THE SOCIOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK OF ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM'S PEDAGOGY

Abstract

There is a pedagogical motive lying at the basis of Chrysostom's "social Gospel":

1. the renewal of man's God-like freedom and the healing of the personality through divine grace, asceticism, and repentance, and a life accorded with the principles of ethics available in the Gospels; and 2. saving the world, i.e. the whole society through its integration into the Church as a community which enables deification in Christ. The sacramental source of the biological individual's transformation into a sacred personality and of the collectivist socialness into a collegial ecclesiality is the Church's Divine Eucharist. The Church is a collegial community of salvation in which "the many become one Body in Christ, and limbs to one another". Establishing a full continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament, two phases in dispensation, since the very beginning the Church viewed itself as a New Communion of God and man, a New God's People, New Society in history, for which reason the entire structure of the Christian life is social and collegial. Thus, for early Christians, building the Church equalled building the New Society, New Mankind, i.e. the transformation of the old society of this world into a New Society of God-man, built on new, Christian, clerical foundations. The aim of the Church's graceful pedagogy is precisely to transform into a New Matter in Christ, to transform the old man into a New Man in Christ, to transform the current society into a New Society in Christ. Nothing of the world remains "outside" of the transformational, missionary and pedagogical activity of the Church, all is to be transformed in Christ and incorporated into Christ's Body. The pedagogy of the Church has thus had pronounced social and sociological dimension from the very beginning.