Metropolitan John Zizioulas is a leading contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologian. In this essay he discusses the intimate relationship between the two sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Orthodoxy stresses the ontological changes made by the sacraments in their recipients; changes leading the Christian to a progressively closer union with God. Many liberal mainline Christians, by contrast, see these sacraments as thoroughly demystified rituals reinforcing social bonds between community members. These issues are especially prominent in the Episcopal Church, where there is an ongoing debate over the fairly widespread practice of giving communion to non-baptized people. Compare and contrast.

A hat-tip to Facebook friend Freeman Ioannis Edward.



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Baptism...is not only the death of the past--which is henceforth abolished--but also the Resurrection into a new life, which new life however is expressed...with our incorporation into the body of the Church. There can be no baptism which does not automatically entail incorporation into the Body of the Church...For us Orthodox...it is of vital importance to insist that Baptism, the Chrism [Confirmation] and the Divine Eucharist constitute a unified and inseperable liturgical unity. Our criterion is that we undergo an ontological change; that a person must enter a new relationship with the world. One cannot be baptized and yet distance himself from experiencing the Community of the Church; this is why Baptism simultaneously signifies a placement within the Community of the Church and participation in the Divine Eucharist.

...What is important with regard to the Eucharist experience is that man now enters into a relationship with others and the world in general, with Christ as its center. The Church has, at her center, the Body of him who overcame death, and this victory over death that the risen Christ possesses is the same victory from whence life springs for all members of the Church. This Christ-centeredness of the Divine Eucharist is what makes it different from every other experience that the faithful (or people in general) may have. There is nothing so Christ-centered as the Divine Eucharist. There is no other experience that the faithful can have, which is so directly associated to the corporeal presence of the risen Christ.

When he isn't getting his knickers in a twist over gay bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury is actually a pretty fair theologian. Evidence of this can be found in a recent sermon delivered at a service honoring the 350th anniversary of the British Royal Society, held at St Paul's Cathedral in London. Alluding to the fact that many of the Society's founders were practicing Christians as well as practicing scientists, +++Rowan reminds us that science and faith do not exist in watertight compartments.

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...The house of wisdom is a house of many dimensions; seven pillars, not merely four walls. It is upheld by a variety of questionings; the so-called scientific worldview is itself a complex pattern of deeply diverse disciplines, very resistant to any idea of global reductionism--to the conclusion that there is one and only one kind of basic question...The wisdom celebrated here is something indeed that could never fully be dealt with by any one question or any one style of questioning...

...Science needs to remain human in that sense, to be self-aware of itself as human science, aware of incompleteness, aware of the joy of non-fulfillment. And at that level at least, science is bound to be operating with an image of humanity itself as a life form attuned to truth and to growth. Metaphysics, perhaps, or even worse, faith; and yet it's hard to see how the real life of the scientific enterprise can be sustained without that image of what is properly and joyfully and fulfillingly human. Recognized or not, the resonance of this with the life of faith is worth noting. Faith, our Christian faith, presupposes that we are indeed as human beings attuned to truth and to growth, made by a God whose love has designed us for joy, and discovering that this directedness towards joy mysteriously comes alive when we look into the living truth, the living wisdom, of the face of a Christ who drives us back again and again to question ourselves so that we stay alive.

A faith which can discover joy in penitence, self-questioning and growth is a faith which can reasonably (I use the word with forethought) hold out its hand to a science that is determined to be human. That kind of faith and that kind of science joined hands 350 years ago; and while at times the grip has somewhat slackened in the intervening period, I dare to hope in the name of eternal wisdom that we may yet join again in our search for the joys of being human, the joys of being wrong, the manifold wisdom in which we find life.

Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) was one of the academic and ecclesiastical superstars of his day. With connections to both Oxford and Cambridge, he successively served as bishop of Chichester, Ely, and Winchester. He chaired the committee of translators that produced the King James Version of the Bible. He was a favorite preacher of the king, who loved Andrewes' erudite sermons, replete with numerous quotations from the Fathers. Andrewes' spirituality and churchmanship had a strongly "catholic" sensibility, rooted as they were in patristics and the Sarum Rite of the late medieval English church. In an age when the typical Anglican service was Morning Prayer led by a priest in a surplice (and the Puritans objected violently even to this), Andrewes swam against the current by insisting on a weekly Eucharist celebrated with a fairly rich ceremonial. However, he could pull this off only in his private episcopal chapel.

Fortunately, historical documentation allows us to reconstruct what these semi-public liturgies were like. An excellent article by Andrewes scholar Marianne Dorman summarizes this data, giving us a picture of a bright spot in an otherwise dim liturgical landscape. The excerpt deals with the physical layout of the chapel; read the whole essay to see how he augmented the official Prayer Book in creatively catholic ways. And, no, I have no idea whatever what "tricanale" and "triquestral" mean.

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The focal point was the altar, raised on a foot-board and adorned with its lavish frontal against the eastern wall...It was railed off from the rest of the chancel to denote it was sanctum Sanctorum. These rails served another purpose as Andrewes insisted that communicants kneel before the altar to receive the Sacrament. On the altar were two candlesticks with tapers, basin for the oblation, and a cushion of violet and crimson damask which matched the altar frontal, for the service book. When the Eucharist was celebrated a chalice, paten, and tricanale for mixing the wine with the water were also placed upon it, whilst on the credence table were the silver and gilt canister for the wafers like a wicker-basket and lined with cambric laced...On an additional small table in the sanctuary was place a "navicula" (ie boat-shaped vessel) from which frankincense is poured into a triquestral censer for censing at the appropriate places in the Liturgy. This censer hung in the chancel behind the lectern during the services to symbolize the offering of worship to God. In the center of the chancel on a pedestal was the lectern with its great Bible, and in front of it was a faldstool, that is, a small desk for praying the Litany. There were also seats for the bishop (his seat was canopied), the chaplain, for ordinands and two long benches for the family. On the eastern wall above the altar there was a...hanging depicting the story of Abraham and Melchizedek emphasizing no doubt both the blessing and sacrificial ministries of the latter. The pulpit also was richly covered with a matching cloth of crimson and violet damask.

It has been observed somewhere or other that it is impossible to preach about the Trinity for longer than fifteen minutes without falling into heresy. I have not timed Fr Matt Gunter's essay, which appears in full on Into the Expectation, but I am confident that heresy-hunters will be disappointed. Special greetings on this Trinity Sunday to all members of churches named after this puzzling yet vital dogma.

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...before and beyond and within all creation God is a dance, God is a friendship dance. From all eternity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit dance the dance of love and truth and joy. God is a dynamic dance of mutual giving and receiving and delighting. As they sought language to point toward an understanding of God as Trinity, the early Christian theologians used the Greek word perichoresis, which means something like "they dance around together".

...The triune nature of God is one of the central mysteries of Christianity. But mystery is not the same as conundrum. Nor is it the result of a presumptuous desire to explain more than can be explained...[The Cappadocians of the 4th century] argued that all we can really know of God is what God has revealed in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. What God is beyond that is unknowable. We do not use trinitarian language for God out of presumption. It is just that, as Rowan Williams has said, "It is the least worst language for God we have".

...The doctrine of the Trinity is also good news because it means there is room for otherness. If there is "space" within God for the Son to be other than the Father, and the Spirit to be other than the Father and the Son, then there is space for us to be other than God. God makes space for creation and for us in it. Understanding God as Trinity means understanding God as involved in, but not overwhelming, everything. There is room for real freedom. We can celebrate our unity and diversity, not as a contemporary cliche', but as a reflection of what it means to be created in the image of God. God is one, but one in whom there is intimate otherness.

Irenaeus was born in Smyrna, Asia Minor. His dates are uncertain but he somehow migrated to Gaul, where he eventually became the bishop of Lyons. He is known mainly for his work Against Heresies (ca 180), in which he defends a fairly mature orthodox faith against Gnosticism and other "alternative" explanations of Christianity. The excerpt below, dealing with the theological interpretation of Pentecost, describes the action of the Holy Spirit using a moisture metaphor instead of the more customary wind image.

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This is why the Lord had promised to send the Advocate: he was to prepare us as an offering to God. Like dry flour, which cannot become one lump of dough, one loaf of bread, without moisture, we who are many could not become one in Christ Jesus without the water that comes down from heaven. And like parched ground, which yields no harvest unless it receives moisture, we who were once like a waterless tree could never have lived and borne fruit without this abundant rainfall from above. Through the baptism that liberates us from change and decay we have become one in body; through the Spirit we have become one in soul.

Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) lived for many years as an anchoress or solitary in a church in Norwich, England. At the age of 30 she had fallen very ill and had experienced a series of visions, which she later recorded in Revelations of Divine Love (numerous editions), the first book in Middle English by a woman. Today being Julian's feastday as well as the day before Mothers' Day, we honor both with passages from her book describing God's love in strikingly maternal terms that are perhaps even more relevant today. They may be found here on the website of the Anglican Order of Julian of Norwich.

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57. Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and never shall come to birth out of Him.

58. ...The Second Person of the Trinity is our Mother in human nature in our essential creation. In Him we are grounded and rooted, and He is our Mother in mercy by taking on our fleshliness. And thus our Mother is to us various kinds of actions (in Whom our parts are kept unseparated) for in our Mother Christ, we benefit and grow, and in mercy He redeems and restores us, and, by the virtue of His Passion and His death and resurrection, He ones us to our essence. In this way, our Mother works in mercy to all His children who are submissive and obedient to Him.

59. As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother...I understood three ways of looking at motherhood in God: the first is the creating of our human nature; the second is His taking of our human nature (and ther commences the Motherhood of grace); the third is motherhood of action (and in that is a great reaching outward, by the same grace, of length and breadth and of height and depth without end) and all is one love.

60. The mother can give her child such from her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with Himself; and He does it most graciously and most tenderly with the Blessed Sacrament which is the Precious Food of true life. And with all the sweet Sacraments He supports us most mercifully and graciously.

Today being the third anniversary of this blog, I revisit the concept of theosis, which was the subject of our very first post. Theosis lies at the center of Eastern Christian theology and spirituality, but is by no means restricted to that tradition. In a very useful essay on the Jesuit site Ignatius Insight, Carl E Olson points out a number of places in which theosis is alluded to in Catechism of the Catholic Church (Doubleday 1994), the definitive statement of Roman Catholic dogmatic teaching.

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460. The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature"(2Pet 1:4): "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God (Irenaeus)..."The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods" (Athanasius).

654. Justification...brings about filial adoption so that men become Christ's brethren...We are brethren not by nature, but by the gift of grace, because that adoptive filiation gains us a real share in the life of the only Son, which was fully revealed in his Resurrection.

1996. Our justification come from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.

2009. Filial adoption, in making us partakers by grace in the divine nature, can bestow true merit on us as a result of God's gratuitous justice. This is our right by grace, the full right of love, making us "co-heirs" with Christ and worthy of obtaining "the promised inheritance of eternal life" (Council of Trent). The merits of our good works are gifts of the divine goodness. "Grace has gone before us; now we are given what is due...Our merits are God's gifts" (Augustine).