in Him all things consist

in Him all things consist

Beginning in Lent and ever since I have been making Orthodox lectures and podcasts a part of my lengthy commute. What a blessing and encouragement they have been to me - and curiously enough I find they are having an effect on me in ways that watching movies such as "The Transformers" were not.

Presently I am listening to a fascinating lecture series by Fr. John Oliver called "The Astonishing Christ" and I really must commend it to you. I have just this morning finished the second session and truly it was inspiring. In my experience of Christianity in the past, a dichotomy was often created between theology and worship such that you had those who were "dry" in their theological pondering and those who were "sopping wet" in their emotional noisy worship. Sometimes we'd express this dichotomy in our own individual lives as well: theology was like mathematical formulas that we learned and applied toward complex word problems assigned to us - but rarely to REAL life. Worship would be a separate realm where we strove to meet a Person, not an equation. How flawed this dichotomous approach is!

Theology ought to be of such a nature that it does more than just give us head knowledge about a topic, but that such knowledge further and inherently propels us to action and change. WHO Christ is, says much about us, the Church, Creation, and EVERYTHING and it has significance upon everyday life. Even the most seemingly insignificant of things become impregnated with profound meaning in the context of a proper Christology.

Orthodox worship and life rightly incorporates theology seamlessly because theology is far more than "dead" equations. Theology, as is EVERYTHING, is all wrapped into the Person of Christ as Fr. Oliver so well notes in this series (as I've listened thus far.) There are so many gems particularly to be found in Part 2!

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3