In part one of this contemplation, I sought to identify the origins of the communal nature of salvation, and came to the conclusion that because the fall of man was a common experience, then salvation must be as well. I discussed how the sacraments are not just optional tokens but necessary cornerstones of our faith, and that because of the sacraments, the idea of Church becomes a very different proposition. Even though I am a fully initiated Orthodox Christian, at times I have struggled to answer the question of what “being saved” actually means to heterodox, especially as it pertains to this idea of being saved together. I remember really wanting to know what I must do, and how will I know I am going to heaven?
This is one place where communication between the Western mind and the Orthodox mind breaks down. For the Protestant, salvation is a guarantee that if you died right now, you would go to heaven. It means you have believed in Christ, prayed a prayer and your sins are forgiven. You “committed your life to Christ,” and you got baptized (though some would say that isn’t required because it is a symbol only). I wrote about these things in part one so I won’t belabor the point.1
On the other hand, the Orthodox model of salvation says that the Kingdom of Heaven is here among us now. In chapter 7 of his book The Ethics of Beauty Dr. Timothy Patitsas clearly articulates the difference in the Orthodox understanding of salvation (emphasis mine):
In the Church, we really do experience the fact that the Kingdom of Heaven has already become present, even though we also await our hope at the end of time. This paradox has been termed “the now and the not yet” of the Kingdom of Heaven. And if you lose the emphasis on the fact that already “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” then you’ve defeated the very gospel itself and rendered Christ’s first public words null and void! Christians don’t repent in order to get to heaven; rather, we repent (and in the preaching of Christ we see this clearly) because heaven has come upon us. By the way, this clear emphasis on the “now” of the Kingdom is one reason why the Orthodox Church has not been divided by discussions about whether you “get to heaven” by faith or by works. When people outside the Orthodox Church ask you whether you’re saved, they often mean, “If you died right now, would you go to heaven?” But for us, this question itself sounds like a denial of the gospel: the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand here and now, whether we like it or not! It’s not about our trying to get there, but about the fact that the Kingdom has come to us in Christ, so now how do we react? Besides, not only are we already in heaven, we are also all “going to heaven” at the Last Judgment, whether we are in the Church or not, have lived pure lives or not, in order to experience this meeting either as salvation or as condemnation. The question of salvation is not only a matter of getting God to notice us favorably, for He already loves all of us. The question of salvation is really the question of how not to get crushed by the awesome purity and power of the Kingdom, now and at the end of days, when it has the mind to visit us. (Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty 2019, 520-521)
C.S. Lewis, in his novel The Great Divorce illustrates beautifully this “purity and power” and the weight of the beauty of the kingdom of heaven by having characters who are dead and enduring a miserable existence in a Gray Town pay a visit to heaven where they are revealed to be mere shades, almost invisible, unable to tolerate the blinding light or the blades of grass which pierce their feet like knives, or even pick up an apple because of its immense weight. The reality of heaven is so great and profound that their feeble essence cannot abide it. Each shade who arrives in that intolerable place is visited by a “solid person” who knows them from their earthly life and attempts to reason with them and convince them to enter Paradise. Those who respond positively find almost immediately that they become more substantial and able to tolerate the grass which had been agonizing to their feet, and the light becomes more tolerable to their eyes. Those who refuse to enter with their guide return to the Gray Town or even become so insubstantial that they vanish.
Beauty Versus Theology
What both Patitsas and Lewis deftly illustrate is that the Truth and Reality of the Kingdom of Heaven is such that when we encounter it, or perhaps it is rather when we submit to being drawn into it, the weight and beauty that is present within trumps any amount of theology that can be argued. It is unlike anything else, and even as I attempt to write this, I find it quite difficult to articulate my meaning because so much of it is dependent upon the experience of this weight. Anyone can read himself blue trying to understand Orthodox dogmatics, but the best theology is to “come and see.” (John 1:46) When the apostles saw and believed, their lives began a wild trajectory that would lead them to torture and martyrdom, but they would not recant. For two millennia men and women who have embraced the Kingdom in our midst have died defending it. Even in our modern times the Church continues to produce Saints who bear an inexplicable weight of godly authority (including the working of miracles) which originates from continually and prayerfully abiding within the Kingdom of Heaven and drawing near to Christ. Even more importantly, people are still laying down their lives for this Truth.
The question is this: what truth is so deep and so real that millions upon millions have been willing to stand before society, before family, before enemies, kings and governments and not back down? How do we begin to experience this conviction that bears the weight of the Glory of the Kingdom of Heaven? Are we a part of this “great cloud of witnesses?”
Access through Liturgy
Just as Moses, when he descended from Mt. Sinai after his encounter with the Living God had to be veiled because the Israelites were afraid to come near due to the brightness of his countenance (Ex. 34:30), and like the apostles Peter, James, and John on the Mount of Transfiguration were stricken with fear at the Glory that surrounded them (Matt. 17:6), we too would be unable to tolerate Christ’s glorified presence if we encountered it directly. However, we are able to experience it through the liturgy. Indeed, the participation in the liturgy serves for us as an entry point to that very weight of Glory that would crush us if we encountered it head on.
In a recent interview with Jonathan Pageau, Dr. Patitsas stated: “…liturgy is supposed to be openness to the radical unknown…to a God that is so vast…that without the mediation of liturgy the encounter would crush us.”2 The willing and regular attendance in the Divine Liturgy reflects our deep reverence for the holy act in which we are participants. It unites and binds us, and connects us to that inexpressible weight of glory that we encounter in the Kingdom of God.
2 Corinthians 3:16–18
But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (ESV)
During the time Christ spent with his apostles, they experienced his own institution of the sacraments, and the apostles themselves were the first ministers of the liturgy. As discussed in part one, they are not optional physical tokens of some esoteric existence of nebulous faith—rather, they are the mysteries of water, oil, bread, wine, physical touch, flesh and blood. These are infused by the Holy Spirit and are thereby made holy. By obediently and humbly receiving these sacraments, the faithful are made holy. The Orthodox do not see holiness as a state of mind which gives rational assent but a state of being that makes Christians uniquely one with Christ through the sacraments. We are not just set apart because of our beliefs and actions, but our human flesh is made holy by being washed in baptism, anointed in Chrismation, and fed the body and blood of Christ. By this we are empowered to bear the weight of the Kingdom of God and thereby to transform the world through our Christian witness. The proper administration of these sacraments is found in the Church and no other place.
The coming together of the members of body of Christ therefore becomes non-negotiable, and the way in which we receive the sacraments is very uniform. The sacraments are administered every Sunday, and in some parishes and monasteries, more than once a week, or even daily. There is something ineffable about this experience. It is not merely “receiving communion.” As a body we are sacramentally entering anew into the death and resurrection of Christ. It is vital that we do so in a right manner and with the utmost reverence. We prepare ourselves with prayer and fasting; if needed we go to confession and receive absolution for our sins before partaking, and we participate in the prayers of the liturgy as members of the body of Christ, leading up to the glorious moment when the bread and wine is sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Every week we participate in a miracle—together. Liturgy allows us who tend to reside in the the chaos of our sinful and fallen state to experience the reordering of ourselves through God’s Glory without being crushed by it. Liturgy is the organizing response to the Weight of Glory, and the sacraments received together form us into the body of Christ, which is a greater whole than we can be as individuals experiencing God alone.
The Kingdom of Heaven and the Church
Therefore, following the Orthodox model of salvation, we must respond not only to the Gospel, but also to the Church, because the Church is the repository of this heavenly weight. It is not a man-made institution. It does contain humans who are fallible, but Christ prayed that we would be one as He is one with the Father (John 17), and also proclaimed to the apostles that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church that He would build (Matt. 16:18) and it hasn’t. Even today the Church of the first century still stands. If we look at the wolves throughout history that have attempted to scatter the sheep we can see that there are schisms and fractures,3 but the Orthodox Church still draws its life from the Head who is Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is to this that we belong!
This kind of thinking is hard for most Americans, who when they find something does not meet with their tastes or align with their feelings and beliefs, find the exit and move on to the next situation. It also happens often that a “church” that is led by a dynamic personality will crumble and abandon the members when its leader fails to live up to expectations, or when their successor is not as appealing as the original pastor. The reality, however, of the Orthodox Church is that we don’t follow Paul, or Apollos, nor do we follow Calvin, Francis Chan or John MacArthur, or any other such leader of a movement that would move people further from the root of the apostolic Church, founded at Pentecost.4 We follow Christ who self-identifies with the Church, when he asks Saul on the road to Damascus, “Why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4) By this we know that we are in Christ and He is in us.
It is difficult to explain to friends and family who want “historical evidence” to support our claims about the Church and who want to discuss our faith in terms of scholasticism and philosophical takes, because so much of what we do is embedded in Tradition, which they find hard to accept, inadvertently conflating the “traditions of men” (Col. 2:8) to be the Traditions of the Church, which are a very different thing. These Traditions (capital T) are the things taught by the apostles that were handed down to faithful men who were able to teach others also (II Tim. 2:2, I Tim. 3:15). The Western academic mind assumes these Traditions were lost or corrupted, but the Eastern Orthodox Church just scratches her head and says, “Funny—we’ve been here all along, doing and teaching the same things for 2000 years.” The reason for this is because the Church is a mystical body sustained by Christ, and we are part of this mystical entity, participating in mysteries that cannot be inscribed, legalized, or reduced to verbal descriptions. It is a vibrant organism, and to dissect it academically reduces it horribly to a set of parts that do not add up to a living whole.
The weight of the Kingdom of God is not something that we can bear individually. We need the Church. We need others by our side to share the Christian life, beginning with the sacraments and on through the dailiness of life. We need to read the lives of the Saints who spur us on by their examples of selfless love and holy living. We need our monastics, priests, and hierarchs who pray for us and stand before the altar on our behalf. We need each other. It is in this that we are saved together, but even more that we are the light of the world, the city on the hill that cannot be hid. We bear the Weight of the Glory of God not only for ourselves but also for the life of the world.
Matthew 5:14–16
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. (ESV)
I recognize that my expression of the Protestant understanding of the gospel is fairly reductionist here. I am not attempting to disprove Protestant theology or say that a Protestant Christian does not have a relationship with Christ. I will save that discussion for those interested in theological debates. Rather, I am examining the depth and richness of a deeper understanding of the Gospel that (thanks be to God) my knowledge of the scripture gained as a Protestant prepared me for. The points I make are the ones with which I had to personally wrestle in my own spiritual walk.
I am referring directly to the The Roman Catholic Church, the Great Schism, and the thousands of Protestant denominations which have spawned and continue to fracture and multiply as a result. I am not in anyway disparaging the faithful Roman Catholics who value their connection to the ancient faith of the Church and put their faith in Christ.
According to John, Francis Chan - "What should I do next?" Father Josiah Trenham, an Orthodox priest, gives the answer, October 30, 2020.
Thank you.