I have recently discovered the blogsite of Fr. Aiden Kimel and the philosophical musings therein.  It is a banquet of theological thought and philosophy, rich and savory, a meal to be taken in slow bites rather than consumed in a single, hurried sitting more akin to our habit of gulping down fast food. What is bad for the body is equally bad for the soul. Truth as food for the soul should not only be eaten slowly, but the flavors and nuances savored, much as Remy admonishes his brother in RATATOUILLE:  “No! No! No!  Don’t just hork it down!!” Not only do we, in like fashion to Remy’s brother, have a strange desire for that which is foul-smelling and rotten, such as Fundamentalism in all its bizarre flavors, but when offered something good, we “hork it down” rather than allowing delicate flavors to engage our souls and draw us closer to the Master Chef. Hurried prayers, hurried Masses, hurried everything. I admit, I am no good at Adoration. An hour with Jesus, an hour of having to put my thoughts on hold, to empty my soul, and seek the rich flavor of the very presence of God in the Eucharist, is as foreign to me as the rich taste of Brie to Remy’s brother. I am the poorer for such inability.

Much the same as Remy needs to teach his brother about food, Christian philosophers have much to teach us about God, or at least, the very limited amount we can know about the Unknowable. Reason, as the Church has taught us, is not the enemy of spirituality, yet so often, people treat it as such. Scripture is our foundation and starting point, yet many people treat it as if it is the all-in-all, the final locus of all we need to know. Such a sola view of Scripture most often gives us a truncated view of God, and more than that, a God I distinctly would not like to know, the angry God,  God the infernalist. To add to this problem is the seemingly constant ability of man to mess things up, including translations of the Sacred Scriptures from their original languages. What Greek Fathers of the Church wrote and understood in the third century is as far removed from today’s KJV translation as a finely aged piece of Camembert is from a week old, rotten hot dog. The 20th century handicap for Christianity is that we do not understand Greek – neither the language nor the subtle nuance and flavors that certain words convey within their broader meaning.

This, of course, leads to another problem. Fundamentalists of all stripes have a tendency to resort to their chosen translation of Scripture when defending their theological home turf. When raising questions, I have often been confronted with these words:   “Don’t you believe in God’s Word?” said in a tone of voice – with raised eyebrow – which implies that if I do not accept that which they are teaching, it is akin to spitting in God’s face. And herein for me lies the problem – I do believe in God’s Word, but question both the translations of it as well as the persons who have done the translating over the years.Were they untouched by political and personal machinations? I ask this for the following reason.

The Church  – both Orthodox East and Catholic West – has condemned apocatastasis. The very mention of such an idea in most circles brings a wide assortment of responses, none of which are salutary.The most common response – and the one I do struggle with – is this:

“The Church condemned this teaching at the Fifth Ecumenical Council.”

Scripture states that the Church is the “pillar and ground of truth.”  This limitation curtails the freedom of every man to insist that he alone has somehow found truth that 2000 years of previous believers missed, as well as giving us perfect theological freedom to ignore their rantings ala Ellen White, Charles Taze Russel, and John Calvin. No truth which Christians across the board accept as orthodox today has failed to pass the muster of conciliar inspection. We accept the Trinity because Nicaea put Arianism to rest. We understand Christ as true man and true God, two distinct and separate natures in one person, because II Constantinople rejected Nestorianism.

But II Constantinople, in the last canon of that council, also rejected apocatastasis. And while the Greek understanding of “aionios,”  the philosophical understandings of God’s redemptive love, and the writings of the Early Fathers present a most compelling case for apocatastasis, the bottom line is that the Church has spoken in an ecumenical council and said, “NO!”

Case closed.

It is one thing to understand the Greek. It is one thing to research, think, and come up with non-scriptural understanding, such as was done in the Iconoclast Controversy which was ended by the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787. The council fathers reasoned that since God had created an icon of Himself in Jesus the Christ, since the spiritual had used matter to represent – or make an eikon – of Himself, then the use of icons was permitted in Church. This represents the use of reason over any directly-worded scripture which would say, “Hey, it’s okay to use pictures in church, guys. Love, God.”

It is, however, quite another thing to resist the Church. Such action takes one out of the realm of good and obedient believer and into the realm of Protestant chaos where every man is his own council, pope, and theologian. 40,000+ denominations is the simple epistemological outcome of such thinking. If I decide that I don’t like what the Church has said on this issue, I open the door for all other believers in Christ to defy what they do not like of the Church’s teachings. This is no small matter, as attested to by the myriad of confusing and conflicting teachings in Christendom. I have said it before and say it again, a pagan looking at the multitudinous conflicting varieties of Christianity, each of which claims to have “THE truth” and claiming to get that truth from the Bible alone as its source, could only think that Christianity is a religion of the mentally disturbed.

So I am not going to hork down any of this theology. I will take measured bites and thoughtfully chew on the rich flavors from Fr. Aiden and David Bentley Hart. But all the while, there is that lingering in the back of my mind that the Church has spoken and this for me must mean that the case is settled. If not, then I leave the Church and go back to being a Protestant and establishing my own little assembly with my own theology.

Perhaps Fr. Aiden and Hart could do us all a favor and research the legitimacy of the council’s last canon. There was, after all, a so-called “Robber’s Council” which was dismissed. I would be more than delighted to find that the last canon against apocatastasis was a politically motivated addition unrelated to the main reason for the council’s existence –  condemning Nestorian heresies.  Or maybe I have simply misunderstood something.

But until I have that evidence, I must, for the safety of my own soul, remain faithful to the Church. She alone is the pillar and ground of truth, and no man.