✦ Magdalene House
Our Faith
What We Believe
An introduction to the theological vision of the Christian East — ancient, living, and inexhaustibly rich.
✦ A Living Tradition
Ancient Faith,
Living Today
The Eastern Christian tradition is one of the oldest continuous expressions of the Christian faith. Rooted in the apostolic communities of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, it has preserved a theological vision that is in many ways distinct from the Christianity most familiar to Western audiences — not because it diverged from the tradition, but because it developed along different lines, shaped by different questions, different languages, and a different philosophical inheritance.
At Magdalene House, we hold this tradition not as a museum piece but as a living inheritance — a way of encountering the living God that is as fresh and urgent today as it was in the fourth century. We offer these reflections not to argue with other traditions but to share what we have received, in the hope that it may be nourishing to those who encounter it.
We are an Open and Affirming congregation. Our faith does not exclude — it embraces. People of all races, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, and backgrounds are fully welcome here, not merely as visitors but as full members of the Body of Christ, with equal access to all sacraments, ministries, and leadership.
✦ Salvation
Theosis:
Becoming by Grace What God Is by Nature
"God became man so that man might become God."— St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation
The central category of Eastern Christian soteriology — the theology of salvation — is theosis, or deification. This is the teaching that the purpose of human life is not merely to be forgiven, or to go to heaven, or to follow moral rules, but to participate in the very life of God — to become, by grace, what God is by nature.
This is not a metaphor. The Eastern tradition, drawing on St. Peter's statement that we are called to become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), understands salvation as a genuine transformation of the human person — a progressive union with God that begins in this life and reaches its fullness in the age to come. The saints are not merely good people who went to heaven; they are people in whom God has truly dwelt, and through whom God's light has shone into the world.
This vision of salvation shapes everything else in the Eastern tradition. Sin is understood not primarily as a legal transgression requiring punishment, but as a disease — a disorder of the soul that prevents us from receiving the life of God. Salvation is therefore healing, not acquittal. Christ is the Divine Physician, not the divine judge. The sacraments are medicines, not legal transactions. The spiritual life is a process of healing and transformation, not a courtroom drama.
The Eastern tradition is careful to distinguish between God's essence — which is utterly beyond human participation — and God's energies, which are the real presence and activity of God in the world and in the human person. Theosis is participation in the divine energies, not the divine essence. This distinction, articulated definitively by St. Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, protects both the genuine reality of our union with God and the genuine transcendence of God who is always beyond us.
✦ Sacramental Life
The Holy Mysteries:
Encounters with the Living Christ
The Eastern tradition calls the sacraments "Holy Mysteries" — a name that already says something important. They are not mechanisms, not legal instruments, not merely symbolic gestures. They are genuine encounters with the living God, moments in which the boundary between the visible and the invisible becomes thin, and Christ himself acts in and through the material world.
The Eastern tradition does not typically enumerate the sacraments as precisely seven (though seven is the common number) or define them with the same juridical precision as the Western scholastic tradition. What matters is not the number but the reality: that God acts through matter — water, oil, bread, wine, touch, word — to transform the human person and draw them into the divine life.
✦ Worship
The Divine Liturgy:
Heaven on Earth
"We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere on earth. We cannot describe it to you; only this we know, that God dwells there among men."— The envoys of Prince Vladimir, on attending the Divine Liturgy at Hagia Sophia, 987 AD
The Divine Liturgy is not a service about God. It is a participation in the life of God. The Eastern tradition understands the Eucharistic assembly as the Church's entry into the eternal worship of heaven — a standing before the throne of God where, as the Book of Revelation describes, the angels and the saints and all creation offer unceasing praise to the Holy Trinity.
This is why the Eastern Liturgy is so rich, so long, so full of beauty. It is not ornamentation for its own sake. It is the attempt to make visible, in the material world, something of the reality of heaven. The icons are the saints present with us. The incense is the prayers of the faithful rising to God. The chanting is the voice of the Church joining the angelic chorus. The priest, vested in gold and crimson, acts in the person of Christ the High Priest.
The great theologian of the Eastern Liturgy, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, wrote that the Liturgy is "the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom." We do not bring God down into our world; we are lifted up into his. This is why the faithful stand for the Liturgy — standing is the posture of the resurrection, the posture of those who have been raised with Christ.
The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which is celebrated at Magdalene House on most Sundays, is one of the oldest continuously used liturgical texts in the world. Its prayers are saturated with Scripture and with the theology of the Fathers. To pray it attentively is itself a form of theological education.
✦ Sacred Art
Holy Icons:
Windows into Heaven
The icon is not a painting of a holy person. It is a theological statement about the Incarnation. When God became flesh in Jesus Christ, the invisible became visible, and the material world became capable of bearing the divine presence. The icon is the consequence of this: because Christ took on a human face, that face can be depicted; because the saints are truly united with God, their faces can be windows through which we glimpse the divine light.
The Eastern tradition distinguishes carefully between veneration (proskynesis) — the honor given to icons, to the Gospel book, to the Cross — and worship (latreia) — which is given to God alone. When an Eastern Christian bows before an icon or kisses it, they are not worshipping a piece of wood; they are honoring the person depicted, just as one might kiss a photograph of a beloved person. The honor passes through the image to its prototype.
The Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787 AD) defined the theology of icons definitively, after a century of iconoclasm — the heresy that destroyed icons on the grounds that depicting Christ was impossible or idolatrous. The Council's response was that to refuse to depict Christ is implicitly to deny the reality of the Incarnation. The icon is the Incarnation made visible.
Icons are written (not painted — the Eastern tradition uses the word "write" for icon-making, as for Scripture) according to a precise theological grammar. The reverse perspective, the gold background, the stylized faces and hands — these are not primitive art but a sophisticated theological language, designed to depict not the external appearance of things but their inner, transfigured reality.
✦ The Communion of Saints
The Theotokos
& the Cloud of Witnesses
The title Theotokos — God-bearer, or Mother of God — was defined by the Third Ecumenical Council (Ephesus, 431 AD) not primarily as a statement about Mary but as a statement about Christ. If the one born of Mary is truly God incarnate, then Mary is truly the one who bore God. To deny the title is to deny the full divinity of Christ.
In the Eastern tradition, the Theotokos holds a unique place in the life of the Church — not as a goddess, not as a co-redeemer, but as the first and greatest of the saints, the one in whom theosis was most fully realized, the one who said yes to God on behalf of all humanity. Her intercession is sought constantly in the Eastern rite; her feasts punctuate the liturgical year; her image is present in every church, in the apse above the altar, looking down on the assembly as the one who bore the Word of God into the world.
The saints, in the Eastern tradition, are not merely good people who have died and gone to heaven. They are people in whom God has truly dwelt — people who have been so transformed by the divine life that they have become, in some sense, transparent to God. They are present with us in the Liturgy; their icons surround us; their prayers intercede for us. The Church is not divided into the living and the dead but is one Body, one communion, spanning time and eternity.
The Akathist Hymn
The Akathist to the Theotokos — 'Standing Hymn' — is one of the great treasures of Eastern hymnography, sung in its entirety on the Fifth Saturday of the Great Fast. Its 24 stanzas praise the Theotokos in language of extraordinary poetic beauty, weaving together theology, Scripture, and devotion.
The Paraklesis
The Small and Great Paraklesis (Supplication) are services of intercession to the Theotokos, sung especially during the Dormition Fast (August 1–14). They are among the most moving services of the Eastern liturgical year — a sustained cry for mercy and healing, addressed to the one who bore the Healer.
✦ Authority
Scripture &
Holy Tradition
The Eastern tradition does not set Scripture and Tradition against one another, as though they were two competing sources of authority. Rather, it understands Scripture as itself a product of Tradition — the written crystallization of the living faith of the apostolic community. The same Spirit who inspired the authors of Scripture is the Spirit who guides the Church in its interpretation of Scripture. The two cannot be separated.
Holy Tradition, in the Eastern understanding, is not a collection of additional doctrines added to Scripture. It is the living memory of the Church — the way the faith has been lived, prayed, celebrated, and handed on from generation to generation. It includes the Scriptures, the Creeds, the definitions of the Ecumenical Councils, the writings of the Fathers, the liturgical texts, the canons, the lives of the saints, and the iconographic tradition. All of these together constitute the Tradition within which Scripture is read and understood.
The Eastern tradition has a deep reverence for the Church Fathers — the great theologians and spiritual masters of the first millennium: Athanasius, Basil, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, and many others. Their writings are not merely historical documents; they are living voices in the ongoing conversation of the Church. To read the Fathers is to enter into the mind of the Church.
The Seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787 AD) hold a special authority in the Eastern tradition as the definitive expressions of the faith of the whole Church. Their definitions — on the Trinity, on the Incarnation, on the veneration of icons — are binding on all Eastern Christians. Beyond these seven councils, the Eastern tradition is more cautious about claiming universal authority for later doctrinal developments.
✦ Ascetical Life
Fasting & Prayer:
Medicine for the Soul
The Eastern Catholic tradition has one of the most demanding fasting disciplines in all of Christianity — and one of the most misunderstood. Fasting in the Eastern tradition is not a punishment, not a way of earning God's favor, not an expression of contempt for the body. It is a medicine: a practice that disciplines the passions, clarifies the mind, and opens the person to the action of God.
The Eastern tradition fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year (Wednesday in memory of the betrayal of Christ; Friday in memory of his crucifixion), and during four major fasting seasons: the Great Fast before Pascha, the Apostles' Fast before the feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, the Dormition Fast before the feast of the Theotokos, and the Nativity Fast before Christmas. Traditional fasting abstains from meat, dairy, fish, oil, and wine — though the tradition is always applied with pastoral sensitivity and common sense.
The Jesus Prayer — "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me" — is the great prayer of the Eastern tradition, practiced by monks and laypeople alike. It is not a mantra; it is a cry of the heart, addressed to the living Christ, asking for the one thing necessary: his mercy. Prayed slowly and attentively, it becomes a way of bringing the mind into the heart, of integrating the whole person in the presence of God.
The Great Fast
The most solemn fasting season of the year, culminating in Holy Week. The Great Fast is a time of intensified prayer, almsgiving, and repentance — a journey with Christ into the desert and toward the Resurrection.
The Apostles' Fast
A variable fast in honor of the holy Apostles, commemorating their missionary labors. Its length varies from year to year depending on the date of Pascha.
The Dormition Fast
A two-week fast in preparation for the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos (August 15). It is observed with particular devotion in the Eastern tradition, often with daily Paraklesis services.
The Nativity Fast
A 40-day fast in preparation for the feast of the Nativity of Christ. It is a time of joyful anticipation, less severe than the Great Fast, oriented toward the mystery of the Incarnation.
✦ Come and See
The Best Way to
Learn Is to Pray
No amount of reading about the Eastern Catholic tradition can substitute for the experience of standing in the Liturgy, hearing the ancient chants, and receiving the living Tradition in the assembly of the faithful. We invite you to come and see. All are welcome.