Fr. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: The life in the body and epilogue

This is part three and the conclusion of a review. See here for part one and here for part two.

In his final chapter, Fr. John Behr applies the method of seeing all things through the perspective (the hypothesis or starting point) of the Passion of Christ on to the life of the individual believer in the body. In the church's classic teaching, Christ recapitulated- assumed, took into Himself- all of humanity in His Incarnation and Passion, and we in turn are to recapitulate His life. Living the life of Christ in our body is to live the perfect human life. What does this look like?

Fr. John points to St. Athanasius' On The Incarnation as a key source for theoretical understanding on this, but then to St. Athanasius' Life of St. Antony as this theory shown in practice. St. Antony (icon above) is presented as an example of one who has so assumed Christ, that he can be seen to be the continuation of Christ's life in a "normal" human existence. The text emphasizes that Antony was not a superhuman, that the presence of Christ was not felt in him as something other than human, but as a human being as he ought to be. Particularly notable is that he was neither insensible to natural human emotions and bodily needs or motions, nor was he controlled by them- his was a life of perfect balance, the vision of God ruling the life on earth rather than vice versa: "He maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by the logos and steadfast in that which accords with nature."

In discussing the way we capitulate the life of Christ in our bodies, Fr. Behr pays particular attention to the confusion over the Christian attitude towards the human body and the material world in general. In both the Scriptures and the writings of the fathers, the body or flesh is portrayed in seemingly contradictory terms: On the one hand as a glorious creation and helper in our salvation, on the other hand as unruly and an enemy to be subjugated. Fr. Behr explains that what is spoken of when the body is called an enemy is the body as regarded by a diseased mind, the body made an idol. The problem is not the body in itself, which was created by God and is good, but an "evil husbandry of the mind" over the body. He emphasizes, "If one does not recognize that the struggle is ultimately with one's own perceptions, then one is left waging war on one's own nature." That is in fact what some outside observers and even some Christians who haven't been rightly taught perceive in these Scriptures and early Christian teaching. Fr. Behr underlines that Christ came to fight in and on behalf of the human body, and it is in our body that we seek to put on Christ. The body participates in the soul's salvation and vice versa; it is not just coming along for the ride or awaiting destruction while we continue on as disembodied creatures.

Fr. Behr then provides brief examples of contrasts between "good husbandry" and "evil husbandry" of the mind over the body. While eating and enjoyment of it is natural, gluttony can pervert this: "Gluttony is a false opinion about the way things are: 'Gluttony is hypocrisy of the stomach. Filled, it moans about scarcity...' " (Here quoting St. John Climacus.) Sex is given to us primarily for procreation, but can also be a ground for sanctification. Again quoting St. John Climacus: "I have watched impure souls mad for physical love but turning what they know of such love into a reason for repentance and transferring that same capacity for love to the Lord..."

This ordering of the body's impulses has been described in Orthodox spirituality as apatheia or detachment. Fr. John explains that "it connotes not repression but reorientation, not inhibition but freedom; having overcome the passions, we are free to be our true selves, free to love others, free to love God." (+Kallistos Ware) Such ordering is not accomplished with severity or austerity, still less with judgmentalism, but by remaining "open and pliable" to the activity of God within oneself. It is ultimately not we who form Christ in ourselves but Christ who does so. Lest it be said that Orthodoxy does not preach grace!

Finally, Fr. Behr brings the book back around to its starting place, to his main goal, which was to strip back some of modernity's constraints around our understanding of the gospel and the Christian life. The picture he paints- in this epilogue literally offering diagrams which I found helpful even though as a former Campus Crusader they initially made me nervous!- is that the Cross is literally the starting point of the whole universe. It is in the Cross that we see the history of humanity not in parallel terms to God's part in "salvation history," with arrows going back and forth between parallel lines (reminiscent to me of both dispensationalism and Calvinism), but as a single trajectory beginning at the Cross. The Cross is not only the restoration of creation, it in fact can be seen as its starting point.

I am reminded of St. Ephrem the Syrian's poem The Pearl, where he warns against the soul's wish to plumb the depths of the Trinity, as it is more than enough to content oneself with contemplation of God the Son. This seems to me precisely what Fr. John is calling us to: To regain the perspective the early church had when they considered Christ's Passion in light of the Scriptures. We have been taught to preoccupy ourselves with historical-critical and rationalistic questions and approaches, and to "what if's." They were caught up in a vision of Christ that filled their whole consciousness. Christ the complete image of God, the Alpha and Omega, through Whom we know all that we can know of God and humanity, in Whose Life we become the full human we were created to be, in Whom we, as St. Athanasius taught, become gods.

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."

Fr. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ

A book by one of the most significant Orthodox theologians writing today- so say people smarter than me- and which seeks to explain "the reappropriation of a premodern perspective in a cautious postmodern fashion," ought to be of interest to Oozerdoxies and those who love (?) us.

Fr. John is professor of patristics at St. Vladimir Orthodox Seminary. His ongoing project is a series on the formation of Christian theology, one volume already laying out "The Way to Nicea" and the other the formation of Nicene faith. This small book can be seen as a companion volume to those, while standing as a compelling work in its own right.

The "mystery of Christ" is that Christ is at the center of absolutely everything. He is the axis around which all of the universe turns, all of our understanding of who God is, who we are as the church, and of what truth is. Fr. John asks us to go back in time before the formulations and systematizations of later centuries, which tend to put the gospel in the form of an historical narrative beginning at the beginning and leading forward. In this journey back in time we are not seeking a pristine, primitive church age, but Christ Himself.

He writes: "When the apostle Paul speaks of 'its breadth and length and height and depth' (Eph. 3:18), St. Gregory [of Nyssa] sees him as inscribing the figure of the cross into the very structure of the universe created by 'the God revealed through the Cross'... It is likewise only in this way, 'through the church', that the heavenly powers come to know 'the manifold wisdom of God' (Eph. 3:10)." The cross of Jesus Christ is the centerpoint of the universe, mirroring and being mirrored by all creation, and most significantly, an absolutely unique revelation of God.

The first implication of this cruci-centric view of all things is that Christ is at the center of the Scriptures. We have been so influenced by modern historical-critical method, Fr. John argues, that we have a difficult time reading them any other way. Yet for the early fathers, "the Word of God" referred not to a book but to a Person. There is no meaning in the Scriptures except that which reveals Christ. For the early fathers, the Jewish Scriptures were less historical narrative and more a library of images, prototypes and visions testifying to Jesus Christ. Similarly, the New Testament canon can be understood as having been gathered around the theological center of Christ's Passion moreso than any historical or textual criterion.

He uses the illustration provided by St. Irenaeus of a mosaic, whose tiny jewels only acquire their true beauty when seen according to the design revealed on the Cross. That design is set out by the apostles' teaching, where Christ's revelation was safeguarded. Yet here again Fr. John reminds us that the focal point must be Jesus Christ. It is not enough to see the design; to unearth "the author's original meaning"; one must have personal, dynamic engagement with Christ. The Scriptures, church tradition and apostolic succession are a framework which allows this to happen. Their boundaries are not intended to limit the knowledge of God, but to allow such a genuine encounter to happen, unhindered by "regression and mythology."

(to be continued)

Crunchy Con's Story

Rod Dreher reposts his journey to Orthodoxy......

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2007/07/why-i-became-orthodox-from-the.html#more