Knowing About GodOr Knowing the Father

"Do You Know Jesus?"

A number of years ago, a Catholic lay evangelist came to speak to a group of young believers and, predictably, ruffled feathers when she insisted that "many Catholics don't know Jesus."  What was at stake, it was clear, the failure to distinguish knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus.  When cornered with the question of how they relate to Him, the response was a flabbergasted grasping for words.

That Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Incarnate Word of the Father, and the Redeemer of the human race does not necessarily count for the theological virtue of faith; St James wrote that "The demons believe, and tremble" (Jas 2:19).  To speak of that which Jesus is places the speaker somewhere with respect to an object; to speak of who Jesus is places the speaker in a personal relationship with a Subject, and there lies the difference between knowing 'about' Jesus and 'knowing' Jesus.

Even saying as much leaves out a crucial part of the puzzle which undercuts the claim to know Jesus.  To begin, we must go back to that primordial relationship which existed prior to the Incarnation:

...no-one knows [ἐπιγινώσκει] the Son except the Father, and no one knows [ἐπιγινώσκει] the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal [ἀποκαλύψαι] him" (Mt 11:27).  

This is an absolutist statement made by Jesus Christ--the mutual knowing between the Father and Son is singular and exclusive.  More than that, it is a very particular kind of knowledge, a personal acquaintance and recognition that comes about by way of a relationship.  The Father and Son are able to have this kind of relationship because they are divine Persons.  Since this 'knowing' is a loving knowing, it is correct to say that the very knowledge between the Father and Son is a substantial knowledge, namely the Holy Spirit, whom St Augustine describes as the "love between" them.

It is in this sense that we are to understand those very impolitic words of Jesus (in our prescriptively pluralist culture):

I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no-one comes to the Father except through Me (Jn 14:6).

Though it is possible to know something about "God" (cf Rom 1:19-20), this remains strictly within the praeambula fidei and does not count for theological faith (hence praembula).  To have faith is not to be situated with respect to God as God but, rather, to God as Father.   Being the Son, the Incarnate Word always reveals God as "Father"; were He to reveal God only as "God," Jesus would in fact be un-Sonlike.  In the above passage from Matthew 11:27, the Greek word that stands behind "to reveal [him]" means, literally, to unveil, and to unveil the Father.  Anyone can come to God; but to have God "unveiled" to us as Father comes from the absolutely unique and absolutely unrepeatable only-begotten Son of God, because only a son can know his father; a brother and a nephew cannot, and certainly not an acquaintance.

Classical doctrine refers to faith as a response to Divine Revelation; we must understand this in its most exacting sense:  theological faith re-orientates our lives to God the Father who has been revealed to us in the Person of the Incarnate Word.  As we read at the end of the Johannine Prologue,

...grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  No-one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known [ἐξηγήσατο] (Jn 1:18).

In one of its rare translational bulls' eyes, the New American Bible translates ἐξηγήσατο as "has revealed him."  Again, the Incarnate Word does not simply reveal God, but as Son reveals the Father.  Interestingly, the Greek word ἐξηγήσατο is related to the word 'exegesis,' that discipline whereby we interpret the Bible in such a way that the text speaks for itself.  As the Father's "exegete," Jesus Christ is the only authoritative interpreter of the Father, the "interpretation" being precisely as consubstantial with us in His Incarnation to speak to us in human language and in human idiom about the Father.  More than that, the palpability of the Incarnate Word allows us to "see" the Father in the humanity of Jesus (cf Jn 14:9-10), a palpability that continues in the Church's liturgical worship.  (Which is why claiming to "know God" away from the Sacraments is eloquent nonsense.)

In His conversation with the Samaritan Woman who claimed to "worship" on Mount Gerizim, the enfleshed Son countered by concretizing the implied "God" as Father:

Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.  You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know...  But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in [S]pirit and [T]ruth, for such the Father seeks to worship him (Jn 4:21-24).

 From the vague sense of Samaritan "worship," Jesus gives crystal-clear clarity that it is the Father whom "we" worship--a subtle allusion by the Evangelist to the "Johannine community" who, in contrast to the various Torah-observant religious people, have come into a relationship with God as Father by way of "Spirit" and "Truth"--a reference to the Third and Second Persons of the Trinity, respectively, and a prolepsis of the Johannine appellation of the Holy Spirit as "Spirit of Truth" (cf Jn 14:17, 15:26, 16:13).  This is why, at John 4:24, Jesus says that "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth"--pulling the proverbial rabbit out of the hat by relating "the Father" to the Godhead.

In the Holy Spirit

The astonishment of Jesus' resurrection was, surprisingly, insufficient to spur the Apostles to mission.  Think about it--they had seen with their own eyes that "Man of Sorrows" flogged, dragged, and crucified.  Even after the excitement of realising that Jesus was, in fact alive, some "still  doubted" even as they were worshipping Him at His Ascension (Mt 28:17).  The miracle of Easter was not enough for the Apostles; when Sts Peter and John exclaimed to the Sanhedrin, "For we cannot but speak of the things we have both seen and heard" (Acts 4:20), they were not speaking of the astonishment of Jesus' resurrection, but of that intimacy with Jesus occasioned by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Notice, more specifically, what the nascent Church did when they spoke in tongues, they were not preaching but, in praise and exultation, telling "the mighty works of God" (Acts 2:11).  In so doing, they were addressing the One with whom they were in relationship, and it was in overhearing in their own languages that the bystanders sought meaning to the spectacle.  Only after did St Peter preach (Acts 2:14).  The first movement resulting from baptism in the Holy Spirit, then, was a personal relationship with the Father, his Son, and their Holy Spirit.

When the Risen Lord told St Mary Magdalene not to "cling" to Him because He was "...ascending to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God" (Jn 20:17), He was not merely telling her to 'let go' but, rather, that she would be able to cling to Him even more dearly once she received the Gift of the Holy Spirit, the Gift who would bind her to Him, and from Him to the Father.  Then, and only then, would she have been able to pray the "Our Father" with any meaning.

Therefore it was only with the indwelling Holy Spirit that the Apostles were incorporated to the Body of Christ (1 Cor 12:13).  It is thus as 'co-sons in the Son' that Christ lends us His voice to call God "Abba!  Father!" (Rom 8:15-16; Gal 4:7; Eph 2:18).  To call upon God as "Father" hardly means that Christians are equipped with a newfound vocabulary--like the pagans who thought they could control the deity by using the deity's name as an incantation--but that our newfound personal relationship is such that our hearts swell to call upon the One who loves us so, like a baby's first words "mama" or "dada."

The knowledge of God afforded by the indwelling Holy Spirit is not meant to be an "epistemic" kind of knowledge, as if St Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways would be able to engender faith.  It is, rather, an intimate knowledge, concomitant with a personal relationship with the Father since Christ has granted us a share in His own Sonship:  "...and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."  It is only in Christ that we can know the Father; outside of Christ, only "God" is known, and as an object, not a Subject, and only with respect to the attributes of the divine Essence, not as a Person who begets the Son and from whom proceeds the Holy Spirit.  As the Byzantine theologians (rightly) love to remind us, we cannot have relationships with essences, only persons.

Theological faith yields the gifts of Understanding and Knowledge, for example, the gifts which enable us to grasp the faith and to relate the world to the Triune God.  Theological charity yields the gift of Wisdom, which enables us to contemplatively gaze upon the Holy Trinity, the very thing that makes a relationship to be a relationship.  Since the Seven Gifts always appear as a cluster or a network, they are never isolated from each other, though we may be more or less adept at one gift in comparison to another.  With Fear, then, we cling to God as Father, Jesus as the Firstborn of the human race and Son of God, and the Holy Spirit who sweetly indwells us, anxious to safeguard this relationship.  The gift of Piety moves us to regard our Father lovingly and obediently and listening to the Holy Spirit remind us of what Jesus revealed of him.  Fortitude gives us a courageous heart to forsake the world and to resign from vice in order that we may "walk as He walked" (1 Jn 2:6).  Counsel enables us to supernaturally 'calculate' the best route towards our heavenly homeland, so that, ultimately, "Christ will hand over the Kingdom to God the Father" (1 Cor 15:24).  These Seven Gifts are precisely that modality whereby we may know, personally and intimately, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  "But the anointing which you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that any one should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything..." (1 Jn 2:27).

Theological Gnosiology

A famous theologian began his multivolume series on Catholic dogmatic theology with a treatise on "theological epistemology."  Most of the dogmatic handbooks from the Baroque period onwards spoke (rightly) of "Revelation and reason," though with an insufficient caveat emptor.  Such a schematic runs the risk of reducing God to an "object" of study with an accumulation of "dogmatic facts" and a "system" of collected truths.  I am afraid that "theological epistemology" presents a deeply problematic method, one that accounts for the open secret among many theological faculties as to why there are learned dogmaticians who have little use for prayer.  It is, I am sad to say, a 'dirty little secret' in the 'industry' of dogmatic or systematic theology.

But the New Testament hardly ever (if at all) speaks of an epistēmē tou Theou, an 'epistemic knowledge' of God.  It speaks, rather, in variants of gnṓseōs tou Theou (cf Rom 11:33; 2 Cor 4:6; Phil 3:8, &c).  It is the same word used in Matthew 11:27 above regarding the Son's "knowledge" of His Father, and vice versa.  What makes this word, γνῶσις, -εως different from ἐπιστήμη is that the former is related to γινώσκω (ginṓskō) referring to an experiential knowledge--as opposed to a logical deductive knowledge that forms "epistemology."

To "know" this table I'm sitting at is to know about its shape, colour, size, and so on.  This "knowledge" of the table is not a relationship, but a series of predicates (cf Aristotle's Ten Categories).  But we cannot know God like this, as though God were an object.  God is a communion of three Persons, each in relationship with each other, each of whom experience each other--and invite us to share in this Trinitarian communion experientially, by having a relationship with him, namely with the indwelling Holy Spirit, as co-sons in the Son, and thus empowered and invested with the right to call upon "Our Father, who art in heaven..."  To apply the Ten Categories to God without being in relationship with him would be discourtesy in its finest form, like speaking about someone as if he weren't in the room.

A Personal Relationship with the Holy Trinity

"Do you know Jesus?" is a challenging question, and as a Catholic theologian, I am troubled when Catholic believers mock our Protestant friends for asking the question.  But such mockery is a deflection tactic which, in reality, betrays the relationship with God that one is supposed to have but barely has.

It also betrays the general Catholic attitude with respect to the Mass:  "No more than an hour!"  But to be in a relationship with God means to enter into worship, and surrender to praise, and to prostrate one's self in adoration.  A distaste for liturgical worship on the part of lay believers, and a tendency to 'cut corners' with liturgical rubrics on the part of clerics, are sure signs of a relationship with God in sore shape.  So is negligence when it comes to private prayer, meditative reading of the Scriptures, and reaching out to "Christ in distressing disguise."  Even devotionalism can disguise a rather thin personal relationship with God, as if by rattling off the rosary we can distract God from the meeting of hearts we're avoiding.

I have also seen ebulliently florid addresses to God--"Most Compassionate One...the Divine Other...the Heavenly Mr Nice..."--all of which evade calling upon God as "Father" or, more recently, refraining from praying "Through Christ our Lord."  Most, if not all, of these signal a suppression of the indwelling Holy Spirit's cry to Abba, Father, a suppression which, in turn, shows a relationship with God in need of healing.  Perhaps the ultimate indicator of a lack of a personal relationship with God is refusing to surrender to the Holy Spirit's sovereignty in our lives, as if being our own masters is somehow better.

To know God, therefore, requires first the invitation of grace and, second, a response by asking our Lord Jesus Christ simply and persistently, "Jesus, show yourself to me, so that I may know the Father!"

Rethinking Confirmation Prep

At table this afternoon, I shared with one of the Dominican friars that the long-awaited McCarrick Report was finally out, to which he shrugged his shoulders and continued eating his lunch.

My friend remembers well the "silly season" as though it were last week when, both during and after the Council, all goofiness broke loose.  Not only does he remember the nearly-impetuous changes to the liturgy, the near-wholesale abandonment of religious life (and the sore abuse that faithful religious had to endure), and the dumbing-down of doctrinal formation in many places--not only in theological academies but also in catechism classes, and "lifestyle changes."  He had been in the Church of Hard Knocks long enough to recognise the McCarrick imbroglio for what it was--another day in the life of Catholic, Inc.

It would be a gross simplification indeed to blame this "silly season" on the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council.  What happened, rather, was that many people used the Council--without delving much into its sixteen documents--as an excuse for the seismic changes in the Church; it didn't happen suddenly in 1965 (or even in 1962) but had been pressure-cooking for some time.  Since when is another matter, but the fact remains that something went wrong well before the Council and St John XXIII was wrongfully used as a poster boy for various pet causes.  (His autobiographical Journal of a Soul inoculated me against many progressivist hagiographies--and traditionalist slanders--about him.)

"Pet causes," I said.  We'll come back to that.

My friar-confrere and I spoke about the "system failure" that the McCarrick Report described throughout its four-hundred-some pages, and our conversation turned over to how the ecclesiastical bureaucracy could be repaired.  Please, God, not another Motu proprio.  Nor, I hope against hope, "clergy meetings" (which inevitably give rise to more committees).  Certainly the American bishops are dreading the necessary conversations they will have to endure during their annual fall assembly.  Dr Edward Peters, I am sure, will have a blog post or two about how canon law already has a system in place to prevent the kinds of procedural irregularities that were circumvented in the election of such malfeasant prelates.

We'll come back to that, too.

As I told the friar, "I know I sound like a musician who can sing only one note, but my research on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit suggests to me that this is precisely what's missing in Christian formation--the role of the Holy Spirit's guidance in discipleship."  In other words, the "system failure" is precisely in being unspiritual, unpentecostal.

In hindsight, I told him, most--if not all--Confirmation preparation classes I've encountered amount to little more than "Baptism Prep, 2.0," as it we're having a do-over of everything we should've learned the first time around but didn't, a re-catechesis, as it were.  "Yet, if you look at the Confirmation prep books out there, there is next to nothing about the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit besides a queue--'These are the Seven Gifts, moving on...'"  How many Confirmandi could repeat Isaiah 11:1-3 from heart, let alone explain what each of the Seven Gifts do and how to use them?  If the answer is "very few," the question then becomes "What's the point of having the indwelling Holy Spirit if we keep him on a leash?"

As the friar and I agreed, most Catholic believers assume that cooperation with the Holy Spirit is something "automatic" that comes to us like breathing.  One trusted brother-priest sought my advice about lay preaching (within the boundaries of canon law, of course) and indicated that he wanted to allow the laity to exercise their "baptismal right."  "Right and good," replied I, "but what comes though by way of preaching does not come by automatically; one must be shaped by the Seven Gifts which, in turn, train us for sensitivity to the Holy Spirit's nudges."  We cannot invoke "baptismal rights" with simply an open mouth and call it "preaching."

It seems to me, therefore, that the massive "system failure" in clerical careerism--as well as in being ordinary Christians--is that we expect grace to just "happen" when, in fact, grace must be cooperated with.  So why are we not teaching that in Confirmation prep?

Going back to my point about 'more bureaucracy to fix a bureaucratic failure,' it is interesting to note that St Thomas Aquinas, in the Second Part of the Second Part of his Summa theologiae, discusses each of the theological virtues and cardinal virtues in turn, along with their corresponding gifts of the Holy Spirit and Beatitude, and 'wraps up' his discussion of each by mentioning this or that aspect of the Ten Commandments.  In other words, the Ten Commandments were never meant to be kept by our own gumption and gall, but by the indwelling Holy Spirit which the Seven Gifts trains us in being sensitive to.

If we made Confirmation about--can you imagine it?--the Holy Spirit rather than just an adolescent milestone, I think the face of the Catholic Church would be vastly different, more beautiful, in fact.  Instead, we often teach young believers about God's love that will "forgive you no matter what," forgetting that "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom 5:5), as if 'sin, forgiven' is something more to be desired than 'Love, indwelling us.'  If we made Confirmation prep about learning how to befriend the Holy Spirit, about giving the Holy Spirit sovereignty in our lives making us ever freer, if we took the time to practice using the Seven Gifts, I would wager every last book of mine that we would have glowing young Christians ready to win the world for Christ.

"Be aglow with the Spirit" (Rom 12:11);

"Do not quench the Holy Spirit" (1 Thess 5:19);

"Be filled with the Spirit" (Eph 5:18).

When I spoke earlier about "pet causes," I was not necessarily referring to pet causes in themselves, but the driving force whereby Christians pursue them:  Social activism initiatives, community service, various parish ministries, and so on.  Are we driven by the Holy Spirit, or by our personal enthusiasm?  Very often, I think, we Christians mistake excitement about a project for Pentecostal inspiration when, in fact, it is not, because agere sequitur esse, "action follows being," as we Thomists say, meaning that our personal, existential condition gives rise to the things we do and how we do them.  You know what I mean--how often do such "pet projects" begin with prayer, or just a scripted one?  What accounts for the uncomfortable squirming when some in the group speak about "The Lord working through me" as if he  or she were making a major social faux pas?  This, I would suggest to you, indicates that excitement, not Pentecostal inspiration, is the driving force.  Fuelling the Church with something other than Pentecostal inspiration degrades the Church from an organism to an organisation.

And the Holy Spirit is too courteous a friend to barge in uninvited.  As St Bonaventure of Bagnoregio famously said, "The Holy Spirit comes where He is loved, where He is invited, where He is expected.”

Besides the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, there is yet another glaring omission in most--if not all Confirmation preps I've encountered, even by the loudest self-appointed vanguards of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, who conveniently ignore this:

The Church, which the Spirit guides in way of all truth and which He unified in communion and in works of ministry, He both equips and directs with hierarchical and charismatic gifts and adorns with His fruits.  By the power of the Gospel He makes the Church keep the freshness of youth. Uninterruptedly He renews it and leads it to perfect union with its Spouse.  The Spirit and the Bride both say to Jesus, the Lord, "Come!"

...These charisms, whether they be the more outstanding or the more simple and widely diffused, are to be received with thanksgiving and consolation for they are perfectly suited to and useful for the needs of the Church. Extraordinary gifts are not to be sought after, nor are the fruits of apostolic labor to be presumptuously expected from their use; but judgment as to their authenticity and proper use belongs to those who are appointed leaders in the Church, to whose special competence it belongs, not indeed to extinguish the Spirit, but to test all things and hold fast to that which is good.

...On the contrary [the laity] understand that it is their noble duty to shepherd the faithful and to recognize their ministries and charisms, so that all according to their proper roles may cooperate in this common undertaking with one mind. For we must all "practice the truth in love, and so grow up in all things in Him who is head, Christ. For from Him the whole body, being closely joined and knit together through every joint of the system, according to the functioning in due measure of each single part, derives its increase to the building up of itself in love" (Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, nn. 7, 12, 30).

Yet, when was the last time you heard "charisms" or "charismatic gifts" mentioned in Confirmation prep?  In their landmark study Christian Initiation and Baptism in the Holy Spirit, Fr Killian McDonnell OSB and Fr George Montague SM demonstrated that, well into the early Middle Ages, preparing catechumens for receiving the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit included an element of receptivity to charisms.  If the Second Vatican Council wanted to see the charisms used, where else can we start, besides Confirmation preparation?  And why not receive them at Confirmation--unless we continue to fall prey to the urban legend that this sacrament is only a "rite of passage into adulthood" (which it's not)? 

As I have been discovering lately--thanks to Metropolitan John Zizioulas--there is a cosmic difference between "theological epistemology" and "theological gnosiology":  Whereas the former has to do with dogmatic facts, the latter has to do with living dogma.  It's the difference between 'being on the outside, looking in' and 'being on the inside, looking up.'  The whole Trinity isn't something we "know about" but someOne whom we "know"--personally, experientially, as a friend.  What's the point of singing on every Pentecost Sunday (where the parish priest has the wherewithal to even have it sung!) the Golden Sequence when we chant of the Holy Spirit who is Dulcis hospes animae, "the soul's delightsome Guest"?  After all, isn't it rude, at the end of the day we're Confirmed, to effectively say to the Holy Spirit, "Come on in, sit over there and don't make a mess of me"?  Rather, Confirmation prep ought to teach candidates for the sacrament how to befriend the Holy Spirit.  Again, St Thomas Aquinas was revolutionary to speak of the theological virtue of charity as "friendship with God."  Yet we're scarcely a friend of God when our relationship to him is limited to scripted prayers buzzed off occasionally and the Bible left unread and, therefore, God unlistened to.

My overall point is this:  I'm not entirely sure we've given the Holy Spirit his hour to renew the Church.  Renewal must be just that--by renewal, not "reorganisation."  And renewal happens in no other way than by the Holy Spirit; if we're looking for ways to renew the Church without something so inconvenient and troublemaking as "walking in the Spirit," it's a sure sign that we're taking the exact reverse course to "renewal."  We have got to stop being de facto Pelagians and surrender, rather, to the workings of grace and personal transformation that comes about by intimacy with the Holy Spirit, and intentionally looking for holiness before we reach the confessional doors instead of just after.  And Confirmation is exactly the place undo this veritable Pneumatomachianism.

Hence did Good Pope John begin the Second Vatican Council with that oft-repeated but seldom-reflected prayer which, upon closer inspection, is wonderfully dangerous:

"O Holy Spirit, renew your wonders in this our day, as by a new Pentecost!"

His immediate predecessor, Pope Pius XII, spoke of the Holy Spirit as the "soul of the Church."  À la Metropolitan Zizioulas, maybe it's high time we turn this dogmatic fact to living dogma.

"Peter Has Spoken Through Leo!"

"The Son of God, therefore, descending from His heavenly throne, enters into the infirmities of this world; and, not leaving the Father's glory, He is generated in a new order and a new birth.  In a new order, because invisible in His own, He was made visible in ours; being incomprehensible, He wished to be comprehended; while remaining prior to time, He began to exist in time; the Lord of the universe, concealing the immensity of His majesty, assumed the form of a slave; the impassible God did not disdain to be man subject to suffering, nor the Immortal One to be subject to the laws of death.  He is generated, however, by a new birth:  Because an inviolate virginity, not knowing concupiscence, has supplied the matter of the flesh.  From the Mother of the Lord, nature, not guilt, was assumed.  Nor does the Lord Jesus Christ, born from the womb of a Virgin, have a nature different than ours just because His birth was miraculous.  For He who is true God is likewise true Man, and there is no falsehood in this unity, in which the lowliness of man and the height of divinity coincide.  God is not changed by his compassion, nor is man swallowed up by such dignity.  For each nature does what is proper to each in communion with the other:  the Word does what pertains to the Word, and the flesh to what pertains to the flesh.  One shines forth with miracles; the other succumbs to injuries.  And just as the Word does not depart from quality with the Father's glory, just so the flesh does not abandon the nature of our race."

St Leo the Great, Pope of Rome, Lectis dilectionis tuae

Christological Dogma:Not Merely "About Him" But "Him and I"

Too often I hear Christian leaders tell me that "doctrine" or "dogma" is irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people, and that we are better off getting busy about feeding hungry mouths or sheltering homeless people, as if a dichotomy can be made between "things about Christ" and "Christ about things."  Certainly you've heard these charges:  "The message was exchanged for the Messenger"; "Dogma is an overcomplication of the simple Gospel"; "'Consubstantial' in the Creed has no practical meaning ."

In my early days, I as given the following description of "Roman" theology versus "Byzantine" theology:  Whereas Roman theologians would like to, say, measure the dimensions of a swimming pool, test the water's temperature, seek to discover the properties of fluid dynamics, and maybe, maybe wade in, Byzantine theologians like to dive-bomb right into the pool's deep end!

It is true that Roman theologians like to partition, compartmentalise, label, and store magisterial teachings in warehouses, but this is really only since the Baroque period.  And, of course, St Thomas Aquinas was aware of something like this, hence his complaint about the Scholastics of his day "multiplying useless questions."  It was not unusual, especially after the Twelfth Century Renaissance, for students to travel, amass knowledge, and make sure everyone knew about it.  Today we call them first-year seminarians.

Let's take, for our example, the doctrine of Christ's two wills.  The Sixth Ecumenical Council solemnly taught that there are in Christ

according to the teaching of the Holy Fathers, two natural volitions or wills and two natural actions, without division, without change, without separation, without confusion.  The two natural wills are not--by any means--opposed to each other as the impious heretics assert; but His human will is compliant; it does not resist or oppose but rather submits to his divine and almighty will (DH 556).

Will is a property of nature, not of persons; since Christ is consubstantial (of the same substance of) with the Father, He has a divine nature, and since Christ is also consubstantial with the human race, He has also a human will.

The idea is easy enough, until one realises that Christ, as the God-Man, is one Subject, one Person, and not two.  The dogma is essentially teaching that the single Christ has two wills:  What He does as God, and what He does as man.

Far from being intellectualist hair-splitting, it is, in fact, salvific and existential:  It says something about Christ as Saviour and about you and me as the saved.

St Gregory the Theologian often said that "What was not assumed was not healed."  This is why Nestorius' proposal that Christ was two subjects morally united with each other could not be our Saviour, because it would mean that being Christian is about moralizing.  Nor could Eutyches' proposal that Christ's divinity absorbed or fused His humanity with His divinity, because then Christ would not have saved the human race but some hybrid race (that doesn't exist).  By teaching that Christ was two natures (divine, human) in the one Person of the Eternal Word means that the Incarnation effected a conjoining of two infinitely distanced natures--divinity and humanity--and not only distanced on account of their different natures, but also two alienated natures on account of God's utter holiness and human sin.  By brining together divinity and humanity into the one Person of the Eternal Word, this division and alienation was overcome and, at the same time, preserved the uniqueness of the divine nature and of the human nature.

Thus the 'sentimentality' of Christmas becomes, in hindsight, a cheapening of the Incarnation.

What about Christ's two wills?

Sin is nothing other than a misuse of freedom; God made us for excellence (and not "for whatever we like" as Occam later taught).  Christ as God took upon Himself human nature from the Virgin and, consequently, a concomitant human will.  As the dogmatic definition above stated, the two wills were "not...opposed to each other."  Christ humanly willed what His divinity also willed, thus overcoming Adam and Eve's initial rebellion that cause humanity's downfall.  Christ's obedience undid Adam's rebellion.  He did this "for me" and "for you."

But the "for" comes into play only when we are "in Christ" (Rom 3:24, 6:11; 1 Cor 1:30, 15:22; Eph 2:6, 13, &c) by way of incorporation into His Body, the Church.  By His human will, He overcame sin, and gifts us with a share in this overcoming, thus effecting in us salvation.

But it doesn't end there.  "[H]e who says he abides in Him [= Christ] ought to walk in the same way in which He walked" (1 Jn 2:).  Whereas Christ's human nature was united to the divine nature in the Subject of the Word--we call this the "Hypostatic Union"--you and I are united to the divine nature by sanctifying grace.  And, because of grace, we too are able to conform our individual human wills to God's will.  This is what we mean in the Lord's Prayer:  "Thy will be done."

Only then, when it is "Christ in me" feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless can we be Christians, rather than a mere mimicking of Him.

I hope you can see clearly that Christological dogma, far from being the nitpicking of theologians (though we do that, too, especially over a good ale or two, and only fun with at least one Thomist in the mix) is really the articulation of being "in Christ."  All the doctrines about Christ are not simply about Christ-as-Christ, but also about Christ-for-us and, ultimately, Christ-in-me.  These dogmas, therefore, are not only ontological--about the being of Christ--but especially existential, about "my existence" (this is piety) and "your existence" (this is mission)--because it speaks about what Christ did for us way back when and what He is doing in us here right now.

Metropolitan John of PergamosOn Personhood and Dogmatics

"This personal relationship of Christ and the Father is given in Christ to us, so we are enabled to recognise God because we are made sons, who can address God as Father.  In teaching them to pray 'Our Father' Christ gave this privilege to his disciples, and we are brought within this relationship so we can also address God as Father.  There is no one but the Son who ca n eternally address God as Father, therefore only the Son can bring us in to relationship with him self, so we become sons of the Father and thereby able to know God as he is, as God the Father.  The Christian approach to God as Father originates exclusively from this relationship of the Son to the Father, and the right that the Son bestows on us to address God as Father with him.  

"The concept of the paternity of God was common in the ancient world.  To the Greeks, Zeus was ‘the father of gods and men.’  But in the Bible only the Son has the right to address God as Father.  Christ alone is able to reveal that the Father is the identity of God.  Knowledge of God means the acknowledgement that God is the Father.  This relationship that God has eternally with his Son is the relationship that is passed on to us.  We do not therefore come to know God by compiling a dossier of his characteristics, in the way that some dogmatics systems do.  That God is Father is the whole truth of God, so a true understanding of God is only possible with in the identity of the Son of God.  If we a re familiar with Christian doctrine, we may even give this our intellectual assent.  But really to know this is to recognise and acknowledge God as Father, which is the prerogative of the  Son.  A son knows his own father in quite a different way than he knows any one else’s father.  Personal knowledge exists only within relationships that are unique and irreplaceable."

Metropolitan John (Zizioulas), Lectures in Christian Dogmatics

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh on Love

"So often when we say 'I love you' we say it with a huge 'I' and a small 'you.'  We use love as a conjunction instead it being a verb implying action.  It's no good just gazing out into open space hoping to see the Lord; instead we have to look closely at our neighbour, someone who God has willed into existence, someone whom God has died for.  Everyone we meet has a right to exist, because he has value in himself, and we are not used to this.  The acceptance of otherness is a danger to us, it threatens us.  To recognise the other's right to be himself might mean recognising his right to kill me.  But if we set a limit to his right to exist, it's no right at all.  Love is difficult.  Christ was crucified because he taught a kind of love which is a terror for men, a love which demands total surrender:  it spells death."

Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom), Beginning to Pray