{"id":27,"date":"2011-04-19T12:02:19","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T16:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/bread_on_the_trail\/?p=27"},"modified":"2011-04-19T12:02:19","modified_gmt":"2011-04-19T16:02:19","slug":"st-basil-by-one-death-and-resurrection-the-world-was-saved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/2011\/04\/st-basil-by-one-death-and-resurrection-the-world-was-saved.html","title":{"rendered":"St. Basil: By One Death and Resurrection the World was Saved"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From the book On the Holy Spirit by Saint Basil, bishop<\/strong><\/p>\n

When mankind was estranged from him by disobedience, God our Saviour made a plan for raising us from our fall and restoring us to friendship with himself. According to this plan Christ came in the flesh, he showed us the gospel way of life, he suffered, died on the cross, was buried and rose from the dead. He did this so that we could be saved by imitation of him, and recover our original status as sons of God by adoption.<\/p>\n

To attain holiness, then, we must not only pattern our lives on Christ\u2019s by being gentle, humble and patient, we must also imitate him in his death. Taking Christ for his model, Paul said that he wanted to become like him in his death in the hope that he too would be raised from death to life.<\/p>\n

We imitate Christ\u2019s death by being buried with him in baptism. If we ask what this kind of burial means and what benefit we may hope to derive from it, it means first of all making a complete break with our former way of life, and our Lord himself said that this cannot be done unless a man is born again. In other words, we have to begin a new life, and we cannot do so until our previous life has been brought to an end.<\/p>\n

When runners reach the turning point on a racecourse, they have to pause briefly before they can go back in the opposite direction. So also when we wish to reverse the direction of our lives there must be a pause, or a death, to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another.
\n\u00a0
\nOur descent into hell takes place when we imitate the burial of Christ by our baptism. The bodies of the baptised are in a sense buried in the water as a symbol of their renunciation of the sins of their unregenerate nature. As the Apostle says: The circumcision you have undergone is not an operation performed by human hands, but the complete stripping away of your unregenerate nature.<\/p>\n

This is the circumcision that Christ gave us, and it is accomplished by our burial with him in baptism. Baptism cleanses the soul from the pollution of worldly thoughts and inclinations: You will wash me, says the psalmist, and I shall be whiter than snow. We receive this saving baptism only once because there was only one death and one resurrection for the salvation of the world, and baptism is its symbol.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the book On the Holy Spirit by Saint Basil, bishop When mankind was estranged from him by disobedience, God our Saviour made a plan for raising us from our fall and restoring us to friendship with himself. According to this plan Christ came in the flesh, he showed us the gospel way of life,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,27,14],"tags":[28,90,93],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-early-fathers","category-holy-spirit","category-saints","tag-fathers","tag-holy-spirit","tag-saints"],"yoast_head":"\nSt. Basil: By One Death and Resurrection the World was Saved - Bread on the Trail<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/2011\/04\/st-basil-by-one-death-and-resurrection-the-world-was-saved.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"St. Basil: By One Death and Resurrection the World was Saved - Bread on the Trail\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the book On the Holy Spirit by Saint Basil, bishop When mankind was estranged from him by disobedience, God our Saviour made a plan for raising us from our fall and restoring us to friendship with himself. 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He is a widely recognized voice in the Catholic and broader Christian community. He is a member of the Clergy of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia. In his fifteenth year of service as an ordained Catholic Deacon, he is currently assigned to St Stephen Martyr Parish in Chesapeake, Virginia. He is also authorized to serve the Liturgy of the Greek Byzantine Melkite Catholic Church. Deacon Fournier and his wife Laurine have been married for 34 years and have five grown children and six grandchildren. Deacon Fournier holds his Bachelors degree in theology and philosophy from the Franciscan University of Steubenville (BA), his Masters Degree in Marriage and Family Theology from the John Paul II Institute of the Lateran University (MTS), his Juris Doctor Law Degree Law (JD) from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and is a PhD candidate in Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America where he is currently writing his Doctoral Dissertation. Deacon Fournier also holds two honorary Doctorates, a Doctor of Laws (L.L.D. 1994,Honoris Causa) from St. Thomas University - Given for pro-life legal contributions, and a Doctor of Divinity Degree (D.D. 2005, Honoris Causa ) from the National Clergy Council and the Methodist Episcopal Church for his contributions to authentic ecumenical efforts toward Christian unity. Attorney Fournier is a constitutional lawyer who appeared as co-counsel in cases before the United States Supreme Court on Pro-Life, Religious Freedom and Pro-family issues. He served as the first Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice for seven years. He then served as a public policy activist for the causes of life, marriage and family issues for a number of years. He has extensive experience in nonprofit and for profit leadership. He has taught at the College level and served in Academic administration. He was a Dean of Students and the Dean of Evangelization at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio. Deacon Fournier is, above all, a communicator. His faith informs his passion to share the fullness of life which he has found in the heart of the Catholic Church. He has written eight books on matters of faith, family and the Christian life and is widely published in the broader Christian community on matters of life, faith, family, and cultural and social issues. He hosted two daily national radio programs, Purpose for Living, and Millennial Moment. He hosted several television series on Christian family and contemporary faith issues on EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network). He is actively involved in preaching and teaching in the Catholic Church and the broader Christian community. In addition to serving as the Editor in Chief of Catholic Online, Deacon Fournier is the John Paul II Fellow and special counsel for the National Pro-Life Center in Washington, D.C. and is the president of Third Millennium, LLC, a communications and consulting company. He views his role on Beliefnet as an opportunity to share his Catholic Christian faith in what he calls a new areopagus. The areopagus is referred to in the 17th Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the Christian New Testament. Also called Mars Hill it was there where the Apostle Paul shared the Christian faith with the early Greeks in their temple.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/author\/deaconfournier"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/30"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bread_on_the_trail\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}