Fr. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ Part 2: Creation, the Church and Mary

Recapping where we are, Fr. John Behr is exploring the Incarnation and Passion of Christ as a lens, as a hypothesis or first principle, for how to view all things. Doing so tends to turn things on their heads: Darkness becomes light, death becomes a birth, the womb becomes a tomb. This approach is nothing new; in fact, the book is a small trove of the richness available in the early fathers' writings as they reflected on Scripture. Fr. John is also offering nothing other than classic Orthodox doctrine. However, for those of us schooled in the modern historical-critical method and in systematic theology, his book represents a shift of perspective, and it also presents the Orthodox doctrine in the form of a story based on the typology and imagery of the early church. No long list of bullet points here. In fact, I find it difficult in reviewing the book to not make it all more complicated than he does.

In chapter three we consider what the Passion teaches us about creation, the Fall, and our own death. Drawing especially on St. Irenaeus, Behr reminds us that the teachers of the church, when looking back on creation in light of what the Passion revealed to them, were able to see even this event as a part of God's economy of salvation and not its precipitator. God did not cause their disobedience, but in His wisdom foresaw it as the means by which His creatures would learn their weakness and come to a mature humanity. This paradox is reflected in an early icon of the creation which shows Christ blessing Adam and Eve as they flee the Garden, and in a hymn of St. Ambrose which calls the Fall "felix culpa," the happy guilt. The very disobedience of humanity, offered to God, is transformed into His blessing. Creation and salvation are not two distinct processes, but one and the same. The Fall is not some cataclysmic event that necessitated Christ's death, but a pre-figuring of that very death, all with the goal of lifting humanity to knowledge of God.

This understanding of creation parallels how the early Christians viewed physical death. In light of the Resurrection, human death is always an unnatural tragedy, particularly violent death. Yet the Passion teaches us that this utmost expression of our need is paradoxically where Christ's victory is realized and declared. Death is seen in Eucharistic terms, an offering, a change of matter into something greater. It is true birth. As St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote of his impending martyrdom, "I go to become anthropos", a human being; this recalling the words of God in Genesis, "let us make anthropos after our image."

As the Passion reveals the meaning of sin and death, it is also our lens for how to understand the church. In chapter four, we are reminded first of St. Paul's imagery of believers as those who receive the Word and are birthed as young babies, nourished also by its milk. Fr. John then moves on to the multiple examples of early Christian writing which depicted the church as Virgin Mother, pre-existing creation as the womb in which the Logos would be received and birthed in humanity. For instance, Tertullian compares the Passion to Adam's slumber, when he was wounded in order to form Eve, the mother of all. In the same way Christ slept in the tomb, and from His side, the church was taken and formed in flesh as His body.

It is in this context that the early church meditated on the significance of St. Mary not only in historical terms, but also in theological ones, as symbol of the church. In St. John's gospel, for instance, Mary is presented to John as his mother, a fact which has larger significance than only as historical footnote to the fate of Jesus' human family. The womb of Mary is connected in the mind of early Christians to the tomb of Christ. The icon of the Nativity shows Christ wrapped in swaddling burial clothes; in the West, the feast of the Nativity is dated nine months after the Resurrection, a curious but intentional reversal of the usual order of birth and death. We are reminded in this chapter of why the Orthodox fathers insisted that "Theotokos" was a christological term, as St. John of Damascus said: "It is proper and true that we call the holy Mary the Theotokos ['God bearer'], for this name expresses the entire mystery of the economy."

As a footnote to chapter four, while re-reading it I reflected on why from a substitutionary atonement point of view, veneration of Mary can be seen to be beside the point or even idolatrous, why insistence on a physical and visible church is rejected, and why from such a perspective the Fall is viewed in more negative and absolute terms. Fr. Behr's book may offer insights to those outside the Orthodox thought world as to how doctrines like Mariology and sacrament are not extraneous to, but central to, our understanding of God's work of salvation.

Next we will consider the final chapter of the book which explores what the Passion means to the individual's life of faith, and its epilogue, titled "A Premodern Faith for the Postmodern Era."