The mystery of the truth does not consist in things, ideas, symbols, but in the Person and this is the theanthropic Person of our Lord Jesus Christ: `I am the Truth`, absolute Truth, never changed, always being one, in perfect fullness, always one, yesterday and today and forevermore. A truth always unchanged by times, always infinite, always eternal even in the mortals. Many other different truths derive from it like the sun rays and they are eternal as well. All the dogmatic truths consist in reality in a single truth: Jesus Christ Theanthropos. All these lead to Him…
The eternal dogmatic truths are neither some abstract terms nor the result of thoughts or logical hypotheses but some real events and experiences, since they appeared, they were discovered, they were heard, they took place in time and space among us, the men. For instance, the dogma about the Holy Trinity is an eternal truth obviously shown in the world through multiple apparitions, teophanies and experiences from the Old and New Testament.
The dogma about Christ the Theanthropos is based on the historical reality about Jesus Christ of Nazareth and the dogma of Resurrection is based on the event of the Resurrection of Christ. What is true for these is true for all the dogmas because all of them – from the first till the last one – are based on an obvious and indubitable historical reality.
If the man studies objectively the meaning and the content of the dogmas of the New Testament he will find that all of them are some divine theanthropic events, taking place within the boundaries of time and space.
The men may not understand these things, but it’s not possible to have doubts about them. Those who fight with God deny the events indeed even if they see them with their own eyes. A classic example for this are the Pharisees mentioned in the Gospel as a model of all the Pharisees from all times. They deny the events because they are true events, because they don’t want them to be so and they try with all their might to turn them into hypotheses, fancies and legends.
Dogmatics is a sort of mosaic. It orders the eternal dogmatic truths in accordance with their attributes, it harmonizes them according to the light they spread, in order to compose the Person of Christ in this way in the mosaic of the eternal truths, the Person of the Creator of the whole revelation from the Old and New Testament. The dogmatic truths are all of them divine, endless, infinite and eternal, because they originate in the endless, infinite and eternal God.
The men don’t have inside themselves the strength and power to create eternal infinite truths. They receive those already created by God.
Their creativity consists from this point of view in the following: to accept the eternal dogmatic truths about faith and about the gracious evangelical asceticism and to apply them in their lives, in their thoughts and feelings. And in this way to reach holiness and perfection. From this point of view the saints experience the living in flesh of the eternal dogmatic truths and thus they are their preachers and confessors.
Belgrad, 1932, Hieromonk Iustin Popovici
