Towards an Orthodox Anthropology

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

Orthodoxy first addressed the issues of the nature of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Subject of the Divine Project of Salvation. These parts still stand, and are unchanging and foundational contributions to experience of Christian Truth. However, we see one need facing the Church today, which was a matter ignored because of the previous and gloriously obedient and triumphant state of the Church of the Fathers and Martyrs, who lived in self-denial and repentance, rather than in a state of Christianized secularism in which their religion was relegated to the status of a hobby: that of a theology of the human person. The controversies that surround the Christian world today all have to do with how the human person is to be perceived, and thus, we are divided on many issues where we should have Christian unity. 

The way of life, the limits of occupation and trade, the role of the family, the reality of heart-perception, and issues of human hypostasis that touch upon the Imago and the uses of sexuality. Now it is time to search the Scriptures, the Fathers, the Patriarchs of the Church, and the Hearts of the Faithful, and look forward to a new age of Christian Counsel in which the human dynamic is clarified and the traditional lifestyle of Orthodoxy is contextualized to offer light to the tortured and abused psyches of the world, where identity, family, work, and passions have been exploited until the complete collapse of the human person. 

The Enemy beat the Orthodox Church to the punch over the last two hundred years, as misunderstood and misapplied Christian principles defrauded the Western world and caused hatred, disunity, and doubt. Standing up to take the place of the culturally reactionary Christianity was an equally unequivocal and aggressive form of atheism that hijacked the human person and attempted to alleviate guilt and difficulties through the rejection of all of Man's conscience-oriented needs. The philosophies of Voltaire, of Kant, of the countless other romantics and moderns that populate our cultural air have plunged man into a state of confusion in which man may not trust himself of his smallest inclinations towards the eternal, the beautiful, or the truly good! 

It is time for the Christian worldview to offer an explanation of cosmology, the role humanity plays in the world, and the way in which economy, culture, art, and ritual are to be effected by the realization of Christ's work on the Cross. It is the way in which the Ancient Faith of the Christian Fathers will recontextualize, transform, and begin again the work of Christ's redemption of the physical world through the Church. 

Culture can and does save us, for without culture you have no human relationships or transfer of information - which results in the complete cutting off of the person of Christ, the message of the Gospel, or the confirmation of the Human person by the Holy Spirit. The message can only be heard from a person, and this means that, despite of our sin and shame, Christ uses people to accomplish His redemption. This process of feed-back, teaching, discipling, and affirmation in the lifestyle and doctrines of Christianity is the living function of the Church.