestionably a sola Scriptura Protestant (His theology, and even the questions his theology sought to answer, were all based in his encounter with the Scriptures. In fact, in writing his magnum opus, the 13 volume, 7000+ page Church Dogmatics, Barth self-consciously strove to have the Bible itself as the framework for examining the Bible.), but, as it should be, he privileges solus Christus over sola Scriptura. In other words, Barth's understanding of Scripture is Christocentric rather than bibliocentric. Thus, we find Barth resting the authority of the Word of God, not in an objective factual immaculacy it possesses independent from the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, but in its testifying to Jesus Christ, the "Word made flesh," and in Christ's coming to us again and again each time it is read.

It is in Christ alone, through the work of the Holy Spirit, that the Bible can be and is our final and unfailing authority in all matters of faith, practice, and morals. I therefore testify together with Paul that: "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

Thoughts on the Bible 1

I've been meaning to put together some thoughts on this for a little while, but I've been mired in a bit of a summertime slump of laziness, apathy, and boredom. I've been needing just a bit of a kick in the seat of my pants to get me to write on this subject, and that came in Sunday School yesterday. In celebration of Calvin’s 500th birthday, we've been taking some time to get acquainted with the life and contributions of this father of the Reformed tradition.

Yesterday we talked about his legacy and, inevitably, our pastor, Rev Nancy, directed us to ponder the remarks made in the video about Calvin's view of Scripture. The scholars in the video gave Calvin's doctrine of Scripture a bit of a neo-orthodox coloring. They first described the sense in which Calvin bids us to look beyond the words of the Scriptures themselves to what the Spirit is saying through those words.

They also described the sense in which Calvin bids us to understand that the Bible has an ultimate target that it’s trying to hit—that it’s the Word of God in that it points always only in the direction of the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.

Well, right enough. The Bible is no dead letter; it’s a living document. The Scriptures are not something that is simply acted upon by our reason or our ability to comprehend what is written or spoken; no, rather, the Word of God acts upon us. In other words, the Scriptures have a property of vivifying and transforming power about them because of the Spirit's activity moving over the face of the words printed on the page or those uttered by the mouth. Furthermore, we recognize that the Bible is the Word of God because it testifies to the ultimate revelation of God, His eternal Word, God the Son, Jesus Christ.

These are indeed affirmations that I am willing to wager that we all would accept about the Scriptures, but, does it seem to you that the scholars’ words about the Bible and Calvin's view of it and my own affirmation of those comments are less powerful and forceful than coming right out and saying that "the Bible is the only and authoritative Word of God, without error in the original manuscripts" or some other similarly worded inerrantist formulation? Maybe . . .

At any rate, though the scholars on the video are undoubtedly correct that Calvin lodges the efficacy of the Word exclusively in the work of the Holy Spirit and views Christ as its only target, it's quite plain to me that Calvin would also insist that the Bible not only contains the Word of God but is itself the Word of God and is free from all error. I'll let the Calvin scholars figure out exactly what Calvin believed in regard to the Scriptures, but this puts us in a place where I can venture forth a few thoughts.

"Bibliolatry?"

I learned a new word from Rev Nancy earlier this summer that I had not heard before. She also brought it up in the Calvin class yesterday. That word is "bibliolatry," or, "Bible idolatry." What?! Bible worship?! What kind of nonsense am I talking?!

Yes, indeed, Bible worship does exist, and I don't think that this is just a way theologically left-leaning Protestants dismiss people who actually believe what the Bible says. Bible worship is what happens when we attempt to read the Bible as if we don't need the Spirit's guidance. This is what’s going on when we domesticate the Bible, tear it apart, and put it back together in a neat, compact, easy-to-understand system of essential doctrines and call that system the Word of God and depend on it as if it were God Himself. God and His Word, of course, are bigger than our individual interpretations or those of our particular Christian traditions, so we need to be on guard against this tendency to paint our own culturally-conditioned readings of the Bible on the sky. Otherwise, we will find that we have made an idol too of that which truly and uniquely reveals God to us.

Sometimes we forget that what is more important about the Bible is not the information it provides but the One whom it reveals. The Bible is not an end in itself. Though its message is certainly important, the message is intended more than anything to draw us to the One who breathed it forth through the writers He inspired. We must also remember that for us today it is only as the Holy Spirit hovers over the face of the words written on the page or spoken by the mouth that God and His will are truly and effectively revealed in the Scriptures.

This is enough to chew on for a bit. Stay tuned, I've got more thoughts on this coming tomorrow.

Calvin's Legacy

Kevin DeYoung nailing it on Calvin's legacy. Let us stand as firmly on the Word of God as Calvin. "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever."

http//www.revkevindeyoung.com/2009/07/withering-and-word-john-calvin-at-500.html

For the Life of the World 2.2

"Lift up Your Hearts!": Eastern Orthodoxy, Reformed Protestantism, and the Eucharist (Part 2)

What is the Lord's Supper?

Westminster Shorter Catechism again, Q 96- The Lord’s Supper is a sacrament, wherein, by giving and receiving bread and wine, according to Christ’s appointment, his death is showed forth; and the worthy receivers are, not after a corporal and carnal manner, but by faith, made partakers of his body and blood, with all his benefits, to their spiritual nourishment, and growth in grace.

What is the role of eating? If we do not commune with Christ after a "corporal and carnal manner" but by "faith only," can we not be "made partakers of his body and blood” without eating? Can't we just watch it and think pious thoughts and get the benefit that way? This question reveals the shortcomings of most Reformed views of the sacraments in general. We haven't done particularly well with our attitude toward human actions and things. If no significance is attached to the eating, we can end up with something like the medieval Roman Catholic view that Luther and Calvin were fighting against. At a certain point in the Middle Ages, it became customary for Christians only to receive the Communion bread once a year. The rest of the time they were told that they could receive the benefit of the sacrament simply by watching the priest break the bread at consecration. I think this represents a devaluing of the material.

There is also another direction we could go if we don't attach any significance to the eating. We could end up with a Baptist view of the Lord's Supper where God doesn't do anything at all in the sacrament. It's all about what we do. We simply obey and remember. We don't receive any direct spiritual benefit from the ritual because eating is natural and material but God is supernatural and spiritual. We don't want to confuse nature and supernature or matter and spirit. Well, this kind of understanding is a serious problem. This is a clear example of the dualism that completely separates the world and nature from God. Sounds an awful lot like that darned noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world Schmemann has been warning us about. This is precisely why I'm not a Baptist anymore.

According to Schmemann, something else that smacks of dualism is the distinction we make between Word and Sacrament. We are accustomed to thinking of sacraments merely as secondary helps to the Word. We usually think of the Word in terms of God's activity and the sacraments exclusively in terms of our activity. If we think of it that way, from a Calvinistic perspective the sacraments really aren't that important. Well, I don't think Calvin would agree that the sacraments are unimportant but he unintentionally created that impression when he described the sacraments as appendices to the Word.

So, if the distinction between Word and Sacrament is artificial, how do we overcome it? I want to point us to what Schmemann says on page 33 about the Word being as sacramental as the sacrament is "evangelical." What does the statement that the Word is as "sacramental" as the sacrament is "evangelical" mean?

There’s a couple of things. The first thing is that Scripture is the sacrament par excellence of the Church. I don't want to devalue Scripture, but it must be apparent that the words printed on the page or the words spoken by one reading Scripture or preaching from the Word are also things, things as earthly as water, bread, or wine. These are all earthen vessels that only through the power of the Holy Spirit can carry and deliver the weight of Divine reality. Due to the power of the Holy Spirit, who both inspired the writers of Scripture and who enlivens the printed or spoken words of the Bible for us that read them or hear them today, God speaks to us through His Word. Likewise, it is only through the power of the Holy Spirit that a community ritual meal becomes a sharing in the Body and Blood of Christ. Granted, there are some important ways in which the Scriptures are unique from the things we properly call sacraments (Scripture, being God-breathed, is, with or without the Spirit's new activity of enlightening us, already sacramental), but, just as bread and wine, the ritual actions, the Word spoken, the people, the minister, etc., require the action of the Holy Spirit in order for the sacrament of the Lord's Supper to truly take place, so too do we need the Spirit's activity in order for the Bible to make its transformative mark on us.

The second thing is that the sacraments are an essential part of our evangelical mission as the Church. We are commanded to preach the Gospel to every creature, but we are also commanded to baptize and to gather together to share the Eucharistic meal by which we remember Christ and eat Him as our spiritual food. The sacraments themselves, particularly the Eucharist, both enable our ministry to the world and demonstrate the Gospel to an unbelieving world, showing forth Christ's great love for us and our love for one another. Sacraments are also evangelical because, like the Word, they are means by which the seed of faith can be planted in our hearts and by which that seed can be watered so that it bears much fruit.

Is the above description consistent with the significance of the Lord's Supper in traditional Reformed faith and practice? If not, how central should it be?

We have customarily thought of and acted as if the Word has precedence over the sacraments. I don't think this was the intention of the Reformers. For Calvin, for instance, the right administration of the sacraments was every bit as much a mark of the Church as the right preaching of the Word was. Calvin wanted weekly Communion, but the Geneva city council would not let him. It might have gone differently had Calvin been able to have weekly Communion, but the sacraments have always had second billing in our tradition.

I think this is a mistake, especially when we think about both Scripture and the sacraments as means the Word of God uses to communicate with us. Who is the Word of God? Jesus, of course. He promises to make Himself present both in the Scriptures and in the sacraments. In some sense, then, the Bible and the sacraments are both the Word of God, or, more properly, manifestations of Him. They are really two sides of the same coin, and they complement each other really well. The Bible, for instance, appeals to our minds and to our hearing, while the sacraments appeal to our senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste. God seeks to get to our hearts through every aspect of our humanity so I think we should give Him every opportunity to do so. With that in mind, I think that Word and Sacrament should be equally central to our faith and practice.

Let's look at another perspective. I'll read the following statement about the Lord's Supper. Tell me if this is the statement of a Presbyterian or of an Orthodox or a Catholic.

The Eucharist is the world in miniature; it has cosmic significance. Within it we find clues to the meaning of all creation and all history, to the nature of God and the nature of man, to the mystery of the world, which is Christ. It is not confined to the first day, for its power fills seven. Though the altar stands at the center, its effects stretch out to the four corners of the earth.

Is this the statement of a Roman Catholic or an Orthodox? Well, I changed a few words—I turned Lord's Supper into Eucharist and table into altar to make this sound like something an Orthodox or Roman Catholic would say but actually it is from a Presbyterian pastor and professor who is part of a group that has caused a big commotion over in the Presbyterian Church in America and the other conservative Reformed denominations about the importance of the sacraments and the Church in our salvation. In fact, Peter Leithart, whose words I just read has been investigated not less than three times by his presbytery and has endured at least one heresy trial for his positions. Many Reformed evangelicals think all this sounds too much like Catholicism, so some of them are waging a campaign against those who are attempting to recover the full-bodied Reformed sacramental and churchly heritage.

This is an important question. How central is the Lord's Table in our life together as a congregation? This gets into the issue of frequency. How frequently should we take Communion?

Well, I certainly have a position on frequency. I think every Lord's Day celebration should include the Lord's Supper. Not only does it "show forth Christ's death till He comes" but it guards against this whole tendency toward dualism. The Lord's Supper with its emphasis on ritual and the community of faith and material things tells us right away that our spiritual lives are not lived apart from the world or from other people or even from material things. Our spiritual life must embrace the world, people, and things, not just as purely incidental to our lives, but as means of connection with God.

If we move forward on this idea that the Lord's Supper is the world in miniature; that it is central; that its significance fills all seven days of the week and the four corners of the earth; we have a lot of room to fill out our definition of the Lord's Supper. Of course, the Lord's Supper is a sign and remembrance of Christ's death. I think we all understand that. We have talked about the importance of Communion for our mission—how it turns us into the Body of Christ so that we can be His physical presence in the world and tell others about His Kingdom. We've talked about how for the Orthodox this gets into the whole question of the Eschaton—that time when Jesus returns and sets everything right. It gives us a glimpse of that time so we can prepare the world for His Return. I think we have a bit of that in our Reformed understanding of the Eucharist as well.

In talking about all that this sacrament means for us, I think a discussion about the many different terms we use to describe it would be productive. Somebody give me a name for this sacrament.

1. Lord's Supper- it tells us that this is a meal Jesus has with all of his friends. Not only is Jesus our dear friend at this meal but we are all dear friends to one another. This term points us to his death because it was the last meal he shared with the disciples.
2. Communion- I like this one because it tells us something about our relationship to one another as the Body of Christ. We are one. We must truly love one another. That scary passage of Scripture in 1 Corinthians (11:17-32) that talks about profaning the Body and Blood of Christ by unworthily taking the Lord's Supper is most likely about people in the Church failing to love each other—failing to recognize the Body of Christ in the poorer members of the Corinthian congregation. Paul ultimately says that the sacrament will damn us if we fail to love each other.
3. Lord's Table- This is my favorite because it illustrates our relationship to God. That we get to eat at the table with Jesus says that we are the very sons and daughters of God.
4. Eucharist- This is the one that's most important for the Orthodox. I want to spend a little time with this one. The term Eucharist makes us understand that the sacrament is joy, that it’s praise, that it's thanksgiving. We focus a lot of attention on the fact that this sacrament is about Jesus’ death, but it's also about the Resurrection. It's in the context of the Resurrection that this meal is thanksgiving and joy, that it is Eucharist.

This concept of Eucharist is very strong in the Communion liturgy that we use. I just want to emphasize very strongly once again that the Eucharist is a liturgy. We have to include all of it as sacramental. We can't take it apart and focus just on the bread and wine. It's a seamless action and procession of thanksgiving from beginning to end.

With that in mind, I hope you guys noticed in the last part of this chapter how similar our liturgy is to the Eastern Orthodox liturgy Schmemann discusses in our book. They differ from one another in a few places, but, for the most part, each has a very similar structure to the other and very similar content to the other. I want to have us meditate on this idea of thanksgiving, of offering, of sacrifice that is present in both of our liturgies. Schmemann has some very profound and beautiful yet also very difficult things to say about all this in the last 10 or 12 pages of the chapter. There is a lot of giving going on. Let's look at this on page 35:

This offering to God bread and wine, of the food that we must eat in order to live, is our offering to Him of ourselves, of our life, and of the whole world. . . . It is our Eucharist. It is the movement that Adam failed to perform, and that in Christ has become the very life of man: a movement of adoration and praise in which all joy and suffering, all beauty and all frustration, all hunger and all satisfaction are referred to their ultimate End and become finally meaningful.

I think this correlates really well with the statement from Peter Leithart that the Eucharist covers the four corners of the world. We are offering ourselves and the whole world to God when we offer the gifts of bread and wine.

Well, it's after this point that trying to follow Schmemann begins to make my head hurt a little. It gets a little confusing. He begins to talk about how Christ has already offered all that is to be offered to God by giving Himself, so Christ offers Himself as a Eucharist to God. Well, we as the Church have been taken up into Christ's Eucharistic life, so Christ offers us as a Eucharist to God as well. To make it even more confusing, we then offer the self-offering of Christ as a Eucharist to God. In the end, we end up with four offerings that have occurred in the Eucharist. First, we have offered ourselves and the whole world to God. Second, Christ has offered Himself to God. Third, Christ has offered His Body, the Church, to God. Finally, as a response, we offer Christ's self-offering to God.

This kind of talk makes some Protestants very nervous, especially those who are highly suspicious of anything that sounds remotely Catholic. This begins to sound like we are sacrificing Christ all over again or that we are doing some kind of good work here to earn God's grace. I really don't think that's what's going on here. In fact, we get a very strong affirmation of grace in this. All of this is possible only because of what Christ has done in His once-and-for-all death for our sins on the cross and in His Resurrection, and, at the end of the liturgy, God gives the bread and wine that we have offered to Him back to us as the gift of Christ's Body and Blood.

No one has been "worthy" to receive communion, no one has been prepared for it. At this point all merits, all righteousness, all devotions disappear and dissolve. Life comes again to us as Gift, a free and divine gift. . . . Adam [and Eve are] introduced into Paradise, taken out of nothingness, and crowned king [and queen] of creation. Everything is free, nothing is due and yet all is given. And, therefore, the greatest humility and obedience is to accept the gift, to say yes—in joy and gratitude. There is nothing left we can do, yet we become all that God wanted us to be from eternity, when we are eucharistic.

With that in mind, we can conclude our look at the Lord's Supper with Calvin's view of Christ's presence in the sacrament. This is from his "Short Treatise on the Lord's Supper":

We all confess, then, with one mouth, that, in receiving the sacrament in faith, according to the ordinance of the Lord, we are truly made partakers of the real substance of the body and blood of Christ. How this is done, some may deduce more clearly than others. But be this as it may, on the one hand we must, to shut out all carnal fancies, raise our hearts on high to heaven, not thinking that our Lord Jesus Christ is so abased as to be enclosed under any corruptible elements. On the other hand, not to diminish the efficacy of the sacred mystery, we must hold that it is accomplished by the secret and miraculous virtue of God and that the Spirit of God is the bond of participation, for which reason it is called spiritual.

Two things. One, Calvin understands Jesus’ words about his flesh and blood to be a promise. He rejects any idea of the bread and wine being transformed into actual flesh and blood, but he somehow still manages to take what Jesus says quite literally, even if he doesn't understand how exactly it works. And he makes it very clear that he doesn't know how it works. Listen here to Calvin's rather surprising mystical side:

Now if anyone should ask me how this takes place, I shall not be ashamed to confess that it is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare. And, to speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it. Therefore I here embrace without controversy the truth of God in which I may safely rest. He declares his flesh the food of my soul, his blood its drink. I offer my soul to him to be fed with such food. In his sacred supper he bids me take, eat, and drink his body and blood under the symbols of bread and wine. I do not doubt that he himself truly presents them, and that I receive them. Institutes 4.17.32.

The second thing we must note about Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper is that he bids us to "Raise our hearts on high."

A question: Where is Christ physically at right now? He's in heaven at the right hand of the Father, right? Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, right? Can human beings physically be in more than one place at a time? Well, as much as you might sometimes feel the need to be in two places at once, you that are parents know that this is impossible. Okay, let's try to get this straight; if we encounter Christ in His humanity in the Lord's Supper, explain to me how Jesus can be at a thousand different Communion services all at once. Jesus is human, so He can't do it without destroying His ongoing humanity, can He? What He can do, though, is bring all of us to His place. This is where Calvin looked East toward the Orthodox view of the Eucharist for help.

Leonard Vander Zee explains Calvin's solution:

For Calvin, the sursum corda, "lift up your hearts," was a favorite liturgical phrase, because at the Lord's Table we lift up our hearts to Christ in heaven by the Spirit who has united us with him in his glorified humanity. By the same Spirit and through the sharing of the bread and wine, we now partake in a unique way of that union with Christ.

Calvin's solution for the problem of Christ's physical presence in the sacrament is for the Holy Spirit to lift the Church into Christ's presence in heaven. This is the reason our Eucharistic liturgy is so similar to the Orthodox liturgy Schmemann has shown us. We are basically striving to do the same thing that Schmemann shows the Orthodox to be doing in their celebration of the Eucharist. We are ascending into heaven to offer ourselves and the world to God and to share in a foretaste of the great banquet of the Lord. Let's say a small part of the Great Thanksgiving we share with the Orthodox as we conclude?

Lift up your hearts!
We lift them up to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give our thanks and praise.

I think we're ready to head into worship now. We will be gathering around the Lord's Table today, so let's go together and ascend with Christ into heaven to share in a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

For the Life of the World 2.1

“Lift up Your Hearts": Eastern Orthodoxy, Reformed Protestantism, and the Eucharist (Part 1)

Before we progress forward with our study, I think we need to backtrack a little bit to last time. What, according to Schmemann, is the purpose for the world that God has created? Blessing, communion with God, food that fulfills the hunger of our bodies and inclines our hearts to the One all of our hunger is pointing to.

What does our author believe to be our purpose as human beings? We are to bless God for His gifts. Schmemann even calls us priests. What he's trying to get across in that description is that we are to thankfully receive God's gifts and, as a response, give ourselves and those gifts right back to God. It's in this that we find our purpose and that the world finds its purpose.

But something went wrong. What does our author see as the thing that went wrong? Sin entered the picture. What is the original sin? It was failing to give God praise and thanks for His gifts. Basically, we tried to steal the world from God and we found that without God, the world had no life in it. That's how death entered the picture.

So, what is Jesus's mission? What did the Incarnation, the cross, the grave, and the Resurrection accomplish? He gave all of life back to us; He gave us what we were hungry for all along but didn't realize it. Jesus uses the language of food to tell us this; that's what he means when he calls Himself the Bread of Life. Our hunger for food is a reflection of our hunger for God. Jesus is the Bread that fulfills this hunger.

We are talking today about what the Eastern Orthodox understand to happen when they gather together to receive Communion. We will also be talking about what we as Reformed Christians believe regarding the sacrament, and we are going to compare and contrast that to what Schmemann has to say about the Orthodox view. We can't really say that Presbyterians have just one opinion about what happens when we take Communion, so that part, at least, should give us opportunity for a lively discussion.

Last time, we spoke at length about secularism and dualism. I got myself into some trouble when we started talking about "traditional" American Christianity. I guess we disagreed a little bit about "traditional" American Christianity or whether it even exists, but I referred to what I see as the unbalanced otherworldliness of our brand of Christian faith. Well, of course, the hope of heaven is absolutely a valid aspect of our faith; in fact, it is the hope that all other hopes rest on, and that is exactly where we are headed today as we ascend into heaven with the Orthodox in their celebration of the Eucharist.

Before we do that, though, we need to keep our eyes focused on earth for just a moment. As Chris (a fellow seminarian in the congregation) reminded us last time, not everyone in our world experiences the world as a blessing from God. For some people, the world is an awful place filled with hunger, violence, suffering, and death. For people who don't have enough to eat, they do not experience their food or their lack of it as communion with God.

These kinds of things remind us that all is not right just yet in the world. In spite of what Schmemann said in chapter 1 about Jesus returning the world to us as communion with God, as sacrament, as Eucharist, we recognize that everything isn't fixed just yet back here on earth. That is why the Eastern Orthodox believe they must ascend into heaven where Christ is, because it is only there that Christ's reign is already fully realized and everything is set to rights.

I want to point us to this; when the Eastern Orthodox celebrate the Eucharist and go into heaven, where they are going is the "world to come," and, by "world to come," they do not mean some other world someplace else. What they mean is this world that we live in right now, but in the future after Jesus has returned and set everything to rights. It's not so much that the Orthodox are going somewhere "up there" but that they are moving forward in time to that point in history when heaven comes to earth. That's the heaven to which the Orthodox ascend in the Eucharist.

I might add that this is my own personal understanding of heaven. The New Heaven and New Earth, symbolized in the city of New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation, is the Father's house that Jesus told His disciples that He was going away to so that He could prepare it for us. When we die in the Lord, we are ultimately coming back here to reign with Jesus from the New Jerusalem.

Now we get to talk about mission. The reason the Orthodox ascend into heaven to eat the Body and Blood of the Lord is so that they can see, reflected in the light of the Savior's face, that God's good world is filled with His glory and that it is the means of communion with God.

Perhaps for the Orthodox the appropriate way to sing that classic hymn we all know would be:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus.
Look full in His wonderful face.
And the things of earth will shine clear and true
in the light of his glory and grace.

It would be more accurate to sing this instead of the traditional "the things of earth will grow strangely dim" because in Christ's presence, the things of earth will not "grow strangely dim" but will shine ever brighter, reflecting His glory all the more!

And not only do they see the heaven and earth are filled with God's glory during their ascension but they also touch it and eat it. The idea that the world is given as communion with God is so strong for the Orthodox here that they say that their offering of bread and wine becomes Christ's literal Body and Blood. We'll return to this question of Christ's presence in the bread and wine at some point.

Mission. That's where I was going. The Orthodox ascend into heaven so that they can experience the world as it is meant to be and as it will be when Christ returns and so that they can then come back into the world in their time and place and tell about what they "have heard and seen with their own eyes and handled with their own hands concerning the Word of Life" (1 John 1:1). And this is that Jesus Christ is Lord of heaven and earth and that the world is filled with His glory and is thus a means of communion with Him. I think Schmemann describes this beautifully on 28. This is an important passage. It brings up a couple of important ideas:

The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended. They realized also that this ascension was a very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world. For there—in heaven—they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when after this "liturgy of ascension," they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the "joy and peace" of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses. They brought no programs or theories; but wherever they went, the seeds of the Kingdom sprouted, faith was kindled, life was transfigured, things impossible were made possible.

The first thing we see, and this is mentioned several other places in this chapter, is that the liturgy of ascension is required so that the Church can become the Church. In the Eucharist, then not only is the bread believed to become the Body of Christ but the group of people who share in the sacrament is believed to become the Body of Christ also.

This points to an important term from chapter 1:

leitourgia- n.: 1) an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals—a whole greater than the sum of its parts; 2) function or ministry of a person or of a group on behalf of or in the interest of the whole community.

Okay. For the Orthodox, the Eucharist is the leitourgia of the Church—it is the set of actions by which individuals who believe in Jesus become the Church.

The second part of the definition for leitourgia brings up the other point that I wanted to lift out of the passage on page 28.

The Church does not exist for our benefit but for the benefit of the world. The Church is Christ's own presence in the world. We act in the world in Christ's stead, bearing witness to His Kingdom and preparing the way for His Second Coming. That's what I've got to say to briefly sum up the distinctively Orthodox understanding of the Eucharist.

Now for a general discussion about the sacrament from our perspective, both what each of us understands personally and the Reformed view that is reflected in the Communion liturgy we use in the Presbyterian Church USA. In the process, let's compare and contrast this with what Schmemann has told us about the Orthodox perspective in chapter 2 of For the Life of the World.

First off, I think it would be instructive for us to define just what we mean by the term sacrament. We know that baptism and the Lord's Supper are sacraments, and, from what Schmemann says, the Church is in some sense, a sacrament also. What is a sacrament?

Westminster Shorter Catechism Q 92: A sacrament is a holy ordinance instituted by Christ; wherein, by sensible signs, Christ, and the benefits of the new covenant, are represented, sealed, and applied to believers.

Sacraments are also elsewhere described in the Reformed tradition as "visible words." This raises the question: What is required for a sacrament? The Word and something that is a sign of Christ. Is that all? Are not the people, the officiant(s), ritual actions also required? A sacrament is a ritual. The ritual, not just the signs given but the whole action is sacramental; it is liturgy, leitourgia.

Are sacraments just signs? In other words, are sacraments purely human efforts? Is God active in the sacraments? Does God do something to us corporately and individually in the sacraments?

Westminster Shorter Catechism says that Christ, and the benefits of the new covenant, are represented, sealed, and applied to believers. We have this idea of a sacramental union between the sign and the reality it points to. For believers, both the sign and the reality are presented to them in the sacrament. Yet, even though sign and reality are both present, we still maintain that they are somehow distinct.

We will continue our discussion of the Eucharist next time.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

For the Life of the World 1

Here are my notes for chapter 1 from the group study I led on For the Life of the World. The key issue throughout the whole study was secularism and its incompatibility with historic Christianity as embodied in Eastern Orthodoxy. The conclusion is that secularism is sin because it attempts to carry forth life in the world as if God does not exist. It essentially tries to steal the world away from God. The Orthodox tradition, as expressed in this book, asserts that there is no part of life or the world that does not have God as its central referent. There is no separation between sacred and secular or spiritual and material. All is for the glory of God and is a means of communion with God.

In this study, we also dealt with the question of purpose. What is the purpose of humanity and what is the purpose of the world? Historically, Western Christianity has denied any ongoing significance for the world and has treated with indifference the world's original significance. As put forth by Alexander Schmemann, however, Eastern Orthodoxy strongly affirms that the initial and the ongoing purpose of the created order is for it to serve for us as a means of communion with God.

An important book in my spiritual development has been The God of Israel and Christian Theology by R. Kendall Soulen. This book is important to me for a number of reasons, but, as it relates to the issues dealt with in For the Life of the World, The God of Israel and Christian Theology also deals with the question of the world's purpose. In his effort to ascribe ongoing theological significance to Judaism in the biblical narrative and in the attendant purpose of overcoming the Gnostic temptation to empty the world of significance that has historically been present in Christian eschatology, Soulen affirms that God still has plans for the consummation of the earth and that the economy of earthly consummation is caught up with Israel. For the Life of the World affirms God's intent to consummate the creation as well, but, consistent with Orthodoxy, and, in my opinion, Scripture and the Reformed tradition (post-millennialists like NT Wright and the Federal Visionists, among others), this little volume exuberantly proclaims that this economy of earthly consummation is caught up in Christ and the Church. Christ has indeed died and risen for the life of the world, to bring it to its ultimate fulfillment in Him.

Heaven and Earth Are Filled with Thy Glory: Eastern Orthodoxy For the Life of the World

What we are undertaking here is as ambitious as it is exotic. For some of us, the perspective we are unrolling here is a totally different understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. It is going to challenge some of our most basic thoughts and assumptions about what Christianity is all about, and ultimately, what life is all about. The most important questions we need to consider before we start this project is, What is the chief end of humanity and of the world? What is the life of the world that Jesus has died to reclaim for us? What exactly are we in the Church doing when we gather together to worship on the Lord's Day? What is it that the Church is doing in all of its work and in all of its teaching and what is the purpose and goal of this action and teaching? Also, what is the significance of our lives beyond church doors? Let's chew on this a little bit while I attempt to answer a question that I am sure all of you might be asking.

What is Eastern Orthodoxy and how is it valuable to us as 21st-century American Presbyterians? Why do I think this book written by an Orthodox priest about the faith of his church is so vitally important that we need to hear it? Well, let's work on exploring Eastern Orthodoxy for a minute. Where does this tradition come from?

The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church separated 500 years before the Protestants broke from Rome. There are more similarities between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism than there are between Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism. Nevertheless, Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism have some profound differences. For instance, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy has no pope and rejects the doctrine of purgatory and its artistic expression comes to focus on the icons of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints rather than on the statuary that is more representative of Roman Catholicism.

On the other hand, like Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox have priests (but unlike in Catholicism these priests can marry); they have seven sacraments instead of two, as we will find out; they recognize the Apocrypha as Scripture; they view Tradition as being equal with Scripture in authority; they have strong devotion to the Virgin Mary; and they ask the saints in heaven to pray for them. Unlike Roman Catholicism and also Protestantism, for that matter, Eastern Orthodoxy does not view mystery and questions we can't answer as the problems we tend to think they are; instead of always trying to figure out the mysteries and provide answers the way we seem to want to, the Eastern Orthodox simply bow before God in worship, thanking Him for His majesty and incomprehensibility.

This points us to the language issue. Greek, the traditional language of the Eastern Church, is more fluid and poetic than Latin, the traditional language of the Western Church. Latin, on the other hand, is characterized as a more legalistic and technical language than Greek. Our Western practice of using a great many words and technical terms to describe and understand divine mysteries is undoubtedly part of the heritage left to the Western Church from the Latin tongue. Nevertheless, from whatever sources it arises, our Western wordiness means that the piety of Western Christianity, particularly Protestant piety, is more focused on the Word and words. As a result, Protestant piety, particularly Reformed piety, gets manifested in things like Bible study, listening to or delivering a good sermon, or congregational singing, for instance, while Orthodox piety gets manifested in ritual action, in chanted music, and in painting or venerating beautiful icons of Christ, Mary, the saints, and other heavenly mysteries.

This really points to another distinction as well between Reformed Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy and even Catholicism are more sense-oriented traditions than most Protestant traditions. This leads to Protestant charges of idolatry against these traditions, some of which are quite frankly valid, but, what we fail to realize is that we put a great deal of emphasis on the senses in our traditions as well. We certainly put a great deal of emphasis on our sense of hearing when it comes to hearing and understanding the Word, and, of course, understandings of the sacraments that limit them to teaching ceremonies certainly put a great deal of weight on the sense of sight. In my understanding of the sacraments, though, I think the use of our senses of touch and taste are also significant. Pay attention to this kind of thing throughout our study. We will be returning to the issue of how our humanity and materiality come into play in our spirituality.

That's enough about the specifics of Eastern Orthodoxy for the moment. The question is, "Why?" What does it have to do with us? Well, there's a couple of things. Eastern Orthodox are our brothers and sisters in Christ, but we don't know much about them. Just as I think we need to do with all Christian traditions, we need to get to know them because they are part of the family and they have something valuable to teach us.

Before we dig deeper into what exactly it is Eastern Orthodoxy can teach us, though, we need to talk about modern Western society and the challenges it poses for Christian mission. This is the central issue that our text is going to be addressing and why we have chosen to study this book. We are seeking a vision to help us more successfully make disciples of Jesus Christ in a very challenging and very quickly changing world. According to our author, the chief problem that our society poses for Christian mission is that it opens a great chasm between the Church and the rest of the world. Dualism is the problem. What the heck do I mean by dualism? On one side of life is material existence; on the other side is spiritual existence.

Fundamental distinction made between:

• religious versus secular
• sacred versus profane
• spiritual versus material
• church versus state

In the preface, Schmemann talks about the two responses that Christians have made to this situation. How has the Church responded?

• Page 7-8, 12-13
• What is the "spiritualist" response? What do you make of it? How is it evident in American Christianity?
• What is the "activist" response? What do you make of it? How is it evident in American Christianity?

Do you agree with Schmemann's statement on the bottom of page 13? Why or why not?

Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at a secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave His only begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.

What seems to be our "traditional" understanding of Christianity? What is the purpose of the world, and what is humanity's purpose? Why did Jesus come and what is the goal of our life in him?

I would characterize the "traditional" American understanding of the Christian faith by three terms: world-denying, pessimistic, and otherworldly. It is world denying in that it really doesn't have an answer for God's purpose in creating the world. Its view of humanity and the direction of our future is pessimistic. Our original purpose, of course, is to "glorify God and enjoy him forever," but humanity is so destroyed and the world is so beyond redemption that it is impossible for God to salvage anything from the planet but the few souls that he has decided to rescue. In order to fulfill our purpose, then, we shouldn't focus too much on what's happening here because our hope is completely in heaven. It is spiritual realities that we truly need to apply ourselves to. I would call this understanding an evacuation theology—the "I'll Fly Away" approach to Christian faith. Christ has simply come to rescue us from this rotten, stinking, sin and death-infested world and take us to heaven. The world is only going to get worse, so the best we can hope for is to be raptured the heck out of here before the world literally goes to hell.

In this perspective, everyday life, the eating, drinking, monotonous, daily grind kind of life, doesn't really have a lot of significance. Don't get me wrong, we have a lot of work to do in getting people saved so we can get them to go to heaven with us, but we really shouldn't be wasting our time on trying to change the world for the better. Nothing but winning souls matters; everything else is just waiting around to die and go to heaven. Does that really inspire you and give you a vision by which to live your everyday life? Don't get me wrong; the freedom from pain and struggle that Jesus promises us in heaven is a valid part of our Christian tradition that at some point in our lives as we grow older each of us is going to draw strength from. The hope of being absent from the body and present with the Lord is precious for those whose lives in the world are nothing but pain and hardship, like those imminently facing death or those who are living in the midst of severe poverty, illness, or oppression, but what about for the rest of us? What do we do until then? It's exactly this kind of view of Christian faith that caused me to leave my own fundamentalist background. It was all about what happens after death. There wasn't much meaning attached to our earthly, everyday lives. It's that ugly dualism again! The spiritual life cares not for the things of this world.

Of course, many Christians in America and around the world have realized the deficiency of this completely otherworldly kind of Christian understanding. I would characterize the alternative view by the terms: world-affirming, optimistic, and secular. It is world-affirming because it is insistent that the world is God's good creation. It has an optimistic view of human nature and of the progress of history. People are inherently good and if we just try a little harder, life can become heaven on earth. If this is the case, in this view, if life in this world holds out such good possibilities, we really don't have to focus too much attention on heaven or on truth claims about God. We really can't know too much about that stuff anyway. The most important thing about Jesus is how he has taught us to live in this world and love one another.

I say this is secular because, if the sum total of our Christian life is activism and we don't pay much attention to worship and the revelation of Scripture, there really isn't any need for the Church when we can accomplish the goal of making a better society through politics or justice movements outside the Church. Many historians and sociologists of religion think this is why Protestantism declined in the Northeast after the Civil War and into the early and middle 20th-century. That confounded dualism strikes again, divorcing our practical life in the world from worship.

Well, the reason I put forward Eastern Orthodoxy, as presented in this book, is that it puts forward a vision of life and of what we are doing here as the Church that, in my view, is unpolluted and uncontaminated by Western forces of modernity and secularity. It has not accepted this confounded dualism that puts religion in a marginal place in this world and takes from it the soul and the spirit of life, truly abundant life, that Jesus promises to give God's people here and now in this world and stretching forward into eternity. During the course of the study, we're going to see how the vision of Christian mission that Eastern Orthodoxy sets forth can give that spirit of life back to us.

Another reason Eastern Orthodoxy might be of help to us is that it's a tough time right now for the Church. If any Christian tradition knows adversity, it has been Eastern Orthodoxy. For the last 500 years, the Orthodox churches in the Middle East have managed to remain in spite of repressive theocratic Muslim governments or societies, and, of course, the Russian Orthodox Church and the other Orthodox churches in the former Soviet Union managed to survive and even thrive throughout nearly a century of Communist rule. There is some kind of power and beauty in this Christian tradition that has enabled it to continue and even flourish through long years of trial. What they've got to say, I think we need to hear and learn from.

There is also the fact that Reformed Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy have a few important areas of convergence. One of the pioneers of Reformed Christianity, John Calvin, looked toward the East in his teaching on the Lord's Supper. In light of this historic convergence, the historic catholic movement within American Presbyterianism has been fed and nourished in sacramental theology by Eastern Orthodox thinkers, especially our author, Alexander Schmemann. We see both of these currents running through the Communion liturgy we use in the Presbyterian Church USA.

So, what is the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the purpose of humanity and of the world?

The world's purpose-

In the Bible the food that man eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God. The world as man's food is not something "material" and limited to material functions, thus different from, and opposed to, the specifically "spiritual" functions by which man is related God. All that exists is God's gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man's life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: "O taste and see that the Lord is good." page 14

Humanity's purpose-

Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. All desire is finally desire for Him. To be sure, man is not the only hungry being. All that exists lives by "eating." The whole creation depends on food. But the unique position of man in the universe is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him. He alone is to respond to God's blessing with his blessing. . . . The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he received from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the "matter," the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament. pages 14-15

Is this drastically different from our "traditional" American understanding of the Christian faith? What do you make of humanity being the priest and the world being the eucharist of God's presence? Does this understanding allow for a division of life into sacred and secular? What is most surprising?

What do the Scriptures testify?

Deut. 6:3-12- Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you. . . . then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

Romans 8:19-21- The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

How does Schmemann describe the Fall?

The "original" sin is not primarily that man has "disobeyed" God; the sin is that He ceased to be hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. The sin was not that man neglected his religious duties. The sin was that he thought of God in terms of religion, i.e., opposing Him to life. The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world. The fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and material, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into "life in God," filled with meaning and spirit. page 18

Does this make sense? What about the characterization of religion itself being a result of the Fall?

In light of this understanding of the Fall, what is Christ's mission? What did his death and resurrection accomplish?

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

The light God sent was His Son: the same light that had been shining unextinguished in the world's darkness all along, seen now in full brightness. page 18-19

How is this different from the "traditional" understanding of Christ's mission? How is it similar?

Consummation Theology:

In Him was the end of 'religion,' because He himself was the Answer to all religion, to all human hunger for God, because in Him the life that was lost by man—and which could only be symbolized, signified, asked for in religion—was restored to man. page 20

“In Christ, life—life in all its totality—was returned to man, given again as sacrament and communion, made Eucharist.” page 20

What do the Scriptures testify?

John 6:25-35- When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, "Rabbi, when did you get here?" Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval." Then they asked him, "What must we do to do the works God requires?" Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent." So they asked him, "What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written: 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." "Sir," they said, "from now on give us this bread." Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.

For next time, we will look at how the Church itself is the sacrament of Christ's presence and action in the world by engaging Schmemann's discussion of the Eucharist in Chapter 2. Please take the time to read it; it is well worth it.

Church: Love It, Don't Leave It

Young pastors Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck writing on Newsweek/Washington Post "On Faith: Guest Voices" blog about the importance of the Church. Though they screwed Calvin and Cyprian's statement up, (which is actually: "Those who wish to have God for their Father must have the Church for their Mother.") they are otherwise spot on.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/07/church_love_it_dont_leave_it.html