- Nov 26, 2019
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I can’t agree with that because Jesus Christ is fully God, and when we pray to Him, who according to Scripture will sit in judgement on us (Christ is both our mediator and our judge), we are not asking for his prayers. I would argue that such an interpretation of the phrase “through Jesus Christ our Lord” commonly found in Western liturgies in prayers addressed to the Father is extremely problematic.
Rather, this refers to His mediation, which should not be regarded as one person praying to another but rather to His consubstantial mediation between our humanity, with whom He is consubstantial, and the unoriginate divine essence of the Father which is shared with Christ and the Holy Spirit, both uncreated, coeternal and coequal persons in a familial union of pure love. Thus the essential mediation of Jesus Christ is in His consubstantiality with us and consubstantiality with the Father - he unites, in one person and one hypostasis, our humanity, which He assumed, with the ineffable divine nature. Whatever He knows, the Father knows, and the Holy Spirit knows.
Thus insofar as people might ask Jesus Christ for his intercession, if they do so imagining Him praying to the Father precisely as we pray to Him, in a manner that violates His coequality with the Father, they have made a minor and understandable error of trinitarian theology, one which could be avoided by improving the quality of music, since in those churches that replaced the traditional Protestant chorales with praise and worship music, much of the catechetical function of the worship service was obliterated, and the problem of undercatechesis has not diminished but increased.
Nor is this solely the fault of the Protestants; poor catechesis in the Roman church is largely to blame - they create a stumbling block for potential converts by forcing any, even those trained in theology from a high church Anglican or Old Catholic church whose beliefs are basically the same to go through RCIA, so that only Eastern and Oriental Orthodox and members of the Assyrian Church of the East and Ancient Church of the East, who are officially regarded as separated brethren, can join directly, but at the same time “cradle Catholics” no longer go through as extensive a catechism prior to Confirmation, and furthermore, while great pains were made after Vatican II to translate the rich hymns of the Mass from each liturgical season into the vernacular, and likewise with the Breviary, and to further promote the communal celebration of Vespers, Lauds and the renamed Matins, “The Office of Readings” before Mass and in the evenings, this did not happen, and those proper hymns from the Mass are all too frequently set aside in favor of praise and worship music, in many cases the same music one might hear at a Protestant church.
Thus the distinct beauty of both strands of Western Christianity is becoming increasingly endangered and threatened by a banal model. People have less of an actively Trinitarian and Incarnational faith, and are instead distracted by a morbid fascination with the end times driven by the popularity of premillenarian dispensationalist eschatological concepts pertaining to the Rapture and the Tribulation and speculation on who the anti-Christ will be or is. This is not spiritually healthy. In focusing on the kind of details Left Behind focuses on, according to a model of the End Times that did not exist in its present form until the 19th century, and which was otherwise rejected at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD, which officially rejected Chiliasm and modified the Nicene Creed to attempt to discourage a literal interpretation of the Millenium, by declaring of our Lord quite scripturally that “His Kingdom shall have no end”, people are distracted from the important point that whether our Lord comes tomorrow or in ten million years or in ten trillion years, when we die, we face the dread judgement seat of Christ as surely as we would if he came tomorrow. They also fail to appreciate what a fearful event the return of Christ as Pantocrator will be and the need to ensure that their faith is a living faith as per the Epistle of James.
These problems are also creeping into the Eastern Church, so even as we receive record numbers of converts, some parts of the church such as many of the Greek diaspora communities are at risk of becoming lukewarm, since the Ecumenical Patriarchate seems pre-occupied with Hellenic culture and with its own agenda and also must contend with the fact that it resides in a country that is hostile to Christians on the best of days. The damage to the Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George from the most recent pogrom against Christians in the 1950s has never been repaired, and not for want of funds.
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