Uncut Mountain Press

From "A Defense of the Christian Faith," the first of 3 volumes "AGAINST THE ENLIGHTENMENT" by St. Athanasius of Paros (†1813). PREORDER now at a discounted price! ⬇️⬇️⬇️

I have been finally getting around to reading Saint Hilarion Troitsky's book On the Dogma of the Church and I'm only on page 53 and have been deep in such a well of wisdom and insightful teachings. I am completely absorbed and in awe of this book !. This in particular was interesting to me so far especially in American society so dominated by Protestant "Church" life that feels, from experience, so bare bones perhaps even dry. St. Hilarion begins by showing that the early Church understood herself to be every bit as definite and actual an entity as the Hebrew nation of the Old Testament had been. The New Testament writers, being Jews themselves, used the same terms such as chosen generation, royal priesthood, peculiar people, God's own portion because the Church is not a new invention. She is a continuation of God's covenant community under a new law. The Church is, as Troitsky puts it, the sole cord-measured portion of God not merely in a dogmatic sense, but in an actual one. From there he moves to St. Paul, who most frequently calls the Church the Body (σώμα). And here is where it gets devastating for the Protestant conception: a body is not a random mechanical collection of members, each isolated in its own life. It is explicitly a single organism with a single, indivisible life. Two separately growing trees are not connected in any way only the branches of a single tree are organically connected to each other. There is one fold and one Shepherd. Then St. Hilarion makes the pneumatological argument: the Church is one because the Holy Spirit is one. The unity of the Church is not caused by human agreement or doctrinal consensus it is caused by the Spirit Himself. The shared faith of the Church is real, objective and non-negotiable, but it is the fruit of the Spirit's indwelling. As Vladimir Lossky teaches, theology and mysticism cannot be separated both flow from the same Spirit working in the same Body. And this is where the Protestant error becomes truly catastrophic. If the Church is one tree animated by one Spirit who leads into all truth (Jn 16:13) and preserves her as one just as God is one (Jn 17:21), then how can that same Spirit produce contradictory fruits on the same tree? One Spirit cannot teach two contradictory doctrines, contradictory gospels, forty thousand contradictory denominations. A tree bearing contradictory fruit is not a tree with many branches it is many trees pretending to share one root. They look identical (trees) yet DIFFERENT. The Spirit who makes the Church one cannot be the author of division. St. Hilarion doesn't stop there! Through Chrysostom, Theophan, and Theophylact, he teaches that the Church is the fullness of Christ. Not just where Christ lives and gathers but how Christ is made complete and manifests in the world. Chrysostom says Christ the Head has need of each single member and not only of all in common: the hand, the foot, every part. The whole body is not filled up until all are knit together. Bishop Theophan says the Church is the fulfillment of Christ the way a tree is the fulfillment of a seed what the seed contained in reduced form, the tree manifests fully matured. And that hit me personally because If the Church is Christ's fullness and the Head is not complete until every member is active, then there is no such thing as a passive Christian. A passive member of the Body is a contradiction — like a hand that refuses to move And the slothful servant in Matthew 25 wasn't condemned for heresy. He wasn't condemned for believing the wrong thing. He was condemned for doing nothing with what he was given. Passivity was the condemnation. If the Church is Christ's fullness manifest in the world, the KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH, then every baptized member is called to be an active icon of Christ ! hands that serve, feet that go, a mouth that confesses, ears that listen, eyes that see the suffering of the neighbor and does something about it. Passivity is not a mirror of God’s love.