Deus Misereatur

Over the years I have discussed “Original Sin” with those from an Eastern Orthodox persuasion. Normally they cringe when they find out I’m a conscientious Calvinist. The first is because they misunderstand what we mean by “Total Depravity” (as do many Calvinists, I might add), and then because they assert that “guilt” is not “legal” passed on in Original Sin, just the curse of death. So here are a few quotations from 2 heroes of the earlier Church (Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus), and then a couple of quotations from John Calvin (all bold italics mine). “For seeing that man by the commission of the Divine blessing had been elevated to a lofty pre-eminence (for he was appointed king over the earth and all things on it; he was beautiful in his form, being created an image of the archetypal beauty; he was without passion in his nature, for he was an imitation of the unimpassioned; he was full of frankness, delighting in a face-to-face manifestation of the personal Deity...

St. Basil was a senior pastor in Christ’s Church during the 4th Century AD. During this stormy time he found himself beset by opponents on several fronts. During one of the conflicts he wrote a short little piece, “On the Holy Spirit”. In this work he strove to counter the pneumatomachoi (fighters against the Spirit). Their position was that the Son was less than the Father and came after Him in time, and that the Spirit was underneath the Father and the Son. While St. Basil was showing that the Father and the Son are “inseparably joined in name and nature” (34), he made a unexpected statement about tradition and Scripture. What is surprising is the position in which he puts tradition: “…therefore we offer the doxology to the Father with the Son. But we are not content simply because this is the tradition of the Fathers. What is important is that the Fathers followed the meaning of Scripture , beginning with the evidence which I have just extracted from the Scriptures and presented...

Origen addresses what has been a common problem through much of Christian history - how to read the Holy Scriptures. In Book 4 chapter 2 of De Principiis (On First Principles) he shows how Jews, heretical sects and the simple plainly miss the point. It is in this chapter that he lays out his own plan for interpreting Scripture, and the pattern he uses is his tripartite view of humanity: Flesh, Soul and Spirit. “One must therefore portray the meaning of the sacred writings in a threefold way upon one’s soul, so that the simple man may be edified by what we call the flesh of the scripture, this name being given to the obvious interpretation; while the man who has made progress may be edified by its soul, as it were; and the man who is perfect and like those mentioned by the apostle: ‘We speak wisdom among the perfect; yet a wisdom not of this world, nor of the rulers of this world, which are coming to nought; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden...