My beloved spiritual children in Christ Our Only True God and Our Only True Savior,
CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST! HE WAS, IS, AND EVER SHALL BE.
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DIVINE GRACE ACCORDING TO ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY
"But Jesus said, 'Somebody touched Me, for I perceive power going out from Me" (Luke 8:46).
As the Apostle Peter was preaching the Good News of Jesus Christ to Cornelius and the relatives and friends he had gathered together, they received the Gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:44). Even as the Apostle explained that the Logos/Word of God had become flesh to open all flesh to the life and power of God, these Gentiles seekers were filled with Divine grace through the Descent of the Holy Spirit.
Now enlivened and energized by grace, Cornelius finds himself magnifying God in foreign languages, a tangible testimony to the presence of the Spirit. He feels reborn and filled with a new understanding that has enlightened and energized both his soul and body. He has been reborn by the Divine energies of God, just as the Lord breathed His Spirit into the newly created Adam, making him a "living being" (Genesis 2:7). The life of grace lost by the first Adam is restored to mankind by the New Adam, Jesus Christ, for He came "that they may have life," and life "more abundantly" (John 10:10). This is the life God desired for Adam and his descendants from the beginning.
Cornelius realizes he has been enabled to know God in a way that transcends anything he has experienced before. His is not a knowledge of the intellect but of the heart and the understanding, for the grace of God has illumined his heart to "see God" (Matthew 5:8) as Moses met Him in the burning bush. This is not a temporary swell of emotion but a sober and profound encounter with God in the deepest place of his heart. He now understands the words of the psalmist. "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me" (Psalm 50[51]:10), and the prophecy of Ezekiel, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezek. 36:26).
Cornelius and his family will now be called to nurture and increase this gift of grace that the Lord has bestowed upon them. For it is only by the acquisition of this grace that one truly becomes perfected as a Son of God.
WHAT IS GRACE IN THE ORTHODOX TRADITION?
The theological controversy that occurred in the 14th Century helps to refine and further clarify the Orthodox Christian teaching on grace. It provides a good background for us to begin to comprehend the Church's teaching on this topic and to compare and contrast with the ideas and formulations of other Christian traditions. Since, as the Holy Scripture tells us, we are saved "by grace," it is imperative to have an accurate understanding of what grace is and is not and of how it is acquired.
GRACE IS NATURAL
After the Lord formed the first man, Adam, from the earth, we are told He then breathed into him the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Sometimes this breath of life is misinterpreted to mean the creation of Adam's soul. But the teaching of the Church is that Adam's soul was created by God from the dust of the earth concurrently with his body, just as the Saints also teach that the soul of every subsequent human being is created at the time of his or her conception.
If the breath of life is not the soul, then what is it? Saint Seraphim of Sarov addresses this issue directly in his famous conversation with Motovilov. He tells us his friend and disciple that what God blew into Adam at the time of his creation is His Life-Giving Spirit, the Holy Spirit. This teaching harmonizes with the post-Resurrection account in the Gospel of John in which the Lord breathed into the faces of the Apostles, saying, "Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:22). The word for "spirit" in both Hebrew and Greek can also mean "breath."
The Holy Spirit is not the soul itself but rather the life of the soul. The life of the body is the soul, but the life of the soul is the Holy Spirit. It was the very life of God that Jesus breathed into the Apostles after His Resurrection. Without this grace and energy of the Holy Spirit, the soul is, spiritually speaking, dead. Therefore, in the Orthodox understanding, if one is to be an authentic and truly living human being, one must have the grace of God. And the more grace one has, the more truly human one becomes. In the Orthodox anthropology (our understanding of man) we understand the indwelling of grace not as a supernatural phenomenon but as the most natural and normative condition of man.
THE REVELATION OF THE UNCREATED GOD
In the Orthodox teaching, the grace of God is closely associated with the Person of the Holy Spirit, because it is the Spirit's Ministry to take the grace of God that has been made accessible in Jesus Christ and pour it into the hearts of the faithful (Romans 5:5). Grace is something that belongs equally to each person of the Holy Trinity, but it is the Spirit Who makes it manifest.
"However, when He, the Spirit of Truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak, and He will tell you things to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you" (John 16:13-15).
This grace of God poured out to mankind through the Holy Spirit is not a mere theological idea or even an effect produced in us by God; it is the very life of God, His power and energy, His self-revelation. Grace, therefore, is something real and concrete, although uncreated and immaterial--the energies and rays of Divine Life that flow from God to us. Grace imparts God Himself to His creatures and allows them to share and participate in His own uncreated and eternal life. However, as Saint Gregory Palamas insisted, grace is not a participation in God's essence, because His essence cannot be experienced or comprehended by any creature, as the Holy Scripture (see John 1:18) and the Church Holy Fathers' testify.
To use an earthly example: We all experience the power and energy of the sun. We truly experience and feel its warmth and light through the rays of energy that shine down upon us. These rays do not merely give us an impression of what the sun is; they are not a substitute for the sun; they do not present us with ideas about the sun; they do not merely illustrate what the sun is like; they are a real participation in the very energies of the sun itself. By our contact with the rays of the sun, we actually participate in the light and hearty if produces. The sun's power interacts with our human cells, and real, organic changes occur in our human chemistry.
Similarly, the energy of the sun generates the natural process of photosynthesis in plant life. The sun's light interacts with carbon dioxide in the plant's cells, creating a chemical reaction that converts it into the necessary nourishment for the organism as well as releasing oxygen into the atmosphere.
Yet we cannot participate in or fully experience the essence of the sun. If we were to try to approach the scorching essence of the sun in an attempt to discover the inner source of its energies, we would quickly be overwhelmed and annihilated.
The same is true of God and His grace. His essence--how He exists in Himself--cannot be known or experienced by creatures, but He is known and experienced by His grace, the rays of His Divine energies and activities. As the created energies of the sun are real and provide us with a genuine and actual participation in the sun, so do the uncreated energies and grace of God give us a real experience of the uncreated God. And so, while we are capable of knowing God truly and intimately by His uncreated grace and self-revealing energies, yet He remains incomprehensible and unknowable in His essence.
The Orthodox Church teaches that a True and empirical knowledge of God comes when one directly experiences His uncreated grace in a pure heart, and not by the exercise of human logic or philosophical speculation, which is a product of the fallen human mind. True theologians, then, are those whose hearts have been purified of the sinful passions and are illumined by God's grace. In this way they receive God's self-revelation without distortion or imposition of their own ideas and imaginations. In the Orthodox mind, prayer and spiritual formation, not simply information, is the prerequisite to speaking about God. The Fourth-Century ascetic Evagrius succinctly summarizes the nature of theology when he says, "a theologian is one who truly prays; and one who prays truly is a theologian." (Source: Know the faith. A handbook for Orthodox Christians and inquirers by Rev. Michael Shanbour)
(To be continued)
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"Glory Be To GOD For All Things!" - Saint John Chrysostom
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With sincere agape in His Holy Diakonia (Ministry)
The sinner and unworthy servant of God
+Father George