Thinking hard about the Incarnation

I was near the end of my oral exams with the juniors when I began to realize how far I could push them. I would start from basic definitions regarding the Incarnation and gradually force them to think more and more, and they held up—not just the star students, but all of them. Actual excerpt from one of the orals:

What is a suppositum?

How does being a suppositum differ from being an individual?

What is the difference between the terms “suppositum” and “person”?

Are you a suppositum?

Is a tree a suppositum?

Is a dog a suppositum?

Is my nose a suppositum?

Is Christ’s human nature a suppositum?

Why not?

Is Christ’s divinity a suppositum?

Why is that?

Tell me about the heresy of “monoenergism”?

What does “energy” mean in this debate?

What did Maximus the Confessor mean by “theandric energy”?

What would happen to theandric energy if you were a Nestorian?

What would happen to theandric energy if you were a Monophysite?

…and so on.

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Happy . . . day!

Happy Ascension Sunday Thursday, everyone!

And what, you may ask, is Ascension Sunday Thursday?  It is the Thursday we observe while waiting for Ascension Thursday Sunday.  It is the day that was almost Ascension Thursday, and that still bears the minutest traces of its former character, like the almost-unobservable oddness of a picture in which someone has been photoshopped out.

We can’t help it.  Obedient children, we want to do whatever our Church is doing and have this be just another day in the Easter season.  But because of the way we experience sacred time, the transferal-here-but-not-transferal-there process leaves behind a snatch of music we can almost hear but can’t make out, a sense that this day is not Ascension Thursday but is also not a Thursday in Easter.  It is a day that lacks something of its own identity.

It is—Ascension Sunday Thursday!  Have a good one, y’all!

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