As you walk away from the stacks, your eye lands on an intriguing title you’ve never heard of and you’ve not been looking for. It turns out to contain all the crucial information. Just when you’re hitting transition and the book is just not going to come without a surgical intervention, a book that you don’t remembering ordering arrives in the mail, and it happens to have notches in all the right places. Someone you barely know who doesn’t know... Read more
Donald Fairbairn ( Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology With the Help of the Church Fathers ) writes, “In the mind of the early church, impassibility implied that God could not be adversely affected or damaged by anything we might do. We cannot ruin the fellowship within the Trinity or disrupt the purposes of God or cause his will to fail.” This is why the church fathers think of impassibility in connection with timelessness. Timelessness does not mean that... Read more
According to the Economist , the Estonian language has 14 cases (including inessive, elative, adessive, abessive), “Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350” genders, and the Solomon Island language of Kwaio has an exclusive and inclusive form of “we” and in addition to singular and plural has dual and paucal. The Kuuk Thaayorre of northern Australia have no words for left and right, but instead use absolute directions: “as in ‘You have an ant on your south-west leg.’” To... Read more
Christ is the “living will” of the Father, says Athanasius. Rowan Williams glosses this with: “since Scripture makes clear that the Word is the understanding and purpose of the Father, then to claim that the Son exists by an act of will is absurd: he is the Father’s conscious, purposive act. Deny this, and you end up with the gnostic picture of an indeterminate divine void, which might turn out to be anything, at the source of being; unless you... Read more
The impassible suffered, the church fathers said. Why? To make passible humanity impassible. As usual (“God became man, to make man God”), a neat chiasm. But what can human impassibility mean? Can it mean that we no longer feel ? That’s what it sounds like, but that’s hardly possible. The church fathers were aware human beings have bodies, and, if not aware of the nervous system, knew that we sense pain and pleasure. Does it mean that we escape... Read more
God does not have accidents, says Augustine, and virtually every other theologian since. It’s the corollary of God’s simplicity: He always is what He is, nothing added or taken away. God cannot lost any attribute without losing His being as God. But then along comes the incarnation. God the Son takes a body. What shall we call that? It is not of God’s essence, since He did not always have a body and since He essentially has no body. The... Read more
In an essay on the Christian use of the Greek philosophical conception of God ( Basic Questions in Theology, Vol. 2 ), Pannenberg notes that the Platonic tradition only gradually drew the conclusion that God was incomprehensible. Even Middle Platonists conceived of God as mind, and “thus also knowable to the human mind in one way or another.” Plotinus is the first to reject the premise (God is mind) and thus the conclusion. For Plotinus, “the ultimate origin could... Read more
This night is different, O Lord, from all nights. On this night, You opened the womb of the virgin Mary, so that she brought forth the seed of the woman, the new Isaac, the firstborn of Israel, David’s Son, Immanuel. On this night, Your Word, the eternal Light that lightens every man, began to shine from within our flesh. Therefore, let the sea roar and all it contains, the world and those who dwell in it. Let the rivers clap their... Read more
even in the private sphere the Christian is not only vindicated in defending another, but actually has a serious obligation in this matter: qui enimn on repellita socio injuriams, i potest, tam est in vitio quam quifacit (De Off. Min. 1.36.178 [PL 16.8I]). Thus, Moses’ slaying of the Egyptian is not simply to be condoned, but to be regarded as an act of virtue. Precisely here, of course, we have a new problem in that violent action is not merely... Read more
McGivern again, pointing to the ambivalence regarding military service evident in the accounts of military martyrs. On the one hand: “When Maximilian, the first known conscientious objector in Christian history, declared at his trial in A.D. 295 that ‘It is not right for me to serve in the army because I am a Christian,’ his execution was seen as a glorious martyrdom that elevated him as a model of sainthood. One would have thought that the lesson was clear: the army... Read more
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