The Church Was Born in Holiness
by Joshua Sturgill
Eve of the Theophany of Our Lord and Savior Jesus ChristAnno Domini 2020, January 5
First, for the humbling of our pride. Those of us in the European West should remember that Christianity is not ours to individually interpret or to preserve, though Christ may (and does) share this task with us. Christianity came to us not only from another place, but from another time and another way of thinking. We should continually look to this origin for instruction and inspiration.
This speaks to the second reason we should remember those first centuries of the Church. Not only the circumstance but the means of the Church’s birth should be a source of contemplation. Faith in Jesus was not spread and rooted in the world by war and violence, by logic and scholarship, or by adherence to moral systems.
The Church was born in Holiness.
In and through the holy lives and witness of the early apostles, martyrs and confessors was Christianity indelibly impressed on history. Holiness is true war, reason, and morality. And the early Christians “fought” by prayer, service, and martyrdom.
When we compare the lives of the apostles and martyrs with the many trends and movements in the Faith down the centuries, we have cause to be alarmed and ashamed. Some have tried to persuade through superior military might. In this regard, the Crusades and the age of colonization come to mind, when conversions were forced through violence, threat, bribery.
Some have tried to spread the faith through fear of punishment - either temporal or eternal. There are many social groups and philosophies which claim to speak for Christianity, but offer in its place only a more or less strict, more or less complex social code. Heaven is assured to those who “follow the rules” and behave correctly; Hell awaits those whose activities are substandard.
Some have tried to spread the faith through programs of education and indoctrination. Rhetorically beautiful philosophical systems replace the Gospel, and are often so alluring in their literary power that the substitution goes on, unnoticed, for centuries. In this case, the most well-researched and thoroughly-footnoted theology is considered the most correct.
In all these methods, of course, we may find seeds of good intention. We do not, of course, wish to live contrary to reason, and we do strive to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” But taken to extremes in isolation, social programs and evangelistic methods become dangerous and directly counter to the message of Jesus who came “not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”
Some of our traditions have reached a point in which they cannot conceive of the Faith except through the lens of some belief that is tangential, external or even contrary to the Gospel. Several examples immediately come to mind.
Perhaps we believe that the essence of Christianity is well-performed, beautiful liturgies. Or that the essence is “tolerance” of all people at all times. We frequently insist that the essence is a rather superficial membership in one communion over or against another. Many are taught that real Christianity is foreign missions, and anything less is a kind of spiritual failure.
We are not questioning the importance or value of these beliefs. In fact, they are good in their place. We are, instead, looking for essence
and comparing all else to this essence, which is Holiness. When Holiness is forgotten or lost, the good is mistaken for the best. And the good-but-not-essential aspects of our traditions can subtly become excuses for our choosing not to pursue a deeper union with God. We might say, “I am a member; that is all I need to do;” “I am kind and generous; that is all I need to do;” “My church has beautiful services.” These less important things are tempting because they are easily made into measurable goals. We want to see our progress, and compare ourselves to others.
Holiness, however, is not easily measured or attained. Our scriptures are expressly clear on this point: “Through many trials we must inherit the Kingdom of God.” “They will deliver you over to affliction and kill you.” “Strive to enter by the narrow door.”
The heroes of the Church in its first five centuries did the difficult and Christ-inspired work of attaining holiness. They taught doctrines from holiness; they stood before judges and executioners in holiness; they went out to the deserts to pray in holiness. They were filled by the Holy Spirit.
And we might pause here to ask, why does the Church give this third Person of the Trinity the appellation “Holy?” Why not Divine, Beautiful, Powerful, or Loving - which are also attributes of God? This alone should impress on us the importance of holiness, and lead us to ask: what does it mean to be holy?
Without definitions and descriptions of holiness frequently set in front of us, we are each confined to our own ideas of this word, and perhaps to self-justifications based on these ideas. Remembering that holiness is ultimately beyond what we can express, we might for the sake of these reflections consider two possible descriptions - one brief, and one more extensive.
Briefly, the word holy refers to that which has been fully consecrated to God. Consecration is mysterious and profound. Even for the consecration of objects for holy use, there are prayers and observances, and not every object is sought out for consecration. The creation of the world is depicted in Genesis 1 as a series of consecrations. When fallen human beings are called to return to holiness, how much more awe-inspiring and difficult.
Jesus spent three years intimately consecrating His disciples. Saint Paul went into the desert and then carefully consulted with the early Christians to be certain his teaching was holy. Seminaries, monastic orders, eldership, ordinations - these all speak to the care our communities take to ensure that holiness is recognized and preserved for the very consequential offices of Church leadership.
We mention this short definition first, because holiness, being something divine (and therefore both natural and supernatural) should be described as both simple and complex, both given and struggled for, both easy and difficult, both immediate and subsequent. Many of our arguments about holiness through the centuries ensue because we do not keep the full mystery and richness of holiness in mind.
The short definition is helpful, but does not offer us a direction or compass. Many would like to pursue a more deep union and consecration to God, but do not know how to start or how to maintain. So we might look for something more concrete - a measure or description offered by a member of the Church who has lived a holy life. There are many such people. We call them variously Saints, Elders, Sages, Teachers, and all traditions preserve their example.
*This is the first half of an essay which will appear in its entirety in Synaxis 7.1 for the tenth annual Eighth Day Symposium.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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