Friday, February 25, 2011

To Be Divine In The Way That He Is Human


I ran across this great passage in which Fr. Behr in "Thinking Through Faith: New Perspectives from Orthodox Christian Scholars" takes an interesting and refreshing approach to previously well covered ground:

In one way or another, all the various heresies against which the Fathers fought attempted to dissolve the apparent paradox of Christ: what it is to be God through how he lived and died (or rather, died and lived, for his death enabled the disciples to understand what he did before) as a human being. The Docetists denied that he was truly human, claiming that he only appeared to be such. Arius denied that he was truly divine, for how could one who is as divine as the Father suffer in such a manner? Diodore, Theodore, and Nestorius, though affirming his full humanity in a manner palatable to today's taste, do so at the expense of separating his divinity from his humanity: Christ no longer shows us what it is to be divine in the way that he is human, and so we remain, once again, separated from God.


Is this at all meaningful to us, divinity in humanity, to be God through how he died and lived as a human being? If so, in what way? The "Divine as human" is what strikes me here.