We may not be battling Arius like they were, but similarly, in our own day, it’s common to hear people making Jesus into whomever they want Him to be, so that He fits their lifestyle, their own ‘personal’ beliefs. Little reference is given to the historic Jesus, the Christ of the Church. Modern man has flipped the axiom: it’s no longer we who need changing, conforming to the likeness of God, but rather, God whom we think to change and conform to our likeness or that of our culture. Needless to say, this won’t work—we will have made of the transcendent God a ‘straw man’ who isn’t the God who has revealed Himself to us and who alone can save us.
Many in our culture today want to hold onto vestiges of who the historic Jesus is for the sake of legitimacy, so that there erroneous beliefs will care more weight, sound reasonable. But many don’t want to go as far as accepting Christ as Lord and God, except perhaps in word. Many today say that they are ‘Christians,’ but they want Jesus without the Christ and Christianity without the Church, which turns out to be no Christianity at all, but rather a ‘man-made’ religion.
St. Paul warns us in today’s Epistle saying, “savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock” (Acts 20:29). In fact, the history of the Church is replete with a great number of such ‘wolves’—the Gnostics, the Arians, the Nestorians, the iconoclasts—just to name a few—all of whom sought to have Jesus conform to their ideas, their likeness. They even called themselves part of the Church, but without submitting themselves to the Apostolic Faith.
For the early Christians as for faithful Orthodox today, the idea of being a Christian apart from the Church, is an oxymoron. The two belong together as our head belongs to our body; they cannot be separated without losing something integral to what is Christianity, the Way of Christ.
A watered-down Jesus, who represents some non-judgmental and vague notion of ‘humanity,’ ‘peace,’ ‘friendship,’ whatever, is not the same Jesus Christ, the Logos of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who loves all by calling them to repentance, healing, and salvation, to new life in Him by ‘water and the spirit’ (John 3). When we look on the icon of Christ the Pantokrator, we see not only the historic reality of the Incarnation of the God-man who came to save us, who blesses us, but also the Gospel by which we will be judged. This Gospel is the ‘Book of the Church,’ and is meant to be understood only in the context of conformity to her.
A ‘no rules, just right’ ‘church’ can’t stand the test of time, or possess the tools of salvation we need; it won’t hold anyone accountable, or be able to refute heresy or even recognize heresy—those ‘savage wolves’ St. Paul speaks of—when they come to ravage the flock. And so, this kind of ‘church’ cannot represent to us the timeless Truth that is the God-man, Jesus Christ and the recipe and means you and I need to find the fullness of life in Him.
Today, ‘denominationalism,’ the idea is, that we’re all part of the Capital “C” Church no matter what we believe as long as we ‘have Jesus,’ has become the hallmark of American Christianity, but it’s just another heresy. What does it mean to ‘have Jesus’ if we water down the Gospel or conform it to our culture to become more inviting at the expense of the fullness of the truth?
The Mormons, to give one example, maintain they’re part of Christianity, even though they don’t believe that Jesus is God. Some Protestant groups are even beginning to recognize them as just another denomination, even though their beliefs are nothing less than modernized Arianism, which the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council whom we commemorate today, soundly condemned in 325 A.D. because of the Arian’s belief that “there was a time when he (Christ) was not.” The Fathers maintained that Christ is not a creature but the Creator.
Even in some Protestant circles, however, Jesus is reduced to little more than “friend”—something far short of the Messiah, the Logos of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, revealed to us through the Scriptures and worshipped in the Church through the ages. If Jesus is ‘dumbed-down’ then we can’t be sure that we’re coming to know or grow in Him, and then how can we find the healing from our passions and the salvation that is the active life in Him?
Indeed, here’s the rub: the only Church (capital “C) that’s stood up to the heresies that have tried to ‘water-down’ Jesus or adulterate the faith once received, robbing the people God loves of the fullness of life in Him and the means of healing and salvation, the only Church that has preserved the Apostolic Faith in its fullness, is the Church Christ founded, i.e., the Orthodox (‘right-believing) Church. This is a historical reality testified to from the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 through our continued adherence to the Seven Ecumenical Councils to this day.
When we as Orthodox today read the early Fathers of the Church—Saints like John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, John of Damascus, Gregory Palamas, we find ourselves in agreement with them and their faithful interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. The tenets of the Orthodox Faith, our understanding of the Scriptures, haven’t changed. As Orthodox, we don’t find ourselves having to explain away aspects of the faith or the Scriptures, the prayers or teachings, that are inconvenient or increasingly at odds with our culture. The Truth, Jesus Christ, doesn’t change, nor does the means of our healing and salvation, and so our Faith doesn’t change; it’s as simple as that.
Salvation has always been for Orthodox Christians communion (koinonia), participation in the life of God the Holy Trinity. And this life is revealed to us through Jesus Christ in His Church by the power of the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised us would “lead us into all truth.”
When we receive Christ God into ourselves through the Holy Eucharist, when we participate in the sacramental life of His Church, when we pray, when we worship Him, we are growing in that life that He is, we receive the “fountain of immortality.” We don’t need just part of Jesus, or Jesus on our terms, or just some of the tools of salvation found in the Church. Rather, we need all of Jesus—the whole Life that He is, that is in Him alone.
We need Jesus Christ as He is, as He’s revealed Himself to be, to convict us, to help us, save us, have mercy on us, heal us, and grow us into the fullness of godly manhood, womanhood that we’re created to be as part of the new race of Adam. The Fathers of the First Council re-affirmed the Apostolic Faith that Christ is God. Only if He is life can He have raised Himself; only then can He raise us from our sin and death. We need Jesus Christ as Savior so that we may inherit eternal life. Christ says to us in today’s Gospel: “this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”
To come to know God and continue to grow in Him, demands that we conform ourselves to Him, and not the other way around. The historic reality of Who Christ is, of who He has revealed Himself to be as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, His abiding presence in His Church by the power of the Holy Spirit and witnessed to by countless Saints and changed lives through the ages, give testimony to the timeless Truth of who God is—the only Lover of mankind.
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Sunday of the Fathers of the 1st Ecumenical Council
16 June 2013
