Deus Misereatur

The Victory of the Cross: Salvation in Eastern Orthodoxy by James R. Payton Jr. My rating: 4 of 5 stars We've been friends for years, one a Presbyterian minister, and the other a one-time Lutheran parishioner now Orthodox priest. It has been a warm relationship filled with frankness and humor from day one. And though we are in the same spiritual solar system, we both know that we are, at the least, on different sides of the same globe; and at the most, on different planets altogether. But we have grown in learning and understanding from within each other's frame of reference, which has built goodwill and affection. That is the value of a new and thoughtful 224-page softback, "The Victory of the Cross: Salvation in Eastern Orthodoxy" penned by James R. Payton Jr., author and emeritus professor of history at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. Payton, a Western Protestant, draws in years of research to help readers better apprehend Orthodoxy, e...

Perichoresis and Personhood: God, Christ, and Salvation in John of Damascus Charles C. Twombly Pickwick Publications (imprint of Wipf and Stock) www.wipfandstock.com ISBN: 9781620321805; $16; February 2015 4 or 5 Stars Most Christians in Church or parishioners in the pews have never heard of perichoresis . To them it will likely sound like a bad skin disease. But hopefully most pastors, theologians and Church history buffs are at least mildly familiar with the concept, recognizing that it is an extremely important notion with regard to the inner life of the Trinity. Charles C. Twombly, a historical theologian who has taught in several seminaries and has been published in Crux , Christianity Today and First Things , has pulled together a new addition to the Princeton Theological Monograph Series with his 132 page paperback, "Perichoresis and Personhood: God, Christ, and Salvation in John of Damascus." This densely argued work lays out John of Damascus'...

I have started re-reading St. Athanasius' little treatise, "The Incarnation of the Word of God'. Athanasius wrote this short piece possibly around 318 a.d., to show the positive aspects of the Christian Faith to a non-Christian audience, and to challenge their pesky resistance to Jesus Christ. At the end of section one, he sums up the reason for Jesus, the eternally divine Son of God, becoming human: He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men. We will begin, then, with the creation of the world and with God its Maker, for the first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning (p. 26). I fin...