Having entered the Christmas season, we ask those who find the work of the Mystagogy Resource Center beneficial to them to help us continue our work with a generous financial gift as you are able. As an incentive, we are offering the following booklet.

In 1909 the German philosopher Arthur Drews wrote a book called "The Myth of Christ", which New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman has called "arguably the most influential mythicist book ever produced," arguing that Jesus Christ never existed and was simply a myth influenced by more ancient myths. The reason this book was so influential was because Vladimir Lenin read it and was convinced that Jesus never existed, thus justifying his actions in promoting atheism and suppressing the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. Moreover, the ideologues of the Third Reich would go on to implement the views of Drews to create a new "Aryan religion," viewing Jesus as an Aryan figure fighting against Jewish materialism. 

Due to the tremendous influence of this book in his time, George Florovsky viewed the arguments presented therein as very weak and easily refutable, which led him to write a refutation of this text which was published in Russian by the YMCA Press in Paris in 1929. This apologetic brochure titled "Did Christ Live? Historical Evidence of Christ" was one of the first texts of his published to promote his Neopatristic Synthesis, bringing the patristic heritage to modern historical and cultural conditions. With the revival of these views among some in our time, this text is as relevant today as it was when it was written. 

Never before published in English, it is now available for anyone who donates at least $20 to the Mystagogy Resource Center upon request (please specify in your donation that you want the book). Thank you.



October 11, 2010

Why The Filioque Is A Heresy


By Fr. John Romanides

The Filioque is a heresy, because it confuses the hypostatic properties of the Father, i.e. His being cause, with those of the Son and, as a result, introduces a kind of Semi-Sabellianism. This is the case if the notion of being cause belongs both to the Father's and to the Son's hypostasis, but not to the Spirit's. If the Father and the Son as hypostaseis are the cause of the existence of the Holy Spirit, then, according to Photios, we have two principles in the Godhead, or, if they think of the Father and the Son as one cause, then, as we said above, we have Semi-Sabellianism, i.e. the identification of the incommunicable, hypostatic properties of the Father and the Son. If the cause is identified with the essence and not with the hypostaseis, then the Holy Spirit is a creature, because the doctrine that the essence is the cause of another person is the doctrine of the Eunomians, since they identified the cause of the existence of the Son with the essence of the Father and attempted on this basis to demonstrate that the Son is a creature. Consequently, if the Father's and the Son's essence is the cause of the existence of the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit is a creature. Again, He is a creature, if the cause of the Spirit's existence, or His procession, is a common energy of the Father and the Son, of which the Spirit is lacking. This is the case, because, as Orthodox and Pneumatomachians argue, the lack of even one energy common to the Father and to the Son from the Spirit would demonstrate the created nature of the Spirit. The one doctrine leads to Semi-Sabellianism and the other to Eunomianism, or to the heresy of the Pneumatomachoi where the Spirit becomes a creature.

Today, the Latins are obliged, if they wish to revise the foundation of their theology, not only to take seriously the theology of the Fathers, which constituted the basis of the decisions of the First and Second Ecumenical Councils, but also to revise the Trinitarian terminology, which is based on Augustine's doctrine.

Source: An Outline of Orthodox Patristic Dogmatics, pp. 33-35.

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