The Scriptures, Gospel, and the Exegesis of Jesus

To say that the Hebrew Scriptures are about Jesus, in the normative sense, does not convey what Jesus meant when he said the Scriptures “testify about me” (John 5:39), or what Paul means when he writes, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). The Gospel which Paul delivered (παρέδωκα, “traditioned”) is not a reference to the four Gospels but to the Law, the Psalms and Prophets, which (in and of themselves) do not deliver the story of Jesus; but given the life of Christ, they testify to and interpret Jesus. Apart from events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of Christ, the Scriptures are a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. As John Behr writes, “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it.”[1] Paul calls this regulative interpretive method the rule of faith (Rom. 3:27), which is not only a basic premise for reading Scripture but is the situation in which Scripture is constituted. Scripture is an interpretation of the person of Christ (in both Testaments), and this is the substance of its unity and meaning. The ultimate meaning and significance of the text, is not in the original intent of the author, in the history behind the text, or even in the immediate reference of the text. The meaning is in Christ.

As in the Gospel of John, the point in either the Old Testament references or the Gospel explanation, is not to provide a mere account of the history or story of Jesus, but rather there is an intertextual weaving in the Apostolic explanation, which relies upon the Scriptures, the living tradition, the witness, providing the Gospel (preached first, then written). As John says of Jesus, “He has explained Him” (Jn 1:18), but this exegesis of God in Jesus is through Scripture. The exegesis of Scripture itself is never the point, but Christ is explained through the medium of Scripture (the exegesis of God). The point is not to understand the text, the original meaning, or the author’s intent, as in historical-critical scholarship. The point is to understand Christ, and through Christ to understand God. Christ explained, “according to the Scriptures,” becomes the sole subject of Scripture throughout.

As Jesus says, “It is they that bear witness about me” (Jn. 5:39). We understand that it is on the basis of the Old Testament witness to Christ, that the identity of Christ (who he is, in the language of the Gospel) is spelled out: “We found the Messiah” (1:41); “You are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel” (1:49); “This is the prophet” (6:14; 7:40); and, “My Lord, my God” (20:28). Jesus as the Logos (of Genesis and the Targums), is the initiator of a new humanity in his first week: showing in day one, with John the Baptist, the transition to a superior kingdom, and in day two with John pointing to Jesus as a new sort of Passover Lamb a new atonement, and in day three the first disciples and the assembling of the Church (true Israel begins), and day four and five the chief apostle and the apostles selected, and day six Israel, without guile, is selected, and day seven with the Cana miracle, pointing to the passion, resurrection, and wedding feast of the Lamb. The new creation of John 1, followed by seven days of unfolding new creation culminates in a new Israel. Jesus then inaugurates a new Temple, lending new significance to the feasts, the Sabbath, the Father’s household, the law, which at the same time provide the interpretive frame for understanding who he is.

Jesus indicates his signs inherently bear testimony about his identity, “for the works which the Father has given Me to accomplish—the very works that I do—testify about Me, that the Father has sent Me” (Jn. 5:36; see also 10:25, 37–38; 14:11). However, even the seven signs in John have as their interpretive frame, the Hebrew Scriptures: 1. the new wine (a phrase related to God’s blessing in the Hebrew Scriptures) of Cana points, as indicated, to the passion – or to the “coming of the time” of Jesus’ death and resurrection. 2. The cleansing of the Temple is an overt reference to the death and resurrection and a new understanding of kingdom and temple. 3. the cure of the royal official’s son (4:46-54) demonstrates Christ’s power to speak events into reality, as at creation. 4. the cure of the paralytic at the pool (5:1-17) points to the healing of the nations fulfilling the prophecies of Isaiah. 5. the multiplication of loaves (including walking on water) (6:1-66) speaks of the period of the Exodus when God led Israel through the Sea and fed them in the wilderness and revealed his true identity (I am that I am). 6. the cure of the man born blind (9:1-41) is a direct fulfillment of Isaiah 35:5. 7. the raising of Lazarus (11:1-44) points to Jesus’ resurrection, and the raising of all Israel. In Isaiah God promised to raise up Israel on the third day after they were cut down and killed in exile, and in Ezekiel, God promised to gather scattered Israel again, and this gathering is described as a resurrection (“The dry bones shall rise again” Ezekiel 37:1-14). Christ’s resurrection is more fully understood in this light, and gives a new depth of meaning to the rescue of Israel.

 Throughout, Christ is duplicating and fulfilling or giving final meaning to the history of Israel. The Exodus of Israel and the original Pascha (or Passover) is the type of the true Passion of Christ (Christ is the true Passover Lamb). In turn, Moses warded off the deadly snakes in the wilderness but this event finds its true meaning in Christ: “Just as Moses raised the snake in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, so that those who believe in Him may have eternal life” (John 3:14).

The intertextuality in John is sometimes an overt quote, an echoing of an event or a name, a fulfilling in a prophetic sense, or a filling out of meaning, but throughout the life and sayings and events of Christ, are witnessed to or according to Scripture. The true bread from heaven (6:41–42), the heavenly King and Truth (18:36–38), and the true prophet (7:47–52), resonate with and complete the prior understanding of the Scriptures. The Jews Jesus addresses (in Jn. 5) fail to understand their Scriptures, and he accuses them of voiding Scripture: “You do not have His word abiding in you, for you do not believe Him whom He sent” (Jn. 5:38). They may have memorized much of Scripture, and they may have literally been wearing Scripture on the phylactery around their head, but nonetheless, they have emptied out the word of God by focusing on the Scriptures apart from Christ.

John is simply a case in point of what Paul means about the testimony of Scripture. It is not that Scripture alone is enough, or that the Gospel is understood in isolation from Scripture, but the Gospel is the point of Scripture. Paul illustrates (in 2 Cor 3:12-4:6), seeming to build upon the saying of Jesus: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me” (John 5:46). There is no accepting Moses and rejecting Christ, as Moses is all about Jesus. In Corinthians, Moses’ veil is simultaneously a cover-up of the fading sort of glory, whose only function is to point to the unfading glory of Christ: “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Co 3:18). The veil of the law, taken as adequate, hides the true glory, but taken as a type is itself an indicator of the unfading glory of Christ. The limit of the one is a means of understanding the other.

The true proclamation of Scripture, found in Christ, means that Scripture must be read within the interpretive frame (the hermeneutic) of the Gospel (Christ crucified and raised). “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it, so justifying the claim that Christ died and rose according to the Scriptures.’”[2]


[1] John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology: The Way to Nicaea, Vol. 1, (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 27-28.

[2] Baer, 27.

Epektasis: Gregory of Nyssa and the Eternal Ascent of Redemption

“Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14).

Transcending the self, or going beyond the self (being stretched out, epektasis in Paul’s description), in Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation, not only captures the life course of the Christian, but the eternal goal. There is an unceasing evolution toward the eternal likeness, or an ongoing progress of participation (theosis) in being joined to Christ.[1] For Paul, this simultaneously refers to “knowing Christ” in “resurrection life,” through being “conformed to his death” (3:10-11), which means “forgetting what lies behind” (3:13), even counting as “rubbish” legal accomplishment (3:8) so as to “lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus” (3:12). There is a going beyond (past accomplishments or failures), a forgetting and moving forward, which involves what Christ has done (he “laid hold” of Paul) and Paul’s response (a “laying hold of Christ”). Paul uses the term “perfect” (τετελείωμαι), to indicate he has not achieved this end (3:12), and those who are “perfect” (τέλειοι) he indicates should have the same attitude (3:15). He may be ironic in describing them as perfect, or he may, in fact, be describing the goal as the process of perfecting.

Gregory, in his Life of Moses, presumes perfection is an unceasing growth: “The perfection of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness.”[2] According to Gregory, Paul “never ceased straining toward those things that are still to come. Coming to a stop in the race was not safe for him. Why? Because no Good has a limit in its own nature but is limited by the presence of its opposite as life is limited by death and light by darkness. And every good thing generally ends with all those things which are perceived to be contrary to the good.”[3] Progressing, evolving, perfecting, being joined to Christ, participating in the divine life, becoming like Christ and God, according to Gregory, is an eternal process.

[Paul] teaches us, on the one hand, that what is ever and again discovered of that blessed Nature that is the Good is something great but, on the other hand, that what lies beyond what is grasped at any particular point is infinitely greater; and during the entire eternity of the ages this becomes the case for the person who participates in the Good, since those who participate in it receive increase and growth in that they encounter ever greater and better things.[4]

As I previously described (here), conversion and salvation are not one-off events of the past, but as with Christ, the beginning and end are interwoven and thus eternal. The expanding and spiraling realization of divine love, through an expanded moral sense, to a broadened intellectual engagement, to a psychic experiential shift (the fruits of the Spirit) sums up the New Testament dynamic, which by definition stretches out eternally. The knowledge of God, and the accompanying expansion of virtues and understanding, and the experience of love and peace never come to an end. We are created to be in the divine image and this is an unending goal. Becoming like God, and not just self-improvement, is the human purpose, and this purpose entails the eternal. This eternality is more than a long or infinite time, but is a qualitative goal in which the finite and the creaturely are ceaselessly transformed. The limited enters the unlimited, the finite takes up the eternal, such that the stretching forth (epektasis) in God cannot be finalized.

Gregory also takes up this explanation in his homilies on the Song of Songs, which means he is describing an expanded desire or even a divine and eternal eroticism. As he describes, thirst for God is never quenched:

The wellspring of good things always draws the thirsty to itself—just as in the Gospel the wellspring says: “If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). For in using these words, he sets no limit, whether to thirst, or to the urge to come to him, or to the enjoyment of the drinking. Rather, by the open-endedness of his injunction, he issues a continuing invitation to thirst and to drink and to be impelled toward him.[5]

While physical thirst and satisfaction has its limits, the spiritual thirst for God is unlimited as God is infinite. In the soul’s longing for God there is no ultimate satisfaction, no final union, no perfect vision, no final satiation, and to imagine there is, would amount to considering God as finite. In Gregory’s allegorical interpretation of the life of Moses, Moses is an allegorical Christian pilgrim, desiring to see God, but recognizing there is no end to this pursuit. “Whereas, Moses, your desire for what is still to come has expanded and you have not reached satisfaction in your progress and whereas you do not see any limit to the Good, but your yearning always looks for more, the place with me is so great that the one running in it is never able to cease from his progress.”[6] It is not that there is a lack of satisfaction, but an ever deepening desire and satiation. “He still thirsts for that with which he constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to partake, but according to God’s true being.”[7]

When I described this to my daughter, she said, “It sounds exhausting.” It may be that we tend to attach notions of rest and peace to stasis. Luther’s disparaging of works may tinge our conceptions of effort with a physical, or sinful agonistic struggle, but Gregory is offering up an alternative form of peace and stability. There is a stability in standing on the rock. “I mean by this that the firmer and more immovable one remains in the Good, the more he progresses in the course of virtue.”[8] It is the one who “is tossed one way and another (as the Apostle says)” or the one who is “doubtful,” or in Paul’s picture the one who seeks stability in the law, or something less than Christ, that experiences the exhaustion of effort and works. There is rest and peace to be found in putting on Christ, and this putting on is not subject to the “body of death.”

As Gregory describes, there can be a futility of effort, on the order of climbing a hill of sand, in which one is ever sliding back down the hill. There is a lot of effort but no progress. “But if someone, as the Psalmist says, should pull his feet up from the mud of the pit and plant them upon the rock (the rock is Christ who is absolute virtue), then the more steadfast and unmovable (according to the advice of Paul) he becomes in the Good.”[9] Gregory compares it to putting wings on the heart, and flying upward through the upward stabilizing draft of the good.

The cleft of the rock, in which God placed Moses during his vision of God (his being planted on the rock), Gregory says is “a heavenly house not made with hands which is laid up by hope for those who have dissolved their earthly tabernacle.”[10] The heavenly home, or the spiritual rock, is absolutely secure and stable, but this is not a delimiting stability, but a rock of ascent. According to Liviu Petcu, there is a stability in this “continuous ascension” on the order of climbing the rungs of a ladder, with each step leading to a higher step. “This movement is born out of the forever infinite distance between what he is from God and Who God is. The spiritual life is thus a permanent transformation of the soul in Christ, in the form of an ardour which grows more and more, as it becomes more united with and stabilised in God.”[11]

As Gregory says of Paul, “he is still hastening toward something higher and never leaves off his ascent by setting the good he has already grasped as a limit to his desires.”[12] There is a continual surpassing of the self or self-transcendence, as “God is always within us in unification and always outside of us, in His transcendency.”[13] The move toward God who is simultaneously dwelling within, and yet beyond and without, is not an object obtained at death, but a person with whom one is continually converging in eternal life.

Hence we find that the apostle taught this truth concerning the nature of the inexpressible goods when he said: “eye has not seen” that Good even if it be ever gazing upon it (for it does not see as much as there is, but only as much as the eye is capable of taking in); and “ear has not heard” the full extent of what is revealed, even though its hearing be ever receiving the Word; and “it has not entered into the human heart” (1 Cor 2:9) even though persons who are pure in heart may regularly see as much as they are capable of.[14]

There is a progression from glory to glory, a continual moving beyond to the ever-greater, the ever-fuller, and the ever-higher. While there is rest and peace that are incorporated into knowing God, this rest does not mean stasis but effort toward completion. “But now finish doing it also, so that just as there was the readiness to desire it, so there may be also the completion of it by your ability” (2 Cor. 8:11). With every end accomplished there is a new beginning, for where the beginning is in the end (which is Christ), the beginning is eternally stretched out, enabling a new step in the ascent to divine likeness. “Thus, no limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the good can be found nor is the increasing of desire for the good brought to an end because it is satisfied.”[15] There is a continuing depth of desire and satisfaction that knows no end in the stretching forth of being joined to Christ.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th.  Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)


[1] Gregory spells this out in his sermons on the Song of Songs. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘Homilies on the Song of Songs’, in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, ed. and trans. Richard A. Norris (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012).

[2] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1978), Book I paragraph, 10, p. 31.

[3] Life of Moses, I:5, 29.

[4] Gregory, Homily 8, 259.

[5] Gregory, Homily 8, 268.

[6] Life of Moses, II, 242, p, 116.

[7] Life of Moses, II, 230, p. 114.

[8] Life of Moses, II, 243, p. 117.

[9] Life of Moses, II, 244, pp. 117-118.

[10] Life of Moses, II, 245, p. 118.

[11] Liviu Petcu, “The Doctrine of Epektasis. One of the Major Contributions of Saint Gregory of Nyssa to the History of Thinking,” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia (ISSN 0870-5283; 2183-461X, Pages 771-782, 2017) 774.

[12] Gregory, Homily 8, 259

[13] Petcu, 774.

[14] Homily 8, 259-261.

[15] Life of Moses, 239, p. 115.

Transcending the Self Through Conversion: Bernard Lonergan and Sin and Salvation

In teaching theology the problem is where to begin, as both a nonviolent and apocalyptic theology require a reconception of reality inclusive of the entire theological catalogue (from the doctrine of God and Trinity to the doctrine of atonement and revelation). Beyond the practical problem of the classroom, it could be argued conversion marks the lived entry point, but defining conversion poses the same problem, as it is only adequately defined and realized in connection to theology as a whole. Conversion cannot be separated from the reconceptualization of God, self, and the world (the reworking of the moral and religious imagination), so conversion itself must be rightly realized (making every beginning an ongoing task). The entry point into theology through conversion, illustrates the predicament that no singular beginning is adequate, but the beginning and end are necessarily tied together.

Conversion is first of all conversion from something; it is dynamic in its movement (from one thing to something else). Conversion describes a turn; the turn from out of a self-enclosed world in which stasis and permanence are experienced as synonymous with the self. To convert means, at the most basic level, an abandonment of the human project conceived at an infantile, and narcissistic stage. The construct of the ego, the experience of the superego (the law), the drive for being, all speak of basic and immediate experience and it is this most immediate reality that is rendered false in conversion.

The theological problem is, there is a fortress of religion protecting and substantiating this false experience. Conceptions of God as law-giver and punisher, conceptions of humanity as continually given over to guilt and struggle, are supported by economies of salvation in penal substitution and divine satisfaction which reduplicate the human disease as an economy of salvation. Whether or not the sickness is the root of this theology, nonetheless the entire theological catalog poses a potential obstacle to the cure (attached to conversion). Bad theology and failed Christianity, more than simple atheism or paganism, pose an obstacle to a nonviolent, apocalyptic, transformative faith. This is the case, as human notions of righteousness replaces divine rightness (in absolutizing the law), masochistic self-punishment is given divine status (in notions of conscience and guilt), the human word (in a depth psychology) is reified and deified (in doctrines of the logos), love and forgiveness are confused with anger satisfied, and this shows forth in contractual theology and in various theological dualisms (in the Trinity, between heaven and earth, between nature and grace, etc.). So religious conversion must include, not simply conversion from one religion to another, but conversion from particular religious sensibilities and this entails conversion from inadequate conceptions of self and the world (which may sound like a restatement of the problem).

Bernard Lonergan describes conversion as an ongoing, lifelong process, or an unending dynamism.[1] There is no clear place to start, other than the place we each individually begin, so perhaps every conversion is adequate to the task of the continuing journey, with the caveat that conversion pertains to everything and intersects with everything. The problem then is perhaps not with where to begin but with the danger of ceasing to begin in a stunted conversion. Everything must be incorporated into this beginning, but this beginning cannot cease. Conversion must continue, and all things must be reconceptualized and reworked in light of the person and work of Christ. Conversion is a life-long turning, which may be stunted by pietistic notions focused on guilt and repentance, or any notion that sees conversion as a one-off experience in the past.

Conversion and repentance must be expanded and reconceived (Lonergan again), and Lonergan recognizes that there is a reciprocal process between conversion, self-transcendence, and authenticity. In the description of Robert Doran, “Authenticity is achieved in self-transcendence, and consistent self-transcendence is reached only by conversion.”[2] Doran goes on to describe the ever-spiraling relationship between these three poles: “what makes a person an authentic human being is that he or she is consistently self-transcending, and consistent self-transcendence requires that one undergo a multiple and ongoing process of conversion. The process moves causally, if you wish, from conversion to self-transcendence, and from self-transcendence to authenticity.”[3] To be an authentic self, there has to be movement beyond the strictures of infantile egotism, which may be necessary to survival and the developing sense of self, but taken as an end this egotism is a lie. The passage is from out of “self-absorption or self-enclosure to self-transcendence,” which may occur apart from awareness of the details of its happening, but entails moving beyond the “self-referential” or loveless horizon to the realm of love.

This conversion is religious, moral, intellectual, and (Doran adds) psychic; in other words, it pertains to everything about the self. It is notable that the intellectual is last in this sequence, coming at the end of one’s life course.[4] Self-transcendence is religious conversion, as one awakens to the divine realm and to the realm of love; it is moral, not in the sense of moral perfection, but in taking account of others in one’s decisions; it is intellectual in that certain questions are raised and there is pursuit of intellectual truth and integrity in understanding and judgment; and it is psychic in that the above connections are linked to “affective and imaginal components” such that empirical consciousness synthesizes the religious, moral, and intellectual into experience.[5] This synthesis of love gets at the ever renewed dynamism in conversion.

It is easy enough for the immature to live and experience the religious, moral, and intellectual, as separate realms, none of which necessarily impinge upon shaping emotions and imagination. The content of morality, intellect, and religion, often pertain almost completely to the self.

Morality may be nothing more than loveless self-interest, and moral decisions may be nothing more than utilitarian (which describes entire moral systems). “My delight in eating is for the sake of me. My studies are for the sake of me. My good works are for the sake of merit, and merit is for the sake of rewards, and rewards are for the sake of me. If it is for the sake of me, there is no need to inquire further. I have a sufficient and efficacious motive for acting.”[6] The immediate experience of desire is the driving force in this morality, and there is no questioning of the end of moral pursuit, and there is no doubting the self which it serves. The fact that this experience and conception of self is false (dead, in Christ’s description) is not up for consideration. This self may be the Girardian self, guided by imitation of the group, it may be the ethnocentric self in which one’s group is an extension of the self, or it may be one’s tribe, family, or religious cohort. That is the self-enclosure may be constricted or more expansive, but it is self-enclosure nonetheless. “Greed is good,” “knowledge is power,” “self-interest is corporate interest,” are all ways of maintaining self-enclosure on a more expansive scale. But so too I would argue, is a contractual religion focused on “my” moral transgression, “my” forgiveness, “my” going to heaven, etc.

As long as one is egotistically self-enclosed, intellect is also self-absorbed and stunted. The intellectual world of the egotist, is the world that refers to the self so that desire, drive, self-interest, commonsense, and the God that supports this world are left undisturbed. Intellectual conversion may be the most difficult to measure, but it would seem its cosmic scope, as opposed to micro-scope, focused on the individual, is its measure. The theological equivalent of the Copernican revolution is a Christocentric revolution, in which not only this world but eternity revolves around this person. The New Testament, the work of Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, the work of Maximus, and Sergius Bulgakov, point to this all-embracing possibility, in which the intellect along with morality is opened to deification.

Psychic conversion may occur in small increments and the overall effect/affect may be slow in coming, yet all of the other elements of conversion depend upon this psychic aspect. It is psychic conversion that establishes connection between the other elements of conversion. “And the reason for establishing or re-establishing that connection, in terms of authenticity, is that affective self-transcendence is frequently required if we are going to be self-transcendent in the intellectual, moral, and religious dimensions of our living.”[7] Conversion begins to bear fruit in our emotions and imagination, so that peace and love pervade all things. As we experience this psychic reality along with the reconceptualization of all things, the experience brings forth renewed understanding. The mind is transformed and with it all things are understood from a new perspective or horizon.

The summation of this conversion is love: religious conversion is lit up by love through faith. God realized as love is a rescue from the lovelessness of the self enclosed in the world conceived from a loveless horizon. Whoever abides in love abides in God and this love pervades the intellect, the morals, and the human psyche, in a dynamism of participation. Love is participation in God, synonymous with participation in a community of love. This community of participation, of course, poses its own hazards; just as there is a loveless theology, there are loveless communities brought together by fear and coercion. As Doran warns, “profound religious inauthenticity can also be mediated by participation in a religious community.”[8] So while being part of a community is no guarantee, it may be that small communities of friends formed out of the spontaneity of love, best serve purposes of self-transcendent love. The unconditional love of God received, and the response of loving unconditionally, realized in community, is the ever-renewed end of conversion.

The unconditional love through which one transcends the self, entails then, a shift in faith (religious conversion) and this comes with a shift in values (moral conversion from primarily valuing the self), and an opening up of the intellect to the cosmic and eternal, and all of this arises in an ongoing psychic conversion of all-embracing, unconditional love and peace. This is where one begins and ends the theological project.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th.  Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)


[1] It is appropriate that for the first time Ploughshares Bible Institute is holding two classes simultaneously, Sin and Salvation and Lonergan and the Problem of Theological Method.

[2] Robert Doran, “What Does Bernard Lonergan Mean by ‘Conversion’?” (2011) accessed on 1/22/2025 at https://lonerganresource.com/media/pdf/lectures/What%20Does%20Bernard%20Lonergan%20Mean%20by%20Conversion.pdf p. 2.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 4.

[5] Ibid, 5.

[6] Ibid, 14.

[7] Ibid, 6.

[8] Ibid, 7.

A Thousand Small Inanities or Radical Love: Adam Gopnik Versus Flannery O’Connor

My daughters often buy me books for Christmas and usually are quite successful in their selection, but this year I received a book by Adam Gopnik which, while written with the panache of a New Yorker staff writer, continually reaches points of incredible banality. Typical is the stirring conclusion: “The most you can say is that experience suggests that treating both the proposition that love is good and the proposition that the facts can be found as true tends to make more people happy.”[1] Or there is this riveting inanity defining liberalism: “A belief that life should be fair – or fairer, or as fair as seems fair.”[2] Gopnik’s daughter tries to gently point out the shallowness, as she and her father are cycling on their island retreat. They come upon a sign at a yoga studio: “In this house we believe that: Black lives matter – Women’s rights are human rights – No human is illegal – Science is real – Love is love – Kindness is everything.” His daughter says, “Dad, there’s your entire book!” Gopnik does not miss that she has reduced his entire effort to “one-sentence attitudes that comic book liberals like me are supposed to share.” However, he doubles down, and acknowledges the sloganeering captures the “liberal imagination.”[3]  I cannot disagree with the slogans, but it was hard to believe his conclusions (which literally appear on the wall of a yoga studio) serve as his deepest life principles. I kept reading the book thinking, there had to be more depth to come. I was wrong.

At the same time, I was reading Flannery O’Connor’s, The Violent Bear It Away,[4] and I realized Gopnik was the perfect stand-in for the protagonist in O’Connor’s novel. The teacher or Rayber, believes in science, reason, fellowship, and experience, but these are exposed as banalities by his nephew, Tarwater. Tarwater, due to his isolated upbringing under his great-uncle suffers sociopathic compulsions, and eventually murders his cousin (Rayber’s son). Rayber, who would save Tarwater from his great-uncle, imagines taking Tarwater to the Natural History Museum, exposing him to science and the ways of reason, will cure him of his evil tendencies: “He intended to stretch the boy’s mind by introducing him to his ancestor, the fish, and to all the great wastes of unexplored time.”[5]

Gopnik suggests exposure to Darwin, Mill, and Adams, and other exemplars of liberal principles, found in science, capitalism, and the bent toward a practical materialism, are sufficient for a rule of life. Both Gopnik and the teacher are committed to the lesson of experience and the notion that the individual creates values, based on their experience. On the basis of experience, Gopnik says, “people make up their values . . . they aren’t handed down from the past on high.”[6] Likewise the teacher imagines, “By virtue of kinship and similarity and experience, [he] was the person to save him (Tarwater) . . .”[7] Meeks, a travelling salesman, imparts the same wisdom, “He said he himself had graduated from the School of Experience with an H.L.L. degree. He asked the boy if he knew what was an H.L.L. degree. Tarwater shook his head. Meeks said the H.L.L. degree was the Hard Lesson from Life degree. He said it was the quickest got and that it stayed learnt the longest.”[8] Rayber attempts to extract the boy from the grip of his uncle’s fanaticism by similar appeal: “’There are certain laws that determine every man’s conduct,’ the schoolteacher said. ‘You are no exception. Experience is a terrible teacher.’”[9]

The boy and his great-uncle mock the ineffectual Rayber, though he is a regular topic of conversation. The problem is, they cannot remember him, or put flesh on their memories of him. “He had made a habit of catching his great-uncle in contradictions about the schoolteacher’s appearance. ‘I forget what color eyes he’s got,’ the old man would say, irked. ‘What difference does the color make when I know the look? I know what’s behind it.’ ‘What’s behind it?’ ‘Nothing. He’s full of nothing.’”[10] The man is so vague and empty, he cannot hold down an enfleshed image.

Imagine trying to build a life around Gopnik/Rayber philosophy. Certainly, as the boy says about the teacher, “He knows a heap. I don’t reckon it’s anything he don’t know.” As the old uncle explains, the problem is not in the knowing. “’He don’t know it’s anything he can’t know,’ the old man said. ‘That’s his trouble. He thinks if it’s something he can’t know then somebody smarter than him can tell him about it and he can know it just the same.’” Rayber is incapable of recognizing his own self-deceived understanding, as knowledge is the cure to everything. Likewise, Gopnik does not admit the possibility of an evil, the very nature of which is self-deception. The old man describes this as the danger of being dispossessed of the self.[11]

To inculcate liberalism, or a “hatred for cruelty,” an admission we are not perfect, a “belief that sympathy can save us from clannishness,” a belief in “permanent reform based on reason and an appeal to argument,” and to be “open to the lessons of experience,” is Gopnik’s plan of salvation.[12] Certainly, no one can disagree that being nice, having public parks, trying not to be violent (though Gopnik hedges on this one), not judging people by race, parentage, or income, are worthy ideas, but being kind does not constitute a worldview. It is insufficient in the encounter with evil and radical goodness. Gopnik explains, “These values are rooted in a simple moral idea about human capacity – a moral idea about the source of meaning in the individual imagination.”[13] He does not consider the possibility that individual imagination may be inadequate, deceived, or captive to a particular time and place. He does not consider, as the old man explains, that he might be dispossessed of himself.

Gopnik may be among the best representatives of the modern perspective, which is not a political point of view (Republican or Democrat) but the liberalism which is the prevailing creed of our time. Most agree, cruelty is bad, conversation is good, egalitarianism and tolerance are to be valued, but to imagine this constitutes a world or takes account of reality, is to mistake the problem (human imagination) for the solution.  

 In the novel, Rayber is bowled over by the impudent boy. “The boy had overtaken him, given him a thunderous blow on the head, and then disappeared. And with his disappearance there had come such an overwhelming feeling of release that Rayber had waked up with a pleasant anticipation that his guest would be gone.”[14] Best to ignore and get rid of the evil, rather than to acknowledge the challenge the boy poses to his world. It is not only his nephew though, but his son, Bishop, who challenges his world. He had tried to drown the boy, due to his disability, but had failed. Meanwhile, “he sent him to a school for exceptional children and he had made great strides. He could wash himself, dress himself, feed himself, go to the toilet by himself and make peanut butter sandwiches though sometimes he put the bread inside.”[15] The boy was independent enough that Rayber could mostly ignore him, but then he would once again be confronted with reality: “the moments would still come when, rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity.”[16] He is unnerved by his son’s complete innocence (in his value system he should be drowned), so that he is afraid of his love for a boy who is worthless in regard to reason, science, and knowledge. “His normal way of looking on Bishop was as an x signifying the general hideousness of fate.”[17] If there were an “image of God” he understood, his son fit that likeness, but this reality represented by his son was one that his world could not afford:

The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. Bishop did not have to be around. It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk. If, without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him—powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.[18]

How can this irrational, “idiot” love have a place in a world where, in Gopnik’s terms, “reasoned conversation” is supreme?[19] The extremes of goodness and evil, love and hatred, cannot be accounted for. Rayber’s hatred for his nephew, and his unwillingness to include his son in the realm of his values, consist of the same stunted imagination. Both challenge a world of liberal values: material concern, reason, science, and the power of imagination. His nephew is positively evil and his son worthless in regard to the potential of imagination. They do not really qualify as human, in the Gopnik/Rayber world.

Rayber’s uncle recognizes that his nephew’s worldview is such that he cannot love what does not fit his standards: “And once, only once, the old man had leaned forward and said to Tarwater, in a voice that could no longer contain the pleasure of its secret, ‘He loved me like a daddy and he was ashamed of it![20]” The old man and the disabled boy are both beyond the pale of Rayber’s values. As O’Connor explains, “Bishop looked like the old man grown backwards to the lowest form of innocence.”[21] In this narrow world of modern liberal values, the grotesque, the disabled, the fanatics, the zealots, have no place. They should not be, and only when we progress beyond such malformations can liberal values and imagination take hold.

In a weak attempt to ameliorate the boy, Rayber says they are a alike, but the boy accuses his uncle of being deluded: “’I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.’ He was looking at his uncle now with a completely fresh contempt. ‘It’s nothing about me like you,’ he said.”  Rayber would receive and leave the world as he found it, but the boy – as strange and crazy as he is – has no such intent: “I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all.”[22] The boy’s world was wrecked from the beginning, as he was literally born in the midst of the car wreck which killed his mother, but out of this experience, “He had always felt that it set his existence apart from the ordinary one and he had understood from it that the plans of God for him were special, even though nothing of consequence had happened to him so far.”[23]

It is this wrecked sort of outsider and his strange world that Rayber/Gopnik cannot abide. Such weird grotesqueries must be submitted to the normal, reasonable, stable world of the enlightened. This world has no room for enchantment, depth of spirit, or for acknowledgement of radical evil or radical love. Gopnik/Rayber certainly acknowledge love – with Rayber praising its practical value in the life of his sister, and Gopnik meaninglessly acknowledging “love is love,” but there is a different order of love that is dangerous: “It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.”[24] The love for a child that is “worthless” or an old man that is insane or love for a world which ultimately cannot contain such love. “It began with Bishop and then like an avalanche covered everything his reason hated. He always felt with it a rush of longing to have the old man’s eyes—insane, fish-coloured, violent with their impossible vision of a world transfigured—turned on him once again. The longing was like an undertow in his blood dragging him backwards to what he knew to be madness.”[25] He could not afford the price of radical love as it reeked of inexplicable spiritual madness.

The choice is between the stable orbit around a human imagination grounded, as Gopnik describes, in “reason, good conversation and debate,” and committed to “egalitarian social reform” and “ever greater tolerance” (though obviously “not absolute”)[26] or the enchanted possibilities of a world lit with an inexplicable grandeur, open to radical love and enabled to grapple with radical evil. One is an engagement with flesh and blood reality, and the other cannot bear the weight of reality. Flannery O’Connor is posing both possibilities, without making her case, beyond the fact of an inexplicable love and evil. Much like Rayber, it seems Gopnik cannot afford a world beyond “a thousand small sanities.”  Insanity may be lurking in anything more. O’Connor describes this absolute faith in sanity as constricting: “He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness, and when the time came for him to lose his balance, he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.”[27] Only a flat world, devoid of extremes of love and evil, allows balance, choice, and human imagination to reign supreme.

O’Connor expresses the other choice in the voice of a small child, an “evangelist” in a Pentecostal meeting who confronts Rayber:

“Do you know who Jesus is?” she cried. “Jesus is the Word of God and Jesus is love. The Word of God is love and do you know what love is, you people? If you don’t know what love is you won’t know Jesus when He comes. You won’t be ready. I want to tell you people the story of the world, how it never known when love come, so when love comes again, you’ll be ready.[28]

Extreme love is unacceptable to Rayber, its insanity and crudity threatening and beneath his consideration, so he runs into the night.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th.  Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)


[1]Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2019) 216-217.

[2] Ibid, 80.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Kindle Edition, 2007).

[5] Ibid, 39.

[6] Gopnik, 81.

[7] O’Connor, 33.

[8] Ibid, 17.

[9] Ibid, 53.

[10] Ibid, 16.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Gopnik, 80.

[13] Ibid, 81.

[14] O’Connor, 39.

[15] Ibid, 32.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Gopnik, 24.

[20] O’Connor, 20.

[21] Ibid, 32.

[22] Ibid, 53. Unfortunately he probably means he intends to kill Bishop, as his act of “uprooting” though even this evil works a kind of grace.

[23] Ibid, 12.

[24] Ibid, 32.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Gopnik, 23-24.

[27] O’Connor, 33

[28] Ibid, 36-37.

Jesus as the Answer to Nothing or the Alpha and Omega: The Jesus Logic of Robert Jenson

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that he became “reluctant to mention God by name to religious people – because that name seems to me here not to ring true.”[1] He describes something like a feeling of disgust at religious jargon (he says “I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable”).[2] When I see billboards or bumper stickers advertising “Jesus is the Answer” or “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” I get a similar feeling. I am suspicious of the question Jesus might be thought to answer, or the “reason” behind such sloganeering. The language is largely unintelligible. As Robert Jenson has noted, this is true not simply of slogans but “That Christianity’s language about God has become unintelligible to its hearers is finally apparent also to us who speak it – in that we find it increasingly unintelligible to ourselves.”[3] The sloganeering like much of popular religion, seems to be on the order of “Coke is It” – spoken with enough force by enough smiling people the product is consumed for an unspecified “it” factor. To ask after the meaning is already to have missed the point. The implication is Coke/Jesus will bring on a certain toothy happiness, devoid of specifics and requiring a hollow intensity of “faith.” This Jesus answers nothing and does nothing, and yet rather than assume this name is a cipher, preachers and believers blindly committed to the faith, increase the intensity of the sloganeering. It cannot be admitted the meaning is uncertain, as this implies it may have no meaning.

The problem is not that too much is made of Christ. As Jenson has noted, much of Christian thought is falsely construed as part of a “possessed rationality” in which an idea, an image, or a mental picture serves in place of the person of the Logos and this results in human striving toward God, rather than a reception of the Word. From his Lutheran context, this is “works righteousness” – with focus on ascent to God, rather than on a relinquishing of human logic. The Logos is not received on the basis of an already possessed logic, as if the Word is one word among many. This Word which establishes all of creation and which is its fulfillment, is an order of reality which exceeds human speaking and thinking, as it is the summation and creation of reality. As Michael Brain has written of Jenson, “All of the disparate words of creation coalesce into one: the Word of God, whom Jenson identifies exactly with the person of Jesus Christ.”[4] This is not a Word subject to verification by other means, or testable according to scientific positivism, but is a Word that surpasses this sort of reason.

On the other hand, this Word is not an abstraction, an analogy or an image, but a person. Brain maintains, “Jenson emphatically taught the unqualified and exhaustive identity of the Word with this person, for the Word that establishes creation in the beginning is the exact history of Jesus in our midst and the Kingdom he enacts. Creation has its being from the historical life of Jesus Christ, from 1 to 30 A.D., so that statements of reality are true insofar as they narrate the story of Jesus as both the story of God and the story of creation.”[5] Of course, this makes no sense according to a reason built on the logic of cause and effect, in which the life of Christ is subsequent to the eternal life of God, but neither does a suffering God, a God that is human and is born, a God that experiences time and history, or a God who in Christ grows in wisdom and stature.

In Jenson’s reading and expansion upon Maximus, he maintains the Logos is “a triune identity” (tropos hyparxeos): “he is a subsisting relation to the Father, the subsisting relation of being begotten.”[6] Jenson recognizes that to follow Maximus, “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[7] If God the Son suffered, then one of the Trinity suffered, and if one of the Trinity suffered, then God suffered. “We may still apprehend paradox in his position, but the paradox is now not that the presumed impassible Logos suffers, but that the suffering Son is the Logos of the presumed impassible Father.”[8] As Maximus states it, he is “Suffering God.”[9]

Jenson, following Maximus and Origen and deploying a metaphor of Augustine, asserts a peculiar first century understanding, that the Trinitarian God is accomplishing his identity in Christ. Deploying Augustine’s psychological analogy, God the Father is like “consciousness” or the locus of awareness, while God the Son is as God’s “ego,” the “diachronically identifiable individual” while the Holy Spirit is God’s freedom. God in Christ is not a disembodied logos asarkos, but the historical person Jesus.[10] “The second identity of God is directly the human person of the gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[11] Jesus find his “I” “in the same way that other human beings do – or, rather, that other humans find their ‘I’ and are free” as he is and does.[12] “This human personality is then an identity of God in that before the Father in the Spirit he lives the mutual life that God is. . .”[13]

According to David Bruner, “A Father without a Son – that is, without an incarnate son of the kind Jenson specifies – would be the same as an apparatus of mental perception without any lived history.”[14] God would have no lived content or actuality and Trinity and theology are rendered abstract and unintelligible. For Jenson, apart from the historical Jesus, God would not be who he is, Trinity would not be a fact about God, and the love of God or the very definition of God would not be the case. This is a paradoxical logic which accounts for the synthesis found in Christ between God and human, between Creator and creation, which is definitive of the personhood and love of God. This paradoxical, cosmic, synthesizing, love of God found in Christ, is directly accessible and intelligible.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th.  Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)


[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), 141–42. The title of this blog was inspired by Jordan Wood’s lecture 8 on Maximus at PBI, http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/maximus-and-the-love-of-god-in-synthesis-personhood-and-humility/

[2] Bonhoeffer, Ibid.

[3] Robert Jenson, The Knowledge of Things Hoped For: The Sense of Theological Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) 3.

[4] Michael Raymond Brain, The Metaphysics of the Gospel: Christ, Reality, and Ecumenism in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Toronto: Wycliffe College Dissertation, 2023) 70.

[5] Brain, 70.

[6] Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 136

[7] Ibid, 137.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Maximus, Ambigua, 91:1037B, quoted in Jenson, Ibid.

[10] David Bruner, “Jenson, Hegel and the Spirit of Recognition,” International Journal of Systematic Theology (Volume 21 Number 3 July 2019) 317.

[11] Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, 137, Cited in Bruner, Ibid.

[12] Jenson, Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Bruner, Ibid, 317.


“That Christ Would Be Formed in You”: From False Imaging to the Image of Christ in Maximus

Out of the long disputes in church history about the nature of the person of Christ, there develops a complicated and nuanced understanding of what it means to be a person. This is developed by Maximus the Confessor, who describes the “depth of the soul,” the “hidden part of the heart,” the two natures and wills, the role of reason, intellect and sense experience, all of which is integrated into a singular personhood.[1] Maximus is “Confessor,” having his hand cut off and his tongue torn out, because of his defense of the union of the divine and human natures and wills in the singular person of Christ. Maximus sees Christ as uniting the human and divine, but the very definition of person takes on this mediating role between the heavenly and earthly, the sensible and intelligible, the natural and the spiritual. On the basis of sense experience there is the development of discernment, intellect, and the fulfilling of the personal. In one of Maximus’ favorite triads, he speaks of the development of the human as passing from being, to wellbeing, to eternal being. Being does not explain wellbeing, and wellbeing does not explain eternal being, but as in Einsteinian field theory, the explanation works from the top down, with the person of Christ demonstrating the integration of being (being human, having passions and sense experience etc.) with wellbeing, all of which is understood in the light of the divine-human being. By concentrating vision on eternal being, and understanding God gives being to all that exists, there is the grace of well-being. [2]

In Maximus, as opposed to Freud, this depth psychology is not simply bent on describing the source of human passion and aggression (though Maximus also does this), but also describes how to direct the passions. As Kallistos Ware has put it, Freudian psychoanalysis goes down to a “dank and snake-infested cellar” but there is also a depth psychology serving as a ladder that leads to the Kingdom of God.[3] There is a ladder of ascent through being, the natural, the sensible and the knowable but the ladder of ascent, as with Moses going up Sinai, is a movement from knowing to unknowing, beyond the conceptual into the unknowing of the mystical, and this pertains to the personal. The personal is not reducible to the conceptual or the sensual, or simply to being, but being and all that it entails is mediated through the personal and the personal is ultimately synonymous with the divine Person: “On account of the very things that are and that are becoming, he is the one who is and the one who ‘becomes all things to all’” (I Cor. 9:22).[4]

Synonymous with the concept of the personal are both the divine Person and the cosmos he has created. It is not that either God or cosmos, Creator and creation, can be conceived separately, but it is their integration in Personhood which give them coherence. As with David, he “heard the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaim the work of His hands, and this is wondrous indeed, since the creator did not endow these things with a soul. Yet with the ears of his intellect, he heard inanimate beings proclaim the principles of theology . . .”[5] David said, “My father and my mother abandoned me, but the Lord took me to himself.” Maximus takes him to be describing the passage from “the natural law of the flesh, which governs the process of birth and corruption” and the passage through “sensation, which feeds us like a mother,” or the passage from desiring the visible to desiring the invisible. “In this way, the visible world is abandoned by us and abandons us, but the Lord takes us to Himself and according to the spiritual law adopts those who are worthy, becoming their adopted father through virtue and knowledge, and in His goodness He gives the whole of Himself to the whole of them, according to the likeness.”[6] God is not perceived apart from the cosmos, rather: “If the soul uses the senses properly, discerning by means of its own faculties the manifold inner principles of created beings, and if it succeeds in wisely transmitting to itself the whole visible universe in which God is hidden and proclaimed in silence, then by use of its own free choice it creates a world of spiritual beauty within the understanding.”[7] As Maximus explains in the Mystagogy, God made all things and defines their limits, though apart from Him these things seem to diverge but “he makes the things that have been set apart from one another by nature to be the things that have converged with one another by the one power of relationship with him as their beginning.”[8]

Throughout, Maximus has in mind the mediating role of the incarnation, which is not simply a model, but the mode of personhood enacted in the body of Christ, which is the explanation of the cosmos: “The universe possesses a sanctuary, which is the realm above and is assigned to the powers above, and it also possesses a nave, which is the realm below and is traversed by those whose lot it is to live through sense perception.”[9] He describes the process of the soul passing through its three stages, as one entering the Church: “By means of the nave, representing the body, it proposes ethical philosophy, while by means of the sanctuary, representing the soul, it spiritually interprets natural contemplation, and by means of the intellect of the divine altar it manifests mystical theology.”[10] Life is a process of putting on Christ, and passing, by means of the earthly nave, into the heavenly sanctuary.

Maximus describes the same process, in detail, in an allegorical reading of the Exodus, in which Moses represents the intellect. Deprived of Moses, as at Sinai, Israel reverts to the mental images of Egypt and return to their delusional wanderings in the wilderness. In Moses absence, they melt down their practice of the virtues in the fire of their passion, and they produce an irrational image, the Golden Calf. When Moses returns, or when divine reason arrives, it grinds this irrational state into powder and scatters it under the water.”[11] The calf is the “mixing and confusion” of the passions, and it is molten as it is the reification of “the form of the evil imaginings stored up in the mind.”[12] The calf is an interpretation, a projection of the imagination, or a false rationalization.

As Jordan Wood explains, Maximus does not think we can avoid making images, or what he calls phantasms, as this is what is entailed in being a rational being.[13] These phantasms, are simply interpretations or intelligible pictures, and in the absence of Moses/reason, a calf “emerges from the fire” of the passions. Humans are continually personifying, even the inanimate, but this false incarnation and false imaging intimates the reality. Every time we stub our toe and get angry at an inanimate object, creation as incarnation is at work. There is an external manifestation, a taking on of flesh, a concretization, which points to the working of grace, even here. The grace of false incarnation is that it can lead to true incarnation as it objectifies, and opens to examination, even stupid delusions. When you examine this object that has now become this event that has now become clear to you (e.g., you yelled at that door or that table), that means you are starting to self-scrutinize what you have brought out of yourself and made into an image, a phantasm, a molten calf.  Certainly, you are confused, you have mixed things up, and assigned agency where it is lacking. As Maximus states it, “The intellect takes all of these things, according to the meaning given to each, and throws them into the fire of the passions, where it forges the irrational and mindless state of ignorance, which is the mother of all evils.”[14] Recognizing this evil for what it is, in Maximus extension of the allegory, is to grind the idol into dust and cast it onto the water:

This state, however, can be broken down whenever the intellect—observing in thought the density of the passion as it is manifested externally to the senses—breaks apart the combination of elements producing the passion and brings each one back to its proper principle of origin. This is how it “scatters them under the water,” which is to say “under the knowledge of truth,” clearly distinguishing and decoupling them from their mutually evil coalescence and combination.[15]

Every passion takes a natural power such as desire or anger, and turns it from its created nature, but the intellect enables a deconstruction of this idol, and a return of the natural powers to their proper place. The intellect can grind the molten calf, and its various elements, into powder, and the image of God be restored.

In Jordan’s explanation, Maximus takes from our reifying and idol producing tendencies, the hopeful point, that it densifies, thickens, and becomes almost a false incarnation, and that it thus becomes an object open to examination and deconstruction. Even though it is constructed out of delusion (which is to say, nothing at all), the very fact that that the dynamic product is an incarnation, is also the very occasion for being able to destroy it and therefore be saved. Recognizing false incarnation, in light of its true realization, allows release and the opportunity to pull the powers and passions back from this object and to redirect them. The point is not to give up on images, and to see God as some transcendent immutable other, but the point is to enact discernment. To grind the molten calf into powder, requires discernment and judgment, as the soul comes to possess the divine image of God alone. We do not simply become idol smashers, nor is it simply the right kind of imaging, but it’s a matter of the right image, and the true incarnation.[16]

Personhood, image making, and interpreting, which are at the root of false incarnation, are also the reality and truth of deification. Paul describes this as the goal of his ministry and the point of the spiritual life. Prayer, meditation, spiritual discipline, Bible study, and church involve us in image making as “Christ is formed in you” (Gal. 4:19).


[1] See the development of this in Michael Bakker, “Maximus and Modern Psychology” in The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, eds, Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 534.

[2] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 10:119.

[3] Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996) 56, Quoted in Bakker, Ibid.

[4] Saint Maximus The Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, trans. By Jonathan J. Armstrong (Yonkers New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019) 50.

[5] Ambigua, 10:20, 179-181.

[6] Ambigua, 10:21, 181.

[7] Ambigua 10: 21, PG 91. 1248C; trans. In  A. G. Cooper. The Body in St Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 59,  cited in Bakker, 538.

[8] Mystagoy, 51.

[9] Mystagogia, 56.

[10] Mystagogia, 4, cited in Bakker, 540.

[11] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington D. C.:  The Catholic University of America Press) 16:2, 131.

[12] Thalassios, 132.

[13] Jordan Wood, Lecture at Ploughshares Bible Institute http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/discerning-and-becoming-the-image-of-christ-with-jordan-wood/

[14] Thalassios, 16:5, 132,

[15] Ibid.

[16] Jordan Wood, Ibid.

Maximus on the Lord’s Prayer: The Specific Instance of the Word Actualized Always and In All Things

Prayer, the most instinctive and common of religious practices, is also the most paradoxical. How can God be both personal and interactive and yet be eternal? Does the unchangeable God hear and respond to our requests? Does he change his mind, at our prodding?[1] In a classical theistic understanding, God is prior to all things. He is impassable, unchangeable, immovable, and all knowing. If he already knows, then doesn’t his foreknowledge require that all things are already determined? In some Calvinist interpretations, for example, all events are direct determinations of his will. The only explanation for prayer, for a classical theist, a Calvinist, or for any who hold that eternity is prior to creation, is that prayer is about aligning human will with the eternal (the unchanging purposes of God). Even in my anti-Calvinist fundamentalist Bible college this was the explanation that was given. While aligning our will with God’s must play a role in prayer, this also seems to fall short of the basic human need in the midst of pain, sickness, suffering and evil. It also does away with authentic personal interaction with God. Is prayer just a matter of learning to accept bad things, and relinquishing any hope of a different outcome? This is not very satisfying and does not accord with the Bible’s picture of God “repenting” or changing his mind, as he did in response to both Abraham and Moses, the most prominent examples of many, in which God interactively changes course. Open Theology, in attempting to answer this problem, concluded God is subject to time and does not know all future events, and so, as in Process Theology, God is discovering the future along with the rest of us. This may be more emotionally satisfying, but it also seems to diminish God and his power in the face of evil and suffering (the very things that evoke much prayer).

Maximus the Confessor provides an alternative cosmological setting and understanding of prayer, in which eternity and God do not simply precede creation, but the identity of God is in incarnation and creation. Time is not subsequent, or outside of God’s eternal purposes, but as is clear in the incarnation, creation is part of and participates in who God is. In his explanation of The Lord’s Prayer, Maximus concludes that this model prayer, which touches upon the needs and requests of every prayer, is answered by Christ in the incarnation. “For the words of the prayer make request for whatever the Word of God himself wrought through the flesh in his self-abasement.”[2] Creation’s purpose and completion, realized in incarnation, sets prayer and the Lord’s prayer, directly within God’s eternal purpose. It is not that God’s eternal purposes precede or are outside of time, or that human free will conflicts or obstructs eternity, but God, in his eternity, responds to human freedom. Afterall, God “became man without any change” in who he is as God.[3] Thus the model prayer “teaches us to strive for those goods of which only God the Father through the natural mediation of the Son in the Holy Spirit is in all truth the bestower, since according to the divine Apostle the Lord Jesus is ‘mediator between God and men” (1 Tim 2:5; cf. Heb 8:6). Jesus teaches us to petition God for that which he would accomplish, but even here the petition is part of the fulfillment. 

God’s purpose, that his Word would be “actualized always and in all things,”[4] or the purpose of creation as participation in God (deification), means that divine and human purpose (the mutual purpose of incarnation) is to be in full communion/communication. Prayer is central to this purpose: “If then the realization of the divine counsel is the deification of our nature, and if the aim of divine thoughts is the accomplishment of what we ask for in our life, then it is profitable to recognize the full import of the Lord’s prayer, to put it into practice and to write about it properly.”[5] Maximus equates “divine thoughts” with “the accomplishment of what we ask for in our life.” That is, human need, human action, human desire, in this reversal of the way we may often think, shape divine thoughts. Time shapes eternity, as creation and incarnation are eternal facts about God. We know this, as God’s eternal purposes are realized in the incarnation.

Seen in this light, Maximus concludes the prayer contains the meaning of 7 key things: “theology, adoption in grace, equality of honor with the angels, participation in eternal life, the restoration of nature inclining toward a tranquil state, the abolition of the law of sin, and the overthrowing of the tyranny of evil which has dominated us by trickery.”[6] In summary, Christ teaches us the true name and nature of God, and adoption is enacted through the Son, rendering men equal to the angels in heaven by bringing together heaven and earth, and providing a new birth fully integrating human free will in the promotion of “Thy Will”, and by providing a new heavenly food (the bread of immortal life). God in Christ restores nature from the bondage to decay by defeating death and purifying nature of the violence of hostility, and by providing a spiritual birth not subject to the law of sin and death, thus effecting the destruction of the tyranny of evil.[7] In each phase of his argument, Maximus demonstrates how the salvation wrought in Christ answers the prayer.

In regard to theology, the prayer speaks of the Father’s name, but the one name given by God is that of Jesus Christ: “for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). According to Maximus, “Father” is not an added designation nor is the kingdom an added dignity: ”The Father indeed has no acquired name and we should not think of the kingdom as a dignity considered after him. For he did not begin to be, as if he had a beginning as Father and King, but he always is, and is always both Father and King, not having in any way begun to exist or to be Father or King.”[8] God did not take on a different identity, but the identity revealed through Christ and because of Christ is who he is from eternity. In the incarnation, the Word “teaches us the mystical knowledge of God, because he shows us in himself the Father and the Holy Spirit. For the full Father and the full Holy Spirit are essentially and completely in the full Son, even the incarnate Son, without being themselves incarnate.”[9] The prayer, in the name of the Father, for the kingdom to come, is inclusive of all of who God is: “For the name of God the Father who subsists essentially is the only-begotten Son, and the kingdom of God the Father who subsists essentially is the Holy Spirit.”[10]

By praying “Our Father,” and bidding others to so pray, Jesus sets forth and shares the grace of his relation to the Father. The adoption by the Father is enacted by the Son: “He gives adoption by giving through the Spirit a supernatural birth from on high in grace, of which divine birth the guardian and preserver is the free will of those who are thus born.”[11] No one asks to be born the first time, but in the true birth and beginning, human will and freedom are preserved by God. “Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate through those who are saved. He causes the soul which begets him to be a virgin-mother who . . . does not bear the marks of nature subject to corruption and generation in the relationship of male and female.”[12] The first birth is something of a false beginning, displaced by the second, in which each, like the Virgin Mary, consents to bearing the incarnate one. “For in Christ there is neither male nor female, thus clearly indicating the characteristics and the passions of a nature subject to corruption and generation. Instead, there is only a deiform principle created by divine knowledge and one single movement of free will which chooses only virtue.”[13] The defeat of evil, the overcoming of temptation, the arrival at virtue, are implicit in the very possibility of the prayer enacted in Christ. The prayer, like the one who modeled it, is a new order of relation with the Father, in the Kingdom through the Spirit.

Throughout, Maximus is picturing the prayer as a process of deification, and so the daily bread is best described as “Our bread” as that “which you prepared in the beginning for the immortality of nature, ‘give us this day,’ to us who belong to the mortal condition of the present life, so that nourishment by the bread of life and knowledge triumph over the death of sin.”[14] Adam missed partaking of the bread of life due to transgression, but Christ restores this possibility. “For the Bread of Life, out of his love for men, gives himself to all who ask him . . . according to the spiritual dignity enabling him to receive it.”[15] Elsewhere Jesus warns not to worry about life, about food or drink, or what you will wear, but seek first the kingdom of God (Matt. 6:25). Maximus suspects some may not agree with his interpretation, but even in the literal understanding (which disagrees with Jesus command) the prayer is for one day’s supply, thus even taken literally the prayer is a preparation for death. “On the contrary, let us without anxiety ask in prayer for one day’s bread and let us show that in the Christian way of life we make life a preparation for death, by letting our free will overtake nature, and before death comes, by cutting the soul off from the concerns for bodily things. In this way it will not be nailed down to corruptible things, nor pass on to matter the use of the natural desire, nor learn the greediness which deprives one of the abundance of divine gifts.”[16] It is due to possessively seeking after earthly life after all, that death reigns, and this prayer for God’s provision is aimed at the institution of a heavenly economy.

The prayer asks those in heaven and on earth to be of a single will, and Maximus also turns this imitation into a two-way interpersonal realization, as the prayer calls upon God to imitate man in offering forgiveness. “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” is a “summons to God to be to him as he is to his neighbors.”[17] As the one praying takes on God’s likeness, he takes on the divine detachment from remembering offenses, and like God, he freely forgives, enacting reconciliation between God and nature: “For since free will has been thus united to the principle of nature, the reconciliation of God with nature comes about naturally, for otherwise it is not possible for nature in rebellion against itself by free will to receive the inexpressible divine condescension.”[18] It is not simply that earth is drawn heavenward, but the heavenly kingdom is brought to earth, in and through the prayer. Not only God, but his children become dispensers of grace in forgiveness.

Maximus ties together the logic of the prayer for bread and the forgiving of debtors, as both are a surpassing of nature. Asking for spiritual bread can be likened to forgiving debtors as the one praying knows he is mortal by nature, and any day natural life may end, but this is the point of the spiritual life, of “outstripping nature” and dying to the world. “For your sake we are put to death the whole day, we are considered as sheep of the slaughterhouse” (Ps. 44:23 and Rom. 8:36). Like Christ, the one praying pours out life as a libation, which is already a deliverance from temptation and evil. This is already deliverance from the law of sin, and from the evil one. “In this way not only shall we acquire forgiveness for our sins but we shall also be victors over the law of sin without being left behind to undergo the experience of it. We shall trample underfoot the evil serpent which gave rise to the law.”[19]

The prayer calls for a radical cosmological shift, in which time participates in and completes eternity, and eternity and the heavenly are enacted in time. The prayer, Maximus insists throughout, calls not only for the completion of creation in incarnation but directs “us to the mystery of deification” as God condescends “through the flesh of the Only Son” to enact His Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.[20]


[1] Jordan Wood raises and answers these issues in a PBI lecture http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/maximus-on-the-explanation-of-prayer-by-jordan-wood/

[2] Maximus the Confessor, “Commentary of the Our Father: A Brief Explanation of the Prayer Our Father To a Certain Friend of Christ By Saint Maximus, Monk and Confessor,” in Maximus Confessor:  Selected Writings, trans. George C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) 102.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7:22.

[5] Commentary on the Our Father, Ibid.

[6] Ibid, 102-103.

[7] Ibid, 103-104. Maximus cycles through these results several times.

[8] Ibid, 106.

[9] Ibid, 103.

[10] Ibid, 106

[11] Ibid,103.

[12] Ibid,109.

[13] Ibid, 110.

[14] Ibid, 113.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 114.

[17] Ibid, 115.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 118.

[20] Ibid, 118.

The Mystical Union: Maximus and the Christologic Beyond What Can be Conceived

If problem and solution are stated in the broadest terms, whether scientific, social, psychological, or spiritual, this is captured in the terms dualism and synthesis. An unresolvable difference, or a disunion, in which two systems, two facts, two grounds of meaning, or simply two people, stand opposed, is this sense of a duality. In turn, synthesis is union without dissolution, accounting for difference but integrating this difference into a larger, harmonious field. Union without dissolution describes the goal of field theory in science, but it also potentially describes every solution or resolution. All peace and harmony, all problem solving, depend upon a synthesizing harmony. The problem is, that unresolvable difference (dualism) characterizes human thought, whether that of wave and particle, Jew and Gentile, or male and female. Maximus the Confessor, in describing the work of God in Christ, demonstrates how it is that Christ overcomes otherwise irresolvable difference. He shows that the way God is at work surpasses any philosophical, religious, or logical system, whether that of Plato and Aristotle, the apophatic and cataphatic, or simply systems grounded in being and nonbeing. Cause and effect, existence and nonexistence, sensible and rational, silence and speech, being and nonbeing, or knowing and beyond knowing, describe the working parameters of human conceptuality. The history of thought, religion and theology, are summed up in these parameters of possibility, and yet Maximus maintains God in Christ surpasses these categories.

He begins On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy by laying out an alternative parameter:

Let God be the guide of the things that are perceived and spoken, for he is the only mind of those who perceive and of that which is perceived, and he is the only word of those who speak and of that which is spoken. He is the life of the living and of the things that have been endowed with life. On account of the very things that are and that are becoming, he is the one who is and the one who “becomes all things to all” (I Cor. 9:22).[1]

Maximus explains that, “on account of himself, he neither in any way whatsoever belongs to nor comes to belong to the things that are or that are becoming, whose essence he constitutes.”[2]  Being and becoming are inadequate ways of conceiving of God as “He is by nature in the same class as absolutely nothing of the things that are, and for this reason, he allows us to say rather that he is not, because it is more properly said of him that he transcends being.”[3] But this Platonic notion of the God beyond being, taken up by Neo-Platonists and many modern day Platonic theologians, is also inadequate in Maximus’ estimate. He acknowledges that we might contemplate the “difference between God and creatures,” and he recognizes that negation and affirmation are both limited possibilities which might be a reverential part of acknowledging God, “yet,” he says, “neither is possible in a proper sense – I am speaking of the existence and non-existence of God.”[4] Maximus acknowledges both of these approaches (and allows for the theological traditions which depend upon either the negative or the positive), while at the same time suggesting neither is “possible” or adequate.

So, this abstract approach to God, focusing on God as cause, might conclude positively that all things speak of God as they can be traced back to their origin, while at the same time maintaining that nothing can be said of God on the basis of cause, as God precedes all effects. It may be correct in a limited sense to speak of God as cause of all things, but as Jordan Wood notes, something is smuggled into God as cause, that is inadequate, as cause speaks of sequence or has reference to an unfolding in time which would never arrive at God.[5]

Maximus argues that neither existence nor non-existence “is possible in a proper sense, because neither establishes the very essence and nature of what existence is concerning the one whom we seek. For nothing at all – whether it exists or does not exist – is united with him by nature because he is their cause; neither anything of the things that are and are spoken nor anything of the things that are not and are not spoken in any way comes near to him.”[6] God is “beyond every kataphatic and apophatic statement”[7] – He is beyond either negation or affirmation or silence and speaking – all are inadequate. In other words, God is beyond any possibility that has been conceived or could have been conceived, and even to conclude to a negative not knowing is a claim about what can and cannot be known.  

While the tradition from Dionysius, which Maximus is referencing, would privilege the apophatic – and which Maximus allows has partial validity, even in itself it would negate the supposed understanding that imagines negation and silence alone are adequate. To claim to know what must be negated (the apophatic), or to know what cannot be spoken or made incarnate, is to claim to know what cannot be known (a self-defeating position). In both Protestant and Catholic understanding, this form of theology has laid the ground for delimiting what God can and cannot do, even in the incarnation. An apophatic theology which goes beyond itself, to that which is otherwise unthinkable, must be open to the possibility of God revealing himself in a manner that is not conceivable.

Yet, in the Christian theological tradition, this neo-platonic apophaticism predominates in Catholicism (East and West) and Protestantism. For example, the hard demarcation often made between faith and reason, presumes to tap into a reason that imagines it has the power to mark the limits of affirmation and negation, faith and reason. It makes a judgment and marks a delimitation taken up in nominalism and forms of Thomism. It limits the possibility of revelation and sets the limits of what God can do in incarnation, yet as Maximus argues, the accessible or inaccessible, the describable or indescribable, the knowable or unknowable do not in any way come near to him. Abstractions devolve into irresolvable differences, differences upon which they either implicitly or explicitly depend, but which are self-defeating.

Maximus moves directly into demonstrating how the incarnation and the church as a continuation of incarnation, goes beyond abstraction to a fulness of synthesis. The church, like Christ, “bears the representation and image of God because she possesses the same activity as his according to imitation and representation.”[8] God binds together those categories, such as the intelligible and sensible: “he makes the things that have been set apart from one another by nature to be the things that have converged with one another by the one power of relationship with him as their beginning.”[9]

Nothing has an origin or nature which establishes some absolute difference; rather all things have a common origin and cause which synthesizes or overcomes difference. “This relationship nullifies and covers over all individual relationships that are contemplated according to the nature of each of the things that are, not because it corrupts and destroys them and causes them not to be, but because it surpasses and outshines them. . .”[10] There is a unified relationship, or a final unified field theory, if you will, in which the unification of all things is posited. “And it is by this relationship that the totality itself and the parts of the totality shine and by nature are, because the parts possess the whole cause, which shines more brilliantly than themselves. And just as the sun is more brilliant than the stars in nature and power, so also its appearance covers over them as a cause does its effects.”[11]

All things relate to God, but humans have the capacity to obscure and fracture this relationship, which infects human recognition of how it is that all things  achieve unity with one another. As Maximus’ translator explains, “nothing in its original, created form is oriented to the division and discord that comes as a result of the fracturing of relationship with God.”[12] As Maximus explained earlier, this restoring of relationship is the work of the church instituted by Christ: “This contract for spiritual work in the spiritual vineyard restores the spiritual denarius of the divine and most royal image that was stolen by the evil one in the beginning through deceit according to the transgression of the commandment.”[13] The church “works the same things and in the same way as God does” – “as an image relates to its archetype.”[14]

For example, though there are a nearly boundless number of people from many different races, tribes, tongues, customs, manners and pursuits, through the body of Christ they are regenerated and recreated: “to all he gives equally and grants freely one divine form and designation, that is to be and to be called from Christ.”[15] Maximus quotes Galatians 3:28 to make the point: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The Church, as the image of God, works the same divine synthesis and oneness around the faithful. “God himself works this oneness by nature without confusion around the substances of the things that are, alleviating and making identical that which is different around them by the reference to and oneness with himself as their cause and beginning and end” and what God is doing in the universe he is doing through the faithful in the church.[16]

Maximus uses the architecture and various offices of the church to illustrate the point that the body of Christ is unified. There are priests and ministers working in the sanctuary, and there is the nave which is accessible to all the faithful, but the church is one. “In the same way, the entire universe of everything that is which was brought forth from God at the creation and is divided into the intelligible realm, which is comprised of intellectual and bodiless substance, and the realm that is sensible and bodily and which has been ingeniously interwoven from many forms and natures” is unified in the Creator.[17] Maximus describes this unity, synthesizing difference (in the body of Christ and the cosmos) as constituting two churches. “The universe possesses a sanctuary, which is the realm above and is assigned to the powers above, and it also possesses a nave, which is the realm below and is traversed by those whose lot it is to live through sense perception.”[18] The universe, like the church, “is not divided by its parts” as the divisions are limited. All differences resolve to an undivided unity as “these realms are alternately identical with the universe and are without confusion with one another.”[19] Just as Christ unifies the church, so too all the facets of the sensible and intelligible are unified in God. If the things that do not appear are clearly perceived on the basis of the seen (Rom. 1:20) then how much more is this the case for those who devote themselves to this spiritual knowledge.

The church is God’s unifying activity in which participation in Christ (deification), is made explicit and visual, in the unifying work of communion, baptism, and priestly mediation. God makes himself known and seen bodily, becoming His own sign. The eucharistic moment, in which Christ gives himself to all who would receive him, constitutes a Christo-logic, exceeding (and unifying) all difference in a unifying synthesis. God is his own symbol in Christ, unifying beginning and end, the lowest and the highest, time and eternity, the cosmic and the heavenly, the sensible and the rational. This action of God in Christ is beyond what could otherwise be conceived, but this logic beyond all other logic, points to a fullness in which God is all in all. “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free,” no earthly or heavenly, no sensible or rational, no apophatic or cataphatic, no mere abstraction, “but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col. 3:11). In this realization there is the transfiguration of the human and a new order of understanding – Christologic.


[1] Saint Maximus The Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, trans. By Jonathan J. Armstrong (Yonkers New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019) 50.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 50-51.

[5]In a lecture at PBI http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/jordan-wood-on-christologic/

[6] Mystagoy, Ibid, 51.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 52

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid, footnote 23.

[13] Ibid, 49.

[14] Ibid, 53.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 55.

[17] Ibid, 56.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

What Is The Proper Christian Response To Evil Government?

As we enter this confusing period in our nation, the response and responsibility of Christians to government is being brought front and center. Rethinking the Christian role in Empire may prove to be the silver lining to the cloud of the present chaos. It was under the darkest of circumstances, after all, that Paul outlined the responsibility of Christians to the state. During the period in which Nero ruled Rome, Christians, by their very existence, were thought to be a danger to the Empire. Paul provides instruction as to how to proceed in light of the fact that Jesus has been slain and Paul himself will shortly be murdered. Continue reading “What Is The Proper Christian Response To Evil Government?”

The Therapeutics of Desire in Maximus’ Bible Reading

As long as a merely historicizing exposition of the Scriptures predominates, the reign of the mind absorbed in transitory and temporal things has not been toppled, and the children of the dead Saul continue to live, along with his offspring, which are seven in number, that is, the corporeal and transitory observance of the law. Maximus the Confessor [1]

Maximus the Confessor demonstrates that his understanding of Christ as the Word who would be incarnate in and through all things, is always the Word made flesh or the exegetical reality of God (John 1:18) and this is his biblical hermeneutic. For example, the story of David handing over the children of Saul to be executed by the Gibeonites, is a story about a literal, historical reading versus a Christ centered-theological-spiritual reading. In an explanation of 2 Kings 21, Maximus describes those who might stick to a literal understanding or cling to the law as controlled by the flesh. In the story “Saul signifies the written law, which rules over carnal Jews according to the power of the carnal commandment. In other words, he signifies the corporeal way of life or thinking that rules over those who are guided solely by the letter of the law.”[2] In a riff on the meaning of Rizpah (Saul’s concubine), he explains that her name means “course of the mouth.” “The course of the mouth is the learning of the law that is limited solely to the pronouncing of words. The person who occupies himself solely with the corporeal observance of the law unlawfully cohabits with such learning, and from their union is born nothing that is pious or loves God.”[3] Such a one gives birth to miserable offspring – “anathema and shame.”

One attached to the flesh, the letter, or the law, is attached to pleasure, having a “passionate attachment to the world.” Maximus equates “love of the world” and “love of the body” with love of “physical configuration of the letter of the law.”[4] Such a one has made the letter his concubine, and Maximus emphasizes the “corporeal” nature of this desire of the law, is aimed at “the enjoyment and satisfaction of the body,” such that to pursue the letter of the law is the same as one “absolutely subject to the activity of the passions and to the shame of the defilement of the vile thoughts they produce. He will be subject to this corrupted world and preoccupied in his thoughts with love for the body and the matter and forms of the passions.”[5] To love the law or to be attached to the letter, is as one who “’reckons his stomach to be God, and who boasts in his shame as if it were his glory,” such a one “knows only how to embrace eagerly the dishonorable passions as if they were divine, and thus attends only to what is transitory, that is, to matter and form, and to the misuse of the activity of his five senses. . .”[6] Maximus describes an incapacity of thought, or an inability to escape the symbols and to arrive at “a natural principle or thought.”[7] Saul, or one attached “to the letter of Scripture,” is consumed with “enjoyment of the flesh, which he thinks is prescribed by the law” and devoid of “divine knowledge” but experiencing a “famine of spiritual nourishment.”[8]

One can rise above corporeal desire, and attachment to the world, only through interpretive lens of Christ. Maximus explains that “Jesus, the Word of God,” does not do away with the medium of thought or what he calls the bearers of wood and water” but he ignites in these materials “the light of divine knowledge” which “washes away the stain of the passions.”[9] Maximus’ point seems to fit naturally with the experience of the two unnamed disciples going to Emmaus.

Though we might imagine an encounter with the historical Jesus would be proof enough, knowledge enough, or experience enough to confirm the reality of faith, the two on the Road to Emmaus, walk and talk with the historical Jesus without recognizing him. Given the best tools of historical criticism, the finest textual criticism, the most elaborate working of all linguistic and textual critical tools, none of these will bring us as close, and certainly no closer to the reality of the historical Jesus, than that experienced by two on the Road to Emmaus, yet this historical, physical, embodied encounter with Jesus did not produce recognition, understanding or faith. It is only the eucharistic moment of breaking of bread that produces understanding and faith, and it is at this moment that Jesus fades from sight. As the two explained later, “He was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread,” when he disappeared (Lk. 24:35). A reading of the Bible that sticks, to the history, to the text, to the letter, or to the flesh, will never arrive at Christ.

While the incarnation is necessary and central to the person and work of Christ, Christ is not recognized on the basis of history, or on the basis of the flesh. Divinity is not the flesh itself, but made manifest in the flesh. Looking upon the flesh of Jesus, Jesus in the body, even the raised body, does not guarantee or equate with comprehension; rather an impassioned attachment to the flesh, to embodiment, can be equated with sin, even when it is the flesh of the historical Jesus. So too an impassioned attachment to the letter of Scripture, to the historical aspect of Scripture, or to Scripture per se, is on the order of attachment to the flesh. Both can be equated with clinging to the finite, to the medium, to the sign, rather than to the Spirit and to Christ.

In this sense, only Christ exegetes God (Jn. 1:18). Scripture, the law, history, the book, the flesh, do not exegete or explain. Certainly, each of these is taken up as a medium of explanation, but the explanatory point is the exegetical reality of Christ. This is the distinction that the early church made between law and Gospel. The law, as an end in itself was presumed to be on the order of taking the flesh as an end in itself. Thus Origen argued that there need be no distinction between the Old and New Testament, as the law or the Old Testament becomes such only where it is not read in conjunction with the Gospel. The law, “becomes an ‘Old Testament’ only for those who want to understand it in a fleshly way; and for them it has necessarily become old and aged, because it cannot maintain its strength, but, “for us, who understand and explain it spiritually and in an evangelical sense, it is always new.”[10] Both Testaments are new in that it is in the newness of understanding brought by Christ that they are to be understood. 

This exegetical or hermeneutic problem as with all human fallenness, is a matter of desire, but it is not desire per se but a stunted desire set on making the finite, the letter, or the flesh an end in itself. Maximus compares it to Potiphar’s wife attempting to seduce Joseph, and left only with his clothing, “completely failing to attain intercourse with the object of her desire.” So is one who only reads Scripture historically or literally. “The garments of the Word are a symbol of the words of Holy Scripture . . . but we must necessarily take thought for the ‘body’ of Holy Scripture, by which I mean its inner meanings, which are far superior to its ‘garments,’ for is not ‘the body more than clothing’? [Mt 6.25].”[11]

In Maximus’ description, with the pursuit of the body of Scripture there arises a desire that is “stretching out alongside God’s infinity.”[12] As Paul Blowers points out, desire in Maximus (who is following Gregory of Nyssa), is not “an unfortunate superaddition to reason or the human intellectual constitution” but “lies at the very core of human nature.” Desire is a necessary component of what it means to be human. As Blowers argues, “Called to the highest knowledge of, and participation in, the Trinity the intellect is helpless without the inclination and passionate pursuit afforded by desire.”[13]

Desire per se is not the problem with humanity, but a deviant desire that can cause the mind to “slip downward from above” but, according to Maximus “God redirects irrational lust for the things of this life to a natural object of desire.”[14] It is “by means of its desire and the whole power of its total love,” as they “cling closely to God through knowledge, and, growing in likeness to God,” that one is “divinized.”[15] Deification, Maximus writes,

is precisely . . . the return of believers to their proper beginning according to their proper end, which is the fulfillment of their desire. The fulfillment of their desire, in turn, is the ever-moving repose of desirers around the object of their desire. The ever-moving repose of desirers around the object of their desire is, in turn, their uninterrupted and continuous enjoyment of the object of desire. And the uninterrupted and continuous enjoyment of their object of desire is, in turn, their participation in supernatural divine realities.”[16]

Reading Scripture with Christ as center and interpretive key, redirects desire toward its proper end (and beginning), not through satiation of desire but through its increase. “For it is simply not possible that those who once come to be in God should reach satiety and be drawn away by wanton desire.”[17] Wanton desire proves empty and trivial, it is easily quenched or it is “repulsed and nauseated by things that were base and repugnant.” However, desire of God opens one up to an infinite desire. God “who by nature is infinite and infinitely attractive. . . increases the appetites of those who enjoy Him owing to their participation in that which has no limit.”[18]

Divinization is a stretching out and proper ordering of desire, which Maximus pictures as inherent to human immortality. Desire is part of the means of breaking out of the finite, the fleshly, the historical, and breaking through to the indwelling presence of the Creator, “making God Himself—who bound together the body and the soul—the body’s own unbreakable bond of immortality.”[19] Desire points to its proper end and beginning in desiring and infinitely attaining God.


[1] St. Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (hereafter, Q Thal, Translated by FR. Maximos Constas (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press), 65.14, 528.

[2] Q Thal, 65.3, p. 521.

[3] Q Thal, 65.5, p. 521.

[4] Q Thal, 65.6, p. 522.

[5] Q Thal, 65.8, p. 523.

[6] Q Thal, 65.11, p. 525-526.

[7] Q Thal, 65.9, p. 524.

[8] Q Thal, 65.12, p. 526.

[9] Q Thal, 65.9, p. 525. Jordan Wood illustrates this point, made below, with the two on the Road to Emmaus in this lecture http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/jordan-wood-on-maximus-view-of-the-word-as-continuing-incarnation/

[10] Origen, Hom Num 9.4.2/GCS 7, 59.10-15. Cited in Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 203.

[11] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 10.29, 33. Cited in Q Thal footnote, p. 527.

[12] Opusc. theol. et polem. 1 (PG 91:9A). Cited in Paul Blowers, ”The Dialectics and Therapeutics of Desire in Maximus the Confessor,” (Vigiliae Christianae 65 (2011) 425-451) p. 432.

[13] Blowers, 432.

[14] Ambigua 8.2, p. 145.

[15] Ambigua 7.31, p. 119.

[16] Ad Thal. 59 (CCSG 22:65), Cited in Blowers, p. 433.

[17] Ambigua 7.28, p. 115.

[18] Ambigua 7.28, p. 117.

[19] Ambigua 7.31, p. 121.