Does the Logos suffer?

[The Liturgist]

God is said to be long suffering in Psalm 86:15. The Word is God ( John 1:1-3) the Word was made flesh ( John 1:14, per John 1-18). Doesn’t the sense of suffering for us be included with grace, mercy, compassion etc as David refers to in Psalm 86?

This is a very good point and one that i was considering making myself, but I am grateful you made it first. God is said to be long-suffering. Is it possible that Christ in His crucifixion represents the fact that our sin has caused God to suffer eternally for us? This is a striking possibility, and if God endures eternal suffering for us, because of his extra-temporality, as a parent endures temporal suffering for their children, it gives us that much more reason to love Him.

One thing people must come to understand about God is that he does not change; he could change due to His omnipotence, but as an eternal being He does not change, both as a promise to us and as one demonstrated to us to be true by virtue of the fact that He created time; before His voluntary action, there was no time, so whatever is of God exists beyond time and is unconstrained by time.

It is for this reason that we as traditional Christians must completely reject the Adventist idea of Christ having “entered the heavenly tabernacle” to begin an “investigative judgement” which was Ellen G. White’s claimed prophetic insight which explained away the error of Miller when he attempted to calculate the time of the return of Christ, which Scripture teaches us that no man can know, and consequently, Miller’s followers ought to have realized that he was in error, but it seems like they spent more time reading the Old Testament than reading the four Gospels. We would of course have rejected it anyway, but we must reject it with that much more vigor because it has the effect of implying God is subject to time, when in fact time is a thing, and as such we know from John 1:1-18 that it was created by Christ our True God together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, like all other things, since through Christ all things were made, according to St. John, and time is definitely a thing, intrinsically connected to space, which is obviously a creation of God.

In my teenage years I made the dangerous mistake of attempting to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, cover to cover, outside of the Church, and it was a bible annotated by premillenial dispensationalists as well, so it is fortunate that I gave up, because otherwise I would have been potentially greatly mislead by it. Even the most talented of Calvinist and Roman Catholic systematic theologians have struggled when attempting to derive systematic theology from a cover-to-cover reading of Scripture. I suspect this is why Orthodox theologians engage in the somewhat less complex task of Dogmatic Theology, which is simply the compilation of the Patristic interpretation of Scripture, showing how the doctrines of the Holy Orthodox Church connect with the text of the Scriptures.

 

[Gregory Thompson]

the dangerous mistake of attempting to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation

I've done this a number of times, I used to play the audio bible on auto repeat until it was ingrained into my subconscious for research purposes.

I'm curious as to what dangers are involved in this activity.

 

[hedrick]

With regards to this Eucharistic question, it is not communicatio idiomatum that facilitates the miracle of the Real Presence; rather Orthodox and Lutherans generally agree that this is a sacred mystery, a supernatural miracle. Additionally, from an Orthodox perspective, we would not say, and I don’t think Lutherans or Anglo Catholics would say, that we partake only of the human body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, because St. Peter refers to us as partakers of the Divine Nature.

Theodore of Mopsuestia proposed a unusual Eucharistic theology, which I don’t agree with, but which might give you something interesting to chew on: he suggested that the Prothesis, the liturgy of preparation, transforms the bread and wine into the crucified body and blood of Christ, and the Epiclesis then causes them to become His resurrected body and blood, which also points to the reality that in the Resurrection, Christ, having become fully human on the Cross and in so doing having recreated us in his own image, as prophesied in Genesis 1, did rise, as we will, uncorruptible, and in His uncorruptible form, demonstrated even more dynamic supernatural capabilities than we saw before His crucifixion, for example, our Lord appears suddenly, and disappears, and He is not immediately recognized in most cases, and furthermore, He also passes through closed doors, yet he is not a spectre, for St. Thomas touches His wounds and He does eat a luncheon including, interestingly enough, fish, with the disciples (this suggests CS Lewis was in error, or perhaps I misunderstood him, when he appeared to suggest that in the eschaton we will entirely transcend the gastronomic, since if that were the case, our Lord would not have dined with the disciples).

I think the Lutheran ideas are different. It really is the communication that enables the presence of Christ's body in the eucharist. That's essential, because Luther believes we literally eat Christ's flesh. See The Omnipresence Of Christ's Human Nature Luther really did think Christ's body was present everywhere because of the communication of attributes. That's why there's the whole debate about the nature of the communication betweeen Reformed and Lutheran. This certainly doesn't mean that we only commune on the body. The human and divine natures are merged into a single person. (One writer has called his position neo-Cyrillian.) Where one is, the other is. But it's the physical presence of the body everywhere that was controversial.

What I find odd about the whole controversy is that both sides (Lutheran and Reformed) seemed to accept that human bodies, even resurrected ones, are limited to a single place. For Paul, the resurrected body is of a different type that the original one. In the post-resurrection apperances, Jesus goes through walls and otherwise has properities that aren't the same as normal human bodies. No one seems to have considered the possibility that the resurrected Christ might not be limited to one place because he's resurrected, not because of the communiction of attributes.

 

[The Liturgist]

I've done this a number of times, I used to play the audio bible on auto repeat until it was ingrained into my subconscious for research purposes.

I'm curious as to what dangers are involved in this activity.

what is dangerous is if one reads it outside the church, that is to say, without reference to any ecclesiastical guidance, which, because at the time I felt alienated by developing problems in the United Methodist Church at the time, which was already beginning to become what it is at present, and as a result there was no denomination that I was fully comfortable with, although I had an interest in the Orthodox but did not know what they taught. I also did not know what premillennial dispensationalism was and was unaware that the commentary in my bible had been written by followers of the doctrines of John Nelson Darby and was highly biased in that direction; however, fortunately, their commentary was so voluminous and offputting that it discouraged me from completing the read-through.

However, had I not grown bored, I would have been at risk of being seriously mislead by a combination of starting at Genesis rather than with the Gospels, where one ideally should both begin and end (specifically, lectio continua is problematic; the books are not arranged in the Bible according to how the church historically used them in the liturgy, which was topical, indeed even the Jews used the Scripture topically and did not start in Genesis and read to the end of the Minor Prophets; rather, just as in Orthoodoxy and the traditional Western Rite liturgy where there is an Epistle and a Gospel in the main liturgy, the main Jewish liturgy reads a Torah lesson followed by a Haftarah. The liturgy of the Assyrian Church of the East is interesting in that while most of the other churches moved the Old Testament lessons to Vespers, so they would be heard the night before the Holy Communion service culminating in the reading of the Gospel, the Assyrian Church of the East kept both of the Jewish old Testament lessons in their Eucharistic liturgy, and largely retained the Torah-Haftarah pairings, albeit reorganized to fit the Christian liturgical calendar, but the specific Haftarah texts that relate to the weekly Torah portion are preserved in association and used to show the prophetic connections to the appointed Epistle and Gospel, which I quite like. I believe this was done because in both Mesopotamia and India the Church of the East had a very large number of converts from Judaism, and to this day remains one of the denominations with the largest numbers of people descended from ancient converts from Judaism, along with the Syriac Orthodox Church (which tends to overlap the Church of the East geographically), the Antiochian Orthodox Church (which overlaps the western half of the Syriac Orthodox Church), and the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church, and also the other Mar Thoma churches in India such as the Syro Malabar Catholic Church and the Mar Thoma Syrian Church which at one time were associated with the Assyrian Church of the East or the Syriac Orthodox Church.

There is no danger in reading or hearing all of scripture read in the context of membership in a traditional liturgical church. I would indeed engage in this repeatedly once I found such a church, then I made an ill fated attempt to support the confessional movement in another mainline denomination, which proved to be unsuccessful, for indeed that denomination was in even worse shape than the UMC and prior to what happened to the UMC experienced the most precipitous contraction of any mainline church in the US.

But let me reiterate: for members of a traditional liturgical church there is no danger in reading or hearing all of scripture read in a traditional liturgical church.

Indeed many of the churches that still use a one year lectionary, such as Anglican churches using a traditional version of the Book of Common Prayer, and also the Orthodox churches, but unfortunately not those churches on the Revised Common Lectionary, will hear the entirety of scripture if all services in the course of a year are attended (in practice, this may not be possible, but for some services, for example, in the case of the Orthodox Church or the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and its Lutheran derivatives, one can do the services of the Divine Office at home.

In the case of the Roman Catholic Church this can be true of some of the traditional liturgical rites as well, although in the specific case of the Roman Rite I have not checked to see if the gorgeous Tridentine use of the Roman liturgy features complete scriptural coverage. However, it is known for being more comprehensive than the Novus Ordo Missae, particularly with regards to the Divine Office (the Novus Ordo Missae was supposed to increase the amount of scripture read, but it did so only in the context of the Mass, but in so doing, it also omitted from the Mass certain important scriptures that were historically read, for example, 1 Corinthians 11:27-32, which was inexplicably omitted from the Novus Ordo Missae.

 

[The Liturgist]

I think the Lutheran ideas are different. It really is the communication that enables the presence of Christ's body in the eucharist. That's essential, because Luther believes we literally eat Christ's flesh. See The Omnipresence Of Christ's Human Nature Luther really did think Christ's body was present everywhere because of the communication of attributes. That's why there's the whole debate about the nature of the communication betweeen Reformed and Lutheran.

Luther was correct that we literally eat the flesh of Christ our True God, and this is a shared belief of the Lutherans, Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and some high church Anglicans, those who are called Anglo Catholics, for instance, all of the Continuing Anglo Catholic churches in North America that I am aware of, and some of the Anglo Catholic parishes of the Episcopal Church and ACNA. Also, if I recall historically the Moravians believed in the Real Presence, and there are also some Methodists who believe in the Real Presence.

The Real Presence is also the most immediate and literal Scriptural interpretation of the Eucharistic pericopes including the Institution Narratives and John chapter 6.

Communicatio idiomatum is definitely conceptually related to the ubiquity of Christ in the Eucharist, but it is not the only reason or even the main reason why we are able to partake of His Body everywhere; indeed, the main reason is that it is a sacred mystery which is supernatural and beyond the limits of human understanding.

This is also the case with communicatio idiomatum, which may be why some intellectual Reformed Christians historically struggled to understand it, since they were unfamiliar with or rejected the sound teaching of the Eastern churches that God is in His divine essence incomprehensible, and can only be understood through His uncreated energies and in His incarnation.

 

[Gregory Thompson]

what is dangerous is if one reads it outside the church, that is to say, without reference to any ecclesiastical guidance, which, because at the time I felt alienated by developing problems in the United Methodist Church at the time, which was already beginning to become what it is at present, and as a result there was no denomination that I was fully comfortable with, although I had an interest in the Orthodox but did not know what they taught. I also did not know what premillennial dispensationalism was and was unaware that the commentary in my bible had been written by followers of the doctrines of John Nelson Darby and was highly biased in that direction; however, fortunately, their commentary was so voluminous and offputting that it discouraged me from completing the read-through.

However, had I not grown bored, I would have been at risk of being seriously mislead by a combination of starting at Genesis rather than with the Gospels, where one ideally should both begin and end (specifically, lectio continua is problematic; the books are not arranged in the Bible according to how the church historically used them in the liturgy, which was topical, indeed even the Jews used the Scripture topically and did not start in Genesis and read to the end of the Minor Prophets; rather, just as in Orthoodoxy and the traditional Western Rite liturgy where there is an Epistle and a Gospel in the main liturgy, the main Jewish liturgy reads a Torah lesson followed by a Haftarah. The liturgy of the Assyrian Church of the East is interesting in that while most of the other churches moved the Old Testament lessons to Vespers, so they would be heard the night before the Holy Communion service culminating in the reading of the Gospel, the Assyrian Church of the East kept both of the Jewish old Testament lessons in their Eucharistic liturgy, and largely retained the Torah-Haftarah pairings, albeit reorganized to fit the Christian liturgical calendar, but the specific Haftarah texts that relate to the weekly Torah portion are preserved in association and used to show the prophetic connections to the appointed Epistle and Gospel, which I quite like. I believe this was done because in both Mesopotamia and India the Church of the East had a very large number of converts from Judaism, and to this day remains one of the denominations with the largest numbers of people descended from ancient converts from Judaism, along with the Syriac Orthodox Church (which tends to overlap the Church of the East geographically), the Antiochian Orthodox Church (which overlaps the western half of the Syriac Orthodox Church), and the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church, and also the other Mar Thoma churches in India such as the Syro Malabar Catholic Church and the Mar Thoma Syrian Church which at one time were associated with the Assyrian Church of the East or the Syriac Orthodox Church.

There is no danger in reading or hearing all of scripture read in the context of membership in a traditional liturgical church. I would indeed engage in this repeatedly once I found such a church, then I made an ill fated attempt to support the confessional movement in another mainline denomination, which proved to be unsuccessful, for indeed that denomination was in even worse shape than the UMC and prior to what happened to the UMC experienced the most precipitous contraction of any mainline church in the US.

But let me reiterate: for members of a traditional liturgical church there is no danger in reading or hearing all of scripture read in a traditional liturgical church.

Indeed many of the churches that still use a one year lectionary, such as Anglican churches using a traditional version of the Book of Common Prayer, and also the Orthodox churches, but unfortunately not those churches on the Revised Common Lectionary, will hear the entirety of scripture if all services in the course of a year are attended (in practice, this may not be possible, but for some services, for example, in the case of the Orthodox Church or the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and its Lutheran derivatives, one can do the services of the Divine Office at home.

In the case of the Roman Catholic Church this can be true of some of the traditional liturgical rites as well, although in the specific case of the Roman Rite I have not checked to see if the gorgeous Tridentine use of the Roman liturgy features complete scriptural coverage. However, it is known for being more comprehensive than the Novus Ordo Missae, particularly with regards to the Divine Office (the Novus Ordo Missae was supposed to increase the amount of scripture read, but it did so only in the context of the Mass, but in so doing, it also omitted from the Mass certain important scriptures that were historically read, for example, 1 Corinthians 11:27-32, which was inexplicably omitted from the Novus Ordo Missae.

Thanks for explaining. This seems to be about absorbing wrong doctrines.

If one listens to the bible non-stop it tends to finish in 3 or 4 days.

In general I was looking for a means to use the "letter that kills" against increasing intrusive thoughts.

In the long term it worked out, but I agree, I was exposed to a lot of danger.

 

[The Liturgist]

In general I was looking for a means to use the "letter that kills" against increasing intrusive thoughts.

That’s also not quite what St. Paul meant in that pericope, by the way, but I’m glad it worked out for you.

Scripture is really a liturgical text that is for use primarily in the Church as part of the liturgical worship in which we glorify Christ our True God together with His unoriginate Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, and engage in the eternal remembrance of the martyrs and saints who have put on Christ and show us the way to Him, learning from the holy example of the Theotokos and St. Stephen the Protomartyr and St. Anthony the Great and St. John the Theologian and the rest of the Holy Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, Evangelists, Patriarchs, Prophets, and the choirs of heavenly angels.

The use of it to validate the doctrines of the Church and as part of the process of catechesis and spiritual formation is an extremely important secondary use for those who are intellectually able to comprehend it. But even infants and the mentally disabled who cannot understand human language are still able to receive and know God’s infinite love for us. As such they engage in Theology proper, as defined by the Orthodox church, whereas the scholar studying scripture and Patristic and liturgical texts and writing academic papers on the subject is not a Theologian, properly defined, but is rather a scholar of divinity, and this is a distinction which has unfortunately been obscured with the widespread overuse and misuse of the word “Theology” particularly in the West - Theology, properly defined, refers to knowledge of God which can only be obtained from Him directly through His uncreated energies such as grace, which one can receive sacramentally in the traditional liturgical churches.

 

[hedrick]

As to Traditional Theology. This group was planned in a private forum not part of CF. The founding group considered mainline Protestant theology to be one of the acceptable traditions. That's because we do theology as a community, in continuity with our tradition. But that tradition includes not just Augustine and Calvin, but also Schliermacher and Rauschenbusch. So most actual mainline theology violates CF rules. Which is why I don't participate all that much. I am a Trinitarian and have no issue with Nicea, but you wouldn't like the details of my theology.

 

[Gregory Thompson]

That’s also not quite what St. Paul meant in that pericope, by the way, but I’m glad it worked out for you.

Scripture is really a liturgical text that is for use primarily in the Church as part of the liturgical worship in which we glorify Christ our True God together with His unoriginate Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, and engage in the eternal remembrance of the martyrs and saints who have put on Christ and show us the way to Him, learning from the holy example of the Theotokos and St. Stephen the Protomartyr and St. Anthony the Great and St. John the Theologian and the rest of the Holy Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, Evangelists, Patriarchs, Prophets, and the choirs of heavenly angels.

The use of it to validate the doctrines of the Church and as part of the process of catechesis and spiritual formation is an extremely important secondary use for those who are intellectually able to comprehend it. But even infants and the mentally disabled who cannot understand human language are still able to receive and know God’s infinite love for us. As such they engage in Theology proper, as defined by the Orthodox church, whereas the scholar studying scripture and Patristic and liturgical texts and writing academic papers on the subject is not a Theologian, properly defined, but is rather a scholar of divinity, and this is a distinction which has unfortunately been obscured with the widespread overuse and misuse of the word “Theology” particularly in the West - Theology, properly defined, refers to knowledge of God which can only be obtained from Him directly through His uncreated energies such as grace, which one can receive sacramentally in the traditional liturgical churches.

Yes. The spiritual energies of the bible became more ... Godlike when I incorporated what I learned from the structure of sacraments and applied them.

Eventually, my spirit could do something that was being emulated through my mind and trinitarian spirituality was actualized. I can see what you mean by dangerous. However, most people don't read so deeply into the text, so the danger is not as apparent.

Thanks for bringing that up.

 

[The Liturgist]

I am a Trinitarian and have no issue with Nicea, but you wouldn't like the details of my theology.

That’s an assumption on your part; since I do not know all of the details of your theology, I cannot comment, but with regards to the mainline churches the only beliefs of theirs that are slightly restricted on CF.com are the promotion of the new doctrines pertaining to human sexuality that have been forced upon the members of these churches and which have resulted in the loss of the majority of members from several of them, including the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ (and it would appear the UMC; of all of the Methodist laity known to me personally who attended Methodist churches in 2020, all of them are presently going elsewhere or are unchurched).

 

[The Liturgist]

Yes. The spiritual energies of the bible became more ... Godlike when I incorporated what I learned from the structure of sacraments and applied them.

Eventually, my spirit could do something that was being emulated through my mind and trinitarian spirituality was actualized. I can see what you mean by dangerous. However, most people don't read so deeply into the text, so the danger is not as apparent.

Thanks for bringing that up.

I would need more details from you on what specifically happened before I could comment. Since it’s not topical to Hedrick’s thread, perhaps you might post another, or you could PM me if it is of a personal, private nature (which I would encourage you to do one or the other, because I am confused by this post of yours, but I don’t want to derail Hedrick’s thread).

 

[Lukaris]

This is a very good point and one that i was considering making myself, but I am grateful you made it first. God is said to be long-suffering. Is it possible that Christ in His crucifixion represents the fact that our sin has caused God to suffer eternally for us? This is a striking possibility, and if God endures eternal suffering for us, because of his extra-temporality, as a parent endures temporal suffering for their children, it gives us that much more reason to love Him.

One thing people must come to understand about God is that he does not change; he could change due to His omnipotence, but as an eternal being He does not change, both as a promise to us and as one demonstrated to us to be true by virtue of the fact that He created time; before His voluntary action, there was no time, so whatever is of God exists beyond time and is unconstrained by time.

It is for this reason that we as traditional Christians must completely reject the Adventist idea of Christ having “entered the heavenly tabernacle” to begin an “investigative judgement” which was Ellen G. White’s claimed prophetic insight which explained away the error of Miller when he attempted to calculate the time of the return of Christ, which Scripture teaches us that no man can know, and consequently, Miller’s followers ought to have realized that he was in error, but it seems like they spent more time reading the Old Testament than reading the four Gospels. We would of course have rejected it anyway, but we must reject it with that much more vigor because it has the effect of implying God is subject to time, when in fact time is a thing, and as such we know from John 1:1-18 that it was created by Christ our True God together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, like all other things, since through Christ all things were made, according to St. John, and time is definitely a thing, intrinsically connected to space, which is obviously a creation of God.

In my teenage years I made the dangerous mistake of attempting to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, cover to cover, outside of the Church, and it was a bible annotated by premillenial dispensationalists as well, so it is fortunate that I gave up, because otherwise I would have been potentially greatly mislead by it. Even the most talented of Calvinist and Roman Catholic systematic theologians have struggled when attempting to derive systematic theology from a cover-to-cover reading of Scripture. I suspect this is why Orthodox theologians engage in the somewhat less complex task of Dogmatic Theology, which is simply the compilation of the Patristic interpretation of Scripture, showing how the doctrines of the Holy Orthodox Church connect with the text of the Scriptures.

I have to say Liturgist, that I feel that I always become much better informed about matters of faith with your posts.

I just also wanted to mention that I should have said re the suffering Logos would be specific in relation to the Incarnation. I hadn’t fully thought out my point in my post. I guess I would just place the aspect of the Logos & suffering in relation to scripture along the lines that God is lovr ( 1 John 4:8 etc,) and suffering is within the definition of love ( 1 Corinthians 13:4 per overall 1 Corinthians 13:1-13). I would never associate this in any carnal sense in relation to God in His essence.

Sometimes I feel that the Apostolic Churches ( Orthodox, Catholic etc.) have often lost the technique to convey basic Biblical faith to the individual ( centuries of upheaval in this mix). Primarily, I mean the Biblical relationship & awareness of faith in balance with the sacraments.

Protestants rightly pointed this out and to varying degrees must have known that more Biblical centered preaching for the illiterate laity( like St. Irenaeus of Lyons of the 2nd century) had become much more ignorant in Luther’s tim e ( east & west). While Luther tried to maintain the relationship of sacraments & scripture, it seems the sacraments ended up devalued & neglected. This is complicated of course since Lutherans themselves, for example., have maintained an arguably sound retention of the sacraments whereas Puritans, for example., lost most sense of balance or acknowledgement ( primarily in the Eucharist).

 

[The Liturgist]

I have to say Liturgist, that I feel that I always become much better informed about matters of faith with your posts.

I just also wanted to mention that I should have said re the suffering Logos would be specific in relation to the Incarnation. I hadn’t fully thought out my point in my post. I guess I would just place the aspect of the Logos & suffering in relation to scripture along the lines that God is lovr ( 1 John 4:8 etc,) and suffering is within the definition of love ( 1 Corinthians 13:4 per overall 1 Corinthians 13:1-13). I would never associate this in any carnal sense in relation to God in His essence.

Sometimes I feel that the Apostolic Churches ( Orthodox, Catholic etc.) have often lost the technique to convey basic Biblical faith to the individual ( centuries of upheaval in this mix). Primarily, I mean the Biblical relationship & awareness of faith in balance with the sacraments.

Protestants rightly pointed this out and to varying degrees must have known that more Biblical centered preaching for the illiterate laity( like St. Irenaeus of Lyons of the 2nd century) had become much more ignorant in Luther’s tim e ( east & west). While Luther tried to maintain the relationship of sacraments & scripture, it seems the sacraments ended up devalued & neglected. This is complicated of course since Lutherans themselves, for example., have maintained an arguably sound retention of the sacraments whereas Puritans, for example., lost most sense of balance or acknowledgement ( primarily in the Eucharist).

In the Orthodox Church we’ve always been blessed by dynamic preaching. In the diaspora you might not experience this in all parishes, and during the Soviet persecution in preaching was suppressed, so within the former Communist lands homiletics are having to be rebuilt using the experience of the emigre communities served by jurisdictions such as ROCOR and the OCA.

I find among all Eastern and Oriental Orthodox church that the Coptic Orthodox Church has some of the most conventionally exciting preachers, both in the US and Egypt.

Of course for my part I don’t mind monastic liturgies where there is no homily at all; indeed one of the great blessings of going to the monastery is the ability to attend the Eucharist celebrated with maximal beauty according only to the rubrics.