For myself, I prefer a much older, more expansive, perhaps overly systematic approach to the seemingly contrary eschatological expectations unfolding in the New Testament – an approach, that is, like Gregory of Nyssa’s or Origen’s, according to which the two sides of the New Testament’s escatalogical language represent not two antithetical possibilities tantalizingly or menacingly […]
Read MoreNow all things were already arrived at their own end: the heaven and the earth [Genesis 2:1], as Moses says, were finished, and all things that lie between them, and the particular things were adorned with their appropriate beauty; the heaven with the rays of the stars, the sea and air with the living creatures […]
Read MoreFor the earliest and greatest of the church fathers in general, the story of salvation was really quite uncomplicated: We were born in bondage, in the house of a cruel master to whom we had been sold as slaves before we could choose for ourselves; we were born, moreover, not guilty or damnable in God’s […]
Read MoreIts [i.e., the soul’s] definition, the Teacher replied, has been attempted in different ways by different writers, each according to his own bent; but the following is our opinion about it. The soul is an essence created, and living, and intellectual, transmitting from itself to an organized and sentient body the power of living and […]
Read MoreWhen we give our hearts with our alms, we give well, but we must often plead to a failure in this respect. Not so our Master and our Lord. His favors are always performed with the love of His heart. He does not send to us the cold meat and the broken pieces from the […]
Read MoreHence if a man whose conscience accuses him of evil calls God his Father, he asserts precisely that God is the cause and origin of his own wickedness. But there is no fellowship of light with darkness, says the Apostle; but light associates with light and justice was what is just, beauty with what is […]
Read MoreNow if man came into existence for this purpose – namely to be made a partaker of the divine goodness, he must have been created with a propensity for sharing in that goodness. In the case of physical sight the eye partakes of light by virtue of a beam of light with which the eye […]
Read MoreThe world we inhabit — the world our imaginations know and within which our deepest desires must move — is the world after Darwin (and Marx and Freud and a host of other prophets of disenchantment, but first and foremost Darwin); we simply cannot now (if we are paying attention) imagine a universe whose grandeurs […]
Read MoreUp until the period when the Cappadocians undertook to develop a solution to the trinitarian problems, an identifying of ousia with hypostasis implied that a thing’s concrete individuality (hypostasis) means simply that it is (i.e. its ousia). Now, however, changes occurred. The term hypostasis was dissociated from that of ousia and became identified with that […]
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RJB
July 19, 2023
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