No Other Foundation

I would like to invite you to come with me on a journey of imagination that may help us to understand what it was like to live in “Bible times”. To make this journey you will need to leave behind absolutely everything you know about geography and science.

I have just finished watching a three-part documentary entitled “A band called LoveSong”, produced by the group itself and focusing upon their music and their part in the Jesus People movement in the 1970s. Pathologically nostalgic old man that I am, I enjoyed the trip down memory lane. The men in the band are now of course much older but they are still singing the old songs.

For some people, the significance of the saints is that of mediators, those who stand between us and God and through their prayers reconcile us to Him and sanctify us. In this way of thinking, Christians are primarily sinners who need to be saved and sanctified, who need a connection with the holy so that they can go from being guilty and profane to being forgiven and holy. The saints, in this setting, provide just this connection. (We note in passing that this mindset tends to forget such texts as 1 Timothy 2:5 and to confuse a mediator with an intercessor. Any Christian, including a saint, can intercede for someone else; Christ alone reconciles us to God.)

During the tumultuous fourth century when it seemed everyone in the Church was fighting everyone else and Arians and Orthodox (to use modern terms) were going at it hammer and tong, one of the weapons used in those debates was the Bible. All the arguing parties called themselves “orthodox” and “catholics”; all of them said they believed in the Holy Trinity (i.e. all could read Matthew 28:19) and all said they believed in “Christ our God” (since the term had been around since St. Ignatius of Antioch used it in his letters at the beginning of the second century). The question was: what did it mean to describe Christ as “God”? Was He truly divine or just sort of divine by participation? What precisely was the nature of His divinity? All the parties doing the arguing said that the Bible supported their views and not the views of their adversaries.

Odds are that if you began to talk about “kenosis” in a room full of strangers they would assume you were talking about a change in your metabolism. Nope: that’s “ketosis”, not “kenosis”. The term “kenosis” is a theological term used to describe the divine self-emptying that occurred at the Incarnation of the eternal Logos/ Word in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.