The Bosom of Abraham

The Orthodox Church has appointed readings this morning that include St. Paul insisting on his Jewishness. His a member of a sect, the Pharisees, they are devoted to tradition they call Judaism (named for the tribe and homeland) which comes down to us through the NCO-Babylonian Empire following the Exile. It is fascinating, therefore, that he should (in our Epistle lesson) set Judaism on the one side against, after a retreat of three years including meditation in Arabia, the Hebrews on the other. He goes to seek St. Peter and St. James the brother of the Lord. For, you see, Peter and James are not Jews. They are Hebrews. Peter is from Capernaum in Galilee. James if from Nazareth. They are from north of Samaria, where those other people live (from the Jewish perspective). This is part of St. Paul's transformation. He was zealous for his fathers, but he now realizes he was mistaken.

And in the same readings we have the "Bosom of Abraham." What do these things have in common? It turns out that our basis for saying anything is very slender.

The "Bosom of Abraham" way well be a phrase that launched a thousand theological and historical ships. For centuries, these three words, spoken only once by the Lord Jesus and never heard before, have been the occasion for countless sermons, papers, articles, and books. Cartographers of the afterlife have bounded off the Bosom of Abraham on their maps of Gehenna, Sheol, and especially Paradise. But I emphasize, it was articulated once. It does not appear anywhere else in history before Jesus taught it. What is our basis for discussing this? There is no tradition before Jesus called the "Bosom of Abraham."

Nonetheless, we are handed maps of Gehenna, Sheol, and Paradise. The main question, of course, is, "How do we get there?" In the West, the answer is, "by offering a sacrifice of the Body of Jesus," this for that, quid pro quo. By contrast, in the Orthodox Church, the answer is "through a tranformation of mind and heart after the Image of Jesus, the God-man." After all, isn't this the main thrust of St. Paul's message after his conversion: transformation of mind and heart. And this is what our Gospel lesson this morning is about. But first, let us explore how we arrived to these stark differences between Western and Eastern Christianity.

We are all too ready to accept phrases like "Jewish beliefs concerning the afterlife" as if these were stable features of a coherent religious culture. We think, if only we could travel back to first-century Palestine, then we understand what they think. But that is not so. For even a casual reading of the Book of Acts, to take one example, reveals that there is no such thing as "Jewish belief" across the board, but rather sectarian differences:

We are not talking about small differences. In fact, these people share no common ground: resurrection or no resurrection. How could there be such wide divergence on so basic a question and still call both members of the same religion? And recall both these groups claim to be followers of Judaism.

And we should note that the Neo-Assyrian and Mesopotamian religions, which had formed the ancestors of the Sadducees, taught of no real afterlife, much less resurrection. Rather they conceived of a ghastly "Great Below" with faint ghosts flitting about.

Beyond the problem of sectarian differences, we face a greater challenge. All of these sects were annihilated following the cataclysm of 70 A.D. Almost nothing survived, making generalities today nearly impossible. Without the Bible, for example, our knowledge of the ancient Israelites and of the Lord Jesus would be near-to-nothing. The flip-side of this insight is that we have few external references to position the books of the Bible in a cultural and historical, much less spiritual, context.

Why should there be so many sects in the first place? What happened exactly?

For nine centuries, the Roman Church was formed in a theology known as Scholasticism — a finely teased system of logic, bifurcation, and hierarchy, was perfectly suited to the needs of an institution founded in the image of the Roman Empire — with armies of missionaries following Roman Legions into conquered territories, as happened in Britain, and vast administrative bureaucracies seated in Roman basilicas, hitherto the seat of judicial offices.

I can tell you as a priest serving Roman Catholic dioceses, that the Code of Canon Law is the main thing in the conduct of Roman Catholic life, not the Scriptures. That is what the Roman Catholic Church is all about.

As I say, Scholasticism was perfectly suited to the needs of administering an institution as vast as the Western Roman Empire. But it had little to do with the mysteries of Christianity.

Christian Evangelicals trace their theological roots back to the sixteenth century and no further. We call this Protestant thought. It gave a rising middle class in the sixteenth century exactly what it wanted. A powerful merchant class, supplanting an aristocracy always in need of money, yearned for a theology that would empower the individual. Imagine the scenario: "I am a wealthy man! I own ships! I own stores in towns and cities all over Germany! I don't want some little priest with his Italian-Latin prayers telling me what to do! I want a religion in my own language! I want to be own theologian-in-chief and a theology that recognizes my power!"

Dismissing the mysteries, and therefore the Church, these new theologies would fasten upon a material expression of the faith, following the empiricist bent of the age. That is, the Bible (and no longer the sacraments) would become the new religion with each Bible reader becoming his own theologian (however ill equipped). But this Scripture-only focus poses an insuperable problem. For there was no Bible until 367 A.D., when the Canon of Scripture was settled (39th Festive Letter of St. Athanasius). By contrast, however, the Book of Acts plainly depicts the Church in the fullness of her power and grace carrying out her career of Divine life, miracles, and life-altering sacraments. The Church was fulfilling her vocation as the Kingdom of Heaven for more than three centuries before Christians had a Bible and a settled understanding of Jesus the Only-begotten Son of God and of the Holy Spirit. The Church is theologically, spiritually, and historically prior to the Bible, not the other way around. The Church does not arise from the Bible. The Bible arises from, and is encompassed by, the Church.

Which Christian can say he is free from sectarian beliefs? The West has been formed for a thousand years in Roman Catholic theology with its Treasury of Merits and Sacrifice of the Mass — quid-pro-quo religion in harmony with the military and engineering sensibilities of Rome and to the Latin language, which lacks Greek's Middle Voice for expressing mystery. "I'll give you this; you give me that!" This is the military or engineering mindset.

Moreover, our own culture is soaked through with Evangelical belief. If we should turn on the radio in our produce delivery van, and we would hear "J. Vernon McGee." We would not hear about the Early Church. We would not hear about the Ancient Fathers. We would not hear about the Mysteries. Our culture is permeated in Evangelicalism and especially with the Protestant cult of Jesus' death — that Jesus had to die so that our unpayable debt of sin to an angry Father God could be cleared. These ideas, put forward by a German Roman Catholic Augustinian monk in the sixteenth century proceed directly from the writings of an Italian Benedictine monk in the eleventh century. In turn, this premise of animal sacrifice appeasing the feared wrath of an angry god traces back to Jewish practices that were forced upon the conquered Hebrews by the Mesopotamians in the sixth century B.C.

But Christianity at its root is not about Jesus' death, much less about His being sacrificed on a high altar, but rather about His life and His ministry of transformation. Sacrifice after the pattern of Jesus is to "make sacred" (the literal meaning of the word sacrifice) — diminishing the animal self to liberate the soul. Transformation of the self stands in stark contrast to quid-pro-quo animal sacrifice. In the latter, nothing is required in the way transformation of mind to Christ (Rom 2:12).

Christianity in its purity, many centuries before the hegemony of the Roman Church, taught that humanity is redeemed whether Jesus goes to the Cross or not. And Christian life was understood to be a constant transformation of mind and heart. This is our religion.

As a Sister emphasized to me a few days ago, we offer prayers of thanksgiving morning, noon, and night that Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral), Primate and First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, has granted us the blessed life we live here on the edge of earth (an island most distant from any major land mass), at the end of the day (last population center before the International Dateline), and living by the Holy Calendar of our Lord Jesus, the Apostles, and the Fathers (presently thirteen days distant from the world). Freed from the pollution of television, newspapers, and radio, we pray, study, meditate, and work Hermitage Community Farm in a pristine atmosphere.

As a former university professor, my role is to filter out Evangelical and Roman Catholic theologies. As an Anglo-Catholic I became grounded in the Greek Fathers. As a licensed Roman Catholic professor of theology, I followed two great theologians who attempted to guide the Roman Church back to her theological roots in Eastern Orthodoxy: Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and Henri Cardinal de Lubac. Today, I anchor myself in the teachings of wise and holy Orthodox teachers including Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) and Metropolitan Jonah (Paffhausen), who also is my Spiritual Father.

The foundation of our faith life is pure Christianity. Like St. Paul we realize that our zealous commitments to our fathers was mistaken. And like St. Paul who entered a three-year hermitage in Arabia and then in Syria, we have gone to Peter and James, the Hebrews. We understand that