The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware

Author:Kallistos Ware
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Here, as elsewhere, Orthodoxy is maximalist. We repeat with St Paul, “If Christ is not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). How shall we continue to be Christians, if we believe Christianity to be founded on a delusion? Just as it is not adequate to treat Christ merely as a prophet or a teacher of righteousness, and not as God incarnate, so it is not sufficient to explain away the Resurrection by saying that Christ's “spirit” somehow lived on among his disciples. One who is not “true God from true God”, who has not conquered death by dying and rising from the dead, cannot be our salvation and our hope. We Orthodox believe that there was a genuine resurrection from the dead, in the sense that Christ's human body was reunited to his human soul, and that the tomb was found to be empty. For us Orthodox, when we engage in “ecumenical” dialogues, one of the most significant divisions among contemporary Christians is between those who believe in the Resurrection and those who do not.

“You are witnesses of these things” (Luke 24:48). The risen Christ sends us out into the world to share with others the “great joy” of his Resurrection. Fr Alexander Schmemann writes:

From its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy, of the only possible joy on earth…Without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is incomprehensible. It is only as joy that the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost the joy, when it ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christianity had no joy…“For behold, I bring you tidings of great joy”—thus begins the Gospel, and its end is: “And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy…” (Luke 2:10, 24:52). And we must recover the meaning of this great joy.15

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