So first of all with regard to Orthodoxy, Orthodoxia, Right Glorification, Right Worship, all of us understand that Right Glorification and Right Worship automatically means in the Orthodox setting Right Teaching, Right Doctrine. But what else can be said about Orthodoxy other than talking about the etymology of the word?
We're always inclined to etymology because we look up words in the dictionary but there's some things about Orthodoxy which one cannot find immediately in most dictionaries, perhaps in a select few, and it's exactly those things that I'd wanted to address this evening.
Orthodoxy is first and foremost a Person. A Divine, or The Divine Human Person of Jesus Christ.
This we say because Orthodoxy is not philosophy, or an ethic, but it is a Person. The Divine-Human Person of Jesus Christ, Incarnate, Crucified, Buried, Risen, according to the Scripture, St Paul tells us.
And first and foremost, this is Orthodoxy.
And right away we have another point of departure then we would have if we thought of Orthodoxy as being an ethic or a philosophy or even a religion.
Orthodoxy is also, and this is a complementary definition, life in the Holy Trinity in Whom we were baptized. We were baptized into the Father, into the Son, and into the Holy Spirit. And of course this understanding of Orthodoxy is intimately connected with the first because the Lord says "no one comes to the Father except through Me." And so understanding Orthodoxy as the Divine Human Person of Jesus Christ and understanding Orthodoxy as Life in the Holy Trinity, we come to see that these understandings are very very much not only complementary but necessarily linked.
Thirdly, Orthodoxy is Church, it is also Divine Human, and while cannot make Christ and the Church absolutely equivalent, neither can we ever separate them. When we read the early fathers we find some very strong titles for the Church. St Irenaeus of Lyons calls the Church "the Son of God." Which I'm sure would make some people do a double take if they heard it, it's not a term which we are used to hearing about the Church. Now he does that within a very very tight framework, but he does use that expression. The Church is Divine and Human, we refer to the Church as the Body of Christ, the Church has a Head Who is Divine Human, and the Church also has a Body and we are all members of that Body. So when we say that Orthodoxy is the Church we are including our life in the Church, and our life in the Church includes our liturgical life and it also includes our life...I hesitate to use the word "outside" the liturgy because it suggests something incorrect about our spiritual lives, in fact we might say that it is our life as it springs forth from the Liturgy, rather than saying outside the Liturgy. Our personal spiritual lives are spiritual lives in our families.
This is also part of the Church, and the Church in addition to being called the Body of Christ is also called by St Gregory Palamas, "the Communion of Deification," because we are all called to deification in the Church. So these are some preliminary remarks about Orthodoxy. When we are living Orthodoxy, this is what we're living.
Now, the world...Cosmos in Greek. Broadly speaking there are two uses of the word "world" in the New Testament. The first use refers to the earth, to creation, to the universe, it is a positive use of the word cosmos. The second use of the word world is different and it refers to humanity in a condition alienation from God, humanity separated from God. When we see St John's Gospel, for example in the twelfth chapter to the fourteenth chapter, "the ruler of this world coming" it is not a reference to something that brings Christians great joy. The ruler of this world in this context is the Devil, when the Lord says in the sixteenth chapter in St. John's Gospel, "I have overcome the world," He does not mean He has overcome the earth, the creation and universe in order to put it down. This would be, if we may use the word, a "different" or a "negative" use of the word "world."
Same word in Greek, so one understands the meaning from the context. And as we look at these meanings I want to turn our attention first to the first one, the positive use of the word world. We understand the world as the object of God's love, St. John writes "for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son," and in the next verse John 3:17 St John writes, "for God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but that through Him the world might be saved." So the word world is used several times there and clearly it is used in the sense of the world being an object of God's love, what God does not want to condemn, what God very much wants to save. And it's important to be able to distinguish between the two uses in the New Testament, to understand the full extent of the positive use of the word "world."
The world in the Orthodox understanding is a gift. In the last century a well know Orthodox theologian, Fr Dumitru Staniloae wrote very much on this theme that the world is a gift of God and that this gift invites a response from us. It doesn't demand a response but it invites a response from us. The world in this sense is given to us as a workshop, an "atelier," a workshop given to us, that we might use, and use wisely for the deification, for our own deification and of course the transformation of the world. Because you see the world in the Orthodox Christian understanding is not static, it's changing, it was created from nothing. Now here I need to make a comment because the pagan Greeks found this concept enormously difficult, for them the nothing was a something. But in the Christian understanding, the nothing is a true and a real nothing...nothing.
God made the world out of nothing, and it didn't proceed from His own nature, it was an act of His will, a free act of His will. So the world is created from nothing, the world that we see and it shows us God's love, it's a workshop given to us, we ought to therefore understand the world, there is a profound place in Orthodoxy for all of sciences, because you need to understand the world better to meaningfully participate in its transformation. But we understand the the world is not going to always be the way we see it now, that it was created from nothing and that it is a gift, but that it awaits fulfillment. So to use modern language the world is a work in progress and God has invited us to be part of that work. If the world were static we could not be part of that work because it would simply be given to us as it is.
Now why talk about all that? it sounds rather philosophical if I might say, but it's very important because it means that the world finds its greatest meaning in what is coming, in its fulfillment. Instead of looking at the world for how it is now we must understand the world the way it is in God's vision, as God has called it to being. And the Church reveals the world's truest vocation. So these are the preliminary remarks that I would like to make first about Orthodoxy and also about the world. And now we can approach the question "how do we live Orthodoxy in the World?"
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