Reminders

Psalm 23

Last night, we attended the first session of a church history class taught at a local Greek Orthodox Church. The class is, obviously, taught from an Eastern viewpoint rather than a Western one.

One of the things mentioned by the instructor, was that during the great theological debates over the nature of Christ, all lay people in the East were conversant in Trinitarian theology. Whether one was a priest or the trash collector, you were able to read and write and discuss the finer points of how did Christ’s humanity interact with his divinity?

This was not the case for the Christian West. After Rome fell to the barbarians in the mid 400s AD, Western Europe headed into the Dark Ages. Ultimately, only the clergy were able to read and write (along with court officials) and therefore theology became the “job” of the clergy and the lay people just showed up and participated in church worship.

This info was a reminder of the exact same data we had learned in our History of the Church in the East class while in Jerusalem. This idea of the lay people being well educated and trained has long inspired us and given us one of our goals: to provide accessible scholarly info to the lay people. We in the West are almost totally literate. Yet, we’ve still maintained the Western tradition of punting theological understanding to the “paid clergy.” This (in my opinion) puts many lay people at risk when engaging in debate with co-workers or neighbors in regards to our hope.

All this to say, I encourage you to study and grow. If ancient Believers could understand the minutiae of Trinitarian doctrine, surely so can we.

~ by eikonministries on October 28, 2009.