Nathan Duffy > Recent Status Updates

"Salvation is not a matter of intellectual acceptance of truth; rather it is a person's transformation and deification by grace."

"The Saints are the infallible criteria against which the Ecumenical Councils are judged."

Still early in, but this book is phenomenal already. Seems like I'm highlighting every other passage.

"Too often Christians who live in the world relate to the monastic experience with an attitude that demands justification for monasticism's existence. According to the Patristic vision, if anyone neefs to justify his existence in light of the Gospel, it is not monastics but *we who dwell in the world*."

I'm biased, but really loving this book. Quite eye-opening. If it became widely read, it would be a lightning rod of controversy, not only among Protestants, but even with certain veins of the modern Orthodox world. It's an unhappy state of affairs when sound Biblical, apostolic, patristic teaching is considered controversial.

"For by no virtue do fleshly human beings so nearly approximate and imitate the angelic way of life as by the deserts & grace of chastity, whereby those still living on earth possess in their frail flesh that which is promised to the Holy ones in the world to come once they have laid aside fleshly corruption." - St. John Cassian

"Procreation through the sex act was the greatest consolation to fallen man. It offered some small beachhead against the encroachment of death."

"Procreation through sexual intercourse became the 'greatest consolation' to man after the Fall. In the generation of children, the fearsome 'visage of death' was reduced, and the Resurrection was foreshadowed."