Beliefs

I figured it was time to provide a summary of my beliefs. So here ya go:

Thanks for visiting my Medium. Let me tell you a little bit about what I’m interested in and what I write here. A basic summary of my beliefs:

1. Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. The root of all created things is the timeless rejoicing of the three divine persons. The Father rejoices in His Son through the Spirit, and the Son rejoices in the Father through the Spirit. The life of the Holy Trinity is reflected in all human life and in every structure of creation- concrete and abstract alike.

2. The threefold distinction between God’s person, substance, and activities, or energies. All things exist in virtue of unique modes of participation in different sets of God’s creative activities. The Father eternally acts in the Son, who is therefore called the Logos of God. This truth is the foundation for the unity of knowledge, the capacity of man to reason, and the vocation of man as the Image of the Logos. The incarnation of the Logos is therefore the revelation of God to man, man to man, and creation to man.

3. All of the ecumenical creeds of the Orthodox Catholic Church, which is the fullness of the apostolic, Christian faith.

4. The centrality and inerrancy of the Bible, which ought to be the basis for all reason and study. The Logos is the foundation of all human language, which symbolizes God’s logoi, or creative activities. The Bible is, as Maximus the Confessor professed, a verbal incarnation of the Incarnate Jesus Christ. If the world is a picture-book, the Bible is the words which enable us to read the world properly.

5. The theology of the Fathers and Councils of the Orthodox Church as the framework within which we understand the Scriptures and the Creation.

6. The centrality of symbolism. All things in the world symbolize God, in virtue of existing by participation in God’s logoi. Man, as the Image-Symbol of God, is the only creature who thinks and reasons symbolically. The revelation of God in Scripture and the Church enables us to understand the visual symbolism of the world.

7. The historical reality of the whole Bible, including and especially Genesis 1–11. This means that the chronology of the Bible is the backbone of all historical study. The rejection of the historicity of these chapters leads to a drastic misunderstanding of the development of human culture, religion, and mythology. Only in accepting the chronology of the Scriptures and using it as the backbone of history will we find confirmation for the historicity of the Old Testament and truly understand the history of the human race.

8. The essential role of the Old Testament for understanding the New Testament. The Bible records God’s development and maturation of the human race in preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ, the true and Last Adam who enables humanity to fulfill its divine calling to transfigure the world. Without the Old Testament, the New Testament loses its meaning.

9. Postmillennialism. As was understood by Ss. Athanasius and Augustine, the promises of Scripture are of Christian victory. The gospel is the exaltation of Jesus as king of the world, and St. Paul declares that He must destroy “every rule and authority and power and dominion” before destroying the “last enemy” which is death. Through the suffering of the Church, the nations will all be discipled to Christ, thus fulfilling the Great Commission.

10. The triple glorification of the world in the tripartite constitution of the human person who microcosmically unites the world in himself. The victory of Christ is not merely in the conversion of the nations. Man is spirit, soul, and body. The Lord is victorious in our spirits when all nations are discipled. He is victorious in our minds (souls) when we rationally symbolize the created world in study and reflection- this is the foundation of all historical, philosophical, and scientific reasoning. The Lord is victorious in our bodies when we, united spiritually to God, rightly apprehend the world mentally and apply this knowledge to the development and glorification of the world in art, technology, and culture. Once the triple glorification of the world is complete, the Lord Jesus Christ will consummate history by destroying death itself and fully renewing the created order.

11. The reality of the development of doctrine. If Scripture corresponds to the Son, tradition corresponds to the Holy Spirit. The Father speaks to us in Scripture, and we, by the Holy Spirit, speak back to Him in tradition. The apostolic tradition is absolutely authoritative, but theology implicit in earlier formulations of the tradition develop into explicit formulations. In symbolizing these developed concepts in language, we come to a deeper understanding of God, man, and the world. St. Vincent of Lerins compares the development of Christian doctrine to a seed developing into a tree. The seed and the tree have the same nature, but the tree is that nature fully realized.

12. The Trinitarian nature of civilization, which is constituted triply by Church, State, and Family. The Church corresponds to the Father, the fountain of the Triune God, for the Church is the source of all human culture. The State corresponds to the Son, since the Father upholds and rules the world by energizing in His Son. The Family corresponds to the Holy Spirit, because the Spirit is the uniter and multiplier, who extends the life of Father and Son out to others. As with the three divine persons, Church, State, and Family dwell in one another and glorify one another. Each of them are called to explicitly recognize Jesus Christ as the king of the cosmos and, taught by the Church, orient themselves rightly within His world. This means that all civilization is theocratic in the very best sense of that word.