Statement of Faith
For
The Celtic Orthodox Church
And
For
Bishop Brian J.
Kennedy, O.S.B.
SEE ADDITIONAL LINKS BELOW THIS STATEMENT OF
FAITH
Unto the Glory, and
petitioning the aid, of the Most Holy, Consubstantial, and Undivided Trinity:
+ The Father,
Unbegotten
+ The Son, Only-Begotten
+The Holy Spirit From
the Father alone proceeding:
I
confess that Participation in Redemption is offered only through the Mysteries
of His Church. That the Orthodox Catholic Church is not present where the
Orthodox Catholic Faith and Orthodox Catholic Praxis are not present.
1. I
believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
Who is the true Father, the sole, indivisible, Hypostatic Source
(arch), Fount (phgh), Cause (aitia), and Principle (arch) of the Subsistence
and Unity and Consubstantiality (omoousios) of the other Two Hypostases of the
Most Holy Trinity, eternally begetting of His own indivisible nature His true,
only- and eternally-begotten Son, and eternally causing the Spirit to proceed
from Him, the Father alone, in all eternity, and these without any partition,
division, diminution, or distribution of the divine nature, which remaineth
utterly and ineffably one, without partition, division, or separation, or
distribution of the divine nature, nor any communication, nor distribution of
His Hypostatic and Distinguishing Property (upostatikh idioths) of being the
Sole Uncaused Cause, Monarchia, and Source and Fount of the Consubstantial
Persons of the Son and the Spirit to the other Two Persons of the Most Holy
Trinity. We repudiate the heretical
doctrine of the filioque, which teaches not Monarchy but polyarchy and anarchy.
The same one divine and indivisible nature is wholly and without partition or
division in Each Hypostasis, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; Moreover
this Our Heavenly Father is Almighty, Good, Sovereign, Just, Eternal, Wise and
Merciful.
2.
Creator of Heaven and Earth, and of all things
visible and invisible,
Who, being Uncreate and without beginning, did create and is the
beginning of all things, Who, by the activity of His most perfect will, doth
ever sustain all things at each moment, but not by any emanation or overflowing
or effluence of His divine and inparticipatable and uncreate essence into
creation, but by His willing to come into existence that which was-not; and
which is not divine in any way; and this creation moreover truly began to exist
when it did not exist;
Who moreover created the order of intelligent beings, the intelligent
bodiless powers, to serve Him, which bodiless powers possess true subsistence,
faculty of intelligence and will, and are truly subsistent, and not merely
metaphors for qualities, nor merely human beings who were once alive, but
wholly different orders of being;
And further, Who, created man as His especial creation, His very image
and likeness, both in soul and in body, and that the image of God which is in
man appertaineth to man's nature and essence, and that the likeness
appertaineth to his person and hypostasis;
Furthermore, I do not believe nor do I confess that the essence of man
evolved, was transformed, mutated, or metamorphosed from any other species nor
in any way from his first creation mutated, save only by that inheritance of
moral and physical corruption from Adam and Eve; nor do I believe nor do I confess
that, in his first creation, man was taken and transformed, mutated, or
metamorphosed from any other living species, nor do I believe that man has
monkeys, fish, reptiles or rocks as his ancestors as the false religion of
evolution teacheth, for if that were the case, Our Lord would be
consubstantial, in His human nature, not only with all men but with those other
creatures from whom man allegedly evolved, and one would thus confess Him to be
consubstantial with rocks, fish, trees and such; but man was truly fashioned by
God from the dust of the ground and the breath of Life breathed into him by the
Spirit of God, Who is the Life-Giving Spirit;
Moreover, I believe that the clear testimony of the Holy Scripture, as
understood always, everywhere and by all our Holy and Orthodox Catholic
Fathers, and that the clear canonical liturgical Tradition of the Holy and
Divine Liturgy in all its Orthodox and canonical rites, is that man was first
created one pair, and only one pair, of First Parents, Adam and Eve, and that
all humanity in all times and places whatsoever is descended from them, and is
therefore consubstantial with them, all objections and difficulties
notwithstanding; and I likewise repudiate as spurious and un- Orthodox any
attempt to reconcile the Holy Scriptures, the liturgical and patristic
Tradition of the Church, with changing theories of human science in any way as
to suggest or entail the compromise or dilution of the above principles, and
especially repudiate that attempt to do so which appeals fallaciously to the
writings of the Holy Fathers Basil of Caesaria or Ambrose of Milan, who clearly
did teach a real Adam and Eve;
3.
And in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God; Begotten of the
Father before all ages, (God of God), Light of Light, True God of True God;
begotten not made, consubstantial (or of one essence) with the Father; Who with
the Father and the Most Holy Spirit is One God according to His Eternal and
Uncreate and unparticipatible essence, but that in this Most Holy Trinity there
are not Three Gods, but One God in Three Hypostases; Who, in His Eternal and
Uncreate Hypostasis, being Only-Begotten from His Unbegotten Father before all
ages, times, places, and before the creation of all that is visible and
invisible -- including all times and spaces -- is truly Begotten eternally from
the Father, eternally and ineffably, and is therefore consubstantial, or of one
and the same identical essence with Him, since like cannot beget unlike; Who
being thus begotten from and consubstantial with the Father possesses and is in
His Person and Hypostasis possesses all the fullness of all deity and
godhead(qeoths) and all the infinite and limitless perfections of the infinite
and uncreate and divine and eternal energies, without division or diminution or
distribution or partition of the divine and more-than-essential essence, and
without confusion of His Person, or the hypostastic characteristic(upostatikh
idioths) of Begottenness and Generation-from-the-Father, with the Father (Who
alone in the Most Holy, Consubstantial, Indivisible and Tri-Hypostatic Trinity
is Unoriginate and Without- Source or -Origin or -Cause), or with the Most Holy
and life-giving Spirit (Who alone in the Most Holy Trinity Proceeds from the
Father);
4. By
Whom all things were made;
Who together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God, did create
the world from nothing, and according to the pattern of all reasonable
principles (logoi) found in Himself, the True and Eternal Son and Logos (Logos)
of God, revealing all creation to be a revelation of Himself in His Economy
(oikonomia);
5.
Who for us men and for our salvation:
Became man substantially, with a reasonable soul and flesh and complete
human nature and will, wholly perfect, completely and totally united, that is
to say, subsisting in his eternally-Begotten Person and Hypostasis; that He is
therefore One Son of God, both God and man, worshipped in both natures with one
indivisible worship and adoration, neither confounding the substances nor dividing
the Person; but rather, that each nature with all the natural operations
(fusikai energeiai) proper to it, intact and whole, was in Him and His
Hypostasis united by subsisting in His One Eternal Person, not by conversion of
the humanity into godhead nor of the godhead into the humanity, but by taking
up of humanity into His Person and therefore into His godhead, each nature
preserving in that union its natural operations and natural wills (fusikai
qelhmata); Who is therefore of and in two natures, two wills, and two
operations, human and divine; and as the celebrated figure of the Fathers, like
a sword heated in fire, thus conjoining in One Hypostasis the nature of fire
and the nature of iron; and conjoining the operation of burning and of cutting into
the cutting burn and burning cut, as St. Maximus the Confessor saith; and that,
as such; as God He hath no Mother, Mary being the Christotokos, and that as Man He hath no Father.
IN
HIS HUMANITY, CHRIST HAD NO FATHER. IN
HIS DIVINITY, CHRIST HAD NO MOTHER
Who
in His One Person willed and effected in each nature, the divine and the human,
all things in such wise as to redeem, sanctify, and deify all the stages of
life and operations of the human nature from conception to death, and did thereby
reveal it in its natural state to be, in and through Him only, without sin, the
fit means of deifying communion with God, as the following articles of our
Oecumenical Symbol of the Faith detail and confess:
The
whole of Salvation, Redemption, and Deification is in the Whole Incarnate
Economy of Our Lord, God, and Saviour Jesus Christ, and in Him alone, Who:
a.
Came down from heaven:
b. Neither leaving it as moving from one place to another, nor leaving
"behind" any operation or attribute of His divine nature, ever being
One with and present to the Father in Heaven; but rather that in His Whole
Person with the whole nature and operation of the godhead, He condescended and
humbled Himself to become what He was not, to wit, man, while remaining what He
was, to wit, God; and all this for our salvation;
b.
and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
In human generation after a divine mode of existence (tropoj uparxews),
i.e., without human seed from any human father, from her whose virginity was
inviolate before and after His divine conception and birth according to the
flesh; and that His Mother is therefore truly Christotokos according to the
flesh of the One Son of God in Whom both our full, complete and un-submerged
human nature and His full, complete and un-submerged Divine nature are united,
and in Whom is their mutual, single, and indivisible Hypostasis and
Subsistence;
And
I believe and confess that the Ever-Virgin Mary, the Christotokos, Mother of
the Christ, is to be invoked and her intercessions sought.
The
invocation of the Saints (Mary is Queen of the Saints but still a Saint)
depends on the will of God and it is understood the Saints and Mary cannot
grant our petition but only pray for us as pleases God and in the measure God
so wishes. We believe and define that no prayer is addressed as to be
heard directly by the Angels, the Saints or even Mary but rather all prayer
ascends to the Father through Christ by the action of the Holy Spirit and in
this wise do pray for the intercession of the Angels and Saints and Mary who is
rightly called the Queen of Saints yet herself only a Saint, but the greatest
also of all Saints.
The
title Theotokos can only rightly be applied if understood as referring to the
Holy Virgin being the God-bearer in that the child in her womb is and was true
God and true Man but it was not in His divinity present in her womb that He was
nourished or nurtured or Mothered but only in His humanity was she His
Mother.
The union of our deficient humanity to Jesus Christ's Human and Divine
perfection is the basis of our Redemption. Some of the earliest such as Saint
Columbanus of Bobbio rightly state that Jesus Christ was conceived without our
deficiency of Original Sin, because His Conception as a human was without seed.
Jesus Christ received our humanity from the Birthgiver of the Incarnate Word
(Christotokos) and ever-Virgin Mary, but in His Conception at the Annunciation,
our humanity began to be restored to Adam's original goodness. Redemption was
completed in Jesus Christ's human Death on the Cross.
CHRIST
ALONE IS THE SOLE ARBITER AND DISPENSER OF ALL THE GRACES THAT COME FROM THE
FATHER; NO BLESSING COMES APART FROM JESUS THE CHRIST AND ONLY THROUGH JESUS
CHRIST DO WE RECEIVE FROM THE FATHER. JUST AS NO MAN CAN GO TO THE FATHER OTHER
THAN THROUGH AND IN CHRIST, ALL GRACES COME TO MAN IN A
WONDERFUL THREE FOLD WAY - FROM THE FATHER, THROUGH THE SON BY THE ACTION
OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.
I REPUDIATE THE HERESY
THAT WOULD MAKE MARY MEDIATRIX OF ALL GRACES
ALL PRAYER TERMINATES IN THE FATHER, THROUGH THE
SON BY THE ACTION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
Original Sin is a fatal deficiency, which makes us
tend toward sin, but it does not impart guilt of any kind nor does it cut humanity
off from God's Grace. Guilt is only possible where there has been sin by the
individual. Deficiency is not guilt. Original Guilt confuses understanding of
our human nature and compromises belief in the humanity, which Christ received
and redeemed.
The Christotokos, the
ever-virgin Mary is free of the stain of a sinful life. I confess and do call
her "immaculate" from the moment of her Conception as confessing, by
this word or similar expressions, that by a special grace of God the Holy Spirit
given to Mary at her conception, she became what we are at our baptism for the
reason that Mary conceived without human seed – that Christ might not inherit
in His humanity the defect of Original Sin and by this manner of her Immaculate
Conception was anointed of God to be the Mother of the Incarnate Word and by
dint of her personal discipline (askhsis) in submission to God and with the
Grace of God, She maintained a pure and holy life.
c. and became man,
With a reasonable
soul, intellect, will, body, and all the natural passions appertaining
thereunto, subsisting in Him in their true natural state, i.e., without sin and
in union and communion with God, and therefore in passionless passion, or
"dispassion" (apaqeia), as the Fathers say; consubstantial with all
men in all ages and places, by Whose redeeming and deifying Life and Economy,
from His seedless conception to the present day and His Dread and Glorious
Second Advent, is salvific and deifying to all men since His human nature is
consubstantial with all men; Who therefore hath truly redeemed all sorts,
conditions, and ages of men, and hath healed and overcome all infirmity and
sin, and that in and upon this Orthodox Catholic fullness of deification
(qewsis) of His Incarnate Economy is founded and grounded the fullness and
pillar of truth and salvation which is His Body, the One, Holy, Orthodox
Catholic and Apostolic Church and Faith;
Whose deifying
humanity is truly offered in the eternal pleading and offering of the sacrifice
of His voluntary Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and Heavenly
Intercession now at the right hand of His Father in the Temple of Heaven not
made-with-hands, His Most Holy Risen and Ascended Body and Blood (i.e., His
very own human nature), Whose seedlessly conceived, crucified, dead, risen, and
ascended humanity is truly, really, and substantially present with all its
nature and natural operations, upon the Holy Altar in the Divine and Holy
Sacrifice of the Eucharist, which Body and Blood, being once-for all times
united with his godhead in His One indivisible Person and Hypostasis, is
deifying to all those who partake thereof in the Most Holy Eucharist; which
Eucharist is therefore the true, real, only and proper sacrifice acceptable to
God, and not a sacrifice of praise and of thanksgiving only, but of His Very
Body and Blood, i.e., His whole human nature- united-in-His-Person-with-His
whole godhead, which was sacrificed and is now offered, an unbloody sacrifice;
Wherefore I repudiate
as false and Doketic the doctrine understood by some Romanists and others of
the heretical doctrine of “Transubtantiation” that teaches the annihilation or
adduction of the substance of bread and wine such that only the accidents, or
operations, of both remain; The change in the Eucharist is termed Metabollo
(Meta-ousiosis) that rightly teaches the substance of bread and wine remain
consubstantial with the substance of Christ’s body, blood, soul and
divinity. The bread has a “change of
being” (meta-ousiosis) in that it becomes the actual, in fact, Body of Christ
consubstantial with the bread. The wine has a “change of being” in that it
becomes the actual, in fact, Blood of Christ through the Epiclesis (the calling
down of the Holy Spirit upon the Bread and Wine to change the substance into the
Body and Blood of Christ) pronounced by the Priest or Bishop.
I believe and confess that the bread and wine are
truly bread and wine, but that, after and by means of the Mystery of the
Commemoration, the Canon and a specific or interwoven Epiclesis of the Holy
Ghost by an ordained Orthodox Catholic Bishop or Priest upon the Holy Gifts,
they become also and in an ineffable manner verily Christ's Very Body and
Blood, His very humanity descended from David, conceived and born of the Holy
Spirit and the Ever-Virgin Mary, in which He truly suffered, Whose Body was
truly pierced and Whose Blood was truly poured out, in which humanity He truly
did die, suffering the division and separation of the soul and the Body from
each other, but of neither from His eternal Person and Hypostasis and divine
nature; His humanity, body and soul, was therefore in Him truly reunited and
did truly rise again from the dead bodily, ascended into heaven, and in which
He is seated at the right hand of the Father and in which He shall come again
to judge both the quick and the dead;
Nor do I believe that
Our Lord, God, and Saviour Jesus Christ is dragged out of heaven at every
Divine Liturgy and made to come hither from whence He now sitteth and reigneth,
and intercedeth before His and Our Father in His Risen and Ascended Body and
Blood; rather, it is we the faithful who, by the operation of the Most Holy
Spirit transmuting bread and wine into His Very Risen and Ascended Body and
Blood (i.e., His whole Risen and Ascended human nature), ascend there to heaven
to that One Altar, One Priest, One Host and Victim and Lamb, One Sacrifice;
d. and was crucified also for us under Pontius
Pilate, He suffered and was buried,
Whose Divine and Eternal
Person and Hypostasis did truly suffer and die humanly.
e. and the third day He rose again
From the dead, bodily,
and not ephemerally, thereby overcoming the Last Enemy separating God and man,
i.e., death; and thereby destroying the power and kingdom of the evil one which
was against us; and He did truly rise bodily, with His human soul, will,
intellect, flesh, bones, and all things appertaining unto His whole and perfect
human nature; and that all human nature in all times and places and all conditions
was and is and will be ineluctably, irreformably, irresistibly predestined to,
in, and by His Bodily Resurrection and Ascension to ever-being (to aei einai),
as St. Maximus the Confessor said;
Wherefore I repudiate
and anathematize equally the pernicious and heretical doctrine of the
Origenists and Evagrians and universalists called the "apokatastasis"
(apokatastasis), which holds, on account of that very same consubstantiality of
Christ's human nature and the resurrection to everlasting life to which all men
are by it predestined as a kind of "guarantee", namely, that all
human persons will, in that everlasting life, experience everlasting
blessedness in the Vision of God in Christ, and will therefore be saved; for
though God's intention to save all men is manifest in the Incarnation of the
Son and Word in His perfect and real human nature which is consubstantial with
all men, and though every human being consubstantial with Christ is affected
irresistibly by the grace of His Incarnate Economy unto the Resurrection of
their bodies, not all men, as Scripture clearly teacheth, will be saved, which,
according to the same St. Maximus the Confessor, means that all men are
predestined unto the grace of Ever-Being by Christ's risen human nature; but
that the state in Ever-Well-Being (to aei eu einai) or Ever-Ill-Being depends
upon their own personal habit of will and mode of willing, which may be
according, or counter, to grace;
f. according to the Scriptures,
Which are in their
logoi the perfect verbal Ikon of Christ the Logos Incarnate Himself; and that
they are the Very Word of God inscripturate; which Holy Scriptures be preserved
accurately and faithfully by the grace and providential activity of the Holy
Spirit, Who was promised to guide the Church into all truth, foremost in the
true and authentic copies (apografa) of the Holy Scriptures which, by His
providential oversight of the One Holy Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church,
have been preserved throughout the ages down to our own time, and in that form
of the New Testament and Old Testament known as the Septuagint alone is found
the true and accurate Verbum Dei.
And I moreover repudiate that unbelieving critical
and "rabbinical" tendency evident in the numerous so-called
"versions" and "translations" to interpret and to translate
said Scriptures into the English or any other language in such a fashion as to
imply that the Law, Prophets, and Writings do not refer to our Lord, God, and
Saviour Jesus Christ's Incarnate Economy, and which thereby deny that He and
His One Holy Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church is the New Israel and the
Elect of God according to the Baptism, Chrismation, and Communion into His
self-same flesh and blood descended from our fathers Abraham and David and Who
is therefore that singular seed prophesied to our fathers Adam, Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, and David and first to our mother Eve;
g. and ascended into heaven,
Bodily, with His
entire glorified human nature and all things appertaining thereunto, to wit:
flesh, bones, blood, soul, and will;
And I anathematize the
spurious heresy of the Origenists and other like minded Platonizers who would
dare presume to interpret Our Lord's Bodily Ascension as that of a
"spiritual" or "ghostly" body, thereby masking their
unbelief in a pretense of piety, and denying the reality of the flesh, bones,
body, soul, and blood of that His Risen and Ascended humanity;
Moreover, I anathematize those who claim that all
men will be saved, for such claims deny the justice of God and the free will of
man.
h. and sitteth on the right hand of the Father,
and He shall come again with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead, Whose
Kingdom shall have no end;
Which Kingdom began in
His First Advent in humility, continueth now, and abideth forever; and I reject
and utterly repudiate any and all the heresies of the "Bible
Christians" and "Fundamentalist-Dispensationalists" and
"Born Againists", i.e., that set of confusing and mutually
contradictory but equally unChristian doctrines called "dispensationalism"
which state that Our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ did not make, by His
Incarnate Life, Death, Resurrection, Glorious Ascension and Heavenly
Intercession, a full and complete fulfillment of all the prophesies and types
of the Old Covenant and of its sacrifices, temples, kingdoms, promises and
ministries; and I repudiate and anathematize that teaching and them that teach
that there will be some future time or "dispensation" before His
Second Advent in Glory when men will again approach God acceptably through the
reinstated temples and sacrifices of the Old Law, and likewise repudiate and
anathematize any who would presume to teach that heresy that there will in that
future time of reinstated sacrifices of the Old Law be a "people of God"
called "tribulation saints" separate and distinct from all
right-believing Christians, who approach God not through the Mystery of His
Sacrifice in the Holy Eucharist, but who, following rigorously the heretical
implications of their false doctrine, take up again turtle doves and lambs, and
turn from Our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ the True Priest, Altar, Lamb
and Sacrifice of God, and who would thus presume to be a new nation and royal
priesthood without Holy Baptism, Chrismation, Eucharist, or Orders;
And I reject and
repudiate absolutely the notion that there will be a future millennial reign of
Our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ after a period of tribulation brought
upon the world by Antichrist, not because there will not be a real Antichrist
or real tribulations brought about by him, nor even because a pretended
"restoration" of the sacrifices of the Old Law will not occur, for of
all these things do the Holy Fathers testify; but I do repudiate and reject
their false and perverse understandings of these things who, with their
"Bible Maps of the Ages" and all similar cabalistic charts and graphs
of dispensations and temples and kingdoms and raptures, teach only materialism
and the gratification of their bellies, since they are concerned only for
political messiahs and earthly riches and kingdoms and privileges of the Old
Law, and that, looking for Christ, they are deceived, and actually prepare for
Antichrist;
Moreover, I anathematize as the most obnoxious and
repugnant of the dispensationalists' heresies that odious twisting of Holy
Scripture called the "Rapture", by which is meant that Our Lord
returns in two stages, the first time secretly to "snatch up" His
Church prior to that period of spiritual suffering and warfare known to them
and their charts as the "Great Tribulation" in order to save His
Church from that suffering which He Himself spared not Himself; I repudiate it
as being the very denial of the Resurrection and the Spirit of martyrdom and
willingness to endure sufferings for His sake Who suffered for us and Who
overcame death for us, not that we might not suffer or die, but that these
things might be made the means of our own salvation;
Wherefore, I
anathematize all them that have aided in the spread these damnable and
detestable doctrines, to wit, Scofield, Darby, Ryrie, Pentecost, Chafer,
Lindsay, Bloomfield, and any of like mind with them;
5. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and
Giver of life
Who is the Third
Person of the Most Holy Trinity, consubstantial with the Father and the Son, in
Whose effectual power, grace, and operation all the sacramental and liturgical
mysteries of the Church, and indeed, the very life of the One Holy Orthodox
Catholic and Apostolic Church, are made effectual and life-giving, and by Whose
grace all men are sanctified who partake of them; Whose gifts are the very
deifying energies of God's own eternal life in us, not apart from, but in and
by the Holy Mysteries of the Church;
6. Who proceedeth from the Father
Who in His Person is
therefore fully God because He proceeds (ekporeuomai) eternally from the
Father, and thus proceeding, that is, taking from the Father alone (ek monou
tou Patros) His Eternal and Everlasting Hypostasis and Subsistence, being
neither begotten from the Father as was the Son, nor created, and Who is
therefore consubstantial with the Father and the Son;
Wherefore I
anathematize the lamentable doctrine of the Papist, the filioque and all the
blasphemous and baseless pretensions of the Papacy which go with it.
7. Who with the Father and the Son together is
worshipped and glorified,
Because He is
consubstantial with the Father and the Son in the one, same, identical and
indivisible essence without diminution, distribution, or division into parts,
but Who is with each of Them Wholly God, worshipped with Them with one
indivisible adoration;
8. Who spake by the Prophets
That is to say, in the
prophets of the Old Testament in all those books accounted canonical by the One
Holy Orthodox and Catholic and Apostolic Church, and that true prophecy is that
which refers to Our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ's Incarnate Economy; and
that therefore any other prophecy which, as following the perverse heresy of
Montanus, would say that the Holy Spirit was poured out upon the Church to give
new revelations along side or apart from Christ or the Apostolic Tradition and
in opposition to the New Testament, is not of the true Spirit of prophecy;
9. and I believe in
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,
Which Church is the
Orthodox Catholic Church solely and exclusively, which, being the Body of
Christ and the Temple of the Spirit, is wholly and completely One, Holy,
Catholic, Apostolic and Orthodox, teaching and preserving the fullness of
salvation and truth and right worship for all times, sorts and conditions of
men; the holiness of which is not overcome by her members' sins or
unworthiness,
Moreover, Bishops are to be accounted and reckoned
such as have consecration by bishops in unbroken succession from the apostles,
and who maintain succession of Apostolic truth regarding the laying on of hands
and that all other ministries, i.e., priesthood and deaconate, derive from the
bishops as the sole source and fount of ministerial and priestly authority in
the Church, in a manner similar to the Father being the Sole Source and Fount
of the Hypostases and Consubstantial Godhead of the Son and the Spirit.
Moreover, I condemn the so-called "branch
theory" of the Church, which claims that all the divergences from the
Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Faith found in the various Protestant Sects,
[having lost all Apostolic Succession and much of the Succession of Apostolic
truth, have separated their adherents from the Church totally or partially] are
valid representations of the Faith, and that the bodies which profess them are
valid representatives of the Church, for there is one Lord, one Faith, and one
Baptism.
10. I confess One Baptism for the remission of
sins;
In accordance with the
tradition and doctrine of the consensus of Orthodox Fathers I confess that the
inheritance from Adam which all men incur by virtue of the conception from
human parents is the inheritance of physical and moral natural corruption and
death, and that all men born from Adam and Eve inherit from them this death,
and are in this sense, as St. John Chrysostom taught, under wrath and the
children of wrath, being inclined to add their own evil deeds to that sin of
Adam.
We hold as certain that Baptism, to be fully
effective, must be accompanied by the reception of the Holy Spirit in the
Sacred Mystery of Chrismation (Confirmation) and must be accompanied by
reception of the Eucharist as Baptism by nature is oriented toward the
Eucharist.
Holy Baptism is in threefold immersion in water or
threefold washing (pouring) in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
the Holy Spirit by an Orthodox or Catholic Priest or Bishop [not by women or
lay persons even in an emergency as only those admitted to Holy Orders can
baptize]; and since all men inherit death, Holy Baptism is for all ages and
conditions of men the normative means of regeneration and entry into the
membership of Christ's Body the Church, and is the Virgin birth in Water and
the Spirit in the Ever-Virgin Womb of the Church; and therefore, Holy Baptism
remits both ancestral and actual sins, being both a burying and rising into
Christ, the laver of regeneration and the grace of adoption unto sonship in
Him; and that, being a burying and rising with Him, that in it the corruption
in the first Adam, earthly, is overcome by the inheritance of the incorruption
of the heavenly Adam.
I profess a belief in "Limbo", a place
neither heaven nor hell, where the unbaptized innocents are said to repose upon
their death and in which they experience natural happiness which is not
Deification nor the Beatific Vision but a happiness of the natural man.
I utterly reject and
repudiate that western heterodox practice of the Papacy, Old Catholics,
Lutherans, Anglicans and others which would withhold the Holy Chrism and
Communion from the newly-illumined for essentially the same reasons as the
heresy of Baptists is rejected, for how can one bring the New Life to new life
by Holy Baptism and yet deny the Spiritual Unction and Life-Giving medicine of
immortality to the Regenerate until the age of reason be reached or the bishop
happen by, whichever come first? One does not starve one's own children;
11. And I look for the resurrection of the dead,
Some to eternal blessedness
and the Vision of Our Risen Lord with all the saints and the faithful for all
eternity, and some to everlasting damnation and torments;
12. And the life of the world to come,
Where, as our prayers
confess, following the teaching of St. John the Theologian in his Apocalypse,
there is no sickness, sorrow, nor sighing, but the everlasting and blessed and
joyous life in the eternal deification of the Most Holy and Life-Giving Spirit,
and the Vision of Our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ to the everlasting
glory and worship of the Father.
13. Amen
This is the Holy Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic
Faith, to which with my Amen I affirm and adhere and by which I do confess and
commit myself, body, soul, will, mind, spirit, tongue and body, wholeheartedly
and without reservation, and do pledge, by the grace of God preventing me and
to His glory alone, to preserve and hand down faithfully.
Of the Holy, Divine,
and Seven Ecumenical Councils
And I do hereby also
teach, confess, affirm and subscribe without qualification or reservation to
all the dogmatic and doctrinal decrees and definitions of the Faith decreed by,
and do anathematize all the heresies and heretics anathematized by, the Seven
Holy Ecumenical Councils of the One Holy Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic
Church, to wit: of Nicea in 325, of Constantinople in 381, of Ephesis in 431,
of Chalcedon in 451, of Constantinople in 553, of Constantinople in 681, and of
Nicea in 787.
THE HOLY SPIRIT IS CO-MEDIATOR OF ALL GRACES
http://www.celticorthodoxchurch.com/divineoffice.html
IS MARY MEDIATRIX OF ALL GRACES?
http://www.celticorthodoxchurch.com/mediatrix.html
IS IT PROPER TO ADDRESS PRAYERS TO ANGELS AND
SAINTS?
http://www.celticorthodoxchurch.com/prayto.html
Signed: Bishop +Brian J. Kennedy, O.S.B.
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