Question for George Blaisdell about baptism [Archive]

George Blaisdell

March 19th 2003, 11:55 AM

Today @ 06:52 AM
GrayPilgrim:

George I am curious about the Orthodox Church's teaching on baptism, especially I have seen you speak of the removal of grace after the infusion of grace or something similar to that. Could you please correct that if wrong and then explain the significance of that process?

GP - I am hardly qualified to speak with any assurance at all, for I am barely three weeks a Christian, and am but a babe in the faith...

There is a fair amount of patristic writing on the matter of withdrawal of grace - Indeed Biblically it is touched upon in Heb 6:4-6, and doubtless in other places as well, of which I am unaware... But the matter is fairly simple, for while we are suffused in grace, and grace is understood here as the uncreated energies [energias in the Greek Bible], we are to build in them our souls, and some build in straw, and some in wood, and some in rock - you know the passages [I am a lousy passage number rememberer!]...

And then what we have constructed is tried by fire, by the fire of God, to test our efforts and to see what can stand and what is burned away - The wind is blown on the threshing room floor and the chaff is carried away, leaving the solid wheat, and the chaff is burned... These are all metaphors for the process of purification of the person in his walk in Christ - Tribulations, as it were, the "reason" why "bad things happen to good people", etc. They are not bad things, in a Christed life, but are disasters in a life outside Christ.

When grace suffuses, it feels good, and all seems to "go well", as indeed it does, and the normal and human response is to enjoy the ride of the wonderfulness of God. But this is counterproductive, for grace is suffused for our benefit, not our mere enjoymnent, and we are in Orthodoxy called to be especially careful in these kinds of times, lest we squander them in unwise construction, for we DO construct, at all times, for good or for ill... In that, we have no choice... As one radio evangellist used to say "It is not a question of you being a slave or not. The only question is WHOSE slave will you be!" Likewise, we can squander the gift. The Corinthians took the gift and headed into sexuality with it, turning back to their pagan ways, thinking they could bring this wonderful grace to the redemption of their previous focus, and they fell, and Paul had to get them back out of it. They needed to turn AWAY from the flesh, you see....

So that the wirhdrawal of grace is not really the loss of it, but a different form of it, where we are cleansed anew in trial that proves or discards what we have built by our conduct as Christian receivers of grace.

What we mostly find is that we come up short most of the time, and little of what we acquire do we retain, so short of God's grace is our lives. Yet the saints in their lives demonstrate the worth of the walk, regardless of apparent setbacks, for such are the chastisements of the Father...

This is an ongoing part of a Christian's walk in Christ in Orthodoxy, and I am not really sure if it is related to baptism, and specifically to baptism by fire... I suspect that baptism by fire means something else, and if you like, I will do a little asking around about it.

For anyone interested in reading on their own, a pretty good place to start might be: http://orthodoxinfo.com/

This stuff is not all that hard to understand, normally, but conversely, outside the Orthodox phronema, it is utterly easy to misunderstand... Hence the acquisition of the mind of the Church, the Orthodox 'mindset', or way of understanding, is a central feature of entry into the Holy Body of Christ...

I struggled for four years to become baptized - The hardest and most rewarding thing I can imagine doing, and that after a pretty long and rewarding, if profligate and sinful, life...

I came on this board because of the lack of witness among Protestants of the ancient Church's understanding, for there is cohesion in Her, and in the Protestant west, there is so much doctrinal chaos and lack of belief, and every person having the responsibility to be their own theologian in their own understanding, deciding what to believe, and what to reject. This is not a feature of Orthodoxy at all... We focus on living Christian lives, and not at all on self-determination of doctrine in endless theological and Christological debates... The Church has pretty well got those issues taken care of across two thousand years. We are still living the faith given once for all to the apostles...

geo