So this is the last session that we’ll be doing together here on this series. The last two sessions, we began looking at the development of the doctrine of predestination, divine decrees in the Latin West. I mentioned when we started this journey that we were focusing there, not so much because we were interested in the doctrine of predestination. That wasn’t really the focus. What we were more interested in is how that doctrine began to affect the ways in which the West, more generally, saw God, world interactions, how they saw divine transcendence, how they saw the ways in which God relates to us, how they understood grace.

And the reason we were particularly interested in that is because, as I pointed out in our last lecture, the ways in which the doctrine developed, God became more and more transcendent, more and more removed from the world. His decrees having less and less to do with us and as we are in time, until in modernity, there arose the question of whether or not we are, in fact, just part of a clockwork that is unfolding according to Divine Decree, or something akin to a computer program that is unfolding, something that’s been laid out and set out, according to a maker off an eternity, but that maker never, in fact, invades the clock. And that gave rise, ultimately, in modernity, to the rise of deism. And then deism gave rise to atheism, as many wondered whether or not maybe there is no clock maker outside of the clock itself, and we’re merely part of an abandoned machinery alone in this universe.

And as I pointed out, the reason that was particularly important is because how we see God, how present he is, or how absent he is, how accessible he is or how inaccessible he is, how trustworthy he is, whether we can trust His goodness or whether his goodness becomes suspect. All play out in how we see God, in how we pray, in how we worship, how much we are willing to give ourselves over to God and serve him out of either love or perhaps fear or perhaps not at all.

Now, today, what I want us to do is look at the contrast between this western picture of the evolving understanding of divine predestination and decrees in the light of the Eastern fathers, seeing the contrast between east and west on a variety of topics, and as we’ll see, there are considerable differences in the doctrine of God and in the doctrines of how God and world interact.

So when we look at the West in contrast with the Eastern fathers, we’ll begin to see a variety of things come to light that are significantly different. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine of the essence-energies distinction, a critical distinction in the east that we actually do not find in the West, the doctrine of divine freedom, and the question of whether God has free choice, the divine attributes, and what’s even meant by that term, knowledge of God. How do we know God, and what does it mean that we know God? And then, in keeping with the essence-energies distinction, the meaning of divine grace, how we see time and eternity, how we see divine providence and God’s goodness as a subset or an extension of that Providence, or more accurately, perhaps Providence as an extension of God’s goodness, then even things like predestination.

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In this current session, we are moving through a history of predestination and divine decree in western Latin theology. As I’d mentioned at the outset of this three-part session, we’re really looking at this not so much because we’re interested in the doctrine of predestination itself. What we’re interested in is how the western concept of God-world interaction develops. As we’ll see, as I had pointed out in the opening of the previous lecture, over time, the discussion of predestination moves us more and more toward a picture of divine transcendence, where God and world seem less and less connected, where more and more it seems that God is outside the world, decreeing things from afar. Ultimately, in modern philosophy, there is a question of whether God is involved at all, giving rise to deism, and then eventually on the heels of deism, atheism.

That’s really our concern: to draw out the evolution of that picture of God-world interactions, and then ultimately, we’ll contrast this with the way the Eastern fathers understand God-world interactions in our next session.

Up to this point, we’ve seen the ways in which predestination was developed in the early pre-Augustine Latin Church Fathers, and we saw that it was a rather simple, straightforward doctrine. It was simply that God foreknows a person’s disposition or their merits, and on the basis of that foreknowledge, he either predestines them to salvation, or alternatively, predestines the rewards that they might receive for responding to him.

It’s really in Augustine that we begin to see a full-blown development of a system of merits, an idea that we have order of loves, the idea that that order of loves is corrupted by the fall, a doctrine of original sin and original guilt, and the ways in which God’s free choice of giving prevenient grace to fix these loves and produce merits and His foreknowledge all interact.

What we’re going to see today is the ways in which the scholastics, the medieval scholastics, on the heels of Augustine, continue to develop this discussion and make it even more nuanced than Augustine himself did.

One of the things I want to do here as we move into the medieval discussion is start by contextualizing this with a certain set of concerns that arise regarding fate. This is really where we left off last time. I had mentioned that Augustine has a sympathy for what’s called divine essentialism, the idea that essential properties are those properties that can’t be otherwise. They’re essential to the nature of the thing. And I use the example of a square. A square has certain essential properties. It has four sides. The sides are equal length. Those can’t be otherwise, because they are essential to what it is.

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We are now beginning a new session. This new session is focused specifically on the history of predestination and divine decree, initially in Western Christianity, and that’s probably going to take us two full sessions to walk through that entire history, because it’s a very long history, even though I’m trying to make it brief. But then after we’ll walk through that, we will take a look at how this contrasts with the views in the east.

Now why are we looking at this topic? Well, let’s start with some basic questions. Here is everything I’m about to say to you predestined from all eternity? If so, do I have any free choice about what I’m about to say? Could I do otherwise? Am I morally responsible, if I have no free choice, am I morally responsible for what I’m about to say? And could God have ordained otherwise? These are some of the basic questions that begin to emerge in this conversation, and the New Testament is really what starts off the discussion, because the New Testament contains certain statements that appear to lean toward fate. And in the ancient world, fate was a common concept. We see it in the Greeks. We see it in the Stoics.

So let’s look at a couple of these. In the book of Acts, we hear that people are doing what God purposed them to do beforehand. This is what we find in Acts four, for example. In Ephesians, we find Paul speaking about God predestinating us to our adoption in Christ. In Romans eight, we find talk of foreknowing and predestining believers. In Ephesians one, God choosing people in Christ, before the world, before the foundations of the world. So such statements tend to lead people to think, well, perhaps there is a certain type of fate here at work in Christianity.

And the fact of the matter is, all Christian traditions believe in predestination. Why? Because Scripture speaks about predestination. The question is not whether they believe in predestination. The question is, what is it? What is it that they believe about it? What does it mean that God chose someone or predestined someone? What does it mean? Does it mean that we have no choice in these matters? Does it mean that those who believe or don’t believe really do so, just because God determined it in advance? Is our belief and unbelief, even our sins traceable to God? Is he to blame and not us? What’s the relationship between our choosing and His foreknowledge as well? These are the sorts of questions that these naturally raise, and these are the sorts of questions we’ll be looking at in the history of Western Latin Christianity, from really the dawn of the church through the Reformation, rather large span.

So the roadmap for what we’re going to be doing, and this will probably take two sessions, I anticipate not just one, is that we’ll begin with the Latin Church Fathers on predestination, before Augustine of Hippo and then after that, we’ll have to look specifically at Augustine. And the reason is because Augustine changes the conversation. I had mentioned in an earlier talk, the first talk I had done here, which is all about terms and concepts and orienting us to the types of sessions we’d be doing, that Augustine of Hippo was always a catalytic figure, always changing the nature of the discussion for the Latin West. And he does so definitively. All of Catholicism and all of Protestantism is indebted to Augustine in some way, shape or form. They all trace their roots to his ideas and insights.

So after looking at Augustine on his own and the way he changed the conversation, we’ll also look at the medieval reception and developments that follow on the heels of Augustine, and then this will set the stage for the Reformation and post-Reformation discussions, which continue in the lineage of this scholastic development.

But why? Why are we looking at this? We’re not really looking at this because I’m interested in talking about predestination. That’s actually not what I’m most interested in. So if the worry is that this seems to be an obscure topic in which you have no particular interest, be assured that’s not where we’re focused. What I’m most interested in is that this discussion about predestination, foreknowledge, free choice really goes to the heart of how do the Latin Western Christian writers think about how God and world interact. Think about God’s choices and our choices. Think about divine causality and our response. How do they think about that?

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We are on the last of the seven Ecumenical Councils. So we’ve been on this journey through the seven Ecumenical Councils of the early church, and we’ve gone through so far: Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople II, Constantinople III. And now today, we arrive at Nicaea II, the last of our seven Ecumenical Councils.

What we’ve seen to this point is that there has been a consistent commitment to a certain understanding of both the person of Christ and of his work on behalf of humanity in the Christian faith. What we’ve seen is that at Nicaea, there is a commitment to the fact that Christ is fully God. He is homoousios with the Father. He has the same nature as the Father.

At Constantinople, we saw this fleshed out, where the Holy Trinity consists of three hypostases, three individuals or discrete subjects, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that all three, not just the Son, are homoousios. Thus the Holy Spirit too is also divine, as is the Son and the Father, and the Son and Holy Spirit have one common nature, the Son and the Spirit receiving their nature from the Father.

We also saw that at Constantinople, the question of Christ’s humanity began to emerge. As Apollinaris had proposed that perhaps he does not have a human mind. The human mind is replaced by the divine mind. And this, we saw, the council insisted that no, he must have a human mind. He must be homoousios with us, having all that we have, and why? Because he takes on our nature in order to heal that nature, and whatever is not appropriated is not healed. Thus, if he hasn’t taken on the human mind, then that human mind hasn’t been healed.

And thus we saw at Ephesus a new question emerge, though there was agreement that Christ is fully divine and fully human. There was a question of how many persons, and Nestorius had this concern that somehow the two natures being united might be mingled or confused, the ways in which you might put two fluids in a cup and all of a sudden they mingle together and become something new, something that dilutes or distorts what was previously there. And thus Nestorius insisted that, well, each nature must have its own container. It must have its own individual, its own hypostasis, or prosopon, as Nestorius insisted on that term, a face.

And Cyril of Alexandria insisted that no, natures in persons do not necessarily mingle. We have two natures, a spiritual nature, an animal nature. They’re harmoniously held together in our one person, but they don’t mingle. And so it is with Christ. He is only one person having both natures, they are hypostatically united, meaning, the two natures are held together in one person, unconfused and unmingled.

And Cyril insisted that this is the language of Scripture. It is the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. There is no second person involved. It is the Word who suffers for us. It is the Word who redeems us. And this is why Cyril insisted that we call Mary the Theotokos, the God-birther. Why? Because the person she birthed is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity.

We saw that there arose a new controversy and worry about Nestorianism and the insulating of the natures. The monophysites and the Eutychians emerged, suggesting that there is, in fact, some sort of mingling of natures.

Now let me give an aside here. Dialog with the monophysites and the miaphysites to this day indicate that perhaps the monophysites do not actually believe that there is a mingling of the natures. It’s tough to say that Eutyches didn’t believe that, but certainly the non-Chalcedonians who held that there is one nature of Christ seemed to be committed to the view of Cyril because Cyril had suggested that them being hypostatically united, those two natures are Christ’s nature. And thus there’s a sense in which we can say these are Christ’s nature. There’s one nature of Christ. And to this day it seems that really, there is a linguistic divide between the non-Chalcedonian miaphysites, or monophysites, and the Orthodox.

But nonetheless, historically, that did create a rift. Returning nonetheless, to the Councils, we saw that over against the miaphysite and the Eutychian controversy, there was an insistence that we reiterate once again that Christ is only one person, having both natures, fully God, fully man, homoousios with the Father, homoousios with us. But these two natures are united in only one person, contrary to the Nestorians. But these two natures do not mingle or get confused, as happens in Eutyches.

Nonetheless, the divine nature energizes the human nature, healing it, not confusing the natures, but rather fulfilling the nature. Why? Because we as humans are icons of God who are made to partake of the divine nature. And thus the energies being communicated from the one nature to another is an actual fulfillment of our nature, not a confusion or mingling of that nature.

And we saw that this is their understanding of the gospel, that the gospel of Christianity, the Christian faith, the Christian religion, what has been handed down to them and handed down to that council, is a faith that insists that we as a dying species who have corrupted ourselves and crippled the ability of us as icons to partake of the divine nature as we are intended to must be healed by our Creator, by the Logos, who takes on our nature, unifies it with divinity, restores it, reorders it, and heals it. And this is the faith that has been handed down at Nicaea.

We now reach a new controversy. Now, again, like with Ephesus, I’d mentioned that every now and then, a certain topic comes up that on first blush, on first appearance, it looks like it’s not about Christ. I’d mentioned this with the Mary controversy. The point of controversy that sparked the Nestorian dispute was the question of, what do we call Mary? And Nestorius had insisted that she’s Christotokos, not Anthropotokos, birther of the man, not Theotokos, birther of the God, but Christotokos, the birther of the two conjoined faces, which is what brought to light Nestorius’ error and what Cyril opposed, insisting on Theotokos. And thus the controversy appeared to center around Mary. But ultimately it was a question about Christ.

And so again, in Nicaea II, we encounter another controversy that has this type of appearance. It’s about iconography, like the icon on the wall back there. This icon controversy, again, to the outsider, might look like, this is just about church practice. This is about artwork, or paintings or something like this. What does this have to do with Christ? And if what I’ve said is true that every council is about “who do you say that I am?” How can we possibly look at a controversy about iconography and suggest that somehow it has something to do with Christ? But as we’ll see, just as in the Mary controversy, so the icon controversy is ultimately a controversy about Christology, and ultimately a controversy about the gospel and the faith that’s been handed down from the apostles to the fathers and ultimately to the council itself.

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We’re continuing our march through the seven Ecumenical Councils. Last time we finished up Chalcedon, so Council number four. We have three to go, and today we’ll be looking at Constantinople two and three taken together.

Before we do that, let’s quickly rehash what we’ve already talked about. We saw that the early discussion, the discussion with Arius of Alexandria, concerned whether or not Christ was fully God. We saw that Arius had suggested that the Son of God, being begotten, must be a creature—a time when God was not a father, and he chose to then create a son. And so the Son is not truly God the way God the Father is.

Athanasius and the Council of Nicaea had insisted, no, that’s contrary to the teachings of Scripture and contrary to the faith once given over to the saints, that Christ is fully God. He is of the same nature as God the Father. He’s homoousios. He has the same nature as God the Father.

We also saw then at Constantinople how the Trinity itself was articulated, that the Trinity consists of three hypostases, three individuals or discrete subjects who have a common nature. Thus, it’s not just the Son of God who has the same nature as God the Father, but also the Holy Spirit has the very same nature as the Son and as the Father.

We also saw that at Constantinople, there now emerged questions concerning the Incarnation in Christ’s humanity. So Apollinaris had suggested as a proposal, well, perhaps how the Incarnation occurs is that man, consisting of an animal body, an animal soul, and a rational mind or spirit, is taken on, but the rational spirit is replaced—the Logos itself, being a rational spirit, takes that place in the man, and that’s how we get an incarnation.

But here emerged a central feature of how the Eastern fathers understand the gospel. They pointed out, or specifically Gregory of Nazianzus pointed out, that whatever is not appropriated is not healed. And here again, we saw the message of the gospel, according to the eastern fathers, is that the Son of God takes on our dying species, joining it with the divine nature, joining it with the divine life, in order to heal it and make it incorruptible and immortal. And thus, Gregory’s point is, if any aspect of our nature is not taken on, then that aspect of our nature is not healed. That will be actually quite relevant today at Constantinople two and three.

And thus there was an insistence that Christ is fully God. He’s not only homoousios with God the Father, but he’s homoousios with you and me. He has really become one of us and taken on our nature, the nature that is common to me and to you is the very same nature that he took on. And he took it on in total.

Then we saw arise this question at Ephesus, the question of whether or not there’s one person or two. And this question really emerged because Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, had a very peculiar notion, this peculiar idea that if somehow Christ were to take on divinity and humanity in one person, those would somehow merge and become a new type of nature, a new type of nature that is neither god nor man. Just like if we were to take human and horse and put them together, we get a centaur, which is neither horse nor man.

And thus, Nestorius proposed that what we really need is the Son of God as one person who has divinity. And when he takes on humanity, he also takes on humanity with another prosopon, and thus, as Cyril put it, Nestorius has two sons. There are two individuals, one who possesses humanity, one who possesses divinity, and these are somehow fused together or glued together. And this is Christ, and this is why Nestorius insisted that Mary is not Theotokos, the God-bearer, but the Christ-bearer, because what she births is this strained fusion of two sons of God.

That’s what Cyril suggested is entirely contrary to the teachings of Scripture. Scripture never speaks about a second person who walks around. It is the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. It is the Word who suffered and died for us. It is the Word who imparts life to us and heals our nature. And thus, Cyril insisted that this strange notion must be dispelled. Both of the natures, though unconfused, are held together in only one person.

Cyril suggests that this happens all the time. You and I, for example, have two natures. Cyril pointed out we have a spiritual nature that is very different than our animal nature, but both are had and held together, unconfused, unmingled in one person. You are one such example. And so Cyril suggests there’s no danger of the natures mingling and becoming confused in the person of Christ—they are held together in a hypostatic union. They are held together in the one subject. And that’s why we can say that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And it’s also why he insisted that we say that Mary is the Theotokos, the bearer of God, or the bearer of the Son of God.

And we saw at Chalcedon how all of this came together. So following the Council of Ephesus, there arose certain heresies, such as Eutychianism or Miaphysicism, or Monophysitism, the idea that somehow the natures do, in fact, mingle. Eutyches talking about a drop of vinegar being dropped into the ocean and dissipating, and Chalcedon had to insist that both natures are held together, united in the hypostatic union, they are not confused.

And yet the balancing act that we saw is that though the natures are not confused, the divine nature does, in fact, energize the human nature. This is something that Nestorians had lost—in insulating the two natures one from another, they also insulated the one not energizing the other, but the insistence of Chalcedon, in keeping with Cyril, is that both natures are united in the one person of Christ and the Divinity energizes the humanity.

And we spoke about that this is not a mingling. And the reason it is not a mingling of natures, a confusion of natures, is because humanity, being an icon of God, is actually created to participate in the energies of God. This is a fulfillment of human nature, not a confusion of human nature. And thus we saw the complete statement of Chalcedon bringing together all of the decisions of the prior Ecumenical Councils in that articulation.

Constantinople 2 (553 A.D.)

So now we reach Constantinople two and three. I had said that we would hope that somehow Chalcedon, offering us such a clear statement of the prior councils, would bring unity, and this would be the end of the ecumenical discussions about Christology and the Trinity. After all, we’ve hit all the bases, right? But unfortunately, that’s not actually what happens.

Constantinople two in 553 A.D., let’s look at the context of this. Chalcedon itself, its aim was actually to unify folks. So the Miaphysites were particularly concerned about Nestorianism. They recognized that Nestorianism is quite heretical. They recognize that Nestorianism is a threat to the gospel. They recognize that with the Nestorians, you really insulate the natures one from another. They recognize that you don’t really have the Son of God coming into the world to save us. You have the Son of God sort of appropriating a man, which is not really what the incarnation is. And they also recognize, quite rightly, that the Nestorians denied the energizing of humanity, the healing of humanity. That’s the very purpose of humanity being porous and receptive to the divine nature. If we are not energized by the divine nature, then there’s no point in Christ taking on our nature. He takes it on in order to heal it.

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We’re doing our march through the seven Ecumenical Councils of the early church of the first millennium. We’ve made our way through the Council of Nicaea in 325, the Council of Constantinople, and the Council of Ephesus, and here we arrive at the Council of Chalcedon at 451 AD.

I’d mentioned early on when we talked about terms and concepts, I talked about Chalcedonian Christology, and how oftentimes, when people talk about Trinitarianism, they’ll talk about Nicene Trinitarianism, and when they talk about Christology, they’ll mention Chalcedonian Christology. The reason, as we said, is because those are named for certain Ecumenical Councils. Nicene Trinitarianism being named for the Council of Nicaea, even though it really involves Nicaea and Constantinople, and then the Council of Chalcedon here that we’ll talk about today.

The reason Chalcedon is typically pegged as the council to name when talking about Christology and Orthodox Christology is because, as we’ve seen, there’s sort of this progression that’s happening in the conversation. It was at Constantinople that this issue of whether or not Christ is fully human really first emerged. We saw that Apollinaris had suggested that maybe Christ doesn’t have a human mind. That’s how an incarnation is accomplished, that really the rational spirit is removed from the human person, and the Logos or the Word of God enters and fills that spot. And we saw the problems with that proposal. One of the main problems being the insistence that Christ, in the Incarnation, is taking on our nature in order to heal and restore it.

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Last time we talked about the Council of Constantinople (381 AD) and we talked about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as developed there. So we had seen in Nicaea, there was an insistence that the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, has the same nature as God the Father. And in Constantinople, we saw the formal articulation of what this doctrine really looks like. When you’re talking about the Trinity, you have three discrete individuals or particulars or subjects—three hypostases: Father, Son and Holy Spirit—that are absolutely distinct, but they share a common nature. And what we also saw is that these three are really one God, but not one God in the sense that they’re somehow collapsed, that they’re parts of a whole, or they’re one guy with several masks, but rather the One God refers to the one common divinity shared between them, just as you and I and another human person here would be one human, as Gregory of Nyssa put it, that we share a common humanity, so they share a common divinity.

And yet we also saw that there were critical differences between us as creatures and God, namely, that all of the differentiations between us are really material. So we are not just distinct, but we’re separate. We’re spatially separated because we have material bodies, and how we’re differentiated one from another is also based on this materiality, the fact that you have accidental properties and so do I. We’re different sizes, we’re in different positions, different locations, different colors, and so on and so forth. And none of that applies to the persons. But that, of course, raised the question, what differentiates the persons? How are they differentiated? If they’re not differentiated by physical characteristics, what does differentiate them? How do we tell Father apart from the Son, for example?

And we saw that the differentiation was rooted in the one idiosyncratic property that each of the persons have. The Father’s idiosyncratic property is that he begets the Son. The Son’s idiosyncrasy is that he’s begotten, and the Spirit’s idiosyncrasy is that he is out-breathed or spirated, or proceeds from the Father, and we saw that these are causal terms. That within the Holy Trinity, what we see is that the divine nature is native to the Father. It is his nature, and he is uncaused. He is unbegotten, he is ungenerated, but he gives that nature by generation to the Son, and he out-breathes the Spirit—different type of causation—but both of them are caused, and they are caused by the Father to have that nature.

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This is the second session in our march through the seven Ecumenical Councils of the early church. We talked about Nicaea last time, and we talked specifically about the question that was raised by Arius of Alexandria. Arius had suggested that the Son of God is actually a creature, and this was connected with the doctrine of eternal generation, or beginning, something we’ll talk about today.

Christ is referred in Scripture to as God’s only begotten Son, and Arius took this to be quite obvious indication that the Son is caused, right? Just as I have a son, and he’s caused by me to exist. Arius presumes there must have been a time when God was not yet a father. Then he decided he wanted to be a father, so he caused the Son to exist, and now he’s the father. And thus he must be a creature, a very God-like creature, to be sure, similar in nature to God, but a creature nonetheless.

And Athanasius insisted that this was not true, that this was contrary to the teachings of scriptures, and more importantly, as we saw, contrary to the Gospel according to the Eastern Church Fathers, how Athanasius and as we’ll see, other eastern fathers understand Christianity. And we saw that as the gospel was looked at in light of what Athanasius says. What we saw was that Athanasius insists that what Christianity really suggests is that every creature, the lot of every creature, is that we are changeable, because we come into existence and coming into existence and being subject to change, we’re subject to change for worse. This is what makes us susceptible to death, to dying, to corruption, to sin, to evil.

And the question is, how do we overcome that? And according to Athanasius, what Christianity teaches is we overcome this by participating in partaking of the only nature that is immortal, incorruptible and immune to such change and evil, which is the nature of God Himself. And so the gospel, according to Athanasius, is actually that the Son of God becomes one of us. He joins the divine nature with the human nature, in order that we, through union with Him might participate in God’s own immortality, God’s own incorruptibility, God’s own eternal life, God’s own goodness, virtue and righteousness.

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This is going to be the first of several sessions focused on the seven Ecumenical Councils of the early church. If you haven’t watched the introductory session, you might want to do that where I go through various terms and concepts. In that session, I already talked about these Ecumenical Councils of the church. The idea being that ecumenical refers to the entire house.

We had already seen in the book of Acts that there was precedent for the bishops of the church, the apostles, coming together and discussing matters that needed to be settled. For example, do we require Gentiles to be kosher now that they’re converting to the faith? That Synod, that gathering, decided what the proper practice was in terms of the Gentiles. It “seemed good to them and to the Holy Spirit,” and that was the sort of framework that we begin to see in these synods.

This would be far from the last time that the authorities, the church, the bishops, the priests, the clergy, would gather together in order to discern what seems good to them and to the Holy Spirit. However, most of the synods, many of the synods were often regional councils. They had to do with very localized issues, but every now and then, there would emerge a controversy that was so central to the Christian faith and so dangerous to both the church and to the Empire, oftentimes, that it threatened to rip the house apart. For that reason, there would be called an ecumenical council, one where bishops and representatives from the whole house were called together in order to adjudicate the matter.

One of the things I had also mentioned in that introductory section, and this is critical to keep in mind when talking about the Ecumenical Councils, is that the Eastern fathers understand the faith to be complete. I had mentioned that in the Nicene Creed, there’s the mention of “one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.” And Catholic here does not refer to the Roman Catholic Church. Rather Catholic in this context, in the Greek context, Catholic comes from the word “katholos,” referring to “according to the whole.” In other words, what this means is it is a confession that the faith is complete. It is lacking in nothing.

This is reflected in the belief of the Eastern Church Fathers. There has been “a faith once given over to the saints,” to quote Saint Jude, and they believe that this faith is complete. It is lacking in nothing. And so in the Ecumenical Councils, they don’t come together as philosophers or theologians, saying, “Hey, that’s an interesting question. Nobody’s ever thought of that before. Let’s put our heads together and come up with a new idea, a new insight, to solve that new problem.” Instead, the question that they’re always asking is, “What did we receive? What was the faith once given over to the saints that was whole and complete?”

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This is going to be our last session on this series that we’ve been doing on the Gospel according to the Eastern Church Fathers. So we’ve covered a lot of ground to this poi…

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So last time I upset our expectations, right? I had promised that we were going to talk about this notion of participation, and how do we enter into the work of Christ and participate in it? And then I threw you a curveball, and I let you know that that’s not what we were going to talk about. We’re going to talk about one further aspect of Christ’s redemptive work. So we talked about his descent into Hades, Holy Saturday. We talked about the ways in which Christ enters into the realm of the dead. He, being the light of the world, dispels the darkness of Hades. He who is life itself brings life to the dead. He binds Satan and liberates those held captive in his house. He breaks the gates that hold humanity captive to death, and he liberates all.

This time, what we want to talk about now that we’ve talked about the work of Christ, we talked about two sessions back. We talked about the way in which the Creator God enters the corrupted creation. He sends us back to dissolution and to death, unmaking us so that we might be remade. But the need is that the soul is converted, lest in our remaking, we become corrupt again. And we talked about the ways in which the Incarnation itself enacts this unmaking and this remaking, that the Creator God Himself reorders our nature, and puts the passions back in the right place. He lifts the soul back up to God. He energizes it, he joins it with divine life, and ultimately communicates incorruptibility and immortality to it, to the whole human person, body and soul, in the resurrection from the dead. And we also added to this Holy Saturday, that that work is not just on the cross and in the resurrection, but in the days between as he brings life to the dead and liberates those held captive.

So now we actually will talk about participation. How is it that we enter into this? Now consistently, I’ve mentioned that the Eastern fathers have a balance, a balance that’s mentioned in Scripture, that Christ has saved all, everyone is saved. You’re saved. I’m saved. And the reason is because his redemptive work is in humanity. Humanity has a common nature. My nature is your nature, your nature is your neighbor’s nature. And when Christ takes on humanity, he takes on our nature, he heals our nature, our nature has been healed, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, whether you have any interest in it or not, whether you know it or not.

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So last time we talked about the fall and the corruption of man, we discussed the fact that man is an icon of God, which makes us naturally susceptible to the attributes of God, and we talked about the ways in which the fall inverts our higher and lower nature, elevating the lower nature in a way that subjugates the higher nature to the passions, the way Paul and James and others talk about in Scripture. We also talked about this war between the Creator God and the anti-creator that is the devil, and the ways in which God being providential and being good, which, according to the eastern fathers, really means that he wills the good of a creature, is always bent on drawing creatures, not only into existence, but to our proper good.

And this is why the demonic rebels are bent on undoing that providential act and distorting our nature. This is where corruption enters the story as part of the demonic rebellion. We also saw the way in which when the Creator God, and specifically the agent of creation, that is the second person of Trinity, the Son of God, the logos, sees this demonic rebellion, that the solution to this is ultimately to become a creature himself, to enter the creation as one of us. And in doing that, he does so, according to the eastern fathers, in order to fix our nature from within, unmaking humanity, undoing the corruption from within and restoring that icon back to its original shape, so that in the resurrection from the dead, his resurrection from the dead, we see the first real human being, something that has never been seen on the face of the earth before that.

Today, I had said in our last session that we are going to transition into the next topic, which is, how do we begin to participate in this redemption that the logos the Son of God has enacted on our behalf? But that’s actually not true. That’s not quite where we’re going next. That’s actually the next lecture after this. Where I wanted to go before we touch on that is to an aspect of the work of the Son of God that has been more or less lost in western theology, but is just as critical to the eastern fathers and drawing from scripture, Scripture itself to the work of Christ. And that doctrine concerns what’s sometimes called in the east, Holy Saturday, or Christ’s descent into Hades.

So Holy Saturday is so named because it refers to that period between Christ’s death and his resurrection, and what happens in that time period? What is he doing? And the answer to that question, according to the fathers, is clear in Scripture, and it is ultimately redemptive, as redemptive for humanity, as his crucifixion and ultimately his resurrection. So what is that doctrine that is going to be the focus that we have today? And it’s the focus because I really want us to be able to round out this talk of the work of the Son of God on behalf of humanity, before we move on to the question of, how do we enter into the benefits of this redemptive act?

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Last time we spoke about the faith of Abraham and the doctrine of resurrection, and what we saw as we moved through this doctrine, as we looked at what the New Testament had to say about the doctrine of resurrection, was we found that, first of all, Abraham’s faith is the faith in resurrection and God who gives life to the dead, and this faith was exercised in the face of the deadness of his own body, the deadness of Sarah’s womb, the anticipated deadness of his own son.

And then when we looked at the doctrine of resurrection itself in the New Testament, what we saw is that resurrection is something that is unique to Christ first and then to the righteous. So not all who are raised are resurrected, not in that positive sense that we see what’s happening in Christ. And so we looked at three questions: Who is resurrected? What is resurrection? How is resurrection accomplished?

And what we saw is that, in answer to that who is resurrected, we saw it was unique to Christ and the righteous, as we said. And then we also saw that the quintessential sort of character of resurrection is this immunity to death, putting off corruption for incorruption, putting off death for no death. And in answer to the question of how is this accomplished, Peter tells us quite plainly that it is accomplished by partaking of the divine nature. And this is where we saw that God gives His own immortality to creatures and through participation in that. That is the hope we have of resurrection. And that really is the essence of the faith of Abraham, the faith that Paul says is our own faith. And really, as we’ll see, this is the essence of the gospel according to the Eastern Church Fathers.

So now today, what we want to do is we want to dive a little deeper into this idea of partaking of the divine nature. And more specifically, what I want to look at is both this picture of partaking of the divine nature in the context of the original intent for creation in Eden. What would it have meant to partake of the divine nature there? But then also, more importantly, for our sake, since we’re talking about the gospel, what does it mean to partake of the divine nature in the context of a fallen world. And here, what we’ll be looking at is the way in which Eden requires that man is unmade so that we might be remade. And specifically, we’ll look at how the incarnation of Christ and His work on the cross and in the resurrection both unmakes and remakes man, so that this participation in God might be accomplished. So that’s the focus that we have today.

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We’re jumping into our first session on this series, which is about the Gospel according to the Eastern Church Fathers. I mentioned previously that the term “the gospel” is used frequently by Christians. But what is meant by that term, what the gospel is thought to be, varies depending on whether you’re a Protestant or a Catholic or Orthodox. And so in order to understand the Eastern Church Fathers, where I’d really like to begin is understanding the Gospel according to these Fathers.

The way I want to approach this is less by starting with the fathers themselves and what they have to say, and instead focusing on a biblical doctrine. My own spiritual journey led me to Orthodoxy, and the journey of studying religion and philosophy and eventually led to my discovery of the Eastern Church Fathers. There’s a doctrine in the scriptures, in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in Jewish tradition, outside of the scriptures of resurrection, namely, the doctrine of resurrection to judgment. And when I studied that doctrine, prior to ever encountering the Eastern Church Fathers, it was actually that doctrine and the anomalies about it, the strange threads that emerged in looking at it, which first awakened me to something that’s happening in the scriptures in this doctrine, something that at the time of studying it, I saw as nothing more than just contradictions in the Bible, in Jewish tradition, until the church fathers gave me tools to resolve those contradictions.

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I am Eastern Orthodox. To share a little bit about my own journey, it was really the study of philosophy, beginning in the ancient world and then moving into modern philosophy, looking at the problems that I saw there in terms of philosophy of religion, that led me to the Church Fathers in the first place. In studying the Church Fathers, I became acutely aware of the difference between Eastern thought and Western thought. It was really the Eastern Church Fathers who ended up drawing me to Christianity generally, and Eastern Orthodoxy in specific. So when I share these thoughts with you in these classes, talking about the Eastern Church Fathers, the differences between East and West, I’m really, in many ways, sharing the fruit of my own journey, my own spiritual journey, in moving toward Eastern Orthodoxy. So these things are very near and dear to my heart. The content we’ll be talking about isn’t strictly an academic exercise for me, although it will feel very academic at times. Nonetheless, I hope it benefits you as it’s benefited me throughout my spiritual journey.

In this class today, in our session today, we’re going to be looking at some basic terms and concepts, concepts that might be unfamiliar to you, terms that maybe you’ve heard but you don’t have a full grasp what they mean or their historical context. I’m going to try to give you some of that here today. The reason is because as we go through the next sessions, these terms are going to come up again and again, and unless we have a clear concept of what we’re actually talking about when we use certain terms, we’re open to a tremendous amount of misunderstanding. Here, what we want to do is give an initial foundation, introduce you to the common terms, what they mean, where they came from, how we understand them, how we don’t understand them, and dispel some of the misconceptions that might be associated with them.

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