In today’s post, I want to spend some time giving you an explanation not just about the book but about why a historical and patristic scholar such as myself decided to write a book on Christian Anthropology instead of some monograph on the theology of St Augustine.

The answer is simple, and it was the thesis of my entire book: Modern Christians are more informed about what they believe or should believe than any other generation before them, yet despite their deep theological knowledge, they do not know why orthodoxy is important.

We are all ready with arguments for our statement of faith and why we are correct over position x, and yet, beyond the mere fact of being right, we do not understand why our orthodoxy matters and what it is calling us into.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, and a PhD researcher in historical dogmatics. I publish every week on Mondays and Thursdays. Paid subscribers receive every post. Free subscribers receive weekly Thursday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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As a historical scholar, I have assessed that a big reason for this is the compounding effects of the unique historical shifts that happened after the Middle Ages.

The Renaissance and Humanism marked the first major shift. The Renaissance in Europe and the rise of humanism led to a more positive view of humanity, which subtly reoriented Christian thought toward human potential rather than divine sovereignty. This created space for subsequent movements to expand.

This also developed a methodology for recovering the past. Instead of receiving the books that had shaped the world down to the present moment, the Renaissance issued a call back to the sources so that they might be lifted out of their own time and put to work in ours. The difference sounds small, but it is not. To inherit a text is to stand under it, but to recover it is to stand over it. More on this later.

The Reformation and Scientific Revolution then fractured medieval certainties. The Protestant Reformation challenged traditional sources of authority and religious dogma, while modern science was developed during the Scientific Revolution, and advances led to a new understanding of the universe.1

Together, along with the invention of the printing press, which made information more accessible than ever, these movements delegitimised appeals to institutional authority and demonstrated that observable reality could be understood through human reasoning rather than received doctrine.

This mindset inadvertently promoted an inherent scepticism of institutions or inherited knowledge, and its cure was an extension of retrieving knowledge of the past outside of the bounds of history.

The Enlightenment delivered the decisive blow to traditional Christian epistemology. Rationalism, which emphasises human reason as the basis of knowledge, and empiricism, which emphasises the senses and experience, developed as major movements of thinking which challenged traditional authority figures, with the Enlightenment and the rise of rationalism emphasising human reason as the primary source of knowledge.

This was the logical terminus of the compounding effects of each historical movement that came before it.2

Many theologians since the Enlightenment have laboured under the strictures of philosophers such as Hume and Kant, who articulated widely influential arguments against traditional Christian belief. Hume’s argument that belief in miracles could never be rational is obviously hostile to eschatology, for it renders irrational the conviction that Christ is risen and will come again.

Modernism and Industrialisation completed the transformation. The loss of the sacramental worldview in the West arguably began as early as the fourteenth century, slowly at first, then picking up speed with the dawn of the Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, and the social revolutions that followed finished it off, at least in the dominant culture.

The nineteenth century was very much animated by visions of human potential and perfectibility, inspired by the Enlightenment. One of the core sentiments of the Enlightenment is that humanity, released from the bondage of authority and tradition, is free to actualise possibilities hitherto thought beyond the reach of human achievement.

The Virgin Mary Receiving the Eucharist from Saint John the Apostle

Flemish School

National Trust for Scotland, Fyvie Castle

The thing is, doctrines do not die by refutation. They go dark when the conditions of their intelligibility are withdrawn. Nobody in history sat down and disproved the image of God or the Real Presence. What happened was that the world in which such claims could be understood was dismantled beneath them. Entire books have been written about that dismantling. Mine is not one of them. I wanted to write something for the Christian today.3

As much as my book is a theological retrieval of what it means to be Christian and does present the reader with orthodox viewpoints, it is primarily a book of methodological living and thinking.

This means the book does not just tell you what to believe, but it tells you why you should believe it and presents what I would consider a Christian worldview that has shed its historical skin and recovered the ancient faith through regression instead of retrieval.

What do I mean by this?

Henri de Lubac, in his book on Medieval Exegesis, writes that the only way in which to properly interpret Scripture and the church fathers is through a methodology of regression. This means that you shed your modern theological viewpoints and distinctions and trace back to the time of the text. Instead of attempting to find seeds or articulations of modern theological distinctions in ancient works.

De Lubac is so against this concept that he says doing so is to betray the author and the text itself. And I would say my book implicitly implies that this has been the case, especially within the post-Reformation world that then inherited the varying epistemological views of the historic periods listed above.

This has birthed a Christian world in which professors defend queer hermeneutics, Scripture is held to be fallible, and the suggestion that the Eucharist might be more than it appears is treated as unfathomable.

Now I know that the ressourcement movement and the excellent work done by the Popular Patristics Series have in the last few decades slowly pushed back against these views, but these movements have mostly moved the needle in the academy, but not too much at the lay level.

I was listening to a professor speak on a podcast recently and remark how scary it is to him that most Christians today are more impacted by Christian content creators in their theology than by actual professors. Gavin Ortlund and Trent Horn both remarked the same.

People are entrusting their salvation to content creators.4 They don’t read books, and they don’t attend church because why do that when YouTube has my favourite sermons, and Instagram has my favourite content creator. Who may or may not belong to a local church or have any theological training at all.

For example, there is an awesome and sincere guy , who is currently, as a Charismatic, reading through the church fathers and writing commentaries on it here on Substack.

Now, I am not putting words in his mouth because he does clarify that this is just his personal reading of them and that he very much is reading it through a specific lens. I, however, do take fault with his approach for many reasons, one because he does not read them through regression; as we stated earlier, he does not read them in their context.

For example, he reads St Ignatius and the Didache and says that he does not find the words literal body and blood in the text and therefore isn’t fully convinced of this belief. But he fails to see that the Fathers had no need to make that distinction. They wrote inside a world where sacramental realities were legible and assumed, and they read John 6 and the Incarnation as one continuous movement extended into their sacramental theology.

Demanding an earlier text to speak to your later worldview is to misread it completely. I am not accusing him of doing this intentionally, and I actually think this has more to do with hermeneutical ignorance. But it proves my point. If someone who was new to the faith stumbled across his works, they might not understand that this way of retrieving the church fathers is incorrect. This is why we need information literacy.

John Henry Newman remarked in the 19th century that one of the strongest jabs at Protestant theology is their ecumenism.5 When fellowship is given without agreement on theological distinctions, it opens up a gateway for heresy to creep in. The underlying principle here is that we need to curate what we consume, and so many of us have given influence to people that the church fathers disagreed with.

Now I know what you are thinking: I can’t read everything before I decide what church to join or what to believe, so what do I do?

Read Flesh and Memory. It won’t answer all your questions, and it’s not a perfect book by any stretch of the imagination, but it does root all of its theology in the ancient faith in a way that is existentially satisfying. It doesn’t serve as an apologetic for a certain denomination, nor does it aim to address every doctrine.

Flesh and Memory merely aims to present the Christian faith in an orthodox manner in a way that tells you why it is important to believe these things about the faith. It’s good to know that you are made in the image of God, but without understanding what this means for your worth and walk with God, it just becomes a nice addition to a statement of faith.

My book presents the faith in a way that the church fathers would have understood it, as an embodied walk of sanctification and ascent into the likeness of God.

It is the book I wish someone had handed me when I came back to the faith, and it is a book that will help you make sense of the world and your place in it. It is very much theological but also deeply spiritual. I believe every good Christian book should have that tension.

Cover reveal and endorsements to come soon. If you are intrigued to know more or want to make sure you are reminded of when it drops, then subscribe because all of it will run through here.

-Corné

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This week we cross the English Channel and head over to France. While we are moving geographically, we are actually still occupying the same time in history as we look at a particular Benedictine revival that sprang up in the 19th century. These monks were, however, less concerned about what the Christian should believe and more concerned with how he ought to worship.

In today’s essay, we will be looking at the history of the Solesmes Revival and what it left behind for Christians today. We will do this by holding it in tension with what was happening in the Church in France at the time, as well as the overall movement of the Catholic Church as a whole. One thing to note is that, hilariously, what would now be considered a conservative movement was also partly the forerunner of change to the liturgy during Vatican II.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, and a PhD researcher in historical dogmatics. I publish every week on Mondays and Thursdays. Paid subscribers receive every post. Free subscribers receive weekly Thursday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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Over weekends, we would have our matches and competitions for our various sports in the morning till early afternoon, and then we would go home and watch sports on the TV. My brother and stepdad loved watching sports. I wasn’t the biggest fan of watching sports at this age. I wanted to watch cartoons like every normal kid. Plus, playing some form of sport 7 days a week was exhausting, and cartoons felt like a break.

However, because we were rarely home without our parents being around, my brother and I didn’t really get to pick what was on the TV whenever we were home. There were some exceptions, and sometimes I was home alone and could watch whatever I wanted, so I watched cartoons. Yet, every time my brother or my stepdad would come home and see what I was watching, they would make fun of me for it. So, in my angry little heart, I stopped watching cartoons, but I still didn’t want to watch sports, so I decided on NatGeo Wild.

This was National Geographic’s version of Animal Planet. I watched a stupid amount of this show recite random facts about animals all over the world. My parents taught me that you could only be a professional athlete (which at the time was my dream) until you were around 331, so I was nudged to pick something to study so I would have a second career waiting for me once I had retired. My love for animals had me wanting to do something within that realm of study.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, and a PhD researcher in historical dogmatics. I publish every week on Mondays and Thursdays. Paid subscribers receive every post. Free subscribers receive weekly Thursday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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So why the backstory today?

Well, because in all my years of informal study of animals, I have come to learn how fragile their habitats can be. Remove one element, and it disrupts the balance of the habitat and food chain completely. A perfect local example in Cape Town is the loss of our Great White Shark population. Great Whites naturally feed on the massive Cape fur seal population in and around Cape Town, which in turn feed on our local African penguins. Due to the recent loss of Cape Town’s Great Whites, the seal population has grown to record numbers, which has, in turn, put the penguin population in danger of extinction.

One element is removed, and suddenly there is a chain reaction that creates unforeseen effects.

I believe this is true about the unique fabric that is our faith. You remove a few threads, and the whole thing can unravel. Or maybe you remove one thread, and suddenly there is a weakness within the fabric that might not immediately cause it to be undone, but if you give it some time and some good ol wear and tear, soon it will produce a hole that will get bigger and bigger.

This concept has often had me contemplating the nature of the teachings of our faith, and through my own extensive study of it and its history, I have come to understand that our faith is a deeply complex piece of fabric with multiple threads that form one fabric, which is understood very simply. I might not know or be able to see every thread in my sock, but when I see the threads come together in the image of my sock, I can still recognise it as such.

Now, my hypothesis of this removal of a thread is not here presented in a bulletproof claim; this platform is not the right space for it, but I do hold it to be true and will here simply present a few examples of why I believe this to be true. Maybe in a future book I will address and defend this claim at length.

A clear example of this in history is the Arian Controversy. In a course that I teach at seminary, our students are required to engage with the Nicene Creed and the theology of the Arians, and they are instructed, for one of their assignments, to speculate about what would have happened if the Arians had won and the Christian understanding of the Person of Christ had been Arian.

Arius challenged the divinity of Christ and his relationship to God the Father, which struck at the heart of Trinitarian doctrine. His position seemed logically straightforward: the Father alone possessed absolute divinity without beginning, while the Son and Holy Spirit were created beings brought into existence before the world was made. But this single thread, denying Christ’s eternal, uncreated nature, unravelled everything downstream.

Arianism substituted a created intermediary for the eternal Logos, thereby making genuine reconciliation and atonement impossible, and set an irresistible trajectory toward Socinianism, Unitarianism, and pure rationalism.

This is a more extreme example than the one I have been contemplating. As someone coming from a Protestant background, I never understood the Catholic and Orthodox perspective of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Over a year ago, I even read Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s book on Mary and was also unconvinced.

That was until I really started diving into anthropology and ontology and the Church calendar. Through this, I started understanding more and more what role Mary plays in our faith. One of these roles that really stuck with me is something I actually included in my recent book, set to come out soon, and that is her role as teacher of the contemplative life. Pope Benedict XVI wrote:

In Luke, Mary stands as the embodiment of the Church’s memory. She is alert, taking events in and inwardly pondering them. Thus Luke says that she “kept” them (lit., “preserved them together”) in her heart, she “pondered” them (lit., “put them together”) and “kept them faithfully” (lit., “held on to them”). Mary compares the words and events of faith with the ongoing experience of her life and thus discovers the full human depth of each detail, which gradually fits into the total picture.2

And it was in reading Newman’s sermon before Oxford while he was still an Anglican on the theology of the development of doctrine that I fully understood her value to the faith. Newman juxtaposes Mary and Zacharias with one another first. He says that when the angel came to Zacharias, he could not reason what was being said to him, and so the Lord punished him so that later he would have the faith to be obedient. While Mary first showed faith and submitted herself to the will of the Lord, which led her to be called blessed. Newman’s point here is that one has faith and then reasons; the other’s reason stunts their ability to have faith.

Newman goes on to show this pattern of where Mary was constantly receiving the proclamations of the Lord and other people, and not once is she mesmerised or caught up in it. She merely receives it and ponders it in her heart, allowing faith to provide reason and not the other way around. Newman actually connects this pattern to the great Doctors of the Church, saying that Mary provided the framework of contemplation and understanding that, through this same pattern, they can reason, articulate, defend the faith and declare false what is false. In this way, Mary symbolises the faith of the unlearned and the learned.

It is this archetype of Mary hearing the proclamation that her Son was the coming messiah and pondering it in her heart that allowed Newman to connect Marian theology to his concept of doctrinal development. Mary did not go and proclaim to the world that her Son was the Christ, nor did she steer Jesus to do what she wanted; no, she allowed the revelation of this truth to unfold naturally as God intended.

(Lamentation on the death of Christ, detail of the Virgin Mary (Painting on wood) Fra Angelico

Newman understood this, and he also understood that if truth ontologically was Christ, then Truth and the revelation connected to it has to be alive as well. Therefore, it would be natural to conclude that Truth and revelation were not to be preserved in aspic.3 It was meant to develop.

Now, in Newman’s understanding, this development wasn’t the development of a baby into a seahorse. Meaning that in 325 we understand that Christ the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; and now, because after Chalcedon we believe that He was also fully man, that this is a fundamental change in the truth held previously.

For Newman, this was the coming to know of a truth already held implicitly and now being articulated explicitly. So instead of the baby becoming a seahorse, the baby here had become a toddler. No longer fully resembling what it previously was, but still nonetheless the same thing anatomically.

To quote Professor on this:

The eternal is made present to us in terms proper to the time in which we live, in the present. That is the development of doctrine.

So the question then might be “well, is Mary necessary to hold to this doctrine?” And to that I would answer yes. Because we need grounding for this theory. Mary has, in many streams of Christianity, been understood as a figure for the Church. And it is because of this connection that she is necessary.

Both orthodox Christology and Arianism were articulations of development in understanding who Jesus was, yet it was up to the Church to determine who was correct. Orthodox theology won in the end, and this would be true throughout history. Whenever theories or revolutions threatened the Truth held by the Church, the Church has always responded. In fact, I would argue that the large collection of theological works the Church has produced is a direct result of the safeguarding of these truths.

Newman speaks of the religions of the old world and their texts as dead revelation now hidden in cemeteries, locked away in the library of the Church, and in front of each is a trophy of the victory of the living truth over them. The Church is the safeguarder of Truth because she has a Marian approach to doctrine and its development and serves as the safeguarder against the two extreme pulls that exist within the life of the Church, that being progressivism and conservatism.

G.K Chesterton once said that:

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.4

This means that the Church holds together in time the past, present and future while discerning the Truth revealed in the present moment. This means that the Church does not develop its doctrine against the witness of its past, nor will it develop in a way that is merely giving in to the present wave of emotionalism. All while considering how any development might affect the future of the Church and her faithful.

At least this is how it is supposed to be. I think that every church that is part of the Church has development; whether they explicitly articulate it or not, they still believe in a living truth, and I think that we have seen the fruits of churches that have not held to this Marian ecclesiology. I could spend another 5000 words explaining this, but I hope the core argument is clear.

This argument is not in favour of any denomination. This is something I also state in the introduction of my forthcoming book. This is what I believe the Church to be ontologically, and therefore I am hoping that the eyes of my readers shall be opened for their betterment as leaders across the body.

I am but a humble thinker in a room. I echo the words of Ratzinger in Donum Veritatis:

The truth which sets us free is a gift of Jesus Christ (cf. Jn 8:32). Man's nature calls him to seek the truth while ignorance keeps him in a condition of servitude.

So as I journey on to the world to come, my concern is only with that of sainthood, and my work is mere obedience to that which has been imparted into me.

In love,

-Corné

Naturally, most would assume that we would jump towards the saints of the scholastic and study their works for a while, but instead I chose something else. While there is an amazing treasury of works in the scholastics, I wanted to cover the people who have recently tried to recover those works and the works of the fathers. That and there are many other Substacks out there that do an excellent job of retrieving the scholastics.

A while ago I wrote about the ever-evolving discipline of theology. Theology is a field that will always have questions to answer, because although the answers are always the same when it comes to the things of God, history and the future tend to ask different questions or the same questions differently depending on any given period in time.

Therefore, it does not matter who you are or what your question is; chances are you are not the first to ask these questions and as George Santayana said:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

That is why, over the next 6 weeks, we will be learning from 6 semi-modern movements what they attempted to recover, what questions they were hoping to answer in doing so, and how it ended up going. This week we start with the Oxford Movement.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, and a PhD researcher in historical dogmatics. I publish every week on Mondays and Thursdays. Paid subscribers receive every post. Free subscribers receive weekly Thursday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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This story is about how the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness and eventually, once they reached Rephidim, they got thirsty and started complaining. They were asking why Moses would bring them out of Egypt just for them to die of thirst in the wilderness. God then provided for them supernaturally with water from a rock.

The posture of the Israelites and God's response to them has for us, I think, a very interesting lesson for how we sometimes, too, act this way towards God. We often find ourselves in seasons where we are thirsty, wondering where God is, not realising that He has already seen our suffering and will provide for us what we need. Let’s take a deeper look.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, and a PhD researcher in historical dogmatics. I publish every week on Mondays and Thursdays. Paid subscribers receive every post. Free subscribers receive weekly Thursday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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This is what I would like us to discuss today, and I want to look at three different elements of the liturgy. These elements will be systematised and communicated separately for the purpose of coherence and clarity, but are in no way an attempt to communicate that these elements stand on their own as distinct categories of the liturgy. These three elements are form, transcendence and content.

The reason why I want to talk about this today, and at all, is because of what I believe a proper understanding of the liturgy can produce for us on a practical level. When I was still a pastor, we would sit in staff meetings and go over our order of service (low-church version of liturgy); we would structure it according to what we believed was important. So, explicitly, we would dedicate a certain amount of time to worship, preaching and announcements in relation to how important each was to the goal of the gathering of the Church.

In the hopes of teaching our congregation implicitly what is also important to them and their daily lives. In this way, the liturgy explicitly forms their Sunday worship while implicitly and hopefully shaping their Monday to Saturday worship. Now the question probably on your mind is whether it is actually that deep or not, and my answer is yes.

Why? Because of what the liturgy ontologically is. Before we can look at any element of the liturgy, we have to understand at a fundamental level what it is, so that we might understand what it is for. And for that we start with its purpose in the Sunday gathering.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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For worship services, liturgy is the structured, repeated practice of corporate worship through which a community gathers to encounter God. It embodies humanity’s fundamental purpose—worship itself. It represents the end for which we were created, and through it we fulfil our identity and primary orientation.1

Ontologically, the Liturgy is both a divine and a human reality and thus a mystery. It represents the intersection where the divine and the human meet in the mystery of the Incarnation of Christ, who was both true God and true man, and the mystery of the Incarnation is consummated in the Paschal mystery.2

This means liturgy participates in a reality that transcends mere human activity—it is an openness of a glorification of God that embraces both heaven and earth, an openness effected by the Cross and Resurrection.3

The ontological foundation explains why God gave us the liturgy. For adult humanity, conscious turning to God is demanded for membership in the Mystical Body of Christ. As St Augustine teaches,

“Who made you without you, will not justify you without you”

—and without knowledge of Christ and of the Father as revealed in the Holy Face, without the love of Christ, without the following of Christ, no one can be sanctified. Liturgy provides the structured encounter through which this conscious turning occurs.4

Because the Incarnation involved the eternal elevation of Christ’s human nature, including his body, to unity with the godhead, all human sensation is likewise eternally raised higher than its originally created dignity. Matter is now, after the Incarnation, more porous to the passage of the divine light. The liturgy is therefore a form of worship in which the newly transformed and heightened senses beckon the intellect to follow them back into the divine economy.5

This is the purpose and foundation of liturgy within Sunday gatherings, but what about the implicit Monday to Saturday?

The ritual liturgy expands into a constantly lived liturgy, and this extension is central to Christian understanding of it. This was especially true in the religious orders, which sought to bring the ritual character of human life to a new height of intensity by merging liturgy with life—seen in the unceasing round of Cluniac prayer, the Benedictine integration of labour into liturgy, and the attempt of the orders of friars to extend this coincidence to everyday life. Being, life, and prayer by aspiration come to coincide.6

The theological foundation for this is extended by incarnation and therefore becomes sacramental. Because the Logos became flesh, God has entered into the ordinary—Jesus celebrated in ordinary houses, ate with people, walked among us, and shared our joys and sorrows. If we declare that Jesus is God-with-us, then liturgy should be as much a part of ordinary life as any other mundane task we do every single day. This is the point of the sacramental worldview. It points to a life of liturgy.7

Our ability to live this life of liturgy every day, to lead lives that reflect the fullness of truth about man, God, and the world, flows from our encounter with Christ in the sacraments and the Church’s liturgy.8

So how are we meant to do this? How do I know what it is I need to turn a mundane task into a liturgy that I can find in everyday life?

This is where those three elements come in. Briefly, let us define each, and then we can get into the practicalities.

Form is foundational. Liturgy comprises prayers, Scripture readings, and ritual actions, and a liturgical service should possess structural unity, with its general form and movement determined by the significance of the whole. Liturgical action itself functions as art—dialogue with God in symbolic form.9

Content operates through multiple channels. Because humans are both body and spirit, liturgy employs signs and symbols derived from creation and human culture, understood through Scripture. Scripture proclamation from the Lectionary provides the focus for each celebration.10 Poetry serves as the chief method by which liturgy suggests the Supernatural and leads worshipers toward communion with it.11

Transcendence emerges as the animating principle throughout. The experience of mystery in liturgy is found in its God-consciousness and God-centeredness, involving a beneficial tension that invites contemplation and a sense of the holy and numinous. Liturgy leads worshipers toward Eternity through acts expressing human need and relation to God, committing each participant to the adventure of holiness.12

These three elements, now clearly understood, become the essentials for constructing a liturgy around the everyday task. Together, these elements prevent any task from remaining merely mechanical. Form prevents it from being formless sentiment; content prevents it from being empty gesture; and transcendence prevents it from collapsing into mere utility. The three work as a unified whole, transforming an ordinary task into an encounter with God embedded in daily life.

For example, a personal liturgy of mine is making myself a cup of coffee in the morning. While most people have an auto-brew machine or an espresso machine, or they just chuck instant coffee in a cup,13 but I make a very performative pour-over every morning. It takes time, so it makes it easier for me to turn it into a liturgy.

Tangent over; here is how I do it. For the element of form, I do the same sequence every day in my prep. I think this is the easiest one since if I did it any other way I would definitely mess something up. Nonetheless, this form stays consistent, and throughout the process I am actively present, and this repeatable act structures the form.

The next element is content. Now how do paper filters and coffee grounds become holy?14 Quite easily. Gratitude. I thank God for His sovereign provision. The very fact that I can have coffee all the way from Ethiopia, that costs a good amount of money, the pour-over kettle, the V60 Hario, and even the house to make it in is a gift. The contents are all gifts from God, so I say a short prayer of gratitude, thanking God for His provision of these gifts and the talents of the various crafters who produced them.

Transcendence is our last element and probably my favourite. St Augustine writes that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, because we, as creatures with the capacity for transcendence, long for it.15 A longing that in this life will never be satisfied, yet because of the sacramentality of creation due to the incarnation we can receive foretastes of it. As I hold the warm cup, feel its weight, taste its variety of notes and warmth, I in that moment know that I am attending to creation itself as a vehicle of divine presence. The joy and pleasure found in this then becomes a window into God’s care and abundance.

This is what is meant by a life of liturgy and a spirituality of it lived in the ordinary. The beauty of the incarnation is that the promises of John 10:10 and John 17 are accessible to us in the here and now, and it is pleasing to God when we participate in Him through them.

-Corné

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I do not know why I am like this, and my wife often laughs at me for it, but what can I say? Maybe I think it makes me more interesting or something. Anyway, you are probably reading this and thinking: “What does this have to do with our patristics series?”

My answer is: nothing really important, but also everything, because this is how I feel about today’s church father. I know it is rich coming from a guy whose main father for his thesis is Augustine, who is the most popular and basic father out there. I know I am a hypocrite, but in my defence, I tried everything I could to not have to pick him for my work, but it basically was impossible. You cannot do work in historical dogmatics without referencing Augustine.

But enough of me, and let’s get into today’s father.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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Examples of this include things like AI, my calling, reading, and art. I didn’t always believe AI was bad. I can see good in the use of AI for admin, project organisation, language learning, and research assistance. I used to believe that AI-generated writing wasn’t bad either, because I thought that as long as the knowledge gets transmitted, it doesn’t matter how. I was wrong about this utilitarian view, and I can admit that; I have been guilty of this.

I have talked about my mistakes when it comes to reading fiction before, and I can now also say that I didn’t get Art at first, but now I love it and can’t get enough of it. Art has this amazing way of embodying thoughts, feelings and truths in a visually appealing way. Art has also been a notice board of history in some way. The signs, elements, and style are all expressions of moments in history and the philosophies that informed them.

I think in some way the Church’s sacramental signs have a similar function. They embody more than just what can be seen at first glance, and an informed observer is able to take away more from them than the uninformed. This brings us to today’s devotional passage of Exodus 24:1-11 on the mountain of Sinai.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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Writing this book really stretched me in so many ways; not only did I have to research topics outside of my niche, but I also had to rewrite it twice after I finished it the first time. It also taught me a lot about the Christian publishing world.

I think the biggest challenge was that this wasn’t the book I set out to write, yet it was the one I needed to write. I needed to present what I believed was a proper Christian anthropology to the world if I wanted to make a lasting impact. Yes, you can teach people theological doctrines that impact them, but without grounding them in what it means for the Christian life, it can become a fickle doctrinal point held without consequence.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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The book is presented in a way that hopefully exists holistically and without contradiction because so much of what modern Christianity has become has been a Christianity that can teach you what to believe, help you memorise a statement of faith, yet not tell you why it matters existentially for your everyday life. That gap is now a market that somebody is selling into it, and doing very well.

This has produced a Christianity that has largely assimilated into a modern worldview of build-a-bear worldviews and confessions of faith. You are a Baptist, but you believe in real presence? You can just stay Baptist and hold a fully memorial view of baptism, yet affirm real presence, not knowing that you cannot be sacramental when it suits you and not when it doesn’t.

This cherry-picking of doctrines has led to the creation of what I call personal magisteriums. It doesn’t matter what denomination you are: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, all think we know better in some way and are critical of a teaching we disagree with. Protestants embrace theosis as sanctification when it literally doesn’t make sense within their soteriology. Catholics are critical of Vatican II or scrutinise every word of the Pope. Orthodox claim they have held an unchanging line of faith when their own documents and liturgical practices communicate development.

We are all guilty of this. Our modern Christianity, filled with access to information, has made us well aware of what we believe, yet we have failed it by not understanding the why. And this matters because what we believe shapes the way we live out our faith, and it shapes the world.

The modern revolutions that have plagued our times are all due to our own lack of adherence to the ancient witness of the Church on human dignity.

The Industrial Revolution ravaged personhood with the idea that persons are what they produce, consume, spend, and profit from. Such values lead people to that envious glance to see who has “made it” and who hasn’t. What do the neighbours drive? Do they have a shore house? What do their parents do? How much do they make? What academy’s jacket does their son wear? Education becomes simply a race to get grades, extracurricular points, and awards so the student can go to a private high school, get into an Ivy League university, graduate with honours, and make double the parents’ salary. This is what a “person” has become.1

The sexual revolution quickens the storm. The pursuit of pleasure becomes the primary focus along with the portfolio. Whatever feels good rules the day. Marriage, family, and children are obstacles to pleasure, so they are dispensed with. This is what it is to be a human person—accumulating things and pleasures. Unless you have those, you are less a person, and your personal identity is incomplete. Unless you are “feeling good”, you are not a full person.

The technological revolution surged in on top of the first two systems. To “you are what you acquire” and “you are what you feel,” it adds the steroidal rush of “now do it all as quickly as you can.” The greed of the Industrial Revolution and the hedonism of the sexual revolution now ride the wave of speed and efficiency. “Personhood” is assigned on the basis of how closely you can conform to a “social construct based on the compelling presence of certain qualities that we determine to be necessary” rather than on inherent capacities.2

You can watch this happen in real time now. Open any app, and you will find the ancient faith arranged for viewing, being sold as an aesthetic product you can purchase without the sacrifice that built and is required of it. This is not the case for every influencer or publication, however. That is what makes it difficult, but there is also no denying it either.

This is the natural conclusion of our allowance of three revolutions to infiltrate our ecosystem without scrutiny. Each one of these three revolutions stripped Christianity of something essential.

The industrial revolution taught us that a person is what he produces; the influencer produces reach. The sexual revolution taught us that a person is what he feels and how he presents himself; his entire trade is a curated self. The technological revolution taught us that a person is how quickly he can do it, and the algorithm rewards nothing else. Christian content did not resist any of this. It performed all of it effectively.

Which brings us back to the personal magisterium. I named it earlier as a habit, but it is more than that. It has become a business model. You do not gather an audience by handing people back to a bishop, or a confession, or a tradition older than your account. You gather one by becoming the authority they have chosen for themselves. Every feed is a small magisterium with a subscribe button. The market did not merely tolerate our cherry-picking. It discovered that cherry-picking produces engagement.

And the worst part about it all is that the church aided these revolutions. All churches except Catholicism have embraced the use of birth control to some degree. Historians have often marked the change of church teaching on birth control as having accelerated the growth of the sexual revolution (Lambeth 1930). Christians supplied the moral framework and vocabulary for human dignity that were twisted during the Industrial Revolution to justify production. And the modern church’s willingness to embrace any technology that might make it more effective at reaching its goals has created a lack of technological literacy within the body.

The great failure I believe here lies not in the Church’s witness but in its people. Thomas Merton says in his book The Ascent to Truth that the Church has never truly been harmed institutionally due to external persecution, but has often been weakened through the lack of faithfulness among its people. This is because during our own intellectual squabbles of who is right and who is wrong, we were more concerned with getting our people to recite our catechisms and confession than actually discipling them into holding a Christian worldview.

This is why I wrote my book. A book I believe only I could write. From the perspective of someone who isn’t more concerned with which denomination he belongs to but whether or not he is living the abundant and eternal life that God promised him.3 My goal was to present a comprehensive worldview that would lead to such a life.

When I started writing this book, I had a burden on my heart from the Lord that prompted me to write this book with love. It has nothing to do with my bottom line; I barely make money from book sales, but the people who do read my books are always moved, not because I am a great writer, I don’t believe I am, but it is because I believe that God touches these books with love.

To me it has never been about making more money, although I do appreciate and need the money I do make. It has always been about giving value to people. Even if it is in the majority of the population’s least favourite format to consume content in.

Christianity has been stripped of its ancient, existential and sacramental identity, and the ancient faith was far more concerned with your spiritual health and salvation than with your comfort at church or your standing online. Our faith is one of life through death, not clicks through trends. So much of Christianity has become a product or a modern morality because we have treated it that way.

That is why in my book, I take us back. I take us back to the times before this by drawing on the ancient wisdom of the Church.

Why is this better than the modern witness? I answer that with the words of GK Chesterton:

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.4

That is why the Church is the last defender of the dignity of humanity, and it is only possible through the proper discipleship of its members. The Church in this way secures human flourishing by holding the past, present and future in tension with one another and allowing the past and present witness to speak together to what would be beneficial for today and the future.

It is the only institution equipped adequately enough to do this. I did not write this book to win an argument. Arguments have been won before, and the winning changed very little.

The doctrine of the dignity of humanity was never refuted or changed. No church council overturned it, no philosopher successfully dismantled it. It simply went dark. The revolutions did not change Christian minds into believing they weren’t made in the image of God. No, they changed the worldview in which such a sentence could still rightly be understood.

This is why catechesis alone will not save us, and why our confessions, however carefully worded, have not successfully defeated these ideologies. However, the hope of proper discipleship remains.

Discipleship is how worldviews are rebuilt, and that is what tradition does.

My book is not yet in print, but I did want to share some of my heart around it with you. Release is currently unknown, but I will be able to communicate more within the coming weeks.

-Corné

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No matter how you decide to define it, the church father we will be covering today stands at the centre of this reading. Now, I will show some restraint right here and state that in my attempt to show this reading as present in this father’s work, I have to emphasise that modern categories can not be excavated within the past, but as De Lubac points out, this recovery should be one of regression.

Think of it as shedding the modernity from our minds as we travel back in time to inhabit the world of the patristics. And for this particular essay, we will be regressing all the way back to the 3rd century, where we meet Origen of Alexandria.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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This is a story I have obviously contemplated a lot over the past few years; I mean, I named my Substack after it, but it is because I believe this story teaches us something about the ways of God that brings us comfort yet also calls us higher.

Therefore, today you will all get to see into the heart behind the Altar at Moriah and how we got here.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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When we think of this, we think of the parable in Luke 14:7-11 that reads:

7 When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. 8 “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; 9 and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. 10 But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. 11 For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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There is, in a reading of this passage, this great tension that applies to everyday life. Choose to make yourself humble and less important, and your reward shall be being “exalted.” However, this is precisely the problem. Christ is not teaching about the action one takes but rather the heart posture that produces the action. There are actions that may look humble in themselves, but if they are not accompanied by hearts touched by humility, the actions become self-righteous attempts at seeming pious to onlookers, and therefore the reward is not true exaltation but admiration from the world.

This should call our minds back to another teaching of Christ in Matthew 6:5-6:

5 “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.1

Which we will unpack more later on. Let it just for now sit in the back of your mind.

The reason why I point it out right now is that I believe that we have held this tension backwards. Humility is not a reward we receive because of our actions, it is God’s grace working in as making us more capacious—the more humble one becomes, the more spacious the heart grows, and the more completely it fills with God’s presence.

The reason behind all this is that according to our Teacher, humility prepares us to receive the manifestation of God.

“You have hidden these things from the wise and the understanding and have revealed them to the little ones (Mt 11:23).

Who are these little ones? They are the humble.… What are we, after all, however great we may be? If we are humble, if we have merited to be counted among the little ones, we shall also merit the happiness of seeing God’s unveiled face. This circles back to St Thomas’s definition of seeing ourselves rightly as the sinners we are, who are completely dependent on God for anything and everything.

Speaking of the centurion who regarded himself as unworthy to receive the Lord into his house, St Augustine says:

“Humility was the door through which the Lord entered to take full possession of one whom he already possessed.”2

Humility is the first. According to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, the entire construction of Christian perfection is founded upon humility. Without it neither right spiritual life, nor the acquisition of any gifts of the Holy Spirit are possible. What is Christian humility? According to the Gospels, it is first of all poorness of spirit (Mt 5:3)—a state of the soul which proceeds from the vision of one’s own sinfulness and incapability of freeing oneself from the oppression of the passions through one’s own efforts, without God’s help.3

This is the disposition of the humble heart before God. It is one of dependence and recognition of the One who is the great I AM. I am at this point reminded of the story of when C.S. Lewis was asked why an all-powerful God did not just eliminate all evil from the world. Lewis answered that if God did that, we would all cease to exist.

We are often so focused on the postures and actions of others because I believe that the distractions of this world and the lives of each other give us a comforting out from turning inwards and truly seeing our own brokenness. If we spent half the time we spend talking about the lives of others looking inward and quieting our hearts before the Lord and allowing Him to see it, then we would become quite grieved at our brokenness.

It is a sad and uncomfortable truth, and yet never has the world made it easier for us to be so distracted that we never cultivate humility in the hidden place. That is because it is exactly that. A hidden place. No one will reward you for your time spent there; no one will be captivated by your “holiness”, and no one will be impressed by it. The only reward found in the secret place is the heart of God.

And I ask myself all the time. When did that stop being enough? Why is it that every excuse I can find to not enter that place is always sufficient, yet if it were anything else I stood to lose, I would not part with it so easily?

And if I am honest, it is because being there is hard and uncomfortable at times. I become deeply aware of my shortcomings, and it hurts. I realise how much I have chosen other things over God that, in hindsight, never feel worth it, yet my brokenness always manages to convince me that it is.

But the hope that we all have is that God is a good Father who rejoices in our longing and seeking after His presence, and He is quick to forgive those with a contrite heart. And it is in this hidden place in His preferred language of silence that He meets us.

Fr Boniface Hicks reminds us that in our relationship with God, we need to become like little children, indeed, like the humblest one taking the lowest place, desiring to be the lowest of all creatures, even lower than Satan himself! Hiddenness and littleness go together with humility into one perfect disposition of hiddenness in which to better see and hear Him in His hiddenness. This is the kind of love shown and given to us in the poverty and suffering of Christ who lays down His life for us and never comes down from the Cross by engaging Divine power.4

Pope Benedict XVI writes on Jesus’s humility in the washing of the feet and reminds us:

What the Letter to the Philippians says in its great Christological hymn—namely, that unlike Adam, who had tried to grasp divinity for himself, Christ moves in the opposite direction, coming down from his divinity into humanity, taking the form of a servant and becoming obedient even to death on a cross (cf. 2:7-8) —all this is rendered visible in a single gesture. Jesus represents the whole of his saving ministry in one symbolic act.5

Christ divests Himself of His divine splendour; He kneels before us; he washes and dries our soiled feet, in order to make us fit to sit at table for God’s wedding feast.

He kneels before us… God kneels before us. The love and humility of a perfect being who holds the whole world together to willingly kneel before sinners, just so that He could be in relationship with us.

This is because humility and love cannot be separated from one another. Because it is through love that Christ humbled Himself, and it is through love for Him that we are called to act humbly in obedience so that we may carry light into the world. Nowhere is this light better cultivated than in the hidden place, where God comforts, loves and transforms us into who we were always created to be.

I end with this beautiful reminder from Alexander Schmemann:

For if we ask for liberation from sloth, despair, lust of power and idle talk, we are asking for the removal of barriers to love, barriers that prevent love from entering our heart. And chastity, humility, and patience are the building blocks, the roots, the first shoots of love. Therefore, when the word love finally falls upon our ears as if from heaven itself, we already know that love is not simply from God, but is God himself who enters our hearts, which are now cleansed and adorned with chastity, humility and patience, are now prepared to be a temple through the presence, light and all-conquering power of God’s love.6

-Corné

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This is true for every scholar, and no one is truly immune from ever having a bad take. That is just the circle of life. However, for today's father, his one bad take cost him his sainthood, despite being responsible for a lot of the language we have surrounding the Trinity today and being often called the father of Latin/Western Christian theology.

Thus proving that the discipline of theology is also a vocation in which you live by the sword and also die by the sword.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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I am looking at you, Judges 4:21 and Ezekiel 23:20.

But in all seriousness, there are certain stories of figures in scripture who just appear and then disappear, or they are just brief mentions in a passing comment. I am thinking of two specific characters in Genesis. Enoch and Melchizedek. I want the Enoch treatment on my tombstone one day: “He walked with God, and then he was no more.”

I know we have started today’s entry into our Friday devotional series on a whimsical note, but today I want to turn your attention to the other figure I just mentioned, and that is Melchizedek in Genesis 14:18-20.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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Now, long-time readers know this about me. I have written about this posture of writing and the reasons why I write on and off over the past year. Half of the time, I think I needed to write these pieces because it helped me process this vocation I found myself in, and the other half I think I felt the need to explain myself to an imaginary barrier of insecurity that didn’t feel like it was my place to write anything of significance to anybody at my age.

Now, has any of this changed? No, not really. I haven’t been as vulnerable on here as consistently as I was in a past season, but that's because a new season of life requires new rules for healthy relationships. I got married recently, so a lot of things I process now are contained within and only within that covenantal safety net.

Another thing that has changed is a bigger platform and a new faculty role. I now have 3 times the subscribers I had a year ago, thank you Lord, and I also now am a chair of a theological program whose students read my work and therefore all this requires a certain level of tact and confidentiality that wasn’t required before.

However, today I finally feel comfortable sharing some thoughts around a recent season that I think might be of use to my readers.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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Now the past 6 months of my life have felt like the shedding of a skin that no longer fits me. And when I say this, I mean mostly in the relationship aspect. Yes, of course, your external relationships will change when you get married, but this doesn’t really have anything to do with that. In the past few months, I have been mourning former relationships, and I have also realised that some relationships required me to step out of. And lastly, I also realised that my relationship towards certain things and priorities has had to change as well.

What made me realise all this? Well, it was because through the Lord’s grace I was allowed to be truly honest with myself about certain things and people in my life, and I realised that had to change, not just because I had been enlightened to something new but because I knew that if I continued on this path it would spiritually destroy me.

This brings me to a point that I have to preface as my opinion. I believe that all of the spiritual formation techniques that we learn are all just ways in which we help ourselves shed the lies that we believe about ourselves, good and bad, so that we might be truly honest with ourselves and see ourselves as we truly are before God.

Spiritual formation necessitates that we are able to be honest with ourselves so that we might diagnose the illness in our souls and therefore receive its cure from God through His love.

The Lord was kind to me in this season; He shed the scales from my eyes, and I realised that I was pretending to be something I am not. I was pretending that the people who had supported me in a previous season, and who had now turned their backs on me, hadn't hurt me. What a fool I was to think that as long as I stared at the Light, I wouldn’t be affected by the pain and hurt around me.

I was idolising martyrdom while not allowing myself to actually be martyred, and in this I found that I had begun to deceive myself through the pursuit of righteousness. How fickle I was to think that my intentions were pure, yet I had burned myself with my own misplaced zeal and was back to where I started.

Just a man standing before God.

Yet I did not need to take a solitary leap as Kierkegaard suggested, for instead the Body of Christ carried me where I needed to go. God’s people and His church sustained me and poured wisdom into me. The Church militant and the Church triumphant became a place of refuge for me. They stoked the flames of my heart and helped me see where it was I needed to go, what it was I needed to lay down, and what dreams needed to be laid in the tomb of Christ so that they might be resurrected.

Yet the Church militant was also the skin that needed to be shed, not the institution but some of its members. And here is one of the great tensions of our faith. We need people, and they need us, but nobody will hurt us more than those closest to us. That is because the bitter reality of this life is that not everybody walks with us forever; some stay only for a while and then become lessons we learn from.

St. Paul himself had a running mate for the race that he was called to run. When Paul couldn’t locate Titus in Troas, his anxiety was so acute that he abandoned his ministry there and travelled to Macedonia to find him (2 Cor 2:13)—demonstrating how essential Titus had become to Paul’s work and peace of mind.

How many of us have people like this in our lives? When we see them or talk to them about our problems, they bring us this sense of peace. Maybe we have friends who work with us who, when we are in the trenches, we look over at them and find comfort knowing that we have each other’s back.

Paul identified Titus as his “partner and co-worker” in ministry (2 Cor 8:23), making him such a friend as we just described. See, God had given Titus the same commitment to the Corinthian church that Paul possessed, and Titus pursued this work eagerly of his own initiative (2 Cor 8:16–17). Their relationship was built on shared mission and mutual spiritual alignment.

Wonderful! Many of us have people like that in our lives who we run with and feel like God has put in our lives to help us run our race, because they are running the same race as well.

Titus brought Paul consolation often, not only through his presence but through news of the Corinthians’ longing, mourning, and zeal (2 Cor 7:6–7). Titus’s own peace of mind, gained through witnessing the Corinthians’ obedience, multiplied Paul’s joy (2 Cor 7:13–15). Their partnership created a spiritual synergy—Titus wasn’t simply accompanying Paul; he was amplifying the work’s effectiveness and deepening the relational bonds Paul had established.

This brothers-in-arms relationship, where you know what you are doing together is greater than the sum of what you can do apart, is a rare and special relationship that deserves to be highlighted and cherished.

However, for every Titus in your life, you will have about 10 Barnabasses (Barnabi? Idk what the plural for Barnabas is). This is bleak. I know, but it is also truer than most would like to admit.

Paul and Barnabas clashed over whether John Mark should join them in the mission, with Paul upset that Mark had deserted them in Perga on the first missionary journey. Their disagreement is described as a “sharp disagreement,” and the issue split the team, so Barnabas and John Mark returned to Cyprus, while Paul and Silas went back through Tarsus to the south Galatian churches.1

The relational wound cuts deeper when you consider what preceded it. Paul and Barnabas had been genuine partners—they’d endured hardship together, and Barnabas had been instrumental in bringing Paul into ministry. Yet one moment of perceived abandonment by Mark fractured that partnership so severely that Paul couldn’t move past it. Where Titus became increasingly irreplaceable to Paul, Mark’s early failure made him expendable in Paul’s eyes.

What’s striking is that the rupture was not permanent, as Mark and Paul were reconciled later in Paul's ministry. By the end of Paul’s life, he valued Mark’s service deeply. But the years of separation created a lasting scar. Paul had to learn what Barnabas understood instinctively: that one failure doesn’t define a person’s entire trajectory.

The purpose of this is not to see how bleak life with people is, but to understand that we all have brokenness in us that we don’t always fully understand and that brokenness unfortunately makes relationships hard. And the loss of these relationships should be mourned and learnt from.

However, not every loss is actually a loss. This truth extends beyond people into the realm of work, possessions, and almost everything you can think of.

In the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, he teaches that the loss of exterior goods may actually be a blessing in disguise in the case of a good person (for instance, when they become too consumerist), even though it retains its penal character insofar as it goes against her will. In this case, what feels like deprivation can be divine mercy. The pain is real, but the intention behind it is redemptive.2

What about people? Well, here is the tough news I hate to break, but unfortunately have come to know through my own personal failure. When God removes someone from your life, especially if they are a Christian, it is God’s way of punishing sin and the start of redeeming it.

Relationships are God’s idea, and as I said earlier, they can help us be carried towards God, but they can also do the opposite. This is because of sin. Unfortunately, we are sinful people, and as I said, when that mixes with someone else’s, then it creates a break in the relationship.

Sometimes it is only one person’s fault, and the Lord removes either them or you for the sake of the other, but more often than not the fault lies with both. The loss of this relationship then is God’s punishment on sin so that through it we might be healed and saved.

God’s punishment is a means of healing the disorder that is sin. Thus, punishment of sin can have a medicinal character, although not necessarily: afflictions and loss of temporal goods might have the opposite effect, by enticing the sinner to move even further away from God. God’s removals serve as an opportunity for healing and transformation.

This is, unfortunately, the way of life. But it is also where I have learnt to see the hand of the Lord most clearly. For if God can order even the loss of a friend towards my healing, then there is nothing in my life that falls outside His providence — nothing so broken that He cannot bend it towards the end for which He made me.

Providence is God ordering all things, even the sin and the fracture themselves, towards a good I could not have chosen for myself. Two things have served me in learning to trust this: obedience and attention. And I have found that I cannot have one without the other.

Obedience, when it is animated by love rather than by fear, is what stops me from clawing the old skin back on. It is the posture of a man who trusts that the God who removed something did so with a Father’s hand. And attention is what lets me see it. Without attention, obedience becomes mere compliance, a gritting of the teeth. With it, obedience becomes participation: I begin to perceive that even the painful removals were mercy, that the deprivation was a kind of love.

So I have stopped mourning the shed skin as though I had lost some part of myself. I did not lose it. It was taken, gently, by the One who is making me new. I am still just a man standing before God — but now I am standing in skin that has begun, at last, to fit again.

-Corné

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Now I know you are wondering what ball knowledge and the church fathers have in common with my theological conversations with my wife. And the answer is everything and nothing at the same time. Now my wife is brilliant, but she is also early in her theological studies right now, so being able to talk with someone who is ahead of her on this journey just brings her further along in real-time learning.

This has also been my experience when I get to talk with professors and senior researchers. Just when I think that I am more informed than most, I talk to one of these guys, and my ego is immediately shattered. This happened to me last year when I talked with a patristics professor, and he shared some ball knowledge with me on today’s church father.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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The most common answer I hear is that the gospel gives us hope for what lies beyond this life, and that we must simply keep our eyes fixed there. That answer is true. It is also, on its own, an evasion. It is true in what it affirms and thin in what it leaves out, because it quietly concedes that this life is a corridor to be endured rather than a table to be received. The Teacher will not let us have it that cheaply, and neither will the Tradition.

The Teacher himself concludes that we are to enjoy this life. Not just hope for the next. This life that we hold is something to be enjoyed. And this is the perspective of the sacramental worldview I have written about so often. So how is today any different?

Today is different because sometimes life does suck. Sometimes people suck. And sometimes life is just hard, and we end up being hurt or burned or disappointed. What do we do with that? How do we engage with these situations biblically?

For that, we turn to Proverbs 9, and we will see that the answer lies in receiving everything as a gift and that the answer lies in a eucharistic posture of heart, which receives everything as gift and grasps nothing as possession.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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As teachers at any level, we have the power to guide someone into divine revelation, but also the power to deceive them. That is why St. James warns us in James 3 of wanting to become teachers:

3 Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. 2 For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. 3 If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. 4 Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. 5 So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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The cliché of “with great power comes great responsibility” comes to mind. There is a great power within the tongue; James compares it to a small spark that can easily set a whole fire ablaze. Now, often when people talk about the power of the tongue, they might dive into an exposition of James 3, but today I actually want to look at the ontological nature of words themselves.

Now I first have to clarify a category of teachers here. Not all of us are teachers in the same way, but we all are teachers in a way. Stay-at-home mothers are the teachers of their kids, and just like a seminary professor can lead someone closer to God or further away from them, so too can the mother influence the salvation of the eternal souls of her kids.

Some people just teach at a larger scale with a larger influence, meaning that instead of the 4 kids at home, they have 400 church members who rely on their guidance to understand the ways of God, and this teacher will be held accountable for every word they utter to every single soul who hears them.

No wonder James issues this warning. In words there is the power to create and the power to destroy. Think about it. In biblical theology, God initiates all speech by speaking creation into existence. God is the first one to speak in the Bible; he “speaks” (אָמַר, ʾāmar) and brings forth the entire created realm (Gen 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24). People also possess the ability to speak and communicate with one another (Gen 4:8) and God (Gen 3:10, 12). The theological emphasis in the Bible is that a right way to use one’s speech exists.1

Speech is used properly when it aligns with the nature of God and his commandments. This can be seen in the Decalogue, where some transgressions involve improper use of one’s speech (Exod 20:7, 16). Some things should and should not be said, and when speech is performed in concert with God’s moral will, an act of worship occurs.

If, as Paul says in 1 Cor 10:31, all human activity has the glory of God as its aim, then all speech that detracts from this aim would be improper—what the Bible calls sin. What makes speaking “improper” or “proper” depends on the intent and motivation of the human heart.

And if we are to understand human intent, we have to see it through the Incarnation. It is through God’s Word that the world came into being for His glory, and it is through the Word made flesh that a fallen world is now being recreated into its original, glorified form.

This statement reveals two things to us for our context. We are a fallen humanity that can create and destroy through our speech, and that the words we choose are both influenced by something and directed towards something. The key difference being that before Christ there was no real way to consistently choose life, but through the incarnation Christ has come to redeem speech itself.

The language of faith teaches us about living the life of faith. This dynamic flows from the logic of the Incarnation: human words can reveal the truth about the Word made flesh, and so conform us to Christ.

The believer is obliged, then, to employ the language of faith, and to do so, moreover, with a confidence that comes from his own personal adherence to the truth. In morals, the language of faith expresses not only the commandments and the teachings of the Church, but also the vocabulary of the virtues, which translates what the Church teaches into the everyday, and easily recognisable, circumstances of human life.2

The Church and our faith have a vocabulary, and the clearest form of this we see is within the liturgies of the Church, which finds its form within the liturgy of the Israelites.

I mentioned earlier that one of my great joys of being a teacher is that I get to guide students in their thinking. One of the most consistent ways I have done this has been through conversations with pastors on the Eucharistic liturgy.

I wrote my book The Living Banquet exactly because I was having these conversations so regularly that I thought it was just easier to write my answers down for people to consult on their own.

Recently I was asked by my friend, Christian, about the “form” of the liturgy. By form I mean the prescribed, established words and ritual actions used to conduct public worship. Form goes together with the "matter" (the physical elements like bread, wine, or water), and the correct use of both is required for liturgies and sacraments to be validly celebrated.

The classical expression of this understanding of matter and form as, respectively, “potency” and “act” in the sacraments comes from St. Augustine, who, speaking of Baptism, says:

Take away the word, and what is the water except water? The word is added to the elemental substance, and it becomes a sacrament, also itself, as it were, a visible word.… Whence is this power of water of such magnitude that it touches the body and yet washes clean the heart, except from the word’s effecting it, not because it is said, but because it is believed? For also in the word itself the passing sound is one thing, the abiding power another.3

This power operates on multiple levels. First, words carry signification more precisely than material things, whose meaning is largely given and often ambiguous—words pin down what things cannot specify on their own. Water, in the first century, for instance, can symbolise life, purification, or danger. It is only through the spoken formula of “I baptise you” that it is clarified that water functions as a sign of purification in baptism.

Beyond mere clarification, the word operates theologically. The fathers drew an analogy between the Incarnation and sacraments—as the Word was joined to palpable flesh in Christ, so a word is added to a palpable element to constitute a sacrament.

The water touches the flesh and cleanses the heart. It cannot do this, of course, by its aquatic properties alone, but rather inasmuch as it is accompanied by the word. The word is added to the element, and the sacrament is formed, which is like a visible word (accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum, etiam ipsum tamquam uisibile uerbum).4

Note that the word, here, is not composed of matter and idea only, but also of matter and communicative force: it is a saving word, a word of vocation or promise; it is the word of faith, capable of transforming the one who receives it. And it is this transformative power I want to hone in on.

We can try to better understand this reality by borrowing a patristic axiom. This axiom is the aproslepton, atherapeuton, “that which was not assumed was not healed.” Christ assumed our human voice and therefore redeemed it. This means that human language has been redeemed and filled with new meaning and power. This implies the importance of learning from the words of the incarnate Word.

St. Gregory of Nyssa articulates why God employs words at all. Since finite human nature cannot grasp the superior nature of the Most High, God brings divine power down to the level of human weakness, bestowing grace through words—adapting himself to humanity like a tender mother joining in her child’s utterances, so that through feelings corresponding to our own we might lay hold of the Divine nature by means of the words which His foresight has given.

For as by Divine dispensation the sun, tempering the intensity of his full beams with the intervening air, pours down light as well as heat on those who receive his rays, being himself unapproachable by reason of the weakness of our nature, so the Divine power, after the manner of the illustration I have used, though exalted far above our nature and inaccessible to all approach, like a tender mother who joins in the inarticulate utterances of her babe, gives to our human nature what it is capable of receiving; and thus in the various manifestations of God to man He both adapts Himself to man and speaks in human language, and assumes wrath, and pity, and such-like emotions, so that through feelings corresponding to our own our infantile life might be led as by hand, and lay hold of the Divine nature by means of the words which His foresight has given.5

This patristic vision of speech stands remarkably close to James. For the fathers, idle talk and an empty mind do not stay confined to the lips; they spread into our actions and finally into the whole shape of a life. It is the same logic James follows: the one who can bridle his tongue governs his whole body, while the one who indulges the tongue soon finds his conduct following after it.

This is why speech must be handled with such care. Its origin is divine, its beginning in the world solemn, yet its effects on others and on ourselves are genuinely dangerous. It is to be spent only on objects worthy of it, never squandered on lying, slander, or quarrelling.

Rightly used, speech becomes a living echo in us, of the Word of our Creator; a bright expression of our purified nature; a powerful organ of our empire over other creatures.

Here, then, is why the fathers insisted so strictly on sacramental form. The precise words of the liturgy are not arbitrary formulae, still less magic syllables that coerce grace.

They are redeemed utterances — human speech assumed by the Word and now able to align human action with divine intention. And what is true at the altar is true, in its measure, every time we open our mouths.

For this is finally the point. We are formed by what we speak. Our words do not merely report the state of our hearts; they shape it — and they shape the hearts of everyone within earshot. James saw this. The tongue that blesses God and curses those made in His likeness betrays a divided heart, and a divided heart cannot stay hidden, because it keeps speaking.

So the question every believer must ask is not only whether our words are true or false, kind or cruel. But are we speaking the speech of God, or the speech of the world?

Our words are diagnostic. They tell us who we are and where our treasure lies; they are among the surest signs of our spiritual health. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Matthew 12:34).

However, the same Word who assumed our flesh assumed our voice, and what He assumed He has healed. Our speech has been redeemed at its root. The liturgy rehearses that redemption week by week, teaching our tongues the vocabulary of heaven so that, slowly, our ordinary words might be conformed to it.

We learn to speak as children do, by listening, and the Church, joining her inarticulate children in their utterances, teaches us to say after her the words His foresight has given.

Take away the word, and what is left but water? Add the word, and there is a sacrament. Add the Word, and there is a world made new.

-Corné

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And if I am honest, I am still contemplating the depths of this theological framework. This was not an idea that I randomly came up with one day, nor was it something I learned in a modern theological work, but something I found in the gold mine of tradition handed down to the Church by the Fathers.

This framework of seeing the world was first handed to me by St. Irenaeus in his popular work Against Heresies. This work was a systematic refutation of Gnosticism, which claimed apostolic authority for its secret teachings.

This polemical context shaped his entire theological project: Irenaeus grounded his response in Scripture, ecclesiastical authority, and tradition, while emphasising the unified work of Father and Son in revelation and redemption.

This is what we are discussing today.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

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I know many of us can relate to this feeling. We have all dealt with our fair share of struggles because of our faith and obedience to God. Christ Himself tells us that we will be persecuted in this life, for if this world hated a perfect man and persecuted Him, then what hope do we sinners have of escaping its wicked ways?

However, because our Blessed Lord came and took on human flesh and through His incarnation and passion sanctified the human experience, not by removing its brokenness completely but by sanctifying it and giving it new meaning. Therefore, when we pray and seek God’s face, we know that He hears us.

If you’re new to The Altar of Moriah, welcome! My name is Corné Gieselbach. I’m a theologian, author, and Chair of the Undergraduate program at TheosSeminary, with a PhD candidacy in historical dogmatics beginning this October. I publish every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Paid subscribers receive every post; this includes Academy posts and devotional posts. Free subscribers receive weekly Wednesday essays. If this piece resonates, consider subscribing to support the work.

Subscribe now

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