In one of the earliest postings on this blog, the difficulty of defining the exact limits of the Old Testament within the many language traditions of the Orthodox Church was described. Though there is clear agreement on a certain set of books and their authority across all of Orthodox tradition, the exact list of books found in a published Orthodox Bible will largely be a function of the language tradition from which that Bible comes. Many of the books of the Old Testament which all of the local churches agree are authoritative are not read from publicly in our present liturgical life, which further complicates the issue of the canonicity of certain of those books. One such text is 4…
Recent posts have discussed the divine council of angelic beings which surround the throne of God, the way in which certain individuals in the Old Testament were exalted to join that council, and the way the saints in Christ become members of the divine council, sharing by grace in Christ’s rule over his whole creation. Within these themes, and the mediatory role of the saints and their patronage, the Theotokos, Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, has a special role, as has been recognized within the Christian faith from the very beginning. The veneration of the Theotokos in the West developed in ways which ultimately produced Marian dogmas which the Orthodox Church does not recognize. In response to these developments,…
The word which we commonly read in English translation as ‘saint’ or ‘saints’, derived from the Latin ‘sanctus’, translates the Greek word ‘agios’ (plural ‘agiois’) which is seen constantly in the inscriptions of iconography. In the New Testament, this word is used to describe both the worshipping community of the church in its sojourn on earth and the ‘dead in Christ’ (cf. Acts 9:13, 32, 41, Rom 1:7, 12:13, 1 Cor 14:33, 2 Cor 9:12, Eph 2:19). This Greek term is actually the substantive form of the adjective ‘holy’, and could simply be translated ‘holy one’ or ‘holy ones’. The reason it has traditionally been translated as ‘saints’ is to indicate that by the time of the New Testament, the…
In last week’s post, God’s divine council, the angelic beings surrounding his throne with whom He shares graciously his governance of the heavens and the earth, was introduced. There are several ways in which human persons in the Old Testament encounter and interact with the divine council. These encounters and modes of interaction lay the groundwork for a transformed relationship in the New Covenant, which will be the subject of next week’s post. Simply put, every encounter with God the Father in the Old Testament is mediated either through God the Son, as was discussed in a previous series on this blog, or by angelic beings, as will be discussed here. Though these encounters are far from common, the most…
