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
FOR MORE ARTICLES AND THE HISTORY
OF THE CELTIC ORTHODOX CHURCH
http://www.celticorthodoxchurch.com/ENTER.html
CLERGY OPPORTUNITIES IN THE CATACOMB CHURCH MOVEMENT IN THE CELTIC ORTHODOX CHURCH
http://www.celticorthodoxchurch.com/ordination.html
Signed: Bishop +Brian J. Kennedy,
O.S.B.
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