OK - please understand that I'm here at IBTS to do theology. So if you dont 'do' theology, skip this. This blog today is for folk who like doing theology - and I want to share it, because it strikes me as so important a matter. When I am here at IBTS and mix with folk from different cultures, some of whom have a deep, encultured awareness and understanding of Orthodoxy, it really hits me how often all of us can misrepresent the ideas and grasp of reality owned by others. Our hermeneutical paradigms are often so uncritically subjective.
For example, most Westerners confuse the Catholic via negativa, with its spiritual value in a Catholic or even Protestant context, with apophaticism as embraced in an Orthodox context: where it is used to counter any sterility arising out of the kataphatic statements made in the great Creeds, when these are treated in a strict propositional way. Apophaticism should remind us that, all things said, there is mystery in the face of God's greatness. At a popular level, Western Christians can try to represent that formulae and confessional statements can say it 'all', and end up with such sterile representations of truth. Apophaticism should help us guard against that mistake.
And the other thing is about theosis. The suggestion that the Orthodox thereby are contending that we thereby 'become like God' is absurd. Theosis is really all about the process of development and maturing that God calls us into. To return to becoming what we were created and are now redeemed to be.
Well, that is what I've been thinking and talking about over the last 12 hours at IBTS. Home on Sunday!
