If [you have quoted this passage] because you imagined that you could throw doubt on the [preceding] passage, in order that I might say the Scriptures contradicted each other, you have erred. But I shall not venture to suppose or to say such a thing; and if a Scripture which appears to be of such a kind be brought forward, and if there be a pretext that it is contrary, since I am entirely convinced that no Scripture contradicts another, I shall admit rather that I do not understand what is recorded, and shall strive to persuade those who imagine that the Scriptures are contradictory, to be rather of the same opinion as myself.

— St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 65 (in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1).

Subject for further reflection: Christ’s encounter with His two disciples on the road to Emmaus gives the paradigm for our worship. First, as they walk, Christ expounds Moses and the Prophets, “opening their minds” to understand how the Scriptures show it necessary “that the Christ should first suffer and then enter into glory.” Then, as they sit down to supper (“Stay with us!”), the Lord “opens their eyes” in blessing and breaking the bread, and they learn Who it was that unfolded the Scriptures to them: “Did not our hearts burn within us…?” The order is always thus: Hearing ushers us on to seeing; the Word guides us to the Table; the Scripture prepares us for Eucharist.

Questions the “historical method” might ask about the “laws of leprosy” in Leviticus 13–14: What was this disease, actually? The same as what we know as “leprosy” today or different? Multiple diseases? Surely the same pathogen does not affect humans and garments and structures — are these different sorts of molds? What is the cultural logic of hygiene that generates these regulations?

Questions a literary-theological approach might ask: Why is the leper who is “covered head to toe” in his disease pronounced clean? Why must the unclean leper dwell outside the camp? Why are the defilements of skin, fabric, and structure all referred to as “leprosy”? Why is the cleansing of leprosy accomplished through a sin offering and a burnt offering? What exactly is being “cleansed”? Why does it require a full-body shaving? What are the analogies between humans and houses? The significance of clean garments? How can one make atonement for a house?

We should probably be skeptical of efforts to formulate the correct theological method in the abstract, prior to any effort to formulate and commend particular material theological proposals, as though a theological method could serve as an instructions booklet about how to assemble your very own Christian theological conceptual structure.

— David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, 12

I’m sure everyone else has already noticed this, but in Exodus 29:38ff the twice-daily (morning & evening) lamb offering in the Tabernacle is offered with bread and wine:

A few stray observations, with no particular ordering:

• The “bread” is composed of flour and oil. One might object that as described it is not bread yet but merely a sort of flour-oil paste. However, this is of course a burnt offering: the bread is baked, as it were, in the fire, as it is being offered.
• There is, of course, no leaven in this bread. The Passover (which of course involves the sacrifice of a lamb) is followed by the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the first day of which all leaven is cleaned out of every Israelite house. There is no permanent regulation of which I am aware that prescribes leaven the rest of the year. But the collocation of lamb & unleavened bread recalls this festal season. Dare we infer: the Tabernacle exists in a sort of permanent Passover state, or is indeed a kind of permanent Passover?
• The bread and wine are offered with the lamb. They are not substitutable with the lamb, but are its essential accompaniment in sacrifice.
• Similarly, the description of the daily offering as a “sweet savor” comes not in reference to the lamb, but to the lamb with the bread and wine.
• The covenant language of the LORD’s presence with Israel, “meeting” her and “speaking to” her, sanctifying the Tent of Meeting by His presence, dwelling among her and being their God, is not novel to this passage — but its reiteration in connection with the daily sacrifice is, shall we say, suggestive.
• The “grain and wine and oil” of, say, Joel 2, are all present here: the signs, by the fruit of the earth, that the nation is blessed and enjoying abundance.
• To get (potentially) fanciful: Flour symbolically combines various Scriptural images of judgment, death, and resurrection. A kernel of wheat falls to the ground and “dies” so that the plant may “bear much fruit” (John 12). The wheat must be threshed to separate the chaff (which is to be burned unto destruction) from the kernels. The kernels are then ground up to make flour; one thinks of St. Ignatius’ image of himself, preparing for martyrdom, as the “pure wheat of Christ.” Oil, then, is associated with the Spirit; while wine stands everywhere for blood and thus also for judgment.
• More on leaven: In 1 Corinthians 5, when St. Paul is instructing his wayward congregation to expel the man who has his father’s wife (a kind of symbolic, if not necessarily literal, incest), he appeals by analogy to… the sequence of Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread. “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed; therefore let us celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” In expelling notorious evildoers, the churches honor the once-for-all Passover of Christ by keeping a permanent Festival of Unleavened Bread.

A catena of quotations from Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century:

If we ask ourselves how it was that Schleiermacher could become so much our—and perhaps really still our—man of destiny, we are once again faced by the mystery of the great man, which possibly consists in the indissoluble unity of his timeless individual power on the one hand, and on the other of the temporal, historical conditions into which he was placed. … [It] is impossible to consider Schleiermacher thoroughly without being very strongly impressed. Indeed one is more strongly impressed every time one does consider him—by the wealth and magnitude of the tasks he set himself, by the moral and intellectual equipment with which he approached them, by the manly steadfastness with which he trod the path he had once embarked upon right to the end as he had entered upon it, unheedful of the favour or disfavour of each passing decade and by the artistry which he displayed, playfully, and endowing it by this very playfulness with the ultimate gravity of all true art—an artistry he showed in all he did, almost down to his last Sunday sermon. We have to do with a hero, the like of which is but seldom bestowed upon theology. Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendour this figure radiated and still does—I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it—may honourably pass on to other and possibly better ways, but let him never raise so much as a finger against Schleiermacher. Anyone who has never loved here, and is not in a position to love again and again, may not hate here either. [412–13]

Anyone who seeks to negotiate between faith and a cultural awareness which at first is assumed to be unbelieving, and then bring about a lasting covenant between them must, at all events while he is doing this, take up a position which is in principle beyond that of both parties, a superior position, from which he can understand both parties and be the just advocate of both. He must, even if he himself belongs to one side, at least carry a white flag in his hand when approaching the other for a parley; be cannot at that moment be engaged as a combatant. To put it unmetaphorically: as long as he is an apologist the theologian must renounce his theological function. In so far as the apologist approaches the educated among the despisers of religion from the standpoint of theology he must not desire to speak only from faith and with only the faith of his hearers in view. He must present himself to them in a part which is provided for in their categories, which really occurs or can occur there. … This white flag, which the theologian must carry as an apologist, means of course for the theologian himself that in so far as he is an apologist he must, as Schleiermacher once more expressly states, take his point of departure (standpoint) above Christianity (in the logical sense of the word) in the general concept of the community of pious people or believers. As an apologist he is not a Christian theologian but a moral philosopher and philosopher of religion. He suspends to that extent his attitude to Christianity, and his judgment of the truth or even absoluteness of the Christian revelation. Together with the other educated people he looks upon Christianity as being on the same level as the other ‘pious communities’, as being subject to the points of view from which ‘pious communities’ are to be regarded here. He therefore regards the Christian Church too as ‘a community which arises only as a result of free human actions, and can only continue to exist by the same means’. … As an apologist he must say the other things, he must regard the Church as a pious community which has arisen and lives from human freedom, and has to demonstrate its possibility and necessity as such a community. [428–29, 30]

He is as a modern man and therefore as a thinker and therefore as a moral philosopher and therefore as a philosopher of religion and therefore as a philosophical theologian and therefore as an apologist and therefore finally as a dogmatist determined on no account to interpret Christianity in such a way that his interpreted statements can come into conflict with the methods and principles of the philosophy and the historical and scientific research of his time. [431]

If we call to mind the entire situation of theology in the modern world then we shall find it understandable that it fastened upon the point which had come to the centre of the entire thought of modern man. This point was simply man himself. This shifting of interest did not necessarily have to mean man without God, man in his own world. It could also mean man in the presence of God, his action over against God’s action. A genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting-point. We may ask the question whether it was a good thing that Schleiermacher adapted himself to the trend of the time in this way and took up his position at the spot where he was invited to do so by the prevalence of the Copernican world-picture, by its execution during the Enlightenment, by Kant, by Goethe, by Romanticism, and by Hegel. There was in fact no need for the Copernican conception of the universe to acquire the significance of a command that theology should in future be anthropocentric theology. It might perhaps have been both more spirited and wiser to take up and carry through the Reformed theology of the Word more than ever at this time, in instructive opposition to the trend of the age. For indeed this Reformed theology had not been founded upon and conditioned by the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and, as a pure theology of the Word, it offered opportunity enough to do justice to the tendency of the age by an honest doctrine of the Holy Spirit and of faith. There was ambiguity in the fact that theology took the trend of the times as a command which must be followed as a matter of course, and in its inability to do justice to the tendency of the age other than by becoming anthropocentric in accordance with the changed picture of the universe. The suspicion arises whether this does not betray the fact that theology forgot its own theme over against all world-views. But this reversal of theology’s way of looking at things was not necessarily bound to mean that theology was now no longer theology, or had even become the enemy of true theology. Again, a genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting-point. Theology could remain true to its own theme while it went with the times and thus completed this reversal. What Schleiermacher constructed by means of his theology of awareness by planting himself in the centre which for the Reformers had been a subsidiary centre, could be the pure theology of the Holy Spirit; the teaching of man brought face to face with God by God, of man granted grace by grace. If it was this, then as a theology it was just as much justified as the theology which was orientated in the opposite direction, the theocentric, Reformed theology. The fact that Schleiermacher intended it as such (even if he did not perhaps execute it in this way) is revealed by the fact that he is very much aware of a second centre beside his original one, and seeks to grant it its full validity. [445–46]

There is no doubt that Schleiermacher sought to assert something like the absoluteness of Christianity, and continually asserted it. Strangely enough it was in the pulpit particularly that the problem again and again crossed his path: why Christ in particular? Why can we not manage without him? Why can we not manage with someone else? Perhaps with someone else who is yet to come? The answer consists in the constantly repeated protestation that everything we have of higher life we have from him. There can be no doubt about the personal sincerity of this assertion. But it is just this which is in question—whether this assertion can be considered as objectively valid, whether the strength of this assertion can be some other strength beside that of the asserting believer himself, or of the composite life of the community of the Christian Church, from out of whose heritage the preaching believer speaks. Schleiermacher does not seem to be able to say that there is an eternal significance of Christ, an absoluteness of Christianity. At the back of even his most forceful protestations, unrevoked, and irrevocable, unless he is to abandon his basic premise, there stands the fact he established in the Addresses that the basic outlook of every religion is in itself eternal, since it forms a supplementary part of the infinite whole of religion in general in which all things must be eternal. The sincerity and strength of the distinction which pious feeling is inclined and determined until futher notice to accord to Christ in relation to itself stands and falls with the sincerity and strength of pious feeling itself. The original fact of Christ and the fact of my Christianity are links in a chain, and the relationship of mutual determination which links in a chain necessarily have makes it plainly impossible to assume that the effect they have on one another cannot in principle be reversed. [456–57]

In turning away from Hegel the [nineteenth century] acknowledged that, having reached the summit of its desires and achievements, it was dissatisfied with itself, that this was after all not what it had intended. It set Hegel aside and tried again, but did not even reach such a peak a second time, and thus manifestly it was bound to be even less satisfied than it was before, although it pretended to be. Where does the fault lie? In Hegel? Those who study him will not receive this impression. If it is a question of doing what the entire nineteenth century evidently wanted to do, then Hegel apparently did it as well as it could possibly be done. Or is the reason that afterwards the age of the great men was past, that there was no genius present in the second half of the century to carry out the better things which the century it seems had in mind in turning away from Hegel? But it is always a bad sign when people can find nothing to say but that unfortunately the right people were lacking. This should be said either always or never. Every age, perhaps, has the great men it deserves, and does not have those it does not deserve. The question only remains, whether it was a hidden flaw in the will of the age itself, perfect as the expression was that it had found in Hegel, which was the reason why it could not find any satisfaction in Hegel and therefore not in itself, and yet could not find any way of improving upon and surpassing Hegel, and therefore itself. It might of course be possible that Hegelianism indeed represented in classic form the concern of the nineteenth century, but precisely as such came to reveal the limited nature of this concern, and the fact that it was impossible to proceed from it to the settlement of every other question of truth. And that for that reason it was, curiously, condemned.

— Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 374. The whole lecture is an absolute tour de force: elucidating both what, for both philosophers and theologians, makes Hegel such an immensely attractive option — and why Hegel, taken on his own terms (like nineteenth-century thought as a whole), ultimately represents a cul de sac for those disciplines.

• Till We Have Faces is set in a pagan, pre-Christian world: the world of a “barbarian” Balkan kingdom (“Glome”) well to the north of Greece, where pagan religion still holds sway but Greek philosophy, far to the south, has already come to a kind of initial maturity. (During Orual’s reign, Glome acquires a copy of a “long and difficult book” that begins with the line All men by nature desire knowledge; this is Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which is a clever tip of Lewis’s hand that the tale is set sometime in the two or three centuries before the birth of Christ.) The Greek slave and expatriate Lysias (“the Fox”) gives Orual a thorough schooling in the Greek philosophical religion, a narrative device by which Lewis can explore the encounter between the pagan and philosophical views of the gods (or the Divine Nature, as the Fox would prefer to say).
• Orual is drawn to, and sometimes even momentarily persuaded, by the simplistic, naturalistic clarity of the Fox’s philosophy: the gods of the heathens are no gods at all; the Divine Nature is not a thing with passions that must be appeased, but is pure goodness and light; Nature is a great interconnected web of causation, and there is neither “chance” nor the direct intervention of the gods in the natural order (despite the Fox’s periodic thanksgivings to “Zeus the Saviour”), so that things only happen which are “in accordance with Nature”; pagan religion is, more or less, a populist fig leaf for the temple’s political machinations vis-a-vis the palace. This philosophy is particularly useful to her when she becomes queen and shuts her Orual-self up in a small locked space within; it offers her tools for the task of good governance (at which, the concluding lines of the book attest, she succeeds spectacularly), and seems to provide rationalization for suppressing her pangs of conscience.
• Nevertheless, neither does Orual abandon the local pagan religion: it has its own political usefulness, of course, in binding together (the root meaning of “religion”) people and palace, and she must be seen participating in the Ungit-cult; more than that, it provides a sense of holiness as something visceral and awe-inspiring, which the philosophical religion never does, associated with blood and incense and darkness (“holy places are dark places”); the “sacred stories” are of course full of “contradictions” and implausibilities, but they give paradoxical voice to deep human instincts and resonances with the natural world — so the (bastardized) story of Psyche becomes a figure of the cycle of the seasons and the cult thereof; without the shedding of blood there is no expiation of sins. And, of course, Orual does — once, when it is too late — see the god of the mountain, and she never forgets the experience (though she does her level best, so she tells herself, to minimize its power over her) of that momentary encounter with a Being of another order.
• The early drama in which the Priest schemes to have Psyche sacrificed is a perfect example of this. The Priest recognizes, with awful intuition, the need for a “scapegoat” (in the Girardian sense) — one must die on behalf of the many for the whole people to be saved; the power of the paradox that, “in a mystery,” this scapegoat must be both the best that the land has to offer and the worst offender against the gods; the further paradox that — depending on the sex of the Blessed / Accursed — the god to whom the victim is offered may be either Ungit (the Awful Feminine) or Ungit’s son (the masculine god of the mountain), a thing of glorious majesty, and that either may simultaneously be the Shadowbrute, a thing of dark terror; the mystery that being the meal of the Brute and the wife of the God may not be all that different. The Fox has no time for any of this, and attempts to pick apart the seemingly incoherent strands of the mystery. But the Priest recognizes the deep coherence of the mysteries, the coincidentia oppositorum at the heart of reality, and so conquers the Fox: “Why not?”
• One distinctive difference between the pagan religion and the philosophical religion, therefore: the pagan religion inspires faith. Even a shrewd political operator like the Old Priest, who understands perfectly well what he is doing vis-a-vis the power of the palace, nevertheless has absolute confidence (pistis) that what he believes and teaches is true. The Fox, on the other hand, has dissolved his own faith in the gods through philosophical criticism, but as a result no longer has the certainty which he needs to counter the power of the Priest. So, when the old King goes to offer Psyche in sacrifice, he finds that he genuinely believes, if only for the time he is making the Offering. The old pagan Ungit-stone, a dark and shapeless thing, inspires more faith and evokes more holiness than the new Hellenistic Aphrodite-statue, which is recognizably human. (As the peasant woman says to Orual on the day of the Birth-feast: “‘That other, the Greek Ungit, she wouldn’t understand my speech. She’s only for nobles and learned men. There’s no comfort in her.’”) It is narratively ambiguous, I think, whether the Great Offering is in fact efficacious to rescue Glome from its troubles; the Fox of course dismisses it according to his exclusively materialist view of causation (“everything would have had to be different from the beginning”), but it is hard for Orual to avoid the impression that the gods have indeed looked with favor on the sacrifice and sent Glome rain, peace, and good fortune.
• The result of this exploration is a kind of negative-space outline for a genuinely Christological — which is to say, incarnational — view of Divinity. The Fox is right in his own way: there really is an absolute bifurcation, an “infinite qualitative distinction” between the immanent and the transcendent, and the gods are not at all like men. That is part of the power of Orual’s experience on the mountain after Psyche has uncovered her lamp. And yet — holiness is found in darkness and paradox and mystery before it is seen in clarity and light. The transcendent hides itself within the immanent, so that it may be sought by Faith, not merely apprehended by Reason. Psyche is not the slave of a mountain outlaw, but is — or was — the wife of the god. Neither paganism nor philosophy can be simply transmuted, for Lewis, into genuine Christianity; but neither can the genuine insights of either into the nature of things and human experience be dismissed as accidental — and if one believes in an absolutely transcendent Creator who has enfleshed Himself, immanentized Himself, one indeed cannot. Both the pagan religion of Glome and the Greek philosophical religion are, in their own ways and precisely in their interaction, praeparatio evangelica.

Piranesi:

• “I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of itself. It is not the means to an end.” (60–61)
• “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly. Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not. The only part of my existence in which I experience any sense of fragmentation is in that last strange conversation with the Other.” (71)

[Both] sides in the Reformation and post-Reformation controversies seemed to conceive of tradition as something comparable with Scripture, either complementing it or a rival to it. Both Scripture and tradition are objectified: they are that which we seek to understand, there is a distance between them and us who seek to understand them. There are a good many hidden assumptions behind all this: the idea, for instance, that what is revealed is a collection of truths, so that if tradition supplements Scripture, what we mean is that in addition to the apostolic witness that was written down in the Scriptures, there are other truths which have, as it were, been whispered down the ages, and not written down [n.b.: this suggests a parallel to the concept of the “Oral Torah” in rabbinic Judaism]. These truths are objective, independent truths, which we who seek them will, if we go about it the right way, come across and recognize. The problem of how we know at all, what it is that is taken for granted when we seek to understand God’s revelation, has not been broached with any very searching intensity.

— Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of Theology, ch. 4. One perhaps tangential question regarding this immensely perspicuous point, which perhaps Louth will go on to address: is this hypothesized “deposit of unwritten truth” not exactly the sort of thing that advocates of “Sacred Tradition” (whether Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox) often appeal to today in their (anti-Protestant) apologetics — a deposit, to be specific, left unwritten by the apostles but codified within just a few generations (unlike the rabbinic notion of Oral Torah, transmitted unwritten for over a thousand years!) in the writings of various Fathers? Sacred Tradition is presented as filling the temporal gap between what can be found in the New Testament writings and the full emergence/documentation of Christian culture and doctrine, in such a way that its acceptance is quite on par with the acceptance of the New Testament itself (e.g., the names of St. Peter’s successors as Bishop of Rome, the continuity of the papal office, and the essential nature of the doctrine of the papacy to salvation). Not to put too fine a point on it, but is this not how (say) St. Irenaeus speaks about the “rule of the truth” which he firmly accepts as apostolic in a sense precisely complementary to Scripture? I take Louth’s main point to be correct, both substantively and as a matter of the history he is discussing: but if so it has, shall we say, rather broad ramifications.

Addenda: Well, perhaps I should not be surprised to find that, at least in the period of the Fathers, Louth does go on to address my question.

Whereas tradition understood in a human sense is perhaps the continuity of man’s search for the truth, and whatever progress there is in such a search, tradition in the sense of the tradition of the Church is the continuity of the divine sending, the divine mission, which the Church has received from her Lord and which she pursues in the world. … The Church’s sending is in the power of the Spirit: the heart of the Church’s tradition, Holy Tradition, is the life of the Holy Trinity, in which the Church participates through the Holy Spirit.

Well and good. What about the content of the tradition? Louth goes on to quote a number of passages from St. Irenaeus, precisely on the point I questioned above, to this effect:

Irenaeus speaks of the character of the Church which is preserved through the succession of bishops… not just the articles of faith handed down by the apostolic succession of bishops, but the whole character of the Christian community, its rites, its ceremonies, its practices, and its life. … [For] Irenaeus the tradition of the Church is not, like the traditions to which the gnostics appealed, simply some message, truth, or ideology, but a life, something lived. … The rule of truth, then, is the faith, the fundamentals of Christian belief… This is the tradition which has been handed down from the apostles and is received in baptism: the fact that it is received is almost as important as what is received — tradition is not something we make up, but something we accept.

To inhabit and appropriate “Sacred Tradition”, then, is to be part of the Church that transmits the tradition that is Christianity — the “tradition” of the whole of Christian life. Finally Louth comes to St. Basil the Great, and returns to the question of the “unwritten traditions”:

The examples Basil gives of such unwritten traditions are all liturgical practices: the sign of the cross, prayer toward the East, the epiclesis at the Eucharist and indeed most of the rest of the Eucharistic prayer, the blessing of water in baptism, of oil, and so on. The secret tradition is not a message, but a practice, and the significance of such practice. We come back to the fact that Christianity is not a body of doctrine that can be specified in advance, but a way of life and all that this implies. Tradition is, as it were, the tacit dimension of the life of the Christian[.] … What this seems to suggest is that ultimately the tradition of the Church is the Spirit, that what is passed on from age to age in the bosom of the Church is the Spirit, making us sons in the Son, enabling us to call on the Father, and thus share in the communion of the Trinity.

That’s a pretty effective rejoinder to my question. This is what it means that the Christian tradition is “living:” that it is, perhaps, the outward expression of the presence in the Church of the Spirit, who is Lord and Giver of Life.

Understood like this, tradition is not another source of doctrine, or whatever, alongside Scripture, but another way of speaking of the inner life of the Church, that life in which the individual Christian is perfected in the image of God in which he was created. Speaking of it as tradition brings out the fact that it is received, that it is participated in, that it is more than the grasp that the individual has of his faith.

I remain curious to see how Louth deals with more contemporary advocates of Tradition who, presumably, remain trapped within the post-medieval object-subject division.

Athanasius’s debate with the Arians was a lectionary-based discussion, if not explicitly, a least in a very practical way: it had to do with how the full range of the Scriptures in their apprehended juxtaposition disclosed the truth of God. I believe that Athanasius’s discussion is, on that basis, more credible than the Arians’, because it is more comprehensive of the texts of the Scripture as they are made to perdure side by side. In our own day, it is such contiguity in temporal extent that has drastically shrunk. To that degree, the triumph of Arianism lies in the thinning out of the figural word, and thereby the dropping out of texts as divinely referring in their meaning and power. Heresy is the deliberated withering, far more even than the purported contradicting, of the Scriptures.

— Ephraim Radner, Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures, 233

Addendum:

The notion that Christian theology is to be seen as concerned with the mystery of God, the trinitarian God who loved us in Christ and calls us to participate in the mystery which he is, suggests to me that the main concern of theology is not so much to elucidate anything, as to prevent us, the Church, from dissolving the mystery that lies at the heart of the faith—dissolving it, or missing it altogether, by failing truly to engage with it. And this is what the heresies have been seen to do, and why they have been condemned: the trinitarian heresies dissolve the divine life, either by reducing it to a monadic consciousness, or by degrading it to the life of the gods; the Christological heresies blur the fact that it is in Christ that this divine life is offered to us—that it is through him and in the Spirit that we know ourselves to be loved by God himself—and do this either by qualifying the fact that God is who Jesus is, or by qualifying the fact that what Jesus is is truly a man; heresies concerning man’s divinization are no less insidious, as they blur the fact that we are truly loved by God in Jesus and are called to respond to that love, and that in thus loving and being loved we are drawn into a real communion with God.

— Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of Theology