James R. Payton, Jr.
James R. Payton, Jr., is Professor of History at Redeemer University College (Ancaster, Ontario). He and his wife Sharon have four children, six grandchildren—and three Bengal cats! Jim began his scholarly career in late medieval/Reformation-era studies, but his interests have increasingly moved eastward, to the history of Eastern Europe and of Orthodoxy. He has taught at McMaster Divinity College (Hamilton, Ontario); at Evangelical Theological Seminary (Osijek, Croatia); and at Matthias Flacius Illyricus Faculty of Theology (Zagreb, Croatia). He has lectured in the liberal arts program at Crimean Medical University (Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine); at St. Clement of Ohrid Orthodox Theological Seminary (Skopje, Macedonia); and has delivered the "Annual Lectures in Christian Thought" for the Department of Religious Studies in the University of Calgary.
Bio last updated April 30th, 2018.
Articles by James R. Payton, Jr.
A Gift from the East
By James R. Payton, Jr.
December 1, 2015
Resisting the reasoning power of Saint Augustine, Jim Payton writes, the Orthodox Church offers Western Christians the treasure of celebrating mystery rather than explaining God.
But when it came to “figuring out” God, to “understanding” God as God, to “explaining” how God could be both One and Three and how Jesus Christ could be only one person while both fully divine and fully human, the Church fathers universally and constantly rejected what human reason could make of those paradoxes This is a significant omission, indeed, since that one is the Church father who has had the widest and deepest influence on Western Christianity; he is also the Church father Orthodoxy views with hesitation, even suspicion: Augustine of Hippo The Church fathers prior to and after Augustine resolutely decried any attempt to explain Baptism or the Lord's Supper: indeed, to this day, the term used in Orthodoxy for the two sacraments is the mysteries In the meanwhile, Orthodoxy has stood firm with the Church fathers in refusing to attempt to solve the mysteries of God and how God works within us for our salvation In the same vein, the Church fathers also rejected any attempt by human reason, even with the best of intentions, to comprehend how God works salvation within us