What We Forget at Funerals

"Uncle Harry has gone home to the Lord. He's gone on to his eternal destiny."

When we've lost a loved one, we use such phrases to comfort ourselves. While they are right in expressing the Christian hope that death does not have the final word, each of them is missing a key piece of our belief about what happens after we die.

"Uncle Harry has gone home to the Lord."

This says that Uncle Harry is now in heaven. I don't want to be a Negative or Nitpicky Nicky here, but we don't know the fate of any person when they die. None of us can know whether Uncle Harry died in a state of grace, in the friendship of God, with no unconfessed mortal sin; and even if he did, he may well have to spend some time in purgatory, excising those last bits of attachment to sin and making his soul all-holy before approaching the throne of God. There are two potential dangers, then, inherent in this phrase:

1. We fall into an implicit universalism where we assume that everyone will be saved, or at least a near-universalism where we assume everyone will be saved as long as they're basically good and didn't kill anybody or anything. 
2. By assuming they go to heaven right away, we neglect our absolutely essential duty to pray for the souls of the faithful departed, that we might aid their sanctification and help them get from the waiting room of purgatory into their heavenly home. (My girlfriend's family include's a prayer for the dead whenever they pray before meals, which I think is beautiful and practical--then you're sure to pray for the dead three times a day!)

"He's gone on to his eternal destiny."

From hearing this and other similar phrases, you get the sense that our "eternal destiny," our final end, is to spend eternity as a disembodied soul; your ol' body lies a-moldering in the grave, but your soul goes marching on, as though your body were a spacesuit being used temporarily to let your soul function in this alien environment, ultimately separate from you and disposable. But your body is not an accidental attachment to you; it is you. The human person is a composite of soul and body; each is incomplete without the other. You are an embodied soul, an ensouled body. As such, your eternal destiny must also include your body, and that is precisely what we believe as Christians. It's right there in the Creed: "I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." At the end of time, there will be a new heavens and a new earth, and we will have glorified bodies, like Jesus' resurrected body (this is why St. Paul calls Jesus "the firstfruits of the resurrection"), to live with God in this renewed state for all eternity; this is what the Anglican theologian N.T. Wright calls "life after life after death." Spirit and flesh no longer striving against each other, but joined in harmony and integrity, forever enjoying the beatific vision of God Himself, sharing in His very life. That is our eternal destiny.

Don't forget it!

The Origins of the Creed

In the first few centuries after the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the hot topics of conversation within the Church often centered on these questions: who is Jesus? What is Jesus? How do we make sense of all of the things he said and did? He healed the sick, fed multitudes from a few loaves and fish, even raised the dead, even rose from the dead himself. He was clearly a prophet, perhaps the greatest of prophets, the Messiah who was to come and restore Israel. But he also said certain things, like “I and my Father are one,” and “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Was… was he claiming to be equal to God somehow, or to be God Himself? How could Jesus be God if there is only one God? Could God become a human being and still be God? And even if Jesus were God, how would we reconcile that with him saying things like, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone,” or with the Gospels saying that Jesus grew in wisdom (does God need to learn anything)? Is Jesus a man? Is he God? Both? Neither? Something else? How do we express his identity?

Many people tried many solutions to the problem, but most of them tended to fall on one side or the other of the “God or man” equation. Docetists said that Jesus was really God, but only appeared to be human (“Docetist” from the Greek dokein meaning “to appear, to seem”); he didn’t really suffer or die, but sort of went through the motions, his human form being a mere suit of clothes or mirage. Adoptionists said that Jesus was really a human being, but was granted special favor by God and elevated or “adopted” at the moment of his baptism in the River Jordan (“This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”). Different Gnostic groups took some things they read in Neo-Platonic writers and constructed a whole mythos in which human souls were trapped in bodies by an evil creator god (the Demiurge), and Jesus was a spirit who had come to free them by giving them the knowledge that they were imprisoned (“Gnostic” from Greek gnosis meaning “knowledge”).

None of these seemed right. The general sense, gathered from Sacred Scripture, the apostolic tradition of the Church, and the teaching of the bishops around the world, was that Jesus had to be somehow both God and man. But how could that be? Many more made attempts. Some said that God was really one, but appeared in different forms at different times: sometimes as Father, sometimes as Son, sometimes as Spirit. Various ideas had this basic concept, and became known as monarchianism ( Greek mono + arche = “one beginning/origin/power”), or modalism (as in, “God appears in different modes: Father mode, Son mode, Spirit mode”), or patripassianism (Latin “pater” + “passio” = “The Father suffering,” meaning that though it appeared a different person, the Son, was suffering, the Son is just a mode of the Father, so it was really the Father who suffered on the cross). There were others, all falling to the same problem of not respecting both the unity of God and the distinction between the Father and the Son.

Many of these teachers began trying to make use of philosophical terms to help explain themselves, terms like substance, nature, and person. Several challenges stood in the way of this, though. One, the eastern part of the empire was largely Greek-speaking, while the west was Latin-speaking; add to this that the Greek theologians were using more terms than their Latin counterparts, and problems abound. The Latins heard ousia and physis and hypostasis and prosopon and tried to cram them into persona, natura, and substantia. It also didn’t help that the Greeks couldn’t decide what their terms meant—they had a bad habit of using these words without defining them. One person uses physis to mean “nature/essence/what-it-is,” while another uses it to mean “center of subjectivity/who-it-is.” Confusion abounded.

Then, a priest from Rome named Arius began teaching in the Egyptian city of Alexandria that the Son was distinct from the Father, but that he was a creature, the greatest of all creatures and nearly a god himself, but that “there was a time when the Son was not”: he was not eternal; he was not God. But, being that he died for our sins and was glorified by God, he was still worthy of our veneration.

This idea became very popular, especially among certain influential Roman nobles, and the Germanic barbarians living on the borders of the empire. Much of the Church in the Eastern part of the empire took to this new teaching; as St. Jerome wrote, “The world awoke and groaned to find itself Arian.” The western part of the empire still largely held to the traditional view laid out by Tertullian a century before: that Jesus was one person, but a person with two natures, one human and one divine.

Things got bad. Factions sprang up. People were persecuted. Bishops were forced into exile away from their cities.

In 325 AD, the emperor Constantine summoned all the bishops of the world to the resort town of Nicaea and asked them to settle the issue. More than 300 bishops from all over the empire attended, including two legates representing the Pope. This was the first ecumenical (“world-wide”) council in the Church’s history. The bishops discussed, and debated, even fought: St. Nicholas (yes, THAT St. Nicholas) was so furious with Arius that he punched him in the face! The bishops overwhelmingly agreed that Arius was dead wrong. They came up with a summary definition of the Church’s faith in Christ, adding to it at another council held 50 years later in Constantinople. Today we know this definition as the Nicene(-Constantinopolitan) Creed. You say it in Mass every Sunday.

(Tangential epilogue: People sometimes wonder, if the Creed is supposed to be the most basic and fundamental expression of the Christian faith, why is there no mention of the Eucharist, expressing the Church’s belief that it is truly the Body and Blood of Christ? The answer is simple: nobody disputed this point at the time. Creeds and council declarations address the points being controverted at the present time. The Eucharist as the Real Presence of Christ? That was obvious. The nature of Christ himself? That’s the hard stuff.)

Approaching the Trinity: Avoiding the Extremes

This Sunday is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. This great feast fittingly takes place very year after Pentecost, the holy day commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church--after the ascension of Christ, sent by the Father, comes the sending of the Spirit, and thus we see the Triune God, one God in three Persons, made manifest to us. It's an appropriate moment to stop and consider for a moment the most mysterious of the mysteries of our faith.

I titled this post "Approaching the Trinity" because it is downright foolishness to think one can comprehend the Trinity. To understand God in His inmost being, in which unity is three-ness and three-ness is oneness? You can't get your arms around it; the best you can do is walk up to it. It's very hard to say what the Trinity is, but a bit easier to say what it isn't. In this post I'll show you some of the boundaries of thought on the Trinity (this is why the other half of the post's title is "Avoiding the Extremes"): you can know then that, if you find yourself thinking in this way, you've gone too far and are no longer thinking of God as He is.

Now, if you're approaching a mystery in which you are trying to see in what way something can be both one and three, there are two obvious ways you can err: overemphasizing the oneness, or overemphasizing the three-ness. The first of these errors often becomes a sort of modalism, while the second tends to become tritheism.

Modalism is the idea that God really, truly in His being is one, but he only appears to us in different persons; that is, God appears to us in different modes. Under this framework, the Israelites would have encountered God in "Father mode," and then God would have incarnated in "Son mode," then been present to the Church in "Spirit mode." It seems nice and tidy, and avoids that messiness of trying to explain how one God can be three different Persons, and was the sort of thought that many an early heretic fell into (and not a few modern theologians, I'd wager). BUT this way of thinking doesn't fit our data from Scripture. When Christ speaks of the Father and the Spirit, he speaks as though they are different from him; yes, he says, "The Father and I are one," but he also says, "My Father and I will come and dwell with him," and "I will send you a Paraclete." Sometimes his language denotes unity, sometimes differentiation. What's the solution? Either there is, in some way, both unity and differentiation, or we would be forced to conclude that Christ is a liar, putting on some show to make us think there are three Persons involved when really there's just one. And since all parties would agree that Christ is God, and God does not lie, the last solution does not work. So modalism can't be true.

Tritheism is the idea that God really, truly is three different beings, is three gods, but that they are all one in willing the same thing, or something like that. I think that many people today tend to conceive of God in this way, that there are these three beings each of whom we call God, but we call them one God because they just seem to get along so well. Not only that, I think most people tend to become subordinationists, too, placing the Persons of the Trinity into different degrees or ranks, one being somehow higher than the other: when they think of God, they think of the Father as being really God, and then, oh yeah, the Son, he's pretty god-ish, too, and I guess the Spirit, we can't leave him out. Unfortunately, as with modalism, you could find scriptural support for such a position, as many early heretics did, simply by pointing to all those places where the Persons are spoken of as distinct: how can Christ pray to his Father if they are one being? Well, we could stray off into complex discussions of the Trinity sharing one act of existence, or the thornier questions of what exactly we mean by "God exists" if God isn't a thing among other things in the universe, but rather the ground and source of all that exists, and other such deep metaphysical topics that I'm not sure I understand myself, so instead I'll go with something a bit simpler. Anything that is to be called "God" must be infinite. There cannot be more than one infinite, because in order to be two, there would have to be something that was not the other thing, and thus neither one would really be infinite. So, if God is infinite, God must be one; hence, we cannot understand the Trinity to be three gods.

I would hope that this could be of help in your spiritual life. If you're thinking of the Triune God either as an actor with three masks, or three guys who are just super-chummy, then you're not really thinking of God at all. To help hammer these points home, take a look at the creed attributed to St. Athanasius of Alexandria, one of the great Fathers of the Church, who defended the divinity of Christ and the integrity of the Trinity against heretics of his day. Let this be a small start in coming to know God better as He is.