WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Cloud of Witnesses: St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Pt. 3

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Join Dominic and Fr. Adam as they finish up their discussion on St. Gregory Nazianzus. 

Welcome back to Cloud of Witnesses. This episode is the final installment of our three-part series talking about St. Gregory of Nazianzus with Hillsdale College Chaplain, Father Adam. This was a lot of fun recording. It's been a lot of fun going back and listening and editing. And so I hope you guys enjoy this final installment and final episode of the Cloud of Witnesses. It's like your favorite work of his, his, his sort of autobiographical. Honestly, probably not.

He's not at his best in the Divita Sua. But I mean, obviously, I think the work I've read of him the most is his five theological orations. He's also got a great work. We haven't talked about this yet, but he also wrote the first dedicated tract on the dignity of the ordained ministry. Okay. And that was also written on the occasion of him being forced into something he didn't want to. to do. His father forcibly ordains him a priest to help him tend to the flock in Arianzus. And Gregory's reaction to this force ordination is to literally run away. He leaves the state. He runs north to a

region called Pontus and like hides in Basil's monarchy. This is before Basil becomes a bishop. And it took Basil almost a year to convince Gregory to go back and like take on the mantle of this work. So he'd already been ordained. So by the time Gregory gets back, naturally the congregation he was supposed to minister to was pretty pissed off at him. And so he feels the need to defend himself. So you're seeing a theme here. And he preaches a long sermon called, in defense of my flight. It's oration number two and his collected corpus.

And you would never guess, looking at the title of it, that what that's actually about is the dignity of the priestly ministry. And he's defending his flight because, obviously, he's running away because he didn't feel like he was worthy of it. And so he runs down his understanding of the dignity of the priestly ministry as he's saying, and I was not worthy of this. Yeah.

That ends up being cited by Chrisostom and is on the priesthood. Yes, yeah. And so it's another great sort of vanguard work of Gregory's that no one has ever heard of him for, but like nevertheless, the great works, John Christosven on the priesthood, who is then himself cited by Gregory the Great's

pastoral rule. Mm-hmm. Like Gregory is the source of that genre. and so that's also a sermon I've spent some time studying as well. Okay. Yeah, I was about to say, like, it's not really familiar to close to St. John Chrysostom's because he also talks a little bit about how he really didn't want to be a priest. Yeah, he flees also.

He runs, well, in his case, he flees even being ordained. Yes, yeah. Because it's him and a buddy of his, and they're both ordained at the same. There's like the search at the same time, and there's like a mob that literally like envelops them. And John runs away. Yeah. And his, and gets out of it. And his friend gets ordained.

And then his friend now ordained finds him in the desert. And like, dude, like, you totally screwed me. Like, what were you doing? And convinces John to go back and receive the laying on of hands. So John tells a similar story. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

So you're an ordained priest in the ancient tradition. You've served a director before at Holy Trinity and served elsewhere. But now you're the full-time rector, or sorry, the full-time chaplain at Hillsdale College. How have you used St. Gregory in your ministry? That's an excellent question. So I teach a class in the core curriculum called Western Theological Tradition, and when I get into the doctrine of the Trinity, and particularly as I as I introduce Cyrillian Christology, talking about the humanity of Jesus, I quote his letters to Clodonius in my lectures. So I bring him up in my formal teaching.

One of the student ministries on this campus, the Catholic Society, they have an event every week called Convivian, where they bring in a speaker and talk on some issue of theology or contemporary Christian life or whatever. Usually Catholic speakers, but I impose myself on them as the chaplain, and they graciously let me, usually once a year. And twice now, over my 10 years here as chaplain, I've given a talk. I try to pick a talk that allows us to, you know, kind of I find common ground Catholic Protestant, whatever.

And I did my master's research and have a great interest in patristics, and Gregory in particular. And, you know, interest in the church fathers is definitely something I have in common with a Roman Catholic. And so I've given a talk on Gregory's life and called the reluctant saint, where I say a lot of these same things I'm saying to you now. I've done that twice now because I don't have to defend the legitimacy of Gregor of Nazianzus to them.

You know, they may have never heard of him before, maybe you've only heard of him, but don't know anything about him. So it's just a fun opportunity for us to just have fun, geeking out about church history together. So I've done that. And then he occasionally comes up just in pastoral counseling. Certainly when I've men who are interested in holy orders, he might come up in conversation. As you well know, Domberg, there's an icon of him in my office. Yes, yeah.

And it's hard to say if this was intentional or not. I don't remember thinking it, but it seems pretty obvious that it would be. his icon is right above my head. If you're sitting in my office looking at me where I normally sit, Gregory's on my right shoulder, overlooking me as I ply my wares, so to speak, as a minister. So he's there keeping watch, so to speak. And of course, students who get to know me well know that he's my boy.

And I definitely have had students over the years and their midterm examinations or whatever quote him and say, according to your boy Gregory if you do that you might get you might get an extra credit point for me so that's you kind of just kind of surfaces here and there yeah okay that's really yeah I wish

I wish you had taught sort of like a patristic class focusing on St. Gregory that would have been a lot of fun we got a lot of great patristics guys though between Ken Calvert and Jordan Wales and Cody Stricker yeah I feel like there's just too much talent in the department for me to like stick my head and be like I'll teach patristics too

though of course Of course, I love the subject. And as you can see, I can talk about it without notes at length because I spend so much time studying it. So maybe one of these days. I'll do something with Gregory, but I haven't done that yet. Okay. Well, sort of related to that last question, he is, you know, St. Gregory is considered, you know, and is an Eastern, Eastern saint, sort of more... Meese canonized in the West also.

Yes, yeah, he's celebrated. But he writes in Greek, and so he's known, especially in the Greek. So is there any way in your ministry as an Anglican from the Western tradition that you found, I guess, unique in St. Gregory that you sort of are missing? Like, you know, I'm also an Anglican, so I, you know, committed, committed Anglican. This is a loaded question. But, you know, it's there. You just, like, put two shells to shock and fired them off at me. Gee, kind of be succinct about this.

I think the Western tradition as a rule, it definitely bears the mark of its Roman pedigree. By a Roman, I don't mean Catholic. I mean like ancient Roman. Yeah. And the Romans were committed to simplicity and to order and to, you know, jurisprudence, legality. And there's just a, there's a pedestrian and efficient quality to the Romans

that makes its mark on the way the West has developed its instinct for theology. And certainly in the Middle Ages, what that produces is a desire to want to really pin everything down in nice, neat categories. Yeah, medieval scholastic theology. Yeah, sure. And the Reformation, for all of its critique of certain aspects of medieval Christianity, doesn't generally take off that mantle. You see maybe less so in Luther, but certainly in Melanchthon, and certainly in the reformed tradition. with someone like Bollinger in his decades or Calvin and his institutes, an instinct, like a very peculiarly Western instinct,

to want to just have every eye dotted and every T-E-cross doctrinally. And of course, they're partially reacting against sort of a reified Roman Catholic instinct in that regard as well. The Anglican tradition has that impulse in places as well, but because of its historical circumstances, it resists a systematic theology as becomes normative in other parts of the Protestant West. And certainly after Trent is prominent in the Roman Catholic West as well.

And there's just an instinct to say and to require from John and JQ Christian as little as we need. And I don't mean that glibly or flippantly. It's like what does the Catholic faith actually require you to believe and what is just the church speculating about. And Anglicanism, with its articles of religion, they're very terse, put them next to the Book of Concord or any of the reformed confessions, and you see that immediately.

The fact that a liturgy itself is one of our standards is, I think, unique to Anglicans among Protestants, certainly. What that produces is a theological instinct that I find to be very very very very. very compatible with an Eastern spirit of theology. You talk to any Eastern theologian, they're going to cite their liturgy pretty quick. In a way that you don't necessarily find Roman Catholic theologians doing with the Mass.

I mean, sometimes they do, but not nearly as consistently or frequently. In the Orthodox Church, they really see the liturgy itself as one of the main conduits of the apostolic faiths. They cite it very freely. And Anglicans have that same instinct. Like, yeah, but you want to know what we believe with the Eucharist, you can read the articles, sure. That's a good place to start.

You should also read our Eucharistic liturgy. And of course, particularly within the Eucharist religion, there's a very, very strong emphasis on sort of participation in God, union with Christ. All of that is, it's sort of Western lingo, but it's very compatible with certain Orthodox conceptions of salvation in my mind. And so when I read someone like Gregory, obviously he's not an Anglican, he's not anticipating the Reformation. But I find of the Western options, Anglicanism as a tradition, is able to, to most naturally sort of fit itself into sort of an orthodox mode of theologizing,

if I can put it that way. And so I don't, and even my own reading of the Church Fathers certainly has colored my perception of this, I'm sure, but I never find them presenting a vision of the gospel, which I see is fundamentally incompatible in some respect with the Book of Common Prayer, even though those are two very different eras of church history.

They're dealing with different issues are focusing on. And so I find Gregory to be a wonderful dialogue partner as an Anglican. Yeah. Because I don't see him articulating a vision of the faith that feels foreign to me at all. Yeah. And I don't even can see him, like, his theological method to be something. It's like, yeah, well, of course he's a father.

We don't do it that way anymore. Yeah. Even his theological method is something that, like, as an Anglican, I feel like, is very native. Yeah. It's obviously not English Anglican. It's, you know, fourth century Greek. Yeah. But there's an instinct there that seems to be a natural fit into what has become the Anglican method of spirituality and theology.

So I don't find there to be a conflict there really at all. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things that a couple years ago, you know this. I spent some time discerning converting to Eastern Orthodoxy. Yeah, as did I. I didn't tell that story, but that's part of my story too. But one of the things that sort of drew me to that is I was already sort of used to the way that a lot of Eastern fathers and even modern Eastern Orthodox theologians do theology because it felt

very familiar to me sort of in the Anglican tradition. I think a lot of people sort of underestimate you know, they see Anglicanism as like a Western Protestant tradition and so they just sort of group us in with, you know, Presbyterians and Lutherans and all those guys. But I think that of the Western traditions, Anglicanism is the most Eastern. I think that's fair. And a lot of aspects. And that's been borne out even in fact. Excuse me here. Just in the history of the ecumenical movement, there's been a lot of interesting dialogue between Anglicans and the Orthodox,

and it's just worth pointing out most sort of scholars of the ecumenical movement would identify the year 1920 as sort of the seedbed moment when what becomes the ecumenical movement really is born publicly for the first time. And the year 1920, two different things happen, which are often identified as cardinal moments.

One is a letter, an encyclical, that's put out there by the ecumenical patriarch at that time living under I guess fresh Turk rule I guess that's in modern day Constantinople on modern day Istanbul and he calls, it's a clarion call for Christian unity

that like we got to find a way as Christians of different confessions to come together and this is coming from the Orthodox patriarch yeah and so he writes that letter and then a few months later later, there's a Lambeth conference in England, and all of the Anglican bishops at Lambeth also issue a statement on Christian unity. It's the longest resolution out of the conference by several times. Most of the resolutions are like a paragraph. This thing's a couple pages. Okay.

Where the bishops, the Anglican bishops at Lambeth are calling for Christian unity, and they reference the Ecumenical Patriarch's letter. So those two things together become the seedbed of what becomes the Faith and Order Commission, of what's now the World Council of Churches. And for whatever you want to say about the WCC now, at the time, it was this great sort of bastion of hope for visible Christian unity. And it started by the Orthodox and the Anglican churches. It's those two churches that formally, not just like a, like a, like, like a blurb in a newspaper, like an op-ed.

Like, they write formal ecclesiastical letters calling the whole Christian church, calling all people who call themselves Christians, to really begin to think about what would be necessary to enjoy greater visible unity. And so it's not just my opinion that Anglicanism and Orthodoxy have a bit of a simpatico. Yeah. Like history has borne that out. And it's just worth remembering that. Yeah.

Yeah, one of my other favorite guys, Father A.B. Pusey. late 19th century, especially after Vatican one. He was very, you know, he tried to figure out a way to get the Church of England and the Eastern churches to figure out of a way to, to, you know, start, you know, getting, getting together and making friends with each other. So we're wrapping up, I just have like one sort of blanket question. Is there anything that we haven't talked about from St. Gregory that you want to sort of insert something, you know, theological, homiletical pastoral?

Let me just close with this. The first of the five theological orations, Gregory takes up the issue of theological method. So he doesn't start getting into the persons of God of God, the God, the Father, oration two. Doctrine of God the Father, orations three and four, doctrine of God the Son, Oration five, doctrine of God the Holy Spirit.

Oration one is an introduction to theological method. And for Gregory, at the heart of Christian, at the heart of theological method is prayer and holiness. So he's less interested in your rhetorical and theological credentials, your bona fides. He's more interested in, are you a man of prayer? Are you a man of holiness of life?

If you are, then we can talk theology. And if you're not, just shut your mouth and worship. And so he really wants to, because, I mean, he's slightly scandalized by how all of these sort of esoteric theological conversations are just happening in the marketplace. Yeah.

And it's causing division and it's causing disturbance in the Church of God. And he was like, who are all these people? And like, why do they think they can talk about the divine essence? And so, and then, This is a little bit of Gregory's own aristocratic elitism surfacing a bit, admittedly. But at the same time, his instinct that, like, look, theology is not a discipline you can

abstract out from other disciplines and, like, sort of hermetically seal as something you do, right? And particularly now, most theology is done in the academy, right, by, like, scholars. Even, like, sort of like, the online, like, you just have people running around without. Gregory was a, he was a churchman. He was a preacher and a minister of sacraments. Like, that was his primary ministry. and wouldn't it be great to go back to a day when our own bishops and clergy

are the ones actually leading in the conversation theologically. But he's also an ascetic, right? Like holiness of life, quality of prayer, and even his own vision of God as three and one and one and three is fundamentally doxological for him, right? It's a matter of adoring God as Trinity and not like parsing him out.

And some of his most lofty statements about the Trinity are in the context of sort of flights of fancy of adoration. There's a quote by Gregory's, I think it's his epiphany sermon that's actually referenced by Calvin in his treatment of Trinity. And he says he always reads this passage with delight. And as you read it,

there's nothing systematic about it. It's just clearly Gregory having an ecstatic experience with God as three and one and one and three. And so for Gregory, you can't do theology apart from prayer. You can't do theology apart from like a demonstrated

life of holiness and discipline. And that's a word I think we all need to hear at Hillsdale, especially, where we just love to debate theology. Yeah. Because we think we can sort of separate that off from our life generally, and Gregory would have no part of that. Like, nope, you need to be a man of prayer and a man of discipline holiness first. And then we can, once you've sort of attained a little bit of the divine vision in this life, then we might begin to dabble a little bit in a conversation about the doctrine. Yeah. And that's a word worth heating for sure. Okay. Well, Father, thank you so much. much. This was a ton of fun for me.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This is great. Absolutely. This is the final episode of Cloud of Witnesses. So this is, I think, a really, really great send-off. So thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I love it. Yeah. Thus concludes our three-part series talking about St. Gregory Nazianzis. I hope you guys all enjoyed that.

This is also the last episode of Cloud of Witnesses. I just wanted to say a special thank you to everyone for tuning and listening. Mark and I when we were sort of figuring out what show we wanted to do this semester, we talked a little bit about it and we thought this would be a good idea, not just because it's something that both of us are, you know, interested in on sort of a more academic level. But we also both just, you know, really care about this sort of stuff. We both, you know, take our faith very seriously.

and so we thought that this sort of opportunity to sort of talk about these people who have had, you know, outsized theological influences on us, but also outsized sort of personal influences on us. We, you know, had a fairly wide range of people that we talked about, some of which, you know, both of us had known a little bit about prior, but, you know, a lot of these people, we learned just as much as you guys did in the process. is making the show. And so we just wanted to do our best to help people, you know, in their faith as well, by exposing them to these great heroes of the church to see as examples these godly Christians who lived out their faith in some of the most extreme cases. And so that's all we wanted to do, and we hope that we, you know, accomplish that. and we're really happy we're able to do this for you guys

that was a lot of fun for us and we hope that it was edifying for you all so this is our final cloud of witnesses goodbye but we hope that you enjoyed listening to these as much as we enjoyed making them and so with that God bless and stay holy