The Church Year

It’s Palm Sunday today. We are about to enter the busiest season of the church year. The Book of Common Prayer has a collect, epistle reading, and Gospel reading for every day from now until next Sunday, Easter. While many won’t be able to make it to church every day this week, there are quite a few of us who will make it to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, maybe also a vigil on Easter Even/Holy Saturday.

One year in high school I had an orchestra concert one of the nights of Holy Week (Maundy Thursday, maybe?). I commented to a fellow musician that my dad wouldn’t be able to make it because there was church every day that week as we remember the different events from Palm Sunday to Easter. The response was that we should remember those things every day.

Well, yes, of course.

But we can’t actually have a church service that covers every. single. thing. every. single. day. Or even every. single. Sunday.

Instead, we have the Church Year, the big version of sacred time. Sacred time, of course, has multiple layers. In terms of marking it, we have the daily rhythms of Morning and Evening Prayer, the weekly rhythm of every Sunday being a mini Easter (and in some traditions, fasts on Wednesday and/or Friday), and the yearly rhythm of the many feasts and fasts.

My brother and I already have a podcast episode about the meaning of the seasons and feasts, so I wish to go a different direction, one that turns us back to my trombone-playing comrade of c. 2001.

The absolutely central reality of Christianity is the fact that God became man so that man might become God. Our manifold sins and wickedness are healed by this reality. Our great potential is fulfilled by this reality. Our understanding of Who God Is is bodied forth by this truth. Everything surrounding this reality — the events of Jesus’ life on earth, the preparation and history of God’s people leading up to it, the record of those events, the ongoing life of Christ in the Church through the centuries — is bound to the fact that God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Indeed, from the beautiful reality of the Incarnation comes also the beautiful doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity.

Because God became man, we are disciples of the God-Man, Jesus the Christ. We, Christians, are bound to the divine life. We participate, in our own small way, in eternity. We grasp at infinity, and God gives us what we can handle. Because God took on humanity in every way except sin.

As Christians, as disciples of Jesus, we are called to remember this reality and keep it at the forefront of our devotion. Our devotion is not to a set of ideals or “values”. Our devotion is not to some generic unmoved mover we call “God”. Our devotion is not to the Bible. Our devotion is to the very specific, very real God Who became a man so that we might participate in the divine life. Our worship and our prayer and our moral lives and our everything is meant to be devoted to Christ Jesus Our Lord.

And as humans, we need this to be constantly brought before our hearts and minds, imprinted on our souls, filling us to overflowing.

As humans, we live in the ebb and flow of time. Every twenty-four hours, the earth completes a rotation, a day comes and goes. From the earliest days of our faith, we have ordered our days and our prayers with this rhythm — one of our earliest hymns is a hymn to Christ for eventide, the “Phos Hilaron”. We also have a cycle of daily hymns from Prudentius in the fourth century, not to mention the daily cycle of prayer mentioned in second- and third-century sources such as Tertullian, Origen, The Apostolic Tradition. We fill certain times of day with the remembrance of the God who became man so as not to lose sight of him.

But that’s not enough. Our cycle, based upon the harmony of the universe revealed in Scripture, also includes the seven-day week. And on a specific day of the week, our salvation was wrought for us as Christ trampled down death by death and rose from the dead. And so every Sunday, the first day of the week, we celebrate the resurrection. We keep Jesus and his salvation for us at the front of our minds in our communal gatherings.

But God’s salvation is too big to cram it all into a single day each week. We just can’t do it. And so we have the year-long cycle. Every 365 1/4 days, the earth completes a circuit around the sun. And so we remember the deeds wrought by Christ to save us in the course of the year, commemorating his deeds and teachings, recalling the teachings of his apostles and prophets as well.

This yearly cycle enables us as Christians to keep our hearts and minds focussed on Jesus and his saving grace, his saving acts, his saving of us. God became man so that man might become God. We need to remember this. If left to our own devices, many of us may simply preach through the book of Romans for six years. Or examine only the moral teachings of Jesus. Or double down on the Psalms.

But the church year fixes our eyes not just on the teachings of Jesus but on the God-Man Himself. The church is forced through its cycle of seasons and feasts and fasts and readings from the lectionary to confront the God-Man Himself and not shunt Him off to the side.

Christianity is not about the teachings of Jesus. Its about Jesus Himself. We need to keep Him, the Person of Jesus the Christ, God the Word Incarnate, at the centre of our vision, of our ethics, of our worship, of our Bible-reading, of our prayer.

The Church Year does that for us. This is the pastoral role of the church year. This is why we have the feasts and fasts, why we have seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphanytide, Gesimas, Lent, Eastertide, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, as well as Michaelmas, All Saints Day, the saints’ feasts, the feasts of our Lord. These are there to keep us focussed on Him and His salvation for us.

Christianity is not about ideology, ideals, or ideas.

It is about God becoming man so that man might become God.

Have a blessed Holy Week.

Your Own, Personal Theologians

Over on Twitter, James Wood tweeted yesterday (@jamesrwoodtheo1):

After Christ and your family, committing to a few key theologians is a profoundly life-giving enterprise.

My studies have been largely framed by Augustine, Calvin, Torrance, and de Lubac. I imagine these figures will always be with me.

I had to pause and think about which theologians I am or would like to be committed to. I scribbled on a Post-It note thinking about who are the people who have framed my own studies. I came sideways into theology as a philologist and historian — which I principally am! Who are the theologians I circle back to, though? They must be there, at one level.

Some, I circle back to in my mind. Others I reread or read more of. I don’t have the Post-It with me, but as I recall contenders were:

• Athanasius
• Augustine of Hippo
• Leo the Great
• Boethius
• Maximus the Confessor

And then I thought — but wait! I spend so much time with ascetics and mystics…

• Cassian
• Evagrius
• Bernard
• Benedict

This leaves out Anselm, though, a man whose work I circle back to in my head and heart quite often. I never got around to even writing down Gregory Palamas.

It was also noteworthy that James listed some 20th-century greats on his list. Am I not influenced by people after St Bernard?? What about my own Anglican tradition?

I looked at my calendar and realised that the next day — today — was the commemoration of Richard Hooker. His Learned Discourse of Justification is something that sticks with me. It’s the only piece of modern stuff I have published on, after all! But also, of course, the Prayer Book. The single theological text I have read the most.

So I settled with Hooker but also reflected that there are two lists. Athanasius, Augustine, Leo, Anselm, and increasingly Maximus and Boethius with Hooker on the one hand, and then Cassian, Evagrius, Bernard, Benedict with the BCP on the other. It may seem like a lot of theologians to invest my time in. No doubt they will settle with time. But the one list is the guys I read for theology-as-argument, the others I read for, well, theologia — “If you truly pray, you are a theologian.” Not that the two categories are hard and fast, as any reader of them knows.

Before pondering, “Why these?” you may ask: Why the experiment?

I think James is right in this. It’s an idea a friend once floated at Davenant as well. Devote yourself to a few whom you will read deeply and repeatedly. Get to know them as friends and companions. See their various facets from multiple angles. Love them. Engage with their ideas. Disagree with them.

Doing this will train your intellect and hopefully also your delights and loves. It will help you focus your mind as well. There is so much out there to read and know, coming back to one person and finding his resonances and particular themes and shades and variations and transformations helps train the mind beyond the chaos that our modern social media age creates.

It also teaches us to read deeply, and to reread deeply. My most-read explicitly spiritual books (so not Homer, Virgil, or The Lord of the Rings) are the Confessions of St Augustine, On the Incarnation by St Athanasius, the Life of St Antony approved by St Athanasius, The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, the letters of Pope St Leo the Great, and the Rule of St Benedict. I go back to them over and over. There is something new every time. Or things I’ve forgotten. This is why these authors. I choose these specific books as companions because they delight me.

I am also exploring the vast, spreading corpus of Augustine, including multiple readings of De Doctrina Christiana, The City of God, and hopefully soon De Trinitate. I would not have wanted Augustine on my list of contenders 10 years ago. But I’ve had to grapple with him because of his importance and because teaching him is, I believe, important. And I’ve come to love the Bishop of Hippo.

The wider Athanasian corpus I also delved into for the “historical theology” and anti-Arian stuff but found much more hiding there about the doctrine of God and the Trinity than a standard, pop-level church history book could ever give a whiff of.

Why Leo? Good golly. I have sat with the medieval manuscripts of the letters. I have probably read his famous Tome more times than any other piece of ancient theological writing! That’s “Why Leo?”! I also appreciate his ability to synthesize, not to mention his evident rhetorical skill.

The newcomer Maximus is burned into my mind because he came to me like an electric strike of lightning and set me on fire. As you may know, my original patristic loves were the monks (hence Cassian, Evagrius, Benedict, Bernard). And then I began working away at Christology, greatly enjoying the work of Cyril of Alexandria, Severus of Antioch, and others. When I met Maximus, it was both of these worlds colliding at once. The ascetic and the mystical wedded strongly to what we today call theology, explicating the beauty of the hypostatic union and Chalcedonian Christology, all within a trajectory clearly set by Athanasian Triadology! The blossoming of the legacy of both Athanasius and Evagrius.

Finally, though: Hooker and the BCP. I’m not sure if Hooker will be my long-term Anglican companion. But I’d like to find one. I am Anglican, after all. I pray with the Prayer Book. I sing Anglican hymns. I read Herbert and Donne. I listen to Purcell and Orlando Gibbons. And I once upon a time proposed the idea of an Anglo-Patristic Synthesis! But I think Lancelot Andrewes might end up being my Anglican theologian. Maybe Jeremy Taylor? We’ll see.

This doesn’t mean I won’t read others. Of course not! But these will probably be my mainstays, even as I go further with the Cappadocian Fathers or St Ephrem the Syrian or the scholastics or Palamas.

Who are your theological companions?

Prayer Book and Gospel

Today there was a little cheer from someone in the congregation when our priest said that we were going to use the Book of Common Prayer and not the BAS! (And it wasn’t me, surprisingly!) Like most parishes in the Anglican Church of Canada, my church almost exclusively uses the Book of Alternative Services — although, up to 2011 if not a bit later, it was 50/50 BAS/BCP.

This meant that I had the treat of worshipping with the BCP for Holy Communion and not just Morning and Evening Prayer for private devotion. I’ve sung the praises of the BCP in the past, this living link with the pre-Constantinian liturgy, the theology of the Apostles (+Fathers +medieval divines + Reformers), the wider church through the ages, etc., all in magnificent, soaring prose. I’ll link to some of those posts at the bottom.

The Prayer Book, like the Divine Liturgy of St Basil (about which I’ve also blogged on the topic of Gospel), sets forth the Gospel for us through prayer and ritual. This struck me today during the prayer of consecration. But the Service of Holy Communion begins with the (medieval English!) Collect for Purity, begins with looking to God to reveal within. And then: The Law, either the Ten Commandments or Christ’s Summary of the Law, followed by “Lord, have mercy upon us.”

Having received the Law, we hear the proclamation of the Word. We, like the people of Israel, are spoken to by God through his word, through prophets and apostles. We then make an offering to God, like the people of Israel, and then seek his favour through Intercession.

But the liturgy knows that this is not the whole story. Our true response is about to come. First, we fulfil the promise of the Collect for Purity, wherein we had asked God to “cleanse the thoughts of our hearts.” We “confess our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we from time to time most grievously have committed, By though, word, and deed.” We confess our sins, and God gives his grace, first through the words of absolution, and then through the “comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.”

Next we meet “Thanksgiving and Consecration” — the Greek word eucharisteia means “thanksgiving.” The thanksgiving and consecration is the prayer where we offer up praise to God in company with the angels, and then the priest proclaims the greatest cause of our thanksgiving:

BLESSING and glory and thanksgiving be unto thee Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption; who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world; and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memorial of that his precious death, until his coming again.

BCP 1962, p. 82

This little paragraph has so much theology caught up in it, about the Incarnation and its cause, and about Christ dying to save us “by his one oblation of himself once offered.” This is what we’re here for, isn’t? Giving thanks for Christ’s “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” That line is worth going over and over again. This is how the sins that we need to be cleansed from get cleansed.

This is the mystery of the ages — that God became man in a perfect, full union and single person (hypostatic union!), and died for no purpose other than saving us! And this is Gospel. So we remember it and recapitulate it through the drinking of the blood that redeemed us.

For, indeed, next the priest pronounces the words of institution in order that we “may be partakers of his most blessed Body and Blood.” Here is the central act of our blood cult, the glorious climax of Gospel-centred worship. Bread and wine become body and blood without ceasing to be bread and wine. God ones us to himself by dying.

But also by being eaten. And what becomes more united to a person than the very food he eats?

But before we actually go up and receive the portion of bread/body and wine/blood, in Canada the priest prays that we would “through faith in his blood … obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion”. And then, in any BCP service I know of (I hope!), we pray the Prayer of Humble Access.

This prayer is, again, Gospel. We have heard the law and the prophets and the Gospel. We have confessed our sins and heard the story of our salvation, seen it recapitulated with bread and wine. And we are eagerly looking forward to partaking and finding ourselves oned to mystically. But first, we pray this prayer that is not a confession of sin but, rather, an admission of the great glorious goodness of God, who would come down to the unworthy — and a desire that the Communion would be efficacious:

to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, And to drink his Blood, That our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, And our souls washed through his most precious Blood, And that we may evermore dwell in him, And he in us. Amen.

BCP 1962, p. 84

Only then do we go up and receive the Holy Communion, eating God’s Body and drinking His Blood under the species of bread and wine, being mystically united to Him by His grace and heavenly benediction, with the various benefits mentioned in the prayers, including the prayer after Communion.

Then we join the angelic host. We have gone through the history of salvation. Now we are washed through Christ’s most precious blood. Now we stand and sing, “Glory be to God on high!”

The BCP Gospel is not a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. It is not only about the “afterlife” or “going to heaven when you die,” or any such thing as that. The BCP Gospel is the full deal. God loves us, we sinned and fell and are dead. He comes in the proclaimed word, we respond. He gives himself to us because He loves us, not because we deserve it. We are raised to new life through the blood of Christ. We are united to God. And we are destined to sing His praises forever.

It is a Gospel of worship, praise, adoration, with an eye toward heaven both yet-to-come and here-and-now, focussed on Christ and the benefits of his passion, including the spiritual blessings of being part of Him now.

The Gospel is for you today.

Take, eat…

Some pro-BCP posts of mine

So, what’s Sunday morning for, anyway?

Prayer-book Augustinianism

The Collect for Purity

The Prayer Book and the Bible

Loving the Book of Common Prayer 1: Catholicity

Loving the Book of Common Prayer 2: Protestant

Loving the Book of Common Prayer 3: Theological Depth (and breadth!)

Loving the Book of Common Prayer 4: Beauty

The fourth century: Bursting at the seams with ecclesiastical history

Here’s a YouTube video I made a while back about the fourth century. I’ll be teaching fourth-century ecclesiastical history for Davenant Hall this January in my course called “The Theological World of the Nicene Controversy (325-407).” You can sign up for it here! And if you’re not sold that the fourth century is a wild time worth studying, here’s the video:

Richard Hooker and Union with God

My latest YouTube video was made on the commemoration of Richard Hooker on November 3. In it, I discuss his Christology in relation to Chalcedon but most especially in relation to you and your union with God and participation in the divine life. Enjoy!

The theological flow of the 39 Articles

This post is really just me being a 39 Articles fan (stan? Am I a stan? What is a stan?). I’ve been going through some Reformation-era confessions and catechisms for research lately, looking at what they have to say about Christology. It’s interesting, but the results are still forthcoming. One thing I notice is where the article about Christology falls, and it’s often far down the list, or at least after a discussion of the Fall of humans.

And I noticed this because I’ve been mulling over the 39 Articles of the Anglican faith lately, and it puts the Christological article as Article II, right after the Article of Faith in the Holy Trinity. Here’s a Table of the Articles from prayerbook.ca, complete with links to the text:

1. Of Faith in the Holy Trinity
2. Of Christ the Son of God.
3. Of his going down into Hell.
4. Of his Resurrection.
5. Of the Holy Ghost.
6. Of the Sufficiency of the Scriptures.
7. Of the Old Testament.
8. Of the Three Creeds.
9. Of Original or Birth-sin.
10. Of Free-Will.
11. Of Justification
12. Of Good Works.
13. Of Works before Justification.
14. Of Works of Supererogation.
15. Of Christ alone without Sin.
16. Of Sin after Baptism.
17. Of Predestination and Election.
18. Of obtaining Salvation by Christ.
19. Of the Church.
20. Of the Authority of the Church.
21. Of the Authority of General Councils.
22. Of Purgatory.
23. Of Ministering in the Congregation.
24. Of speaking in the Congregation.
25. Of the Sacraments.
26. Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers.
27. Of Baptism.
28. Of the Lord’s Supper.
29. Of the Wicked which eat not the Body of Christ.
30. Of both kinds.
31. Of Christ’s one Oblation.
32. Of the Marriage of Priests.
33. Of Excommunicate Persons.
34. Of the Traditions of the Church
35. Of the Homilies.
36. Of Consecrating of Ministers.
37. Of the Civil Magistrates.
38. Of Christian men’s Goods.
39. Of a Christian man’s Oath.

The flow of the articles is from more important to less important. We begin with the doctrine of God, and then we discuss Christ, including his saving mission, then the Holy Spirit, before moving on to how we know about God — the Scriptures, the knowledge from which is articulated in the creeds. Having established the absolute foundation of our faith — God, the Holy Trinity who saved us through the life of Jesus — and how we have the knowledge of theology — God’s revelation through Scripture as articulated in the creeds — then we can move into other matters.

And now, not as Article 2, but as Article 9, we come to Original or Birth-sin. From here, questions of justification and sanctification are addressed, including stuff like predestination and election. Once salvation and the place of the church and her authorities are in good order, we look at what goes on in church, from speaking in a tongue such as the people understandeth to the sacraments, to excommunication and traditions of the church.

I love that in reading the Articles we are brought face-to-face with the greatest realities of the Christian faith before anything else. The Most Holy Trinity is where to lay our gaze, and then what he did for our salvation (which is wrapped up with those first few articles). Everything else should flow from or be framed by that belief. And the Articles help us be there.

It’s a great corrective to something I’ve witnessed — I’ve been at baptisms where people are asked about their beliefs in the Bible before their beliefs about God. Something is just … off in that ordering. It is disordered.

I’m sure other people have done this better than I have. But here it is. Now — read the Articles and see how Protestantism looks when it’s done properly.

Interview with Dr Alex Miller about my book

Last week I was blessed to be interviewed by my friend Dr Duane Alexander Miller about my book, The Manuscripts of Leo the Great’s Letters. Parts 1 & 2 are available below:

Part One

Part Two

Some thoughts about St Anselm

Image of an Archbishop from Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Auct. D. 2. 6 (12th c)

I had the opportunity to teach about St Anselm last night. Much of the lecture was taken up with investiture, and I’m still sorting that out in my mind — hopefully, thoughts to follow. I also had the opportunity to linger on his Prayers and Meditations. I believe that these are very important for us to understand the whole man of this Archbishop of Canterbury. St Anselm is more than the clear, systematised logic of his philosophical and theological treatises. He is also a man of great “religious feeling” (if you will), a man animated by his love of Christ, Christ’s church, as well as awareness of his own smallness and sinfulness.

This positioning of Anselm through the Prayers and Meditations helps us see that true Christian theology is always done in Evagrian mode: “If you truly pray, you are a theologian; if you are a theologian, you will truly pray.” The logical treatises, such as De Casu Diaboli are not detached from the saint’s life and worship. This is also a perspective potentially gained from the Life of St Anselm by Eadmer as well, which is why I chose to assign a portion of that text to my students.

A second approach to St Anselm requires us to grasp foundational truths that St Anselm affirmed. I say this because Anselm is famous today for two things:

1. The ontological argument for the existence of God (in the Proslogion)
2. Penal substitutionary atonement (in Cur Deus Homo — check out The Major Works)

The second of these is often misunderstood, most famously and egregiously as “divine child abuse.” To understand why Anselm’s atonement theory of satisfaction is not “divine child abuse”, it is worth knowing both what Anselm believes about God, and second, what penal substitutionary atonement theory actually teaches.

Anselm is a traditional, western Trinitarian. He believes that God is/has one essence/substance in three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The three are co-equal and co-eternal. And one of these three, who is Himself fully God, chose to become human and die. Once you catch a glimpse of the historic doctrine of the Trinity, the idea that penal substitutionary atonement theory is “divine child abuse” is untenable, because it is not a father forcing or sending a son to die for other people because the father is angry. It is God choosing to take his own anger upon Himself in order to save other people.

I’m not saying this is an argument for why you ought to agree with St Anselm — it’s simply an argument that should make you set aside this caricature.

The theory itself is this: In Cur Deus Homo, St Anselm argues that offence against God requires balance, it requires an equitable return, something proportional to the offence. This is a basic principle of law and justice. Since God is infinite, offence against God carries with it infinite weight. No human being can redress the balance of sin against God. In the courtroom of heavenly justice, we will always be found guilty of infinite offence and thus sentenced to infinite punishment, eternal damnation. Therefore, God, in his mercy, chooses to condescend Himself to our weakness, take our flesh upon Himself, and take our place as a substitution by dying on the cross. This substitution of an infinite, perfect, good God in place of finite sinners, redresses the balance and pays the penalty for our sin in our place. By removing the penalty of sin from us, God makes it possible for us to be oned (to use the later language of Julian of Norwich), united, to him and participate in the divine life.

Penal substitutionary atonement theory has fallen out of fashion today. It was first articulated by St Anselm, and it came to dominate western theological discourse about the atonement until Aulen’s book Christus Victor in the 20^th century. A quick example of this theory’s dominance is that it is the model of the atonement used by Edmund Spenser in A Hymn of Heavenly Love.

A final point on Cur Deus Homo. I read it and found it convincing. This does not mean that I do not also believe in the classic or Christus Victor model found in fathers like Athanasius and Leo. The two theories are not mutually exclusive but, rather, complement one another. Perhaps western theology lost sight of one for a while and thereby suffered — but this does not mean that rejecting Anselmian atonement theology redresses the balance.

In closing, St Anselm was a deep, profound thinker, steeped in prayer, in scripture, and in the tools of logic and dialectic from the classroom at Bec. He made two original and lasting contributions to theology as well as some important gains in the king-bishop relationship (but that’s perhaps for another post). Read his devotional works, read his theology, read his life.

The grace of God can make you a better Christian thereby.

Why the Council of Chalcedon is (still) my favourite ecumenical council

As a final question to my students in “The Seven Ecumenical Councils in Historical Context”, I asked which council was each person’s favourite. Votes came in for Nicaea, Ephesus, Constantinople II, and Chalcedon. I affirmed that I still prefer Chalcedon. One student asked who the greatest theologian we’d read in the course was. I’ll save that for another post…

Why do I still like the Council of Chalcedon after all these years?

1. I like the Chalcedonian definition of the faith, which I’ve translated here. It did not solve the Christological can of worms opened by Nestorius by any means, and potentially just opened up another can and poured the new worms on top of the Nestorius-Cyril worms. But I still think it is beautiful and balanced, so long as interpreted correctly.
2. The Council of Chalcedon empowers theologians like St Maximus the Confessor to do wonderful stuff. That’s reason enough for me.
3. I like Pope St Leo the Great and his theology. It’s nice to see traditional Latin Christological formulations showcased at an ecumenical council and enshrined as dogma. As I’ve said on a lot of job applications, I am a Latinist (I can certainly do Greek as well, but my interests and deep knowledge tend more to Rome than Athens).
4. This might be 3a, actually — whether you like Leo or not, it’s an historically interesting fact that traditional Latin Christological formulations from Hilary of Poitiers and Augustine of Hippo are enshrined in an ecumenical council. The councils are usually dominated by eastern/Greek concerns, eastern/Greek formulations, eastern/Greek bishops, and eastern/Greek ideas. This, at least, makes the Council of Chalcedon an interesting object of study.
5. So much evidence survives. For someone who wants to dig into the primary sources for ecclesiastical history, Chalcedon has them in abundance.
6. The actual transpiring of the council is interesting, even entertaining, to read. The acts of the council have embedded in them both the acts of the Second Council of Ephesus (449) and the portions of the acts of the Home Synod of Constantinople of 448 relevant to Eutyches.
7. The flurry of activity leading up to the council survives, documented chiefly in Leo’s letters.
8. The fallout from the council is interesting to read about — monks take of Jerusalem! Bishops get killed in the streets over this! It’s crazy stuff. Historically interesting, whether morally appropriate or not.

I think any other reasons would come in as subsidiaries to these. But these are the reasons why the Council of Chalcedon of 451 is my favourite ecumenical council.

Council of Chalcedon, from St Sozomen’s Church, Galata, Cyprus

This January I’ll be teaching The Historical Context of the Seven Ecumenical Councils

Boy, that’s possibly the longest title I’ve given a blog post yet! But it’s true! This January I’ll be teaching “The Historical Context of the Seven Ecumenical Councils” for Davenant Hall (the Davenant Institute’s teaching wing). If you’re already excited enough, you can register for the course here. If you need more convincing, read on…

Do you believe in the Trinity? Do you believe that Jesus is fully God and fully human, perfect and entire in each, without getting it all mixed up and turning him into a divinised man or a man adopted by a god or a god who merely uses a human body like an avatar or something?

Do you kiss icons?

If you have an answer to any of these (yes, no, what?), then the outcomes of the Seven Ecumenical Councils should interest you! These seven councils met between 325 and 787. All were called by emperors. All dealt with church-rupturing theological issues. All also dealt with some canon law, except for 5 and 6, so a special council was called after number 6 that we call the Quinisext Council. It’s exciting already, isn’t it?!

These seven councils were admitted by the imperial church to provide the dogmatic boundaries for orthodox thought and worship. They come to be considered as having universal jurisdiction in doctrine and canon law. These seven, and only these seven, hold such a status in the Eastern Orthodox Church. These seven plus a bunch of later ones hold such a status in the Roman Catholic Church. Three of these, if I understand aright, are embraced by the Oriental Orthodox. And I’m not sure if the Church of the East formally embraces any of them, but they espouse the doctrine of the first two.

Protestants tend to explicitly endorse the first four, but I see no reason not to embrace five and six as well, whereas many Reformed Christians reject the seventh because of its acceptance and promotion of holy images (icons). I, personally, accept all seven. I’ve been told that I am what they call, “based”.

These seven councils are:

1. Nicaea (325): Jesus is of one substance with the Father
2. Constantinople (381): Reaffirms Nicaea and pushes towards the full divinity of the Holy Spirit
3. Ephesus (431): Jesus is only one person, fully human and fully divine
4. Chalcedon (451): Jesus exists in two natures, one human and one divine
5. Constantinople 2 (553): Jesus’ two natures come together in what we call the “hypostatic union”
6. Constantinople 3 (680/1): Jesus has two wills
7. Nicaea 2 (787): Images of Jesus and the saints are good

In my class, we are going to explore the events leading up to and the aftermath of each council. Some of them had some pretty crazy stuff going on at them (particularly Ephesus and second Constantinople), so we’ll look at how (or how not!) to run a church council. We’ll look at why these seven but not other ones (why not Serdica in 343? Why not the Lateran Council of 649? What about the council of 869?). And we’ll examine the writings of one major theologian associated with the teaching of each council.

It’s going to be a fun ride, and hopefully it will help you appreciate even more the glory of the Most Holy Trinity and the Person of Jesus Christ our Saviour and His work of redemption in becoming man.

The Gospel is Jesus, so these questions matter.

You can sign up here.

And for a foretaste, check out my December 16 lecture, “The Christmas Councils”.

Council of Chalcedon, from St Sozomen’s Church, Galata, Cyprus