John Behr > Quotes

“By his gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man and by exchanging his condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of his love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominization.45 [1084D] For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystey of his embodiment.”
― John Behr, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ

“As Maximus explains in Ad Thalassium 64, each law has its own proper discipline (ἀγωγή) and its own place within the gospel of Jesus. The natural law trains us in the basic solidarity and single-mindedness appropriate to individual human beings who share a common nature; it is enshrined in Jesus’s Golden Rule (Mt 7:12; Lk 6:31). The scriptural law leads to a higher discipline wherein human beings are motivated no longer by the mere fear of divine punishment but by a deep-seated embrace of the principle of mutual love. “For the law of nature,” writes Maximus, “consists in natural reason assuming control of the senses, while the scriptural law, or the fulfillment of the scriptural law, consists in the natural reason acquiring a spiritual desire conducive to a relation of mutuality ith others of the same human nature.”44 The essence of the scriptural law is thus summarized in Jesus’s dictum Love your neighbor as yourself (Lev 19:18; Mt 5:43; 19:19; 22:39; Mk 12:31). Finally, the spiritual law, or law of grace, leads humanity to the ultimate imitation of the love of Christ demonstrated in the incarnation, a love which raises us to the level of loving others even above ourselves, a sure sign of the radical grace of deification. It is enshrined in Jesus’s teaching that There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend (Jn 15:13).”
― John Behr, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ

“For the glory of the human being is God, while the vessel of the workings of God, and of all his wisdom and power is the human being.”
― John Behr, The Mystery of Christ

“It is not the mark of a dead man, he continues, to persuade others to believe in him, to persuade them to live a righteous life and despise the idols they formerly worshipped: it is Christians themselves who are the witnesses of Christ’s resurrection”
― John Behr, The Mystery of Christ

“The whole economy of God is thus structured in such a way that we might learn the truth about God and the human being, and, in the end, become a living human being, the glory of God.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“The essence of the scriptural law is thus summarized in Jesus’s dictum Love your neighbor as yourself (Lev 19:18; Mt 5:43; 19:19; 22:39; Mk 12:31). Finally, the spiritual law, or law of grace, leads humanity to the ultimate imitation of the love of Christ demonstrated in the incarnation, a love which raises us to the level of loving others even above ourselves, a sure sign of the radical grace of deification. It is enshrined in Jesus’s teaching that There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend (Jn 15:13).”
― John Behr, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings

“For antiquity, on the other hand, the truth of Christ is eternal, or better, timeless: the crucified and risen Lord is the one of whom scripture has always spoken. Yet, as the disciples come to recognize him, as the subject of scripture and in the breaking of bread, he disappears from their sight (Lk 24.31). The Christ of Christian faith, revealed concretely in and through the apostolic proclamation of the crucified and risen Lord in accordance with scripture, is an eschatological figure, the Coming One.”
― Fr. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ

“near universal in the fourth century, of celebrating the Lord’s resurrection on a Sunday, the practice which was endorsed by the decision of the Council of Nicaea in 325 to separate the date of Pascha from the Jewish calendar and to insist that it be celebrated universally on the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“quite simply, a work such as On the Incarnation might not be about what we have become conditioned to expect when hearing the term ‘Incarnation’.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“, yet always open to further revision and deeper insight.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“The apostasy of sin of course has meant that, in Irenaeus’ words, we who ‘are of God by nature’ have become alienated from God, ‘alienated contrary to nature’, resulting in our forgetting of our original condition.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“John’s unique claim to be an eyewitness of the Passion—the apocalyptic moment par excellence, the ‘Apocalypse of God’ as de Boer put it—is inseparable from his deeper interpretation of Scripture.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“The third assumption is that ‘Scripture is perfect and perfectly harmonious’. If it is cryptic, but opened in the last times, then it is found to speak of the one who opens the books:”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“as Dunn has it, that the substitution of ‘flesh’ for ‘bread’ in 6:51c–58 is ‘a deliberate attempt to exclude doceticism by heavily, if somewhat crudely, underscoring the reality of the incarnation in all its offensiveness’, the situation of John 6 being, according to Dunn, ‘one where the Christology of docetism has made a strong challenge’.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“Scripture, as the Word of God addressed to us, in human words, breaks through our forgetfulness of our originary condition; it calls us back, as prodigals, to our primal condition as sons of the Father.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“the Gospel of John, as Ashton acknowledges, ‘is obviously not an apocalypse’.45 Instead, Ashton suggested that it is an apocalypse, ‘in reverse, upside down, inside out’.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“What are we to make of his ‘incarnational’ theology? What is meant by ‘Incarnation’ anyway, despite it being such a beguilingly easy concept to use? Who is this Word and what is the ‘flesh’ that the Word becomes?”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“his elevation upon the cross, which in turn is the true judgement seat: his earlier words, ‘Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out, and I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all to myself’ were said, John makes clear, ‘to show by what death he was to die’ (12:31–3).”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“Henry opens up the phenomenological structure of Christianity, as given to us especially by John, manifesting Truth in the generation of Life in the Living One, incarnate in or as flesh, and the call to Life given by Christ’s own words.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“this is indeed the glorious plan, and project, of God: ‘Let us make a human being in our image’ (Gen. 1:26), completed upon the cross with Christ’s words, ‘it is finished’, brought to perfection (19:30). This life is the light of human beings; it is, as we have seen, when he attains to the light that Ignatius will become a living human being (Rom. 6).”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“concerning himself’ (Luke 24:27). Kugel’s fourth assumption is that Scripture ‘is somehow divinely sanctioned, of divine provenance, or divinely inspired’.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“It is precisely, just as it is in John’s Gospel, because of the presence of God within the believer and the community that individually and collectively they are the temple of the living God.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“notion of authorial intent or meaning. Unless such meaning is taken into account, Skinner argues, a further mythology arises, that of prolepsis or anticipation. This is generated, as Skinner puts it, ‘when we are more interested in the retrospective significance of a given episode than its meaning for the agent at the time’.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“As Maximus further concludes, the three laws exhibit the principal ends to which human nature is called: the natural law grants us the fundamental enjoyment of being (τὸ εἶναι), the scriptural law the enjoyment of a higher well-being (τὸ εὖ εἶναι), the spiritual law the beatific grace of eternal well-being (τὸ ἀεὶ εὖ εἶναι).”
― John Behr, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ

“the identification of the bread descending from heaven and the flesh of the Son of Man, given for the life of the world, that is, in the Passion, so that the act of chewing his flesh is not cannibalism but the consumption of the life-giving flesh of the Son of Man.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“Irenaeus notes that the action by which Jesus healed the man born blind (and therefore not as a result of human causes) parallels the action by which God created human beings at the beginning, taking clay from the earth and mixing his own power with it, so that, as this is done ‘that the works of God might be made manifest in him’,”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“Seeing’ Christ, for John, does not mean to ‘see’ him as the world looked upon Jesus before his Passion, but rather to live as Christ lives, to share in the pathos of his life, the pathos of Life that he is.”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“what the Father does, and the Son seeing this does likewise, is to ‘raise [ἐγείρει] the dead and give them life’ (5:21),”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“Irenaeus did not pull off ‘the literary coup of the century’,4 but continued the tradition witnessing to what had been known ‘from the beginning’ (1 John 1:1).”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology

“in Ephesians: the mystery of the will of God from before the foundations of the world was to unite all things in Christ (cf. Eph. 1:1–10), to bring about one new human being instead of the two, ‘reconciling us both to God in one body through the cross’ (Eph. 2:15–16).”
― John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology