St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary - Events SVS Hosts Annual Florovsky Lecture and OTSA Meeting June 9-11, 2005

Crestwood, NY—St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary hosted the 2005 Annual Florovksy Memorial Lecture on Friday, June 10, 2005. Dr Vigen Guroian gave a talk entitled "I Confess the Cross Because I Know of the Resurrection" to an audience that included members of the Orthodox Theological Society of America, whose annual meeting coincided with the event, as well as the general public.

In his talk, Dr Guroian spoke against a piety which separates the cross from the resurrection or glorifies the cross as a natural experience while viewing only the resurrection as supernatural. He presented images from the Rabbula Gospels, a Syriac manuscript from the sixth century, as well as a fourteenth century Armenian illuminated gospel to show how early Christian art read the resurrection into the cross and presented Christ's passion as a voluntary, supernatural act. He ended by citing Mel Gibson's recent film on Christ's Passion as a modern example of a powerful, yet faulted telling of the passion story. He also highlighted the striking visual contrast between the naturalistic, gory rendering of Christ's scourging and death presented in the film with Orthodox iconographic depictions of the Cross. His talk was followed by an animated discussion in which participants aired both positive and negative reactions to the film and pursued the cultural and theological implications of the issues that Dr Guroian presented.