The fact is that while the early Church understood herself as militia Christi, as the people of God mobilized to fight the Enemy, the modern Christian prefers to identify himself and his faith in terms of therapeutics, to see himself not as a warrior recruited for a long war but as a patient in a clinic.
Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 125
The fruit of Baptism, its true fulfillment, is a new life; not simply a better, more moral or even more pious life, but a life ontologically different from the “old” one. And this difference, the very content of this “newness,” is that it is life with Christ: “…if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him” (Rom 6:8). It is His Risen Life “unto God” that is given to us and becomes our life and our resurrection. But his Life in us, our life in Him is precisely the Church, for she has no other being, no other purpose and no other life but to be Christ in us and we in Christ.”
Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 120
Christ saves us by restoring our nature, which inescapably makes us part of creation and calls us to be its kings. He is the Savior of the world, no from the world. And he saves it by making us again that which we are.
Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 84
We often forget that Christ’s title as King—the title which He affirms when He makes His triumphant entrance into Jerusalem and is greeted as “the King that comes in the name of the Lord,” the title which He accepts when He stands before Pilate: “thou sayest that I am a king” (John 18:37)—is His human, and not only divine title. He is the King, and He manifests Himself as King because He is the New Adam, the Perfect Man—because He restores in Himself human nature in its ineffable glory and power.
Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 83
…we receive this personal gift of Christ’s own Spirit not only because we are Christ’s by faith and love, but because this faith and love have made us desire His life, to be in Him, and because in Baptism, having been baptized into Christ, we have put on Christ. Christ is the Anointed and we receive His anointment; Christ is the Son and we are adopted as sons; Christ has the Spirit as His Life in Himself and we are given participation in His Life.
Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 79
It is personal faith in Christ which brings the catechumen to the Church; it is the Church that will instruct him in and bestow upon him Christ’s faith by which she lives. Our faith in Christ, Christ’s faith in us: the one is the fulfillment of the other, is given to us so that we may have the other. But when we speak of the Church’s faith—the one by which she lives, which truly is her very life—we speak of the presence in her of Christ’s faith, of Him Himself as perfect faith, perfect love, perfect desire. And the Church is life because she is Christ’s life in us, because she believes that which He believes, loves that which He loves, desires that which He desires. And He is not only the “object” of her faith, but the “subject” of her entire life.
Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 68
Here one objection can be foreseen. How, one may ask, can all this be applied to infant Baptism, to children who obviously have neither personal and conscious faith nor personal “desire”? In fact this is a “helpful” objection, for it is by answering it that we may grasp the ultimate meaning and depth of the Sacrament of Baptism. First of all, the question ought not to be liked to children alone but indeed extend to every Baptism. If what we have just said about faith and desire were understood as implying that the reality and the efficacy of Baptism depends on personal faith, is contingent upon the conscious desire of the individual, then the “validity” of each Baptism, be it infant or adult, should be questioned. For to whom is it given to measure faith, to pass judgment on the degree of “comprehension” and “desire” in it?
Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 67
The holy water in Baptism, the bread and wine in the Eucharist, stand for, i.e. represent the whole of creation, but creation as it will be at the end, when it will be consummated in God, when He will fill all things with Himself.
It is this end that is revealed, anticipated, made already real to us in the sacrament; and in this sense each sacrament makes us pass over into the Kingdom of God. It is because the Church herself is the sacrament of this passage and in each of her sacraments takes us there, into the Kingdom of God, that the water of Baptism is holy, i.e. the very presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit; that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are truly, i.e. really, and with a reality more real than all the “objective” realities of “this world,” the Body and Blood of Christ, His parousia, His presence among us. Thus consecration is always the manifestation, the epiphany of that End, of that ultimate Reality for which the world was created, which was fulfilled by Christ through His Incarnation, Death, Resurrection and Ascension, which the Holy Spirit reveals today in the Church and which will be consummated in the Kingdom “to come.”
Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 49-50
In the Christian worldview, matter is never neutral. If it is not “referred to God,” ie. viewed and used as means of communion with Him, of life in Him, it becomes the very bearer and locus of the demonic.
Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 48
The eye-witnesses and ministers of the word handed down the teaching of the Church, not only by writing, but also by unwritten tradition. Whence comes our knowledge of the sacred spot, Mount Calvary, of the holy sepulchre? Has it not been handed down to us from father to son? It is written that our Lord was crucified on Calvary, and buried in the tomb which Joseph hewed out of the rock, but it is unwritten tradition that teaches us we are adoring the right places, and many other things of the same kind. Why do we believe in three baptisms, that is, in three immersions? Why do we adore the Cross? Is it not through tradition? Therefore the holy apostle says: “Brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our epistle.” (II Thess. 2.15) Many things, therefore, being handed down to the Church by unwritten tradition and kept up to the present day, why do you speak slightingly of images?
I am not to be persuaded that the Church is set in order by imperial edicts, but by patristic traditions, written and unwritten. As the written Gospel has been preached in the whole world, so has it been an unwritten tradition in the whole world to represent in image Christ, the incarnate God, and the saints, to adore the Cross, and to pray towards the east.
St. John Damascene
Apology Against Those Who Decry Holy Images
Part II