1- The wonder
What is the relationship between God and man? How and to what extent do they relate to each other? All philosophical and religious views have varied in talking about this. But the Christian answer to this topic is very unique. He is the person of Jesus Christ. God and man not only communicate, but are united!
The name of Christ also divided history into two parts. The person of Jesus Christ divided human thought about him into two thoughts. The incarnation of Christ became a stumbling rock upon which ideas and religions were broken, and as the Apostle Paul called it, “foolishness” for the Gentiles and a “stumbling block” for the Jews.
The scientific mentality, represented by Hellenism in the time of Christ, and by the applied sciences in our time, depends primarily on defining matters and defining them according to their essence and characteristics. Thus, for example, for a spike to be an ear, it must consist of a root, a stalk, and wheat grains. If, for example, an eye, a nose, and two feet enter it... it is no longer a spike, but rather something else. Thus, God, for religions and philosophies, must be absolutely unlimited, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-powerful. If something else enters God, such as the body, he cannot remain God. This applies to religions and philosophy. A God who eats, drinks, hungers, thirsts, and bears the infirmities of our weak human body, and what is worse than that is that he is slapped and spat in his face, cries and suffers, this is not a God. A situation like this is not possible. Religious and philosophical thought in general does not accept the idea of God-man. This depends on his intellectual method of analysis.
When Jesus Christ, God and man, came together, human thoughts collided with him. In the face of her intellectual dilemma, and according to her intellectual backgrounds, the solutions split into two directions. As long as the union of God and man is impossible, then Jesus the man is the truth, but some special qualities, energies, and blessings can be added to his attributes, and this trend crystallized in Nestorian thought. There is a second solution that Jesus is God, but since he is not united with the human body, he bears it in appearance and not in reality. This crystallized among advocates of one nature. Both sides start from the principle of denying the possibility of divine incarnation, that is, the union of man with God.
The Church has struggled for four centuries to establish the truth of the possibility of the connection and union of the divine with the human. It's not just a theory! But there is an anthropological truth that explains our entire view of man and his life.
With the divine incarnation, religious theories that consider that man’s connection with God takes place only within the framework of Sharia law have been invalidated. For them, God is very transcendent, and man in his skin is very small. The covenant exists between the two parties as a link. “You shall keep my commandments, and I will be your God, and you shall be my children.” With the divine incarnation, the philosophical ideas that place God in the realm of principle and link Him to man with moral teachings only have been nullified, for He is the example and example. The gap in philosophies and religions still exists and is large between the divine and the human.
However, in the New Testament, Jesus declared that “where he is, we will be,” and “the glory that is his will be given to us”! Nestorianism and Monophysiteism (advocates of one nature) are only two sides of the same coin. It is that God cannot be united with man. They represent the two basic intellectual currents about man, and these heresies are nothing but the result of the collision of these two intellectual currents over the person of Jesus and the reality of the incarnation, that is, over the rock of the Christian faith.
The first intellectual current - Nestorianism, sees it as alive in the current of logic, scientific accuracy, pure rationality, the literalism of laws and commandments, and appreciation of scientific data more than it deserves when it takes on an absolute dimension and is a research fact. And also in analyzing and dismantling metaphysics, the deification of human achievements and social systems, and the absolute dependence on economic provision, which constitutes the key and purpose of everything.
While the second intellectual current - the one nature - we see it living in the deification of ideas, for the idea is God and God is just an idea. And in contempt for what is natural, even in the human being himself, without this meaning not rushing towards it. The body here is humiliated and weak, so the “fall” in sex becomes an imposed reality, and the body with its weaknesses is a necessary evil. On the other hand, this movement is extremist in the face of the humiliation of what is natural, by deifying values, ties, and leadership, moving from both sides to the realm of unreality.
In both trends, human life remains subject to death, but they adhere to some religious moral solutions and aspire to a Superman with divine qualities.
Thus, it is as if this human body was destined to remain in its humiliation, so God cannot carry it, and whoever carries it cannot unite with God. This body has been united with death from the moment of its birth, so that death grows in it as it grows, until death eventually destroys it. All religious solutions, like the mono-nature and Nestorian heresies, remained to believe in moral salvation only and not in an ideological salvation that includes sanctifying the body and liberating it from its mortal nature.
However, the incarnation of the Divine Word, Jesus Christ, nullified these philosophies and heresies. He achieved for humanity what philosophies and religions could not have imagined. He granted our skin to wear immortality and granted our species to gain the life of God, by grace and not by nature. He explained that the source of sin is the will, not the body and skin. God loved His creation and created it good, and He carried it in its weakness to heal our spiritual weaknesses.
The relationship between God and man is that of the vine and the branches, the head and the body, as the Bible says. It is not a relationship between the Absolute and the Limited and the Judge with the Servant! The incarnation of the Lord Jesus proved that this is a possible reality, and even if this is not possible for minds and nature, it is possible because it is a divine gift and grace. The divine incarnation revealed that Christian perfection is not the completion of duties and keeping all the commandments! Rather, it is the completion of our stature to the full stature of Christ. Just as God was incarnated by truth, man is deified by grace, Amen.
2- Disclosure
“Christ destroys religions”
“He lowered the heavens and descended, with clouds under his feet” (Psalm 17:9)
There is no doubt that the idea of God in man seems to be “innate” and attached to his life, and there is no dispute about that. But the difference throughout the ages has been about how we know God, and how He appears to us. God is by nature invisible and outside this created world, so how can this world know Him? How do we discover it?
There are two ways in which we discover God. The first method is what we call “natural discovery,” by which we mean the natural human conclusion about the existence of God and His attributes. This is because man, without effort and with mere logic, infers God from his works and the nature created around man and placed at his service. Therefore denying the existence of God is an illogical conclusion! Within the framework of this revelation, philosophies and religions interpreted their teachings about God.
But there is a method of “supernatural revelation,” which means God’s intervention in history. Here we know Him as He comes and not as one of His creatures. The Bible relied on this method of revelation, meaning the appearance of God more than human exploration. This supernatural revelation took place in the Bible in stages, beginning with the prophecies and prophets of the Old Testament. If prophecy often constitutes news that goes beyond and contradicts the logical human knowledge of its time. Knowledge comes from divine revelation, that is, God's self-manifestation, culminating in the incarnation of the Word, the Lord Jesus.
Our Orthodox Church relies in its speech about God on a realistic and historical method. The Lord Jesus divided history into two parts: what came before and what came after. The eras of the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe in the eighteenth century tried - in vain - to challenge this supernatural revelation and to transform Christianity into a mere religious system like any other, removing it from its historical context as an event. While for our Orthodox Church, faith remains based on events and not on research. We have seen “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have seen and our hands have handled... For the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and bear witness and declare it to you” (1 John 1:1-2). When religion is limited to knowing God on the basis of natural revelation, then it is reduced to a religious system created by humans. But when Christianity bases its faith on historical events, it becomes a realistic science. Our God is someone who entered history for us and shares our history with us.
Some Christian intellectual trends in the Protestant and Catholic world were influenced by the eras of Western scholasticism and enlightenment. Therefore, Protestants and liberals in particular tended to return to natural revelation, and to rely on the role of human logic in discovering God through His works. Thus, we understand how they use the art of icons, but replace the divine person with creation. They use art but to express the natural revelation of God and not to express God directly as He came. There are many examples in worship and theology resulting from this.
As for the “existentialist Protestant” currents, they have benefited from divine-historical events in a way that benefits man’s inner life. Thus, I treated these events as if they were mythological - a useful myth that affects a person's spiritual life and gives him lessons and strength to continue his life in accordance with Christian teachings. Thus, you have accepted history as a myth and not as an event. Thus, it does not differ from religions and philosophies that are based on natural revelation, ignoring God’s intervention in human history, that is, His entry into our history.
We believe that God is a person. Therefore, no one can know Him if He does not know Himself. Add to that that God has a nature other than ours and a world other than ours. Therefore, if He does not come to us, we cannot draw the correct picture of Him. How can a person know something outside his world? Unless he knows God by the attributes of his world and its limitations, then he knows about him what he knows and does not know him as he is, and as he came and made known to us about his essence, which is beyond our knowledge.
Catholic Christian thought accepted the existence of two degrees of revelation, the natural and the supernatural, but it viewed them as two different degrees.
Our Orthodox Church sees the divine revelation as one, which began with the manifestation of God’s works in His creation (the natural revelation) and developed into the supernatural divine revelation. Thus, the natural ways of knowing God represent the foundation and first levels of God’s final revelation, with His eventual entry into the world.
The incarnation of Jesus overturned the methodologies of religions in knowing God. God is the one who appears to us, not the one who is discovered by us. The God of the Bible is a God we received, not a God we invented. This fact has very big consequences. The first is that we accept God as He is, not as we are. God is not an image of human ideals, ideals that develop, conflict, and change. The second important result is that knowledge of God is, in its nature, “reception,” linked to a very important matter, which is “acceptance.” Here human freedom plays the same importance as divine desire. Man's acceptance is equivalent to God's appearance. The love of God alone is not enough without positive human freedom. This bridge, which will connect between the created and the uncreated, between the perceived and the incomprehensible, and the confined and the unconfined, cannot be based on one rule, which is divine love for human beings. Rather, it needs the rule from the other side, which is the free human acceptance of this divine-human dialogue in which God initiates. And the person responds to him.
Thus, divine revelation begins as an appearance, that is, with God revealing Himself to man, and this revelation is the gift of divine love and not the fruit of human effort. But this revelation is only achieved when it becomes “communion,” that is, a shared life between God and man. Therefore, God revealed Himself to man not as knowledge but as communion. This is what acquaintance between people assumes. For man, as God (in his image), is a person. God offers Himself and man receives Him in a free relationship. That is why the psalmist chants, “Christ came from the heavens, so welcome him.” Therefore, divine love has no value when human freedom rejects it. Thus, we do not know God from religion, but from companionship and fellowship in his life. In religious methodologies, God almost becomes a mere “theory” that we can believe in without it changing our lives except the little that is required by adherence to its principles. But the “God of history” who lowered the heavens and descended is a God. When we know Him, we know ourselves in a new way. We know Him as our God and our souls know His companions. Amen.
3-Discovery and miracle
Jesus is the coach of human freedom
“He came down with fog under his feet. He rode on a cherub and flew, and flew on the wings of the winds” (Psalm 17:10).
God descended, lowered the heavens, and came to reveal Himself to us. But the psalm notes another fact, that after God descends to us (revelation), he flies and blows on the wings of the wind, that is, as if we receive him but do not catch him.
The natural and supernatural divine revelation has been very powerful, but not to the point where it eliminates human freedom. Divine revelation has never been, and will never be, an imposition and a forced applied truth on the human mind. God wanted his revelation to be great, because it is great and because at the same time it respects human freedom, and it remains a human discovery as well. God's revelation of Himself in history and its events comes with both gentleness and strength, which guarantee His clarity on the one hand and freedom to accept Him on the other hand.
Therefore, knowledge of God has two parts, the first, which is the greatest, “divine revelation,” and the second, which is as important as the first, i.e., human discovery. Therefore, knowing God is like a “dialogue” movement between God and man that takes place in the daily living existential relationship, in mind and in deed. God's gift to man and His revelation of Himself to man is not a compulsory religion, because the most precious thing God has in His creation of man is the latter's freedom. God does not want people to love Him by force, but by choice. God has equipped man with the mind and spirit in order to choose and not to be forced. There is no meaning to virtue when it is achieved by force. Free and rational beings who possess a special personality have free relationships. This freedom is the basis of that relationship, which is based on God’s relationship with man, this is how he wants him and this is how he treats him. Just as there is God who comes to us, there is the man who receives him, and just as God speaks, there is the man who wants and does not want to hear him. God descends to us when we erect that divine ladder toward heaven (Jacob's Ladder, Gen. 28:12).
In any case, when a person accepts the presence of God, the role of his freedom does not end there, because God comes with that tenderness but also on “the clouds,” as the psalm says. When we know Him, we realize how much we do not know Him. When he comes to our limitations, he explodes in us our abilities towards the absolute. He descends to us only to fly back.
He comes down and we see him, then he rides on the wind so we can run after him. Here begins the second and most important half of the human freedom choice. In the language of theology, this is called “the divine cloud.”
There are also two conditions for knowing God truly and deeply. The first is His revelation to us, because He is a person and we cannot know Him except to the extent that He reveals Himself to us. But this amount is determined by human freedom after it was revealed to us. He reveals to us what we ask for, and this is the law of freedom that He gave us and decorated us with.
God comes revealed and veiled. He descends, but under his feet are clouds. We receive signs from him of his presence, of the fullness of his grace, and “flashes” of his light, and Saint (the Areopagite) calls this cloud “the cloud of light.” It is light and cloud, revelation and concealment, discovery and miracle! This is in the nature of the relationship between the limited - man and the unlimited - God. Therefore, the choice of human freedom to accept the divine presence (revelation) is the beginning of the dialogue with God, not its end. It is more than a reception, it is a departure with God flying on the wings of the wind. It is a change of path and life direction. It is an interesting relationship filled with love that is full but not satiated. If God's beauty were not absolute and endless, God would - forget - be boring to the saints and interesting only to the initiated. But the opposite is true because God’s presence is a “cloud of light.” Whenever we enter into it, our light increases and our knowledge increases due to our lack of knowledge. That is why the Apostle Paul had to keep silent about the experiences that he saw when he was caught up to the third heaven, and he could only describe them as “what no eye has seen and no human ear has heard,” what God has prepared (of love) for His chosen ones (his lovers).
The more we love God, the longing does not diminish. The more we narrate human feelings, the more the longing decreases. On the contrary, in God, the more we love Him, the more the longing for Him is inflamed. Divine love is power, not pleasure. So the more we have of it, the more we are able to move forward with it. The relationship with God is entering into the light. The more we pass through it, the more His greatness appears as unfathomable clouds. The relationship with God is love. The more we tell it, the more it intensifies and does not stop. God is more loving than we know, and the more we know of His love, the more we realize that we are loved.
This is the second condition for human freedom, to strive with steps without laziness, and God is a generous and loving one. Isaac the Syrian cried out to him: “Calm the waves of your mercy for me.” And the sweetest words we sing to the Lord on the occasion of His birthday and His presence are those that the human soul cries out on the tongue of the Song of Songs: “Draw me.” We will run after you” (4:1). Amen
About the book “Tourists Between Earth and Sky”
Metropolitan Boulos Yazigi