A New Blog

Welcome to Sceptrum Dei! This site is dedicated to the topics of theology, aesthetics and ecumenism; not as three separate endeavors, but as a single effort to reveal the underlying unity of the broader Catholic tradition (understood here to include all the ancient, apostolic churches) through theological and aesthetic reflection.

This ecumenical task is not undertaken by the obviation of each church’s particularities, but through the recognition of each others’ Διαιρέσεις χαρισμάτων (diverse gifts, 1 Cor 12:4). This very end was echoed recently by no less than the now-Saint John Paul II when he, in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint, exhorts us to “understand clearly that the vision of .. full communion [is] to be sought [as] unity in legitimate diversity.”

The title of this blog is inspired by St. Clement of Rome. In his epistle, he continually reminds the Corinthians that Christian unity is maintained through humility, and he proves this need for humility with the example of Christ himself (Corinthians 16):

For Christ is of those who are humble-minded, and not of those who exalt themselves over His flock. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Sceptre of the majesty of God (Sceptrum majestatis Dei), did not come in the pomp of pride or arrogance, although He might have done so, but in a lowly condition, as the Holy Spirit had declared regarding Him. … You see, beloved, what is the example which has been given us; for if the Lord thus humbled Himself, what shall we do who have through Him come under the yoke of His grace?

In giving this title – “the Sceptre of the majesty of God” – to Christ, Clement evokes the first allusion in Christian theology to the book of Esther; a book which otherwise has no direct reference in 1st-century theology. If anyone was to come deservedly in the “pomp of pride or arrogance” it would be Christ himself as the extended sceptre of the majesty of God. And yet, he comes rather in humility to restore the peace between God and man.

With this passage Clement maintains the peace between those preeminent sees of Rome and Corinth. As such, it is the hope of this author that through humility we too may extend to each other the Sceptre of the majesty of God.