I was a little
surprised when Archbishop Chrysostomos recently wrote me with some critical
words about my experience of Jesus Christ as my personal Savior within the
context of the Orthodox witness....It seems to me that accepting Jesus as our
personal Lord and Savior is what Christianity is really about....I find Jesus
in Orthodoxy and I can find no reason to look at His saving Grace any differently
now that I am Orthodox than when I was a Protestant. I am saved in Orthodoxy
and rejoice in my Savior (Luke 1:47)....Could you explain why my language was
described as missing the mark or off the mark—whichever? (P.L., IL)
We have asked His
Eminence to respond to your comments and question:
In corresponding
with you some time ago, I had occasion to chastise you for approaching the
Orthodox Faith with a certain superficiality and without addressing the
wholeness of the salvific experience that one finds in Orthodox theology. I
will reiterate and expand on what I told you, hoping that you will reflect on
these matters carefully. Firstly, as I pointed out to you earlier, the concepts
of personhood and salvation in the Orthodox Church have absolutely nothing to
do with these notions as Protestant Evangelicals understand them; and secondly,
the separation of human salvation and the witness of the Church into two
elements, if not the separation of salvation and personhood themselves, is
wholly foreign to Orthodoxy. Salvation is the realization of personhood in
Christ, through theosis (divinization by Grace), and Christ is not only the
Church itself, as Father Florovsky has so clearly demonstrated from a Patristic
standpoint (see, for example, his brilliant essay, Le Corps du Christ vivant:
Une Interprtation orthodoxe de l Église Universelle [The Body of the Living
Christ: An Orthodox Understanding of the Catholic Church] in the collection, La
Saint Église Universelle [The Holy Catholic Church] [Neuchatel-Paris: Delachaux
et Niestl, 1948]), but the very source, as Perfect God and Perfect man
(Teleios Theos kai Teleios Anthropos), of our restoration to the image of God,
or salvation.
I have often
emphasized this point about the existential and wider dimensions of religious
terminology in the Fathers of the Church, by recounting an astonishing incident
in one of Father Florovsky's seminars, in 1976, at the Princeton Theological
Seminary. In the course of a certain lecture, a seminary student—frustrated, I
suspect, at the philosophical depth of Father Florovskys discussion of a
certain Patristic point (in fact, he was, as I recall, discussing
Origen)—raised his hand and rather boldly asked, What does all of this have to
do with accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? There was a
long pause, after which Father Georges, with a piercing glance, looked up at
the student and said, with the frail voice that in those days betrayed his
advanced age: Young man, I was converted to Jesus Christ, not to Protestant
Evangelical piety. He then continued his lecture, without another comment. He
no doubt thought that the matter was closed; his clumsy student, no doubt,
understood nothing of what Father Georges had said.
That one
confrontation has always encapsulated, for me, the vast distance which
separates the experiential theology of the Fathers and the doctrinaire theology
of Christian apologetics (what Father John Romanides, as we shall see below,
calls polemical or dogmatic theology, without implying anything pejorative by
the former word), if indeed one can dignify pietistic clichés such as the one
in question—however sincerely proffered—with the word theology.
Let me elaborate on
what I have said, by touching on the Orthodox meaning of the person and the
relationship of personhood to salvation within the context of the teachings of
St. Gregory Palamas. In this way, you will see vividly what I mean when I refer
to your pietistic notion of personal salvation as superficial. It is, in fact,
only by carefully defining our terminology in the language used by the
Fathers—language rising out of their experience of God and the restoration of
human personhood in Christ—that we can fully understand the profound dimensions
of Scriptural references to Christ as our personal Savior and the experiential
nexus between the person and salvation in Christ. When we turn to the living
witness of the Fathers, we capture a fullness of Christian teaching that is
neither related to the Evangelical understanding of personal salvation in Christ,
nor in any manner captured by that understanding, save in the undoubtedly
well-intentioned strivings of those who seek the ineffable within the
tragically limited boundaries of an existential mystery reduced to a verbal
affirmation.
I will begin my
comments by translating and quoting two sections from a number of very
insightful passages written by Metropolitan Ierotheos of Nafpaktos about St.
Gregory Palamas theology and the theology of the Orthodox Fathers in general,
which give us a grounding in understanding the experiential dimensions of true
theology. These passages are found in His Eminence's excellent essay, He peri
prosopou didaskalia kata ton Hagio Gregorio Palama (St. Gregory Palamas
Teaching on the Person), in which he approaches the question of personhood
somewhat differently—and with a different and more expansive aim—than I, but
whose observations are wholly consistent with what I have to say.
Speaking of the
theological methodology of St. Gregory Palamas, Metropolitan Ierotheos writes:
St. Gregory Palamas was a synthetic theologian, in the sense that he knew all
of the theology of the Orthodox Church and unceasingly directed its application
to the needs of his age. The Holy Fathers of the Church always theologized in a
synthetic and productive manner. This means that, having personal experience
of God, they confronted the theological currents of their age from within their
experience, which was, in actuality, the experience of the Church, employing
even the nomenclature of heretics, but endowing it with a different content and
a different meaning.
Addressing directly
a theology of experience derived from the vision of God, His Eminence notes
that: Theology as a vision of God is one thing, as St. Gregory Palamas
indicates in a number of places, and a theology which aims to express this
experience in contemporary terms is quite another. Father John Romanides, in
order to underscore the difference between these two different theologies,
refers to empirical theology [a theology of experience] and
dogmatic—polemical—theology. The first entails the vision of the Uncreated
Light of God in the human Nature of the Logos, while the second entails the
effort to convey this experience in the confrontation of heretics who [merely]
philosophized about these serious matters of the Faith.
Keeping in mind
these general principles with regard to the source of genuine theology
(empirical theology), let us examine what St. Gregory Palamas says about the
person. To begin with, we must say something about the Orthodox understanding
of man. Man exists both in essence and in hypostasis (and the word hypostasis
is one which Palamas seems to prefer over the word person, having drawn much of
his language in this regard from both St. Basil the Great and St. John of
Damascus). The essence of man (bear in mind that this word derives ultimately
from the verb to be, as Metropolitan Ierotheos reminds us) describes his state
of being, which he shares with all others. His hypostasis (person), however, is
that which distinguishes him from others. (Needless to say, one should not
naïvely confuse the terms used here in describing the human being with the
Hypostasis and Essence of God, which have wholly different meanings and which
apply to God alone. The Essence of God is ineffable; and the Hypostasis of God
is uncreated, while that of man is created.)
The human person is
the hypostatic manifestation of the human essence, the realization of who a
human being is as an individual: being, again, common in his essence but
individual in his hypostasis or person, as St. Gregory Palamas affirms. It is
primarily the human person to which the therapeutic and salvific methods of
Hesychasm, as the spiritual teachings of Palamas are called, are directed. The
cleaning and enlightenment of the individual human mind, the purification of
the human heart, and the restoration of the passions (which have been
misdirected and perverted, as a result of the Fall) constitute the Hesychastic
way of life. And the way of life that effects these things leads to the
restoration of the individual, the human person, who freely turns from a life
of sin to one of synergy with God. In short, one can say, though risking
theological difficulties in overstating this point, that the restoration of the
human being in Christ centers on the person, on the restoration of the person,
and on the cure of the process of disease which separates the individual from
the full realization of his potential in Christ.
In the purest
anthropology of the Fathers, expressed perfectly in the Hesychastic teachings
of St. Gregory Palamas, we come to understand that the essence of man, his
being, has been restored through the divinization of human nature by the
Incarnation of Christ, Who, in His Resurrection, lifted human existence above
what it was even before the Fall. The personal salvation of the human being lies
in his free acceptance of the potential for restoration in Christ, his ascetic
struggle to free himself from the taint and illness of sin, and his restoration
of the human person, his hypostasis, through the vision of God. And this vision
of God, according to St. Gregory Palamas, is communion with God, the
divinization of the human person (theosis), and his union in energy with
Christ. In this divinization by Grace, man comes to an intimate knowledge of
God. His mind cleansed and enlightened, his heart purified, and his passions
cleansed and directed towards the love and attainment of holiness, man finds
salvation.
And once more, this
salvation is personal, centered on the distinct human being who draws on his
essence—renewed in Christ—and who, in his person, becomes a small Jesus Christ
within Jesus Christ, to quote one Church Father. So it is that Jesus Christ is
our personal Lord and our Savior. In this profound sense of the personal, and
in an apocalyptic encounter with redemption (for salvation is closely united to
spiritual vision and to the noetic revelation and knowledge of God), we find,
through experience, what the more fundamentalistic Protestant Evangelicals
understand only in empty form. We know through the attainment of true
personhood in Christ, which is the enlightenment or salvation of man, what
these seekers know only intellectually and in terms of a theology of
affirmation and commitment crippled by the unrestored senses and passions.
It behooves me to
note, here, that God transcends all human categories of thought, all human
conceptualization, and even our understanding of His existence. The personal
experience of the redemption of Christ, therefore, occurs beyond the dimensions
of the human intellect, as I said above, since the true encounter with Christ
is an encounter with God Himself. This encounter is the result of our union
with God's Energies, and thus occurs noetically and spiritually, through the
mind made new in Christ, the heart transformed by Grace, and the person
restored to the image of God in union, by Grace, with the God-Man. Divine
vision is, in effect, vision beyond vision, just as personhood in Christ is
beyond the personal as we understand it, since the fallen personality is not a true person, but the product of passions and
fallen proclivities.
In conclusion, I
should emphasize that the therapeutic path towards the restoration of
personhood in Christ is, and must be, focused, of course, on the life of the
Mysteries, which are the very life of the Church and which cannot be separated
from the Church in any manner whatsoever: among other things, the emptying-out
(kenosis) of sin through confession and the infusion into our hearts, joints,
and reins of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. The spiritual
faculty of man, the noetic faculty, having been displaced from its natural
place in the heart, as St. Gregory Palamas teaches us, must be brought back
into the heart, back to its natural place, so that the human person can be
restored and, cleansed by the Mysteries, rise above his own nature, attaining
what is above nature, transcending human nature through union with Christ. As a
result of this, the human being transcends even his own person, his restoration
in Christ touching on all mankind. Gaining the gifts of the Spirit, he sees all
things clearly, not only for himself, as St. Gregory writes, but revealing what
he sees to others, and thus helping them to gain their salvation through the
vision of God. In this sense, Christ is not only our personal Lord and Savior,
but He is also the Universal Person, Who renews us each individually and, so
made manifest in us, reveals to us a far greater dimension of personal
salvation than we can imagine.
Source: http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/ac_personhood.aspx
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