… the eucharistic gathering, as an image of the last times, certainly should involve only the baptized. In this sense, we are talking about a closed community which comes together ‘the doors being shut’ (John 20:19 …). The Eucharistic gathering can never be a means and instrument of mission, because in the last times, which […]
Read MoreMost believers more inhabit their religion than reflectively assent to it, at least in the way that one might ascent to a simple proposition. In some very real and not at all dishonorable sense, their belief rests upon the experience of belief only, and that of the most generously imprecise kind. It does not need […]
Read MoreLike the Church of Rome, Orthodoxy too, as it developed first in Byzantium and then in the Russian East of the Church of Moscow, suffers from papalism– not consciously dogmatic, clearly or responsibly formulated, but actual and psychological. Orthodoxy is grounded in sobornost, the communality of the body of the Church, and not in the […]
Read More“…the secondary question of whether this defiant rejection of God for all of eterniy is really logically possible for any rational being; and the primary question of whether the God who creates a reality in which the eternal suffering of any being is possible — even if it should be a self-induced suffering — can […]
Read More… the very concept of an “omnipotent entity” is contradictory. Real omnipotence would require a power co-terminus with the whole of being, from its innermost wellsprings and principles to its outermost consequences and effects; it would even require possession of the power belonging to the deepest source of all the acts of every rational will, […]
Read MoreIt is not to deviate from the perfect worship of God that we allow the production of icons made of wax and colors. For we make no icon or representation of the invisible divinity: in fact, the holy angels themselves cannot understand or penetrate it totally. But since the only Son himself, Who is in […]
Read MoreFor 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 […]
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RJB
November 10, 2023
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