John Henry Newman
The Christian religion has at its center the Resurrection of the Christ, without which, St. Paul says, the faith is in vain, and through which we, too, are to rise. To what sort of life? It is not that of an abstracted, disembodied spirit, but that of an entire person, body and soul, whole again, and transfigured. In this sermon from his days as Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, preaching to a society drawn to materialism on the one hand and 'angelism' on the other, John Henry Newman meditates on Christ's invocation of the burning bush as a sign that we – our bodies included – "die but to appearance", a sign of the incarnate eternity that awaits us on the far side of the grave.
Filed under Articles / Essays, Featured Essays · Tagged with Abraham, Body, body-soul integrity, catholicism, Christianity, Creed, Easter, Eucharist, historical criticism, immortality, Isaac, Jacob, John Henry Newman, Oxford, person, resurrection, Sacramental theology, sermons, soul, Victorian England
Bishoy Dawood
Many of us tend to look at prayer life as a mental thing: we praise, we thank, we confess to, and we confide in God – with words. And yet, while we think or pronounce our prayers, our bodies, too, are at work expressing and shaping our souls. In the Coptic tradition, liturgical postures and gestures involve the whole person, proclaiming and realizing the union of body and soul. It is in just this unity that God creates and saves the human person.
Filed under Featured Essays, Theology, Uncategorized · Tagged with Agpeya, asceticism, Body, body-soul unity, Coptic Christianity, corporeal prayer, dualism, Egypt, Freud, liturgy, Matta El-Meskeen, Matthew the Poor, mental prayer, monasticism, prostration, soul, tropology, typology
Vigen Guroian
“What the word says, the image shows silently; what we have heard, we have seen.” That is how the Seventh Great Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople in 787, summarized its defense of the use of icons in Christian worship. What the council confessed to have heard from scripture and to believe, is that God became man in Jesus Christ. According to the Gospel of John “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:13–14). Through an act of unfathomable kenosis, the infinite had become finite, the uncircumscribable was circumscribed in a human being, and the invisible was made visible.
