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In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology
- GenresTheology
164 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2025
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June 30, 2025
John Behr is a contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologian who is currently the Regius Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen. He has also served at St. Vladimir’s Seminary and Radboud University. He is known for his work in patristics and Johannine scholarship. In his contribution to the Didsbury Lectures Series, In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology, Behr proposes a way to read Scripture and understand theology that fits well with certain figures and emphases within the Early Church and as those figures and emphases have been received in Eastern Orthodox theology (even though the latter point is implicit to his project). In short, Behr wants to reconfigure common assumptions concerning the Biblical portrayal of redemptive history by centralizing the paschal Christ, that is, the person of Jesus as he defeats death upon the cross, as the recapitulation (which includes culmination) of all things that came before him.
The first chapter, “Figuring Scripture,” is where Behr first critiques what he labels “the Bible” framework, which is an understanding of redemptive history that is directly molded by the physical book and canonical ordering of our current Bibles. Because of this bookish influence, Behr contends, the typical Christian understanding of God’s works and presence in history is overly linear and segmented. The juxtaposition of Old and New Testaments, the total deferring of the new creation to the future, and the linear ordering of events in the life of Christ are all products of “the Bible.” Of central critique for Behr is the equivocation of the incarnation with the nativity in this framework; as we will see later, Behr will argue for an understanding of incarnation that must be directly connected to the cross. Rather than “the Bible,” Behr seeks to retrieve the sense of Scripture as it was understood in the Second Temple era and the early church, a sense wherein the understanding of revelation was more akin to a field of sources rather than a canonically ordered list. Within this field, however, there is a gravitational pull that centers on the person and work of Christ. The gospels, for example, therefore fall directly into the center of this field as canonically vital to the witness of Christ. “Rather than ‘what happened next,’ the writings of the apostles and the evangelists are a ‘recapitulation’ of the whole of scripture” (11). For Behr, this conception of the canon fits better with the overarching economy of God in creation as articulated by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, namely the First Adam and Last Adam framework. Not only is the first man a type of the last, but the first man is also from the earth while the last is from heaven. There is therefore a horizontal and vertical dimension between the First Adam and Last Adam framework that converges on the person of Christ and his work on the cross. This conception further makes Christ and the cross the “unveiler” of Scripture as a whole; everything is to be read in the “paschal light” of the cross, including ourselves as we read Scripture in the moment and understand ourselves to be gathered into Christ and his work. A very significant point to note within Behr’s introduction to the First Adam and Last Adam framework is his disavowal of a historical or primordial fall. A key theological move that Behr makes in this entire book is that the presence of human death is not a consequence of sin, but rather an intrinsic component to human life as derived from Adam. Behr’s scriptural justification for this is primarily based on 1 Corinthians 15:21–22: “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” Death, according to Behr, is a natural corollary to created life. Behr further defends this view by contending that classic passages concerning sin and death (e.g., Romans 5:1–4, 1 Corinthians 15:54–55, Hebrews 2:14–15) do not teach death as a consequence of a fall into sin, but rather the fear and reign of death as a consequence of sin. On this we will return later.
In his second chapter, “The Paschal Christ,” Behr continues to develop the central importance of Christ and his work on the cross for understanding Scripture itself. Behr ultimately finds both historical christologies “from below” (emphasis on the historical Jesus, kenotic theology etc.) and “from above” (emphasis on the divine logos, en-hypostasis and an-hypostats, etc.) to ultimately be insufficient for maintaining the unity of the person of Christ. Instead, Behr finds a better solution in the recent proposal of Ingold Dalferth and the ancient work of Athanasius, both of whom articulating an understanding of Christ that weaves together his personhood and the cross. “It is the one who ascended the cross that is the Word of God and Savior” (33). For Behr, this is a “significant restructuring of the grammar of Christology” that takes seriously that “the one confessed to be the Son of God, Word, Lord, and Savior is always already the one who was crucified and raised from the dead by God” (36). Significantly, under this grammar, the series of events in the life of Christ are gathered up into his incarnate person; incarnation cannot be separated from cross, death, and resurrection. At this point, Behr returns to his understanding of death. The distinction between genesis (beginning, coming-to-be), and gennesis (beget, born) is fundamental for understanding life and death according to Behr. “What comes to be is animated and necessarily mortal, for all that come to be in time passes away in time; birth, on the other hand, is only ever birth into life, the life that Christ has come to give and which is received by being ‘an imitation of the passion of my God’ (46). Fitting this distinction into the First Adam and Last Adam framework, in Adam we come to be, but in Christ we are born. Being truly born in and through death was a common understanding of martyrdom in the early Church, so Behr utilizes this point to support the notion that the tomb of Christ is the womb of the church. “The paschal death overcomes death by turning death into a birth into life (gennesis), contrasted with mere mortal coming-into-being (genesis), and likewise showing incarnation to be the birth of the (whole) body of Christ” (56). Understanding the death of Christ as a birth naturally leads Behr to discuss how Christ is eternally begotten and begotten in history, particularly in his death and resurrection. The arguments of this section are a bit dense as Behr utilizes Origen’s thought on the relationship between the Father and the Son, but the main function of it is to maintain the unique personhood of the Second Person while also fitting the work of the cross in creation and history as the cross becomes the means by which humans participate in God. According to Behr, again utilizing Origen, the Son is “that-which-is-participated-in” from the Father (which Behr identifies as his begetting). The Father’s begetting of the Son is entirely unique to their eternal being and relation, while human participation is grounded in adoption and incarnation itself. The Son is able to take on humanity as a fire heats iron; the fire remains unchanged by the presence of the iron, and the iron remains iron, but the iron still takes on the properties of the fire, becoming as if one with it. Incarnation is thus central to human participation in and with God. Despite the uniqueness, however, of the Father and Son’s relationship in eternity “the relationship between God and human beings is again bound up with, and an expression of, the relationship between Father and Son. The delight that the Father has in seeing himself in his own Image is located precisely upon the dynamics of the cross, for ‘the image of the invisible God’ is, according to Paul, precisely the one on the cross, reconciling all things to God and ‘making peace by the blood of the cross’ (Col. 1:15, 20)” (64).
Behr’s third chapter, “The Virgin Mother” continues his thought on maternal and birth imagery in Scripture and Christian thought. Finding evidence from Paul, John, and the early Church, the church herself is understood to be a Virgin Mother through whom Christians are born and nourished. Indeed, the church is even the object of typology: “Jesus Christ and the church exist from the beginning – indeed, they are the male and female of Genesis 1:27” (74). For Behr, however, the womb of the church is to be identified with the cross of Christ and his paschal sufferings. As such, Christ, who was born pure due to his own virginal birth, by his death makes pure the womb of the church, who is now “a virginal mother, granting life to those who are born in her womb through their death in confession of Christ” (81). At this point, Behr addresses the issue of Mary and her relation to this conception of Christ and the church. In short, Behr contends that Mary ought to be understood as a figure for the church, who is the archetypal reality (84). Behr concludes this brief chapter with further reflections on the nature of the church and her sacraments, particularly emphasizing the eschatological character of the life of the church that Christ’s death and life has accomplished even now.
The final chapter, “Becoming Human,” Behr utilizes the anthropological thought of Irenaeus of Lyons, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximos the Confessor to support his overall argument for reconceiving (and perhaps retrieving) an understanding of theology that is not shaped by “the Bible.” It is striking to note that Behr puts this final chapter in a context that had been lurking in the background for most of the book: “Within this framework [the linear redemptive-historical model of ‘the Bible’], the question inevitably arose whether ‘the incarnation’ was occasioned by the ‘fall’ (as a Plan B) or would have happened any way. But as we have seen, it is only in the light of the end that we can even begin to understand the beginning, and, moreover, when the scriptures are read in this way, the sacrifice upon the cross is not simply understood as the satisfaction or remedy for sin but rather as an act of love that opens up the womb for us to be born into life by following ‘the pioneer of our salvation’ (Heb 2:10)...” (93). As we will discuss further below, this claim explicitly brings out Behr’s supralapsarian christology. According to the pastristic figures above, as Behr utilizes them, the history of humanity is one of change, growth, and pedagogy. The eschatological accomplishment of human history was always to be brought about in the elevation of human nature in the person of the Son and his death on the cross. Death, the natural accompaniment of created life, is finally defeated by the paschal Christ.
Behr then concludes his book with a postscript that summarizes the content of the book in a clear and helpful way. We will now address a few praises and criticisms.
One the most encouraging aspects of this work was Behr’s positive treatment of maternal and birth imagery into the very being and life of the church. As he notes, “it is striking that this maternal imagery of the church, with its deep scriptural roots and grounding in the very proclamation of the gospel, is as pervasive in early Christianity as it is absent in modern ecclesiological reflection” (88). By articulating this robust understanding of birth in theological perspective, perhaps the church can develop a theology of birth that not only pertains to formal ecclesiology, but also a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of birth itself as it is experienced by women. Behr is to be commended for this aspect of his theological proposal.
The first issue of critique is that Behr seems to be operating under some assumptions of mutual exclusivity between theological paradigms. It is not entirely clear why “the Bible” and its canonical shape cannot likewise accomplish what Behr is seeking to do, especially when significant biblical theological work has been done on the First and Last Adam framework from within “the Bible” and the linear understanding of redemptive history. No doubt, the latter framework can be limited if worked within too rigidly, but I am not convinced that these two frameworks for understanding theology are mutually exclusive. Moreover, the appeal to Second Temple Judaism and the early church as examples for how theology ought to be done in relation to a canonical shape akin to a field seems to lack normative weight. Why should the theological shape of the canon and the theological reflections and developments that came out of this time be more normative than when the canon was regarded as complete? Not only is the fullness of God’s word of utmost value, but it seems that the providentially ordered structure of the canon is theologically valuable too. It seems difficult to justify a theological method based on a providentially conditioned structure of the canon that is no longer present for the church. Additionally, it would also seem difficult to avoid a “canon-within-the-canon” the field approach to the canon, which is a problem that I think is implicit to Behr’s understanding of death, to which we now turn.
Perhaps the most difficult claim of Behr’s (at least from a theologically conservative perspective) is that death is naturally woven into creation. Admittedly, this is a fitting position on at least two accounts for Behr: 1) it is the easiest position to manage within the different flavors of supralapsarian christology. If death is intrinsic to creation, then no matter if Adam obeyed or disobeyed, the incarnate Christ is needed to defeat death. 2) the emphasis on death as opposed to sin is commonly understood to be a hallmark of Eastern Orthodox theology. That Christ comes primarily to defeat death as opposed to atone for sin is a theme one can trace all the way to Athanasius and Irenaues (and there is not to be objected to wholesale!). As noted above, Behr does contend for this position scripturally, but does not interact with all the passages necessary to prove this claim, namely Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death….” Behr’s understanding of the cross as being primarily if not totally focused on life and death rather than sin and atonement is also objectionable (the temptation to focus on one kind of paradigm for the work of the cross may be the implicit “canon-within-the-canon” issue I alluded to above). Moreover, in Behr’s treatment of the phrase “the sting of death is sin” and the “power of death” is questionable; Behr argues that since death is a genitive in these statements, rather than the subject, they denote a state or quality of our relationship to death rather than a total description of the reality of mortality (21–22). Sin is being subject to the reign of death, the fear of death, and so on, rather than death itself. Within this vein, it also seems inconsistent to utilize birth imagery as mostly positive, even the language of pain and travail, but not further discuss the scriptural point that labor pain is stated to be a direct consequence of the fall and sin. Needless to say, by contending that death is intrinsic to creation, Behr places himself within incredibly difficult theodicy issues that we cannot work out here. But one question we may ask is along these lines: if death is the central object of the work of the cross, and death a universal human problem, does the paschal Christ therefore imply a universal salvation? Marilyn McCord Adams, who has articulated a similar supralapsarian christological position position, certainly thinks so. More from Behr would have to be said for his supralapsarian christology for this position to be more persuasive.
In the end, this little but dense book is incredibly thought provoking and challenging for the Western evangelical Christian, but this does not mean it is bad. Indeed, more Western and especially Protestant Christians should read books like In Accordance with the Scriptures, not because it is faultless, but because there is still good and encouraging truth in it that millions of other Christians are likely to believe in (i.e., the Eastern Orthodox). Behr has provided a very interesting model for theology that ought to be considered and pondered on by theologians, pastors, and lay people alike.
The first chapter, “Figuring Scripture,” is where Behr first critiques what he labels “the Bible” framework, which is an understanding of redemptive history that is directly molded by the physical book and canonical ordering of our current Bibles. Because of this bookish influence, Behr contends, the typical Christian understanding of God’s works and presence in history is overly linear and segmented. The juxtaposition of Old and New Testaments, the total deferring of the new creation to the future, and the linear ordering of events in the life of Christ are all products of “the Bible.” Of central critique for Behr is the equivocation of the incarnation with the nativity in this framework; as we will see later, Behr will argue for an understanding of incarnation that must be directly connected to the cross. Rather than “the Bible,” Behr seeks to retrieve the sense of Scripture as it was understood in the Second Temple era and the early church, a sense wherein the understanding of revelation was more akin to a field of sources rather than a canonically ordered list. Within this field, however, there is a gravitational pull that centers on the person and work of Christ. The gospels, for example, therefore fall directly into the center of this field as canonically vital to the witness of Christ. “Rather than ‘what happened next,’ the writings of the apostles and the evangelists are a ‘recapitulation’ of the whole of scripture” (11). For Behr, this conception of the canon fits better with the overarching economy of God in creation as articulated by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, namely the First Adam and Last Adam framework. Not only is the first man a type of the last, but the first man is also from the earth while the last is from heaven. There is therefore a horizontal and vertical dimension between the First Adam and Last Adam framework that converges on the person of Christ and his work on the cross. This conception further makes Christ and the cross the “unveiler” of Scripture as a whole; everything is to be read in the “paschal light” of the cross, including ourselves as we read Scripture in the moment and understand ourselves to be gathered into Christ and his work. A very significant point to note within Behr’s introduction to the First Adam and Last Adam framework is his disavowal of a historical or primordial fall. A key theological move that Behr makes in this entire book is that the presence of human death is not a consequence of sin, but rather an intrinsic component to human life as derived from Adam. Behr’s scriptural justification for this is primarily based on 1 Corinthians 15:21–22: “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” Death, according to Behr, is a natural corollary to created life. Behr further defends this view by contending that classic passages concerning sin and death (e.g., Romans 5:1–4, 1 Corinthians 15:54–55, Hebrews 2:14–15) do not teach death as a consequence of a fall into sin, but rather the fear and reign of death as a consequence of sin. On this we will return later.
In his second chapter, “The Paschal Christ,” Behr continues to develop the central importance of Christ and his work on the cross for understanding Scripture itself. Behr ultimately finds both historical christologies “from below” (emphasis on the historical Jesus, kenotic theology etc.) and “from above” (emphasis on the divine logos, en-hypostasis and an-hypostats, etc.) to ultimately be insufficient for maintaining the unity of the person of Christ. Instead, Behr finds a better solution in the recent proposal of Ingold Dalferth and the ancient work of Athanasius, both of whom articulating an understanding of Christ that weaves together his personhood and the cross. “It is the one who ascended the cross that is the Word of God and Savior” (33). For Behr, this is a “significant restructuring of the grammar of Christology” that takes seriously that “the one confessed to be the Son of God, Word, Lord, and Savior is always already the one who was crucified and raised from the dead by God” (36). Significantly, under this grammar, the series of events in the life of Christ are gathered up into his incarnate person; incarnation cannot be separated from cross, death, and resurrection. At this point, Behr returns to his understanding of death. The distinction between genesis (beginning, coming-to-be), and gennesis (beget, born) is fundamental for understanding life and death according to Behr. “What comes to be is animated and necessarily mortal, for all that come to be in time passes away in time; birth, on the other hand, is only ever birth into life, the life that Christ has come to give and which is received by being ‘an imitation of the passion of my God’ (46). Fitting this distinction into the First Adam and Last Adam framework, in Adam we come to be, but in Christ we are born. Being truly born in and through death was a common understanding of martyrdom in the early Church, so Behr utilizes this point to support the notion that the tomb of Christ is the womb of the church. “The paschal death overcomes death by turning death into a birth into life (gennesis), contrasted with mere mortal coming-into-being (genesis), and likewise showing incarnation to be the birth of the (whole) body of Christ” (56). Understanding the death of Christ as a birth naturally leads Behr to discuss how Christ is eternally begotten and begotten in history, particularly in his death and resurrection. The arguments of this section are a bit dense as Behr utilizes Origen’s thought on the relationship between the Father and the Son, but the main function of it is to maintain the unique personhood of the Second Person while also fitting the work of the cross in creation and history as the cross becomes the means by which humans participate in God. According to Behr, again utilizing Origen, the Son is “that-which-is-participated-in” from the Father (which Behr identifies as his begetting). The Father’s begetting of the Son is entirely unique to their eternal being and relation, while human participation is grounded in adoption and incarnation itself. The Son is able to take on humanity as a fire heats iron; the fire remains unchanged by the presence of the iron, and the iron remains iron, but the iron still takes on the properties of the fire, becoming as if one with it. Incarnation is thus central to human participation in and with God. Despite the uniqueness, however, of the Father and Son’s relationship in eternity “the relationship between God and human beings is again bound up with, and an expression of, the relationship between Father and Son. The delight that the Father has in seeing himself in his own Image is located precisely upon the dynamics of the cross, for ‘the image of the invisible God’ is, according to Paul, precisely the one on the cross, reconciling all things to God and ‘making peace by the blood of the cross’ (Col. 1:15, 20)” (64).
Behr’s third chapter, “The Virgin Mother” continues his thought on maternal and birth imagery in Scripture and Christian thought. Finding evidence from Paul, John, and the early Church, the church herself is understood to be a Virgin Mother through whom Christians are born and nourished. Indeed, the church is even the object of typology: “Jesus Christ and the church exist from the beginning – indeed, they are the male and female of Genesis 1:27” (74). For Behr, however, the womb of the church is to be identified with the cross of Christ and his paschal sufferings. As such, Christ, who was born pure due to his own virginal birth, by his death makes pure the womb of the church, who is now “a virginal mother, granting life to those who are born in her womb through their death in confession of Christ” (81). At this point, Behr addresses the issue of Mary and her relation to this conception of Christ and the church. In short, Behr contends that Mary ought to be understood as a figure for the church, who is the archetypal reality (84). Behr concludes this brief chapter with further reflections on the nature of the church and her sacraments, particularly emphasizing the eschatological character of the life of the church that Christ’s death and life has accomplished even now.
The final chapter, “Becoming Human,” Behr utilizes the anthropological thought of Irenaeus of Lyons, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximos the Confessor to support his overall argument for reconceiving (and perhaps retrieving) an understanding of theology that is not shaped by “the Bible.” It is striking to note that Behr puts this final chapter in a context that had been lurking in the background for most of the book: “Within this framework [the linear redemptive-historical model of ‘the Bible’], the question inevitably arose whether ‘the incarnation’ was occasioned by the ‘fall’ (as a Plan B) or would have happened any way. But as we have seen, it is only in the light of the end that we can even begin to understand the beginning, and, moreover, when the scriptures are read in this way, the sacrifice upon the cross is not simply understood as the satisfaction or remedy for sin but rather as an act of love that opens up the womb for us to be born into life by following ‘the pioneer of our salvation’ (Heb 2:10)...” (93). As we will discuss further below, this claim explicitly brings out Behr’s supralapsarian christology. According to the pastristic figures above, as Behr utilizes them, the history of humanity is one of change, growth, and pedagogy. The eschatological accomplishment of human history was always to be brought about in the elevation of human nature in the person of the Son and his death on the cross. Death, the natural accompaniment of created life, is finally defeated by the paschal Christ.
Behr then concludes his book with a postscript that summarizes the content of the book in a clear and helpful way. We will now address a few praises and criticisms.
One the most encouraging aspects of this work was Behr’s positive treatment of maternal and birth imagery into the very being and life of the church. As he notes, “it is striking that this maternal imagery of the church, with its deep scriptural roots and grounding in the very proclamation of the gospel, is as pervasive in early Christianity as it is absent in modern ecclesiological reflection” (88). By articulating this robust understanding of birth in theological perspective, perhaps the church can develop a theology of birth that not only pertains to formal ecclesiology, but also a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of birth itself as it is experienced by women. Behr is to be commended for this aspect of his theological proposal.
The first issue of critique is that Behr seems to be operating under some assumptions of mutual exclusivity between theological paradigms. It is not entirely clear why “the Bible” and its canonical shape cannot likewise accomplish what Behr is seeking to do, especially when significant biblical theological work has been done on the First and Last Adam framework from within “the Bible” and the linear understanding of redemptive history. No doubt, the latter framework can be limited if worked within too rigidly, but I am not convinced that these two frameworks for understanding theology are mutually exclusive. Moreover, the appeal to Second Temple Judaism and the early church as examples for how theology ought to be done in relation to a canonical shape akin to a field seems to lack normative weight. Why should the theological shape of the canon and the theological reflections and developments that came out of this time be more normative than when the canon was regarded as complete? Not only is the fullness of God’s word of utmost value, but it seems that the providentially ordered structure of the canon is theologically valuable too. It seems difficult to justify a theological method based on a providentially conditioned structure of the canon that is no longer present for the church. Additionally, it would also seem difficult to avoid a “canon-within-the-canon” the field approach to the canon, which is a problem that I think is implicit to Behr’s understanding of death, to which we now turn.
Perhaps the most difficult claim of Behr’s (at least from a theologically conservative perspective) is that death is naturally woven into creation. Admittedly, this is a fitting position on at least two accounts for Behr: 1) it is the easiest position to manage within the different flavors of supralapsarian christology. If death is intrinsic to creation, then no matter if Adam obeyed or disobeyed, the incarnate Christ is needed to defeat death. 2) the emphasis on death as opposed to sin is commonly understood to be a hallmark of Eastern Orthodox theology. That Christ comes primarily to defeat death as opposed to atone for sin is a theme one can trace all the way to Athanasius and Irenaues (and there is not to be objected to wholesale!). As noted above, Behr does contend for this position scripturally, but does not interact with all the passages necessary to prove this claim, namely Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death….” Behr’s understanding of the cross as being primarily if not totally focused on life and death rather than sin and atonement is also objectionable (the temptation to focus on one kind of paradigm for the work of the cross may be the implicit “canon-within-the-canon” issue I alluded to above). Moreover, in Behr’s treatment of the phrase “the sting of death is sin” and the “power of death” is questionable; Behr argues that since death is a genitive in these statements, rather than the subject, they denote a state or quality of our relationship to death rather than a total description of the reality of mortality (21–22). Sin is being subject to the reign of death, the fear of death, and so on, rather than death itself. Within this vein, it also seems inconsistent to utilize birth imagery as mostly positive, even the language of pain and travail, but not further discuss the scriptural point that labor pain is stated to be a direct consequence of the fall and sin. Needless to say, by contending that death is intrinsic to creation, Behr places himself within incredibly difficult theodicy issues that we cannot work out here. But one question we may ask is along these lines: if death is the central object of the work of the cross, and death a universal human problem, does the paschal Christ therefore imply a universal salvation? Marilyn McCord Adams, who has articulated a similar supralapsarian christological position position, certainly thinks so. More from Behr would have to be said for his supralapsarian christology for this position to be more persuasive.
In the end, this little but dense book is incredibly thought provoking and challenging for the Western evangelical Christian, but this does not mean it is bad. Indeed, more Western and especially Protestant Christians should read books like In Accordance with the Scriptures, not because it is faultless, but because there is still good and encouraging truth in it that millions of other Christians are likely to believe in (i.e., the Eastern Orthodox). Behr has provided a very interesting model for theology that ought to be considered and pondered on by theologians, pastors, and lay people alike.
September 23, 2025
A heavily theological and philosophical work which attempts to change how we read the Bible. Instead of seeing Genesis as revealing the true nature of humanity, from which humans fell by sin, Behr advocates for looking to Christ and the eschaton to understand the true nature of being human. Christ does not become fully human in the incarnation, but rather completely fulfills the Father's plan for humanity through the cross and resurrection. Only in the eschaton do we see Christ as a full human being, and only then do we come to understand what the human is in God's plan - the being in which God planned to unite everything in heaven and earth (and in Hades), life and death, the divine and human, male and female and all the other differences which divide creation.
The Bible has one revelation - Jesus Christ the incarnate God. All Orthodox feasts and liturgical rites stem from this unity and reveal this unity. Unfortunately, over time as the Orthodox made the calendar year a re-enactment of Christ's life, it divided these feasts and rites into separate "chronological" units and the unity of the revelation gets obscured as each feast or rite or sacrament gets valued in itself, rather than being just different expressions of the one Truth.
The Bible has one revelation - Jesus Christ the incarnate God. All Orthodox feasts and liturgical rites stem from this unity and reveal this unity. Unfortunately, over time as the Orthodox made the calendar year a re-enactment of Christ's life, it divided these feasts and rites into separate "chronological" units and the unity of the revelation gets obscured as each feast or rite or sacrament gets valued in itself, rather than being just different expressions of the one Truth.
May 4, 2025
Probably need some re-reads…
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews