To Teach with Authority

BK does not stand for Byzantine Catholic. It stands for Burger King. At Burger King, you can have it your way. But not here.

We are a Church that makes bold to teach with authority. Here, we cannot pick and choose what doctrine we will believe. The word heresy comes from the Greek αἵρεσις, meaning “choice – a taking or a choosing.” Picking and choosing what you believe according to your tastes or inclinations or according to what makes sense to you at the time is heresy and we condemn heresy in the Church.

If we would consider ourselves members of the Church, we must listen to the Church with humility and not run off to hear whatever ideas tickle our ears (2 Tim 4:3). We must believe the teaching of the Church even more than our own ideas. This is hard for individualist Americans to hear.

Some people treat their membership in the Church as a birthright. Membership in the Church is not a birthright. I mean to say, for example, you are not a Byzantine Catholic solely as a result of who your parents are, even though they very often have something to do with it.

At your initiation into the Church, you are required to profess the faith expressed in the Nicene Creed, given to us by the first two ecumenical councils. If you are a baby, your godparents must profess the faith for you. By so doing, they take on the solemn task of doing all they can to raise you as a believer. If they fail in that task and you do not believe, then you do not belong to the Church, which is the body of Christ. It is those who believe that will live in Christ.

Some people think they belong to the Church by virtue of attendance alone (or even by virtue of donations alone!). Even coming to church every Sunday of your life does not make you a member of the Church, if you do not believe the faith we profess. Don’t get me wrong; it’s necessary to show up and all are welcome, but becoming and remaining a member of the body of Christ requires giving him your heart, mind, and soul and not merely your butt in the seat.

To belong to Christ, to be a member of his body, the Church, you must profess the true faith and condemn the heresies, which deny this or that aspect of the faith. Every heresy contains a half-truth, overemphasized to the expense of another truth. Every heresy attempts to make human sense of the divine mystery, and to subject God to human reason. This is grievous disrespect of God. The heretic has no fear of God.

The first six ecumenical councils, which we commemorate on this Sunday, worked always to preserve the mystery against heresy and to proclaim the revealed saving truths we know as dogmas. A dogma is not some odious thing. It is the truth of our salvation revealed to us by God. Dogmas set us free. These saving dogmas are expressed preeminently in the Nicene Creed, which we profess at every Divine Liturgy.

The term “dogmatic” in our culture has come to mean someone who is overly rigid and thinks they know more than do. “Don’t be so dogmatic,” we hear. “Be more open minded.” But as G.K Chesterton observed, “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

And he also said, “An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth. Mouths and minds were made to shut; they were made to open only in order to shut.” [i]

I would add that, as with the mouth, it’s important to be able to open your mind repeatedly, lest you starve to death, but it’s just as important to then close it again repeatedly.

And I will say this: It really is true that there are many Christians who think they know more than they do. Not every idea that pops into our Christian heads is a dogma. Not every question has an answer that has been revealed to us by God. It is a common error to regard a widely held opinion to be a dogma. We know less than we tend to think we do.

Why God does not want us to know everything, I do not know, but he does not. He wants us to know him (John 17:3), not necessarily to know things – or even everything about him. He gives us the things we do need to know about him and we can trust that what he has given us is sufficient without thinking we have to have all the answers.

We remain ignorant of many things, and, as the free children of God, we are free to have opinions about these things. There’s nothing wrong with having opinions so long as we hold them as opinions and not as dogmas – and so long as they do not go against the dogmas. We should hold our opinions lightly and adhere to the saving dogmas fiercely. Be ready to die for the latter, but not so much the former. We may keep our opinions at least until God shows us that the truth is otherwise than we thought. Our minds must be malleable in God’s hands, but not in the hands of just anyone.

We can and we must hold fast to what has been revealed to us. To dogma. To the creed – the symbol of faith.

But how can we trust this statement of belief, though? There are some Protestants who reject all creeds or say things like, “the Bible is my creed.” How do we know who to believe?

Well, let’s go back to the source – to the Lord. Jesus has authority from his Father over all flesh (John 17:2). And he says, “I have given to [the apostles] the words which [the Father has] given me; and they have received them” (John 17:8). How can we receive these same words? The words spoken with authority. The words we know to be true because they are from God, who is Truth himself. They were given to the apostles and so it is through the apostles that we receive them.

We call this the apostolic tradition. Traditio means “to hand over” or “to pass down.” The apostles received the words of the Father from Jesus himself and they have passed them down to us under the protection and by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Bible is, indeed, one of the best ways they have done this for us, but it is not the only way.

They also passed on their apostolic authority to the bishops, who always have the authority to teach the faith and to preserve the apostolic tradition. This tradition, which, remember, is the words of the Father given to the apostles by Jesus Christ and passed down to us, is best expressed when the bishops gather together in council and speak with one voice. When all the Church receives their teaching, we call this an ecumenical council. The saving and life-giving dogmas these councils express for us are worthy of our belief. Therefore, at every Divine Liturgy and also at Compline, we profess the creed they have given us. Listen carefully to the words. Ponder them in your hearts. These are words given to us by God.

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[i] (Illustrated London News. October 10, 1908)

Authority Under Authority

All of us are under authority. Most of us have some authority. Many of us have problems with authority.

A mother says to her son, "Go."

And the son says, "Send my brother instead. He's not doing anything."

A priest says to his parishioners, "Come."

And they say, "Maybe we'll come next time. We're too busy at the moment."

A manager says to his worker, "Do this."

And the worker says, "Do it yourself."

Maybe the worker gets fired for this, but it feels really good for a minute. Many of us would like to say something like that to our boss, because many of us have problems with authority.

Of course, maybe the parent or the priest or the boss is an autocratic tyrant. That's another kind of problem with authority – a failure of the authority to recognize that they are also under authority. There’s an important distinction between being authoritative and being authoritarian.

Our society is so given over to democratic ideas, we may be particularly bad at understanding and accepting authority – other than our own authority over our own selves. Nobody else better tell me what to do, we think. We forget – some of us – that heaven is a kingdom. And that Jesus Christ is King – not president – of every nation. Poland actually crowned Jesus as the king of Poland last year. Make of that what you will. But the government of God is not by the consent of the people – the δῆμος. Whether or not you have voted for Jesus Christ, he is your king. His authority over you and me is real and essential.  

You see, real authority comes from above – from God – not from below – neither from the δῆμος nor the demonic. But both people and demons seek to imitate authority – to seize power that is not theirs but truthfully is God's, to assert their own will upon others instead of submitting to the will of God.

Jesus and the centurion in Capernaum (Matthew 8:5), miniature,
Codex Egberti, Trier, Stadtbibliothek, cod. 24, fol. 22r, detail, 10^th century

Well, the centurion in Capernaum has something to teach us about authority – both about leadership and obedience (Matt 8:5-13). He lived and worked in a framework of authority – a chain of command – that helped him to understand the authority of Jesus Christ, the Word, who can heal the servant by his word.

A centurion in the Roman army was a person who had command of a century, which sounds like it would be a hundred soldiers but was usually around eighty. But he was also under authority. He was in the midst of a chain of command – both one to give orders and one to follow them. Maybe he can help us with our problems with authority.

He says to Jesus, “I also am a man under authority,” and, he says, “[There are] soldiers under me; and I say to one, 'Go,' and he goes, and to another, 'Come,' and he comes, and to my slave, 'Do this,' and he does it” (Matt 8:9). Such crisp obedience he speaks of. How alien to us! The centurion is a witness for us of both leadership and obedience.

Firstly, unlike autocrats, who are concerned first of all always with themselves – always with maintaining their own authority over others – the centurion, who bears his authority well, is concerned first of all for the welfare of those under him. This is to be the priority for those who lead.

The centurion's servant "was dear to him," according to Luke (7:2). He comes to Jesus full of concern and solicitude for his servant. He comes to Jesus and beseeches him – "with grief," as St. Rabanus puts it – and says, "Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home in terrible distress." And he says, "Only say the word and my servant will be healed." He seeks what is good for his servant: healing from the true healer. He treats his servant with compassion. As St. Rabanus says, "In like manner, ought all to feel for their servants and to take thought for them."

We can see easily enough, I hope, how good and appropriate it is for a leader to take care of those under his authority in this way. What we might miss if we don't understand the historical-cultural context of this passage is how counterculturally the centurion is behaving.

He comes to Jesus about his “servant.” The word used for "servant" here is "παῖς." Now, a παῖς is a boy - rather like a garçon. But the word connotes more than that. The next entry in the lexicon is παίω, which means to strike or to smite – to hit as if by a single blow with the fist. Now, these words are likely related because a παῖς is a boy whom you may beat with impunity – a punching bag, a whipping boy. A παῖς is really a more a kind of slave than what we would think of as a servant. In fact, in Luke’s version of the story, he’s called a δοῦλος – a slave (Luke 7:2-10).

You wouldn't want to be a slave under Roman law. It was chattel slavery. It was almost – though not quite – as bad as American slavery. It was even permitted – and thought in some cases economically well-advised – to work your slaves to death, rather than wasting resources on feeding them and housing them.

But this is not how the centurion treats his servant. Even in defiance of his own culture, he cares for those over whom he has authority. A real leader must not succumb to the social and cultural pressures all around him to do other than what is best and right for those whom he leads.

The centurion does not seek the best way to use others for his own purposes and ends and goods, but seeks their own good with humility – admitting to the Lord that he is not worthy that the Lord should enter under his roof (Matt 8:8).

He is not first of all concerned with self-promotion or causing others to recognize his authority. He is concerned first of all with helping one under him who is suffering, and he does this by honoring the authority of someone else – namely, the authority of Jesus Christ over all things and his power to heal all sicknesses.

The centurion recognizes the real authority of Jesus Christ. He is intimately familiar with the workings of authority in ways that we – in our more democratic age – may not be. He even kind of identifies himself with Jesus. Pseudo-Chrysostom says that the centurion “clearly” does not draw a “distinction,” but points “to a resemblance… between himself and Christ.” Listen to the way he says to Jesus, “I also am under authority.”

What authority is Jesus under? Pseudo-Chrysostom says he is “under the command of the Father, in so far as [he is] man, yet [he has] power over the Angels.”

Then, it’s as if the centurion goes on to intimate, “I also wield authority. As one who has authority, I recognize that you have authority, too. I give commands and my soldiers obey. You, O Lord, give commands and the whole cosmos obeys. You order all creation by your word. Your authority is the source of all authority. Only say the word and my servant will be healed.”  This is the absolute authority of Christ. What he says is so. Just like that. If he says, “Let it be,” then it is.

Let's consider the authority of Christ for a moment. Authority - ἐξουσία – means literally that which comes out of essence or being. And Christ himself is the being one – ὁ ὤν, as it says in the traditional cruciform halo of Christ – the one who is – the very God and ground of all being who reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush. When truth himself and the author of truth speaks, it is clear enough he speaks with authority. And, more than this, he is the ground of all authority that exists. We may covet power, authority over others, control of others, but unless the authority is given by Christ, it is no authority at all but only an illusion of authority.

And, if we have indeed been given authority, we must always remember, like the centurion, and even in some ways like Jesus, that we are also under authority. Leaders actually function in a long line of authorities responsible for guiding and protecting others. And the Lord – the true and highest authority – will hold leaders accountable for how they exercise their power.

Drawing on his experience in a chain of command, the centurion was able to see and understand the spiritual workings of authority in the Kingdom of Heaven so well that Jesus says of him, "not even in Israel have I found such faith." Let us share his faith and wield our God-given authority as he does – with humility, with obedience to all who truly have authority over us, with awareness of Christ’s absolute authority, and with care, concern, and love for those we lead. 

There is one holiness

For All Saints Sunday 

Matthew 10:32-33,37-38; 19:27-30

Icon of All Saints
16-20 c.

Paul addresses most of his epistles to the saints of this or that city. And, I hope, if he were writing to us, he would say the same and would address the saints among us.

Although, when he addresses the Galatians, he does not call them saints. His letter is written to rebuke them because they have been turning to a different gospel, a perversion of the gospel of Christ.

So, if Paul were writing to our church, would he call us saints? Or, would he, as he did addressing the Galatians, leave that part out? Are we following the gospel of Jesus Christ that Paul preaches? Or are we accepting a different gospel, receiving a different spirit, or preaching another Jesus (cf. 2 Cor 11:4)?

Some in Galatia were holding up circumcision and the works of the old law over and against faith working through love in Christ, the love which in truth fulfills the whole law (cf. Gal 5:6,14). This excessive regard for externals I don’t think is the typical error of our age, but we are inclined toward other errors.

Sometimes, we excessively internalize our faith. We regard it as a private matter, not something to be discussed in public. We are sometimes cowards and we sometimes fail to acknowledge Christ before others. Today, Christ tells us that if we acknowledge him before others, he will acknowledge us before his Father. That is, he will make us his saints. Likewise, if we deny him, he will deny us before his Father (Matt 10:32-33).

If we love Jesus, we will keep his commandments (John 14:15). Among other things, He commands us to acknowledge him before others (Matt 10:32). He commands us to go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16:15). And he commands us to baptize every nation in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19).

If we keep these commandments, Christ will acknowledge us before his Father (Matt 10:32). He will remember us forever. And so we will live forever in him, our resurrected Lord. In Christ, we will know the Father, which is eternal life (John 17:3). This is holiness indeed: oneness with God. This is what it is to be a saint.  

This word “saint” is interesting. If we look at the Greek, ἅγιος, it’s the same as the word for holy. Sometimes Greek has many words for which we have only one, as in the case of “love,” but sometimes, it goes the other way and they have one word, for which we have many. And this is the case with the word ἅγιος, which means holy, which means saint, which means sanctuary (e.g Heb 8:2). At times, even Jesus is simply called the Holy – ὁ ἅγιος (e.g. Mark 1:24). This is worth keeping in mind when we think about the saints. Saint and Holy are utterly synonymous. There is no difference at all in the mind of the fathers, or in the mind of Paul. There are not two holinesses, but one holiness. If someone or something is holy, it can only be because they are partakers of the one holiness.

The single greatest teaching of the second Vatican council, in my opinion, is that there is a universal call to holiness. This is not a new teaching. Not by any stretch.  This was already the teaching revealed by the Lord God through Moses in the wilderness of Sinai 3,310 years ago – or so. The Lord our God says in all ages, “be holy, for I am holy” (Lev 11:44-45).

There’s a tall order. The holiness of the Lord our God cannot be overstated. Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord, the God of hosts. Three times holy is he. In Hebrew, this is a superlative. He is the holiest one and the source of all holiness, in whom is any holiness that is.

Yet, as the Lord, he is God of hosts, that is, as Fr. Stephen Freeman puts it, God of a huge crowd. He is in and with and surrounded by his saints. “Orthodox worship and prayer,” Fr. Stephen writes, “is simply crowded. Though we worship only the Triune God, we nevertheless do so in company with a ‘great cloud of witnesses.’” God, who alone is holy, has chosen not to be alone in his holiness, but to surround himself with those he has made holy, those he has made one with himself by his grace.

In the Divine Liturgy, after the consecration, the priest holds the holy lamb and says, “Holy gifts to holy people.” Does this mean you have to be a saint in order to come forward to receive Holy Communion? Yes, it does! There is no difference between “saint” and “holy.”

Then how do we become saints? None of us is sinless – but among the saints are sinners, every degree of sinner, and every kind of sinner – just like us. So when I say, yes, we have to be holy before we come forward, we have to be saints before we receive the holy things which are for the holy ones, I am speaking of a miracle of God’s mercy and grace with which we cooperate through prayer and humility and confession of our sins. We do not make ourselves saints, the Lord makes us saints.

Every saint he makes is unique. We honor them all. We need them all. Just as in one body, every member is different, yet every member needs the others for the whole body to thrive (cf. Rom 12:4-5). Every person that God makes, God wants and needs for his purposes. We are wanted and needed by God. We should seek God’s purpose for our own lives. As Fr. Thomas Hopko points out, if we are condemned or damned it will not be because we are not the Theotokos, or we are not John the Baptist, or we are not Isaac the Syrian. It will be because we are not truly ourselves. It is for not being who God created us to be that we could be damned. The ultimate authority on who we should be and what we should do is our author and creator.

He reveals a lot of this to us through the Church, so don’t think this means that we can go it alone. Because God gave us the Church to guide us into holiness, that is, into the person that God made each of us to be. Going it alone was never his vision for any human being. We are communal creatures. We are a community of persons, in the image of God, who is a community of persons. The Church is that community - that coming together as one with God and one another.

Abba Dorotheos of Gaza has a beautiful image of a wheel, in which the center – the axis – is God, and each of us are somewhere along the spokes of the wheel. You see, the closer we get to God, the closer we get to each other. Also, the further we get from God, the further we get from each other.

For this reason, it makes no sense to receive communion – to enter into communion with God – if we have animosity toward our brother or sister (Matt 5:23-24). There is no communion with God without communion with one another. First of all, we must “be reconciled with everyone and have no animosity toward anyone.” This is the first rubric in the Liturgikon.

Before we dare to approach with the fear of God and with faith, we pray that the holy mysteries be for our healing and not for our condemnation. We pray that the Lord make us worthy to receive. And we pray for mercy. This prayer – this Kyrie eleison – is our path to holiness. Holiness never comes from relying on the self, but rather on the one to whom we pray. To rely on the Lord, who alone is holy and who alone can make us holy.

So, when the priest holds the Eucharist in his hands and says, “Holy gifts to holy people” what can we say? We can only say, “One is holy, one is Lord, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father.” All holiness that is comes from the holy one.

The holy one, Jesus Christ, teaches us how to be holy in today’s gospel. We must confess Christ before others, we must love him more than all others, even more than our fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. And we must take up our cross and follow him (Matt 10:37-38). These are Jesus’ own words. This is his prescription for holiness.

When we are baptized into Christ, we are clothed with Christ and we begin to become one with him. We must thereafter imitate him, especially in his self-sacrificial love, to remain and grow toward ever greater union with the holy one, Jesus Christ, who is one in essence with the Father who is holy.  

The Holy Spirit Inspires the Church

On Acts 20:16-18, 28-36 and John 17:1-13

Sunday of the Fathers at the First Nicene Council

Today, (did you hear?) Paul was hurrying to Jerusalem in order to get there for Pentecost (Acts 20:16). Pentecost is coming next Sunday, and with it our commemoration of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles. Already, the Spirit is with us. And today we remember the fathers of the first ecumenical council, which met in Nicaea in 325, and who were also inspired by the same Holy Spirit.

The First Council of Nicea, wall painting at the church of Stavropoleos
Bucharest, Romania

At every Divine Liturgy and at every Compline, we repeat the Nicene Creed which these fathers began to craft under the inspiration of the Spirit. The Nicene faith is our faith, the God-inspired faith, the faith of our fathers and mothers.

The Holy Spirit inspires the Church. God is with us. Some fall into a trap of confining the presence and action of God to historical events like Pentecost or to historical documents like Scripture. Or, toward another extreme, some limit their understanding of the Spirit to private individual ecstatic experiences.

In truth, the Holy Spirit inspires the Church.

The Church is, but is not only, historical. It is also the living and breathing body of Christ. It is fully present here where we are gathered in the name of Jesus Christ, where the Holy Spirit descends upon us and upon our gifts, where the Father hears our prayer. And it is present throughout the world wherever orthodoxy is believed and wherever orthopraxis is observed.

In the Church, our experience of God is, but is not only, private and personal. We encounter God alone in our prayer closets, but we also encounter Him in one another, in the least of his brethren, and in our communal prayer, in the mysteries of the Church and in the public proclamation of His Word.

In that public proclamation today we, with the apostles, overhear Jesus say to his Father, “This is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (17:3).

There are ten thousand sermons in this one verse, but today I am struck by an odd turn of phrase: Jesus Christ calls himself Jesus Christ in the third person. This points to an intriguing possibility. It is possible that this prayer of Jesus at his Last Supper was long remembered liturgically before it was committed to writing, which could explain why the prayer is both from Jesus Christ and about Jesus Christ.[i] The gospel of John is the latest gospel to be written and it benefits from the longest theological reflection. Its prose and rhetoric are finely polished. Chiefly for this gospel’s sake, John, whose feast is today, is rightly called the Theologian.

These facts call to mind the reality that while for a while there were Christians without any written gospels, there were never any Christians without worship, without liturgy, without anamnesis/remembrance, without Eucharist/thanksgiving. The inspired Divine Liturgy precedes the inspired written gospels.

Today Jesus says to His Father, “I have given them the words you gave me and they have received them” (17:3). But Jesus did not write down these words. The gospels tell us that Jesus could both read and write. But the only writing that he does, mysteriously, is in the sand – letters that the wind could blow away – perhaps a wind like that wind that blows in the upper room where the apostles hide.

Jesus does not give us a manuscript, but rather the testimony of women and men. He writes his revelation on their hearts. He chooses to reveal himself through people – the people of God - that is, through the Church.

The Holy Spirit inspires the Church, and we must follow the Church, never the Scripture alone. The Scripture is the inspired word of God and the Holy Spirit inspires it in and through the Church, never apart from or against the Church. Decontextualized from the Church, the Scripture can be distorted and perverted to any false teaching or wicked purpose the interpreter desires. Thank God, God did not leave us with the Scripture alone, but also gave us His holy Church.

Today in Acts, Paul tells the elders [that is, the presbyters] of Ephesus that “the Holy Spirit has made you overseers [that is, ἐπίσκοποι, bishops] to feed the Church of the Lord which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). The same Holy Spirit that inspires Scripture and that descends upon the apostles at Pentecost also makes presbyters and bishops for the Church. Ordination is an act of God, a holy mystery, an epiclesis. This isn’t a different Spirit, but the same Spirit. There is one Holy Spirit, one God, one faith, one Church. The Holy Spirit gives us the Scripture and he gives us the bishops too. We don’t get one without the other. We need them both absolutely.

This doesn’t mean that bishops are always good and holy. In fact, if we study the history of the ecumenical councils we discover an uncomfortable amount of all-too human politics, rivalries, and intrigues. Despite this, the Holy Spirit works through these councils, just as he works through Peter, who denied him, and through Paul, who persecuted his Church. Truth is expressed by God from out of the midst of human failings. God is with us, in the midst of us. The Holy Spirit inspires the Church.

When a presbyter, Arius, begins to lead people astray, teaching that Jesus is not of one divine essence with the Father, but rather some kind of exalted creature of God, the Holy Spirit inspires the Nicene council which we commemorate today.

The Arians misread today’s gospel. When Jesus says to his Father that he is “the only true God,” the Arians thought that this must mean that Jesus himself was not the true God. This is what I mean. How quickly the human mind can stumble into error when reading the Scripture alone unaided by the Church. The Holy Spirit has given us both because we need both in order to come to orthodoxy.

The Nicene Council provided the needed corrective. As we say in the Nicene Creed, Jesus Christ is “Son of God, the only-begotten, born of the Father before all ages.  Light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in essence with the Father.” Our Christology couldn’t get any higher.

Our holy father Athanasius, who was present at the Nicene Council as a deacon and who spent the rest of his life defending its teachings against the world, provides the true understanding of the word “only” in today’s gospel. He writes against the Arians,

“If then the Father is called the only true God, this is said not to the denial of him who said, "I am the Truth…” And so the Lord himself added at once, "And Jesus Christ whom you have sent." Now had he been a creature, he would not have added this and ranked himself with his creator. For what fellowship is there between the True and the not true? But as it is, by including himself with the Father, he has shown that he is of the Father's nature.”[ii]

The Holy Spirit was inspiring the Church before the gospels were written, and he continues to inspire the Church after they are written. This is never more evident than when there is an ecumenical council. At the council of Nicaea, the Holy Spirit taught the Church a new word: homoousios, that is, of one essence. The Son is of one essence with the Father. Jesus Christ is not less than God. He is God. And there are not two Gods, but one God. Many of the fathers of the council were reluctant to accept this word at first because it appears nowhere in scripture and because it had been employed in the past by heretics. But guided by the Holy Spirit and for the benefit of all the people of God, accept it they did.

A priest once told me that there are only two words I must never say from the pulpit. One of them is “change.” I’m not going to say the other word. But sometimes the Holy Spirit inspires change. Homoousios was a new word, once.

We must not forget the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church at all times, without whose presence we are not the Church.

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[i] (Suggit 1992). Malan, G.J., 2011, ‘Does John 17:11b, 21−23 refer to church unity?’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 67(1), Art. #857. http://www.hts.org.za/index.php/HTS/article/view/857/html

[ii] Discourses against the Arians 3.23.6-24.8-9.