Cabasilas & Schmemann: The Need to Theologically Explain Ourselves

There are some spots where it is helpful to have a man from our own times speaking on Baptism. Schmemann, writing on the tail of the greatest wave of cultural change in America, the tumultuous 60s, can speak to our mixed up, modern confusion...in this case, about death. “Seemingly, from a modern perspective, nothing has happened to biological death with Christ’s death, because we still all die,” runs the thinking of a modern atheist looking at Christianity. He is able to respond to this confusion with the fundamental Christian vision of death: it is that death “in which the ‘biological’ or physical death is not the whole death, not even its ultimate essence. For in this Christian vision, death is above all a spiritual reality, of which one can partake while being alive, from which one can be free while lying in the grave.”

Cabasilas rightly speaks of this spiritual death in Baptism by saying that “in the sacred mysteries, then, we depict His burial and proclaim His death. By them we are begotten and formed and wondrously united to the Saviour, for they are the means by which, as Paul says, ‘in Him we live, and move, and have our being’.” Though Cabasilas cannot specifically speak to our modern confusion, maybe he does not need to. Like Christ speaking with Nicodemus, it is immediately obvious that being born again means something different than being born the first time. In the same way, if we are speaking of eternal life, then we must not mean that “death” (when our body is placed in the ground) is the end. Maybe St. Nicholas does not need “whole death”, “spiritual reality”, or “ultimate essence” to be able to reach the modern reader.