I think that it is time to address some of the important points that you have raised many times. What has Christianity really brought to the world aside from things such as hospitals, encouragement of learning etc. What has it really changed as far as man’s deepest aspirations are?

In order to answer in depth and satisfactorily to you, we are going to start with something that St. Paul comments on. He says that we often do the very things that we do not want to do. This I think is something that all of us have experienced and therefore it is not something that is controversial. So, how do we explain this inner division in all of us?

Orthodox Christianity teaches that one can discern two components within man – man’s nature and the personal aspect of man. Our nature is that which is common to all humanity and includes our instincts and it is this which is in a state of war with the person within us. What is the person within us? This is something very difficult to define although we all have many misconceptions about it. One very popular one was spoken off by Plato – the soul. This is a spiritual component of man which survives man’s death and goes on to exist forever. This is often spoken of at funerals in an attempt to make some sense out of the tragedy that death represents.

Sometimes the personal is seen as the rational component of man through which he reasons and thinks. The problem with this view is that it raises a very important question – what happens to man’s personhood when he becomes seriously ill and mentally incapacitated?

Our faith teaches us that personhood is the deepest layer within us, the layer that is foundational to who we are. The person is unique and cannot be easily described by characteristics and even if we were able to give some characteristics, they could not exhaust completely what a person is. The person uses reason but the meaning of a person is not exhausted by rationality. The person is a mode of being whose center is love and who is free from necessity.

What has arisen within man, as St. Paul points out, is that there is a conflict between the person in man and his substance or nature (his instincts such as the drive for survival). This conflict arises from the fall of Adam and persists into today and is what finally causes our biological death.

The body and soul of man are not the man but they are the means through which the person of man (in Greek, his hypostasis) expresses himself. Remember that the body and soul are dynamic entities which are constantly changing – the cells in your body, for example, change to the extent of approximately 90 percent in a 7 year span – but the person at the core of our being is untouched by processes of change, of maturation, disease, old age and death.

So let’s try to understand what it is that the Church claims when she says death has been defeated. For the Church, man is a personal existence before God which God calls out of non-being into life. Therefore to live, man must have a continued interaction or communion with God. Once this interaction is broken man suffers death as annihilation – he returns to the ‘nothing’ from which he came. Thus, one of the troparia at the funeral service states: “Your creative command was the arche (Greek word for cause), beginning, source, reality, hypostasis and substance of my being.” This clearly states that we come into being through God’s will. He may use biochemical processes, but they are not sufficient to explain how life begins or who is behind this process. From this, we come to see that the person that is man is the only entity in the created world that is capable of responding to God and it is here that Adam has failed. When there is talk in the book of Genesis about the tree of knowledge of good and evil, this does not refer to a question of morality – as it is often portrayed – but a question between two different ways of realizing life: one pretends to offer man life and in fact ends up giving him not life but survival ending in death (evil) and the other is eternal life of communion with God (good), the true life that man was destined for.

Both God and man are personal and this is what opens the door to the possibility of communion between man and God. It is the person at our depth that bears the image of God. We cannot know the essence of God because this remains eternally unknowable for us but the fact of personhood allows us to relate with God. What this points out to us is that we may try to reason and prove the existence of God and derive logical statements but these are woefully inadequate. St. Thomas Aquinas was a very profound thinker who wrote much about Christian theology in the Western Church but, at the end of his life, his assessment of all of his intellectual efforts is that it was “all just straw”. However, I want to make something very clear. This does not mean that we do not think, that we do not expand our rationality through logic, but we need to continually keep in mind that our goal is not to speak of God but to meet God, two very different things.

So, let’s take a closer look at what is occurring in Christ’s sacrificial death for all of humanity. Christ through his personal freedom accepts death willingly and through this, he renounces every demand for self-existence and independence. When Christians now impress the sign of the cross on themselves, this is a sign of their willing self-renunciation of individual self-sufficiency. The question arises why do Christians continue to die if death has been conquered?

In a sense, every human death now has a special significance and role to play in the life of people. Every death is the opportunity for giving up the individual’s existential autonomy. But this, on its own would not be sufficient to overcome the created-uncreated barrier. Through Christ’s sacrificial death, the whole nature of death has been changed – it has truly become a passover. The love of God now accepts each death as He accepted Christ’s death as a removal of the resistance of the created to his reception by God. But we still need to die in order to ascertain our desire to be united to God in Christ who is our savior. God, because of Christ, is united with everyone and gives them true eternal life, not merely a biological existence. Death proves now to be a triumph of the love of God and an entry into Life and each of us has to go through this doorway and this is why we still die.

All this happens through Christ, and it all has meaning only if Christ is at the center through which man is enabled to break through to the uncreated. Every willing renunciation by man of his existential autonomy (choosing the good of the tree of good and evil) functions for the love of God. In this, we follow in the footsteps of Christ in whom our nature is offered to God for renewal. When we die, our created hypostasis is connected through the hypostatic (personal) union with the divinity in Christ. As God initially created through His Word, so we are, through our death, recreated and renewed, again, through His Word. Even before the general resurrection, the love of God constitutes and gives life to the existence of us all – the living and the dead. Death is the last and most extreme test of our trust and self-surrender to God and that is why, in the past, it was held as a blessing when we died consciously. Beyond this, all is speculation.

Just a reminder – the common sin of all of us is death and this is what it means that Christ frees us from sin, he wins for us the forgiveness that we desperately need. He frees us from the death that separates us from God. Sins, ironically, are our strength because they strip from us the illusion of self-sufficiency and through sin, we are enabled to see our fallenness. This recognition of our inadequacy opens us to the reality of God’s love for us. Salvation from death, which is what we all thirst for, is above else, a work of the uncreated. It is a gift, a grace and cannot be earned. It is given when nature is freed from need and this is what happened with Christ in his salvific work. Every effort that we put into dying to our selfish wishes, to hating to behaving without love is a practice for the time that we will be called upon to die completely in trust in that Christ is united with us in eternal life. Life is not individual survival, which is what most of us think, but the final denial of the self to the point of death.

We speak of Christ sacrificing for us and in the past much ink was spilt as to whom he sacrificed. This is a religious understanding of sacrifices that are used to assuage an angry deity. This is not what is going on here. Sacrifice refers to the depth of the suffering that covers all man’s sins spanning all of creation. To bear this terrible responsibility is truly what this sacrifice encompasses and it does not mean that somehow Christ is trying to appease an ‘angry’ Father.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas