Old Sandals

With joy you will drink deeply from the fountain of salvation!

Our salvation—eternal life with the God of the universe—is something to look forward to with joyous anticipation. But it is not just a then; it is (or is meant to be) a now.

There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him…

“Attend carefully [to the] doctrine of the incarnation… For the exceeding measure of His lovingkindness and the magnitude of His condescension were full of awe, and needed much preparation to be accepted. For consider what a great thing it was to hear and to learn that God the ineffable, the incorruptible, the unintelligible, the invisible, the incomprehensible, in whose hand are the ends of the earth, who looketh upon the earth, and causeth it to tremble, who toucheth the mountains, and maketh them smoke, the weight of whose condescension not even the Cherubim were able to bear but veiled their faces by the shelter of their wings, that this God who surpasses all understanding, and baffles all calculation, having passed by angels, archangels, and all the spiritual powers above, deigned to become man, and to take flesh formed of earth and clay, and enter the womb of a virgin, and be borne there the space of nine months, and be nourished with milk, and suffer all things to which man is liable.  Inasmuch then as that which was to happen was so strange as to be disbelieved by many even when it had taken place, He first of all sends prophets beforehand, announcing this very fact. For instance the patriarch predicted it saying, ‘Thou didst spring from a tender shoot my son. Thou didst lie down and slumber as a lion’ and Isaiah saying, ‘Behold the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call His name Emmanuel’ and elsewhere again, ‘We beheld Him as a young child, as a root in a dry ground’ and by the dry ground he means the virgin’s womb.  And again, ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given’ and again, ‘There shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall spring out of his root.’ “

St. John Chrysostom
Against Marcionists and Manichaeans

Shall the ax boast itself against him who chops with it? Or shall the saw exalt itself against him who saws with it? As if a rod could wield itself against those who lift it up, or as if a staff could lift up, as if it were not wood!

The prophet speaks to you and me today.  This is a timeless message.

For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given. And the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

This is the mystery—hidden in times past but revealed to us in these “last days”.  The mystery is a person.  He comes into the world as a little child. This little child/person/mystery is none other than God Himself.  Immanuel.  God with us.  To save us.

Take counsel together, but it will come to nothing.  Speak the word, but it will not stand, for God is with us.

It is certainly much easier to comprehend the mystery of the Incarnation as a kenosis.  My concern, however, is that, to my knowledge, none of the early church fathers understood kenosis to imply that Christ actually gave up or lost, in an ontological sense, his divine nature and attributes

Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man.  This is the central truth of Christianity.  The only truth. Historical truth.  It marches on through the ages.  It cannot be explained, only believed, followed and cherished.

Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.

The incarnation is the heart of the gospel.  It is the beginning and the end of it.  It is a great mystery.  A wondrous mystery.  A life-changing reality.

I recently found this question and (interesting, but perhaps unorthodox) answer on Greg Boyd’s website, www.Reknew.org:

Q. God is, by definition, eternal, having neither beginning nor end. Human beings are, by definition, finite, beginning at a certain point in time. How, then, can Jesus be both God (eternal) and human (finite)? Isn’t that a contradiction? Similarly, while God is omniscient, humans aren’t. How could Jesus be both omniscient God and non-omniscient human? When Jesus was a little zygote in the womb of Mary, did he also know what was happening on some planet at the other end of the universe?

A. Great question! Theologians have worked through the paradox of Jesus being “fully God and fully human” in a number of different ways. The most traditional way is sometimes called a “two minds Christology.” This view affirms that Jesus was, on some level, aware of what was happening on every planet in the universe while he was a zygote in the womb of Mary, even while he was completely unaware of everything outside the womb on another level. I myself have never been able to render this view coherent.

A different approach to this paradox has been labeled “kenotic Christology,” based on the word kenosis, which is Greek for “to empty.” It’s used in Philippians 2 when Paul says Jesus didn’t cling to his divine prerogatives, but instead emptied himself and became a human. The kenotic Christology says that what the Son of God emptied himself of was the exercise of all the divine attributes that are incompatible with being a human. So the Son of God divested himself of his omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence to become a genuine human who had limited knowledge, took up limited space, and had limited power.

This view obviously means that God doesn’t need to always exercise his divine attributes to be God.  Anyone who believes that humans are created with free will, as I do, should have no problem with this notion, for the only way God could give humans free will is by limiting his omnipotence. Creating a world with free agents thus involves a sort of “kenosis” in God. The kenotic Christology simply takes this logic a bit further and applies it to the incarnation. Just as God limited his power when he created free agents, so too the Son of God limited his power, knowledge, and presence to become a full human being. What the Son of God did not set aside is his perfect divine love, for there’s nothing contradictory about a human loving others perfectly. To the contrary, teaching and empowering humans to love like God is one of God’s central goals for creation.

However, when ambassadors arrived from Babylon to ask about the remarkable events that had taken place in the land, God withdrew from Hezekiah in order to test him and to see what was really in his heart.

God is never far away, even when we knowingly sin against Him. This verse suggests that at times God may seem to be far away, even when we are praying, reading our Bible, etc., but then it may be only that He wants to prove our faith.

Faith is indeed a journey.  Sometimes our feelings lead us. Sometimes we have to drag them along behind.

Kore the son of Imnah the Levite, the keeper of the East Gate,  was  over the freewill offerings to God, to distribute the offerings of the Lord and the most holy things. And under him  were  Eden, Miniamin, Jeshua, Shemaiah, Amariah, and Shecaniah,  his  faithful assistants in the cities of the priests, to distribute allotments to their brethren by divisions, to the great as well as the small.

Eden, Miniamin, Jeshua, Shemaiah, Amariah, and Shecaniah were faithful assistants. To be called faithful is to be paid the highest compliment. It certainly ought to be our highest aspiration.
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We follow in his footsteps;

What if our feet be torn?

Where He has marked the pathway

All hail the briar and thorn!

Scarce seen, scarce heard, unreckoned,

Despised, defamed, unknown

Or heard, but by our singing,

On children, ever on!

      Gerhard Tersteegen, “Pilgrim Song”

And Hezekiah sent to all Israel and Judah, and also wrote letters to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they should come to the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, to keep the Passover to the Lord God of Israel….So the runners passed from city to city through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh, as far as Zebulun; but they laughed at them and mocked them. Nevertheless some from Asher, Manasseh, and Zebulun humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem….Many…had not cleansed themselves, yet they ate the Passover contrary to what was written. But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, “May the good Lord provide atonement for everyone who prepares his heart to seek God, the Lord God of his fathers, though  he is  not  cleansed  according to the purification of the sanctuary.”

There has always been—there will will always be—those who ridicule the things of God.  Love them anyway.  That’s what the gospel is, really.  It is love regardless.  It is mercy regardless. And it is (ultimately) victorious. Regardless.

And [King Hezekiah] said to them: “Hear me, Levites! Now sanctify yourselves, sanctify the house of the Lord God of your fathers, and carry out the rubbish from the holy  place.  For our fathers have trespassed and done evil in the eyes of the Lord our God; they have forsaken Him, have turned their faces away from the dwelling place of the Lord, and turned  their  backs  on Him.  They have also shut up the doors of the vestibule, put out the lamps, and have not burned incense or offered burnt offerings in the holy  place  to the God of Israel. Therefore the wrath of the Lord fell upon Judah and Jerusalem, and He has given them up to trouble, to desolation, and to jeering, as you see with your eyes. For indeed, because of this our fathers have fallen by the sword; and our sons, our daughters, and our wives  are  in captivity. Now  it is  in my heart to make a covenant with the Lord God of Israel, that His fierce wrath may turn away from us.”

The faith is an ancient faith.  We today stand on the shoulders of the saints, men like King Hezekiah, who found it “in his heart” to make (and to keep) covenant with the Lord God.

The eastern orthodox church claims to be the only church that has remained true to the ancient faith, the faith proclaimed by the apostles and handed down to the early church fathers, many of whom were martyrs and confessors, who guarded it against heresy, and passed it on unchanged to succeeding generations, down to this present day. Whether or to what extent that is true is far beyond the scope of this post.

I have, however, copied this interesting, rather articulate polemic in favor of eastern orthodoxy.  It was written by a certain eastern orthodox christian named Joseph (last name unknown, but whose online address is www.arimathea.org):

The basic Orthodox claim is similar to that of Rome: the Orthodox Church is the Body of Christ, spread throughout the Roman empire and beyond by the apostles, and nourished by the Holy Spirit throughout the ages. For the Orthodox, there is no sudden change — no apostasy, no turbulent switch — in Christian history. From Paul to Justin to John Chrysostom to John of Damascus to Gregory Palamas to today, there is a public continuous Christian community that lives in the light of Christ’s resurrection. Rome claims the same. Protestant communities also claim as much, but rather dishonestly. How should we judge these competing claims? Well, we can look for continuity. It is not enough to find some sort of precedence — we must find a general and consistent acceptance of doctrines throughout the Christian era. If you do this, you will see that the Protestant confessions are aberrations in Christian history. It is true that Luther and Calvin found their inspiration in Saint Augustine of Hippo, but his peculiar views were quite singular, and they were rejected by the Western Churches for a thousand years after his death, despite his being the greatest Church Father who wrote in Latin. In the East, Augustine’s quirky theological speculations never influenced anyone. All of the great teachers in Christian history had their individual doctrinal musings. Favorite sons of the Orthodox Church Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus also had peculiar ideas. However, such views were simply their own and did not reflect the general consensus of the faith as inherited through the centuries from the apostles. As such, they were considered the private opinions of wise and holy men — but they were not doctrine. The East had an advantage in this, as most early Fathers were Greek speaking and writing — there was no lack of witnesses writing in Greek from any era of the apostolic faith. No one person and his theological idiosyncrasies could substitute for the general catholic faith that everyone held.It is a common Orthodox contention that most Western errors resulted from this lack of patristic diversity in the West. As the Empire in the West crumbled, fewer people knew Greek, and the knowledge of the early Church was lost in a way that never happened in the Greek East. Moreover, with the onset of the Dark Ages and fewer educated folks in the West, the place of Augustine and the few Western Fathers held an inappropriate influence over the West. Furthermore, the bishop of Rome was forced to take on secular responsibilities as civil authority either crumbled or was taken over by heretical Arians. Over centuries, this aggrandizement of power perverted Rome — from the Orthodox perspective — and made it more about princely power than about guarding the ancient faith for the salvation of souls.Therefore, the Orthodox acknowledge that Rome has ancient roots, but they hold that historical circumstances facilitated Rome’s slow departure from the apostolic faith. Rome also acknowledges its changes, but it argues that such changes were divinely ordained. To weigh the two, consider the relative arguments. However, I think that the burden of proof must rest on Rome, which changed and gathered great power by those changes. Did the papacy transform into a super-episcopacy due to the will of God or due to the self-interest of power hungry men? The Roman position puts so much stock in the power and infallibility of the papacy because it then allows Rome to justify all other changes. To any question, “Why did the Roman Church change from the ancient practice to another?,” Rome can simply answer “Because the Holy Spirit works through the magesterium of the papacy and directs the Church through Christ’s vicar on earth, the pope.” In one stroke, Roman Catholicism self-justifies. The Orthodox reject such papal authority and rest with the ancient apostolic and patristic consensus. Obviously, new questions always arise, and new answers must develop to address them. Yet, the Orthodox position is that these new answers are based in the consistent unchanged “phronema” — the mind set — of the Church. Roman theologians often accuse the Orthodox of being stuck in the past, but for the Orthodox, God’s truth isn’t constrained by time. The Word of God is eternal.  When the Orthodox say that the “truth is a Person”, it is not an excuse not to engage intellectually, though many Western Christians initially think that of Orthodox Christians. Rather, it is a typical Orthodox response to what they see as the hyper-rationalization of divine matters. For the Orthodox, theology is not an academic exercise; it is not an engagement with abstract concepts but rather an engagement with the living God. Out of pastoral reasons, Orthodox priests try to steer Western inquirers to consider their faith more like a life lived — in a relationship of love — than one of propositions to which one assents. Westerners often misunderstand this move, since their prior experience with such responses usually comes from the post-modern, post-doctrinal, post-Christian factions of their own religious tradition: “Only the closet atheists say such things.” Thus, they dismiss Orthodoxy as wishy-washy feel good mystical gobbly gook nonsense. Concerning scripture, the Orthodox rightly treasure the Bible, but they do not see it as something separate from the rest of their heritage from God. The legacy of Abraham, the law of Moses, the prophets, the apostles, the first Christian communities, the martyrs, the great theologians of the early Church, the great councils, the wisdom of the desert monks, the hymnography, the liturgical riches, and the poetry of the Church — these are all aspects of the Christian life, lived in the community of Christ’s gospel. You may hear such and interpret it as denigrating the scriptures, whereas the Orthodox are, from their perspective, putting the Bible in its greater context. The Bible isn’t a document without a home; its home is the Church, where it was written, where it has been kept, and where it has been taught for two thousand years. So, with apostolic succession, scriptural interpretation, and doctrinal positions, the Orthodox can point to any century in the past and state that Christians held the same beliefs then. They do not see the Fathers as distant authorities — Orthodox Christians are not ecclesial archaeologists digging around in dusty cathedral basements — but rather the Orthodox see the Fathers as familiar pastors and teachers. For this reason, the Orthodox do not have the same crisis of faith that many Westerners have when it comes to learning the great upheavals in Church history. The Arian controversy is touted as evidence against the Trinity by some Protestants and apostate Christians, whereas the Orthodox remember it in the way that our parents remember Vietnam . . . it’s a family memory. They know that Arius was wrong, and they know why he was so successful for so long. The intricacies of the conflict are not arcane matters but stories that one knows because they defined a significant moment in one’s personal past — and often such moments are painful and complicated. This is not to say that Orthodoxy doesn’t have problems. Rather, it is to admit that the problem with Orthodoxy is Orthodox Christians, whereas the problem with Protestantism is Protestantism. Anything connected with fallen man will be tainted and disappointing. Nonetheless, God has given us a path, and it is available to all.