Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ

Saint   Justin (Popovich)

"The contemporary dialogue of love, which takes the form of naked sentimentality, is in reality a denial of the salutary sanctification of the Spirit and belief in the truth (2 Thess. 2:13), that is to say the unique salutary love of the truth. (2 Thess. 2:10) The essence of love is truth; love lives and thrives as truth. Truth is the heart of each Godly virtue and therefore of love as well.


And each one of these Godly virtues preaches and evangelizes about the God-man Lord Jesus as the only Person Who is the embodiment and image of Divine Truth, that is to say Pan-Truth. If truth were something other that the God-man, than Christ in other words, if it were though, an idea, a theory, mind science, philosophy, culture, man, humanity, the world, or all the worlds, or whoever or whatever or all it altogether, it would be minor, inadequate, finite, mortal. Truth, however, is a person, and yes, the person of the God-man Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity, and as such is immortal and not finite, but eternal. This is because in the Lord Jesus, Truth and Life are of the same essence: they are eternal Truth and eternal Life. (cf. John 14:6; 1:4,17) He who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ grows unceasingly through His Truth into the divine infinity. He grows with all of his being, with all of his mind, with all of this heart and his soul. People live in Christ speaking the truth in love, because only in this way we must grow up in every way into Him Who is the head, into Christ. (Eph. 4:15)
"This is always realized with all the saints, (Eph. 3:18), always in the Church and through the Church, because a person cannot grow in Him Who is the head of the body of the Church, in other words in Christ, in any other way.
"Let us not fool ourselves...Separation of and detachment of love from truth is a sign of the lack of theanthropic faith and of the loss of theanthropic balance and common sense. At any rate, this was never, nor is it the way of the Fathers. The Orthodox are rooted and founded only with all of the saints in truth, and have proclaimed in love this theanthropic life-saving love for the world and for all of the creation of God from the time of the Apostles until today. The naked moralistic, minimalistic, and humanistic pacifism of contemporary Ecumenists does only one thing: it brings to light their diseased roots, which is to say, their sick philosophy and feeble morality according to the human tradition. (Col. 2:8) They reveal the crisis of their humanistic faith, as well as their presumptuous insensitivity for the history of the Church, which is to say, for its apostolic and catholic continuation in truth and in grace. And the holy apostolic, patristic, God-mindedness, and common sense are proclaimed by the mouth of St. Maximos the Confessor in the following truth: For faith is the foundation of the things that follow, I mean hope and love, which certainly sustain the truth. (P.G. 90c. 1189A)"
 

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