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Rereading Romans, Part 2

A guest blog by Brian Sartor

Protestant era readings of Romans take 1:18-32 as the foundation. Our reading takes it as a false pretense. The voice of 1:18-32 is that of one who “passes judgment” (2:1) and “boasts in God” (2:17). It names boastfulness as a practice of the unrighteous (1:30), yet each remaining occurrence of the word ‘boast’ in the epistle refers to the boasting of one who presumes himself to be righteous (2:17-29, 3:27, 4:2, 15:17). The conventionally acceptable practice of boasting in God, boasting in law, and boasting in an outward form of righteousness (and Jewish identity) is the implicit tone of voice in 1:18-32. In 2:1—3:20, Paul exposes that tone—that mode of approaching life and law—as one of subtle self-deceit, hypocrisy, and death.

The last two verses in 2:1—3:20 conclude: “Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through law comes the knowledge of sin.” “That every mouth may be closed” is where Paul is taking us as we proceed from the boisterous claims of 1:18-32. The nature and function of law is that it closes all mouths, as law is not a foundation from which anyone may boast. “That every mouth may be closed” also pre-figures 11:32, the very last line in Paul’s argument: “For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all.”

“There is No Partiality with God”

The ethnic distinction between Jew and Gentile was a hindrance to gospel living, and addressing it was essential to Paul’s mission as the apostle to the Gentiles (Galatians 2, Acts 15). Writing to establish a base for his future ministry in Spain (1:10-11 and 15:22-24), in Romans Paul sought to address this false distinction from the ground up. He alluded to it subtly at first with an ironic use of the phrase “…to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” in 1:16. Then in 2:9-10, Paul fully twists this conventional phrase back in on itself, neutralizing, or canceling out, any significance it could possibly have for common use in relation to the gospel.

Then Paul states the first point in his argument: “For there is no partiality with God” (2:11). The phrase originates in the Torah (Deuteronomy 10:17), shows up in the wisdom literature, and gets repeated in a passage from the synoptic gospels (Matthew 22:16, Mark 12:14, Luke 20:21). It becomes a fundamental theme in Paul’s corpus and in other New Testament writings (Acts 10:34, James 2:1-9, Galatians 2:6, Ephesians 6:9, Colossians 3:25, 1 Timothy 5:21). The first eleven uses of the word ‘law’ in Romans begin to explain why the ethnic distinction between Jew and Gentile has no place in the righteousness of God:

For all who have sinned without law will also perish without law, and all who have sinned under law will be judged by law; for it is not the hearers of law who are righteous before God, but the doers of law who will be justified. For when Gentiles who do not have law do by nature the things of the Law, these, though not having law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of mankind through Christ Jesus (2:12-16).

Notice the different uses of ‘law’, with and without the definite article: 1) “the Law”, i.e., Jewish Law, God’s Law, and 2) “a law to themselves” i.e., conscience. Paul equates these two in the way they function, saying that “Gentiles who do not have law [and who] do by nature the things of the Law… show the work of the Law written in their hearts.” He is saying that the Jew and the Gentile each participate equally in a universally human and highly consequential relationship to this thing that we call law. Therefore, there is no distinction. Jews participate in law; Gentiles participate in law. There is no partiality with God.

 “He is Jew Who is One Inwardly”

The next eleven references to ‘law’ also support Paul’s primary point, that there is no partiality with God. To analyze the nature and function of law, showing why there is no basis for partiality, Paul takes us to the essence of what it means to be Jewish:

But if you bear the name “Jew” and rely upon law and boast in God, and know His will and distinguish between the things which differ, being instructed out of the Law, and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants, having in law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth, you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who proclaim that one shall not steal, do you steal? You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in law, through your breaking law, do you dishonor God? For “the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,” just as it is written (2:17-24).

For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice law; but if you are a transgressor of law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. So if the uncircumcision keeps the requirements of the Law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? And he who is physically uncircumcised, if he keeps the Law, will he not judge you who through the letter and circumcision are a transgressor of law? For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God (2:25-29).

Paul names five things that on the surface may seem advantageous and consequential about being Jewish: bearing the name “Jew”, relying upon law, boasting in God, knowing His will, and distinguishing between the things which differ. What does the last one suggest? Along with circumcision, the primary identity marker of the Jew by which he may set himself apart from the Gentile is by his knowledge of the Law, his ability to “distinguish between the things that differ.” This description of law is an essential feature of the concept of law itself, echoing God’s command for Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Who ultimately sets and distinguishes between the things that differ, between such things as good and evil? What is the nature of the command to Adam in Genesis 2? Does it go well for Adam after he gains the knowledge of good and evil? Did it not bring death like God said that it would? If so, how? These are the questions Paul is addressing in Romans. The letter of the law distinguishes between the things that differ and relies upon a dialectical knowledge of good and evil, but the spirit as the source of law inwardly habilitates the true Jew to rely directly upon the one who is faithful, Jesus Christ, the tree of life himself. In my next post, Rereading Romans, Part 3, we will look to the latter half of Romans 3 at the next 11 occurrences of ‘law’ and consider the meaning of faith in relation to Paul’s analysis of law.

(Register for the class with Michael Hardin: René Girard and Nonviolent Atonement here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings). The course will run from the week of October 7th to December 6th.)

Rereading Romans, Part 1

By Brian Sartor

In the Torah, life and death hinged upon our mode of approach to a tree: “…the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. …from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat from it, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:9,17). In Saint Paul, life and death hinge upon our mode of approach to the law: “…the letter [of the law] kills, but the spirit [of the law] gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Paul possessed unique insight into the concept of law. After abiding blamelessly by law as a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5-6), he had been dramatically reoriented to it by an encounter with Jesus (Acts 9:1-30). As a result, his analytical insight into the nature and function of law was unique, even among his fellow apostles. It was for this reason that Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles (Galatians 1:11—2:21).

Jew-Gentile relations were troubled in early Christian communities due to commonly held assumptions about law, so in Romans Paul addresses the issue from the ground up. Attention to what Romans says about law therefore lends deep unity and interpretive structure to the epistle’s argument, clarity concerning its occasional purpose, and high resolution to its picture of the universal human condition.

The word ‘law’ occurs seventy-eight times in Romans; seventy-one of those occurrences are in 2:12—8:8; sixty of them occur within the eighty verses that comprise 2:12—3:31 and 7:1—8:8. This means that in these two sections of Romans, the word ‘law’ is found on average three times every four verses.

This would not be so remarkable if Protestant era readings of Romans did not fail to see the unity of these sections. Indeed, the unity of Paul’s argument about the nature and function of law, the unity of his overall aim to address the issue of Jew-Gentile relations in Rome, spans the entirety of Romans 1-11. Romans 3:21 sums up Paul’s announcement, “But now apart from law the righteousness of God has been manifested…” The universally presumed fundamental category of nature we call law is set aside for a divine righteousness that is based on something completely new and wholly other than law as we know it.

Yet Protestant readings of Romans have written law as we know it right back into the gospel. The natural, conventional, and perennial guiding assumption is that law remains fundamental to all things, even to the righteousness of God. As a result, we have read Romans as if Paul were addressing two different topics: the legal aspect of salvation (justification) in chapters 1-4, and the practical aspect of salvation (sanctification) in chapters 5-8.

However, Paul is not using justification as a legal term. Faith is not a precondition for, nor a means of access to, divine righteousness as a legal concept. God’s righteousness itself is a person who is our only mode of direct participation in the power of God, the wisdom of God, the tree of life. Life and death are not two topics, even as the spirit and the letter of the law are not two topics. The dual-designated tree of life at the center of the garden of Eden is not two trees. Life is life, law is law, and it turns out that all that matters is the way we go about them both. The spirit as the source of law gives life, and the letter as an agent of law leads to death.

As Protestants, we have been unwittingly befuddled by the characteristic mistakes of our age. We have interpreted Romans according to “a great mass of common assumptions”[1] about law in the West. St Augustine misread Romans and gave us original sin through the federal headship of Adam. Martin Luther misread Romans and gave us justification as an imputed righteousness. Both are nonsensical apart from a legal paradigm so definitive in the West that it has shaped even our theology.

Rereading Romans, however, promises in the words of C.S. Lewis, “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”[2] This patient and slow-moving breeze, Lewis says, is the only palliative to the characteristic mistakes of eras and individuals. Rereading Romans, we see Paul deliberately analyzing the concept of law, exposing its deadly natural function in the human psyche, naming something better that both perfects and displaces law.

“They exchanged the truth of God for the lie.”

Protestant era readings of Romans place the old lie about law right back at the center. Romans 1:18-32 describes the moral decline and the naturally occurring consequence of wrath among those who presumably do not have the Law. Their depraved condition and their condemnation are due to their own suppression of a basic, nascent, universal human knowledge of God. This purportedly highlights their absolute moral culpability, explaining why they are without excuse.

For many it will come as a shock to hear it suggested that in Romans 1:18-32, Paul is merely giving voice to conventional wisdom concerning the universal human condition. It sounds familiar, harmless, and true enough to many of us at first, just as it would have to the original recipients of the epistle. However, in Romans 2:1 Paul clearly begins exposing the lack of depth, and the inadequacy, of the conventional view to which he had just given voice. Romans 1:18-32 does not sufficiently describe nor accurately describe the human condition from the standpoint of Paul’s gospel.

Here we are following the groundbreaking work of Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.[3] Campbell’s work is extensive, detailed, and monumental. He reads Romans in such a way that the position given voice in Romans 1:18-32 is a voice-in-character speech attributed to a false teacher in Rome. Occasionally, the false teacher is given voice throughout Paul’s argument, representing either conventional human wisdom or an elemental false teaching (as I would read it), if not also that of a specific false teacher who had been influential in Rome (as Campbell reads it).

We already know that throughout the letter Paul spars with an imaginary interlocutor, a rhetorical voice interjecting thoughts and questions that are not Paul’s own but that ultimately serve his point. In this rereading of Romans, we are saying that the dialogical exchange between Paul and this rhetorical voice begins boldly and abruptly in Romans 1:18-32 where Paul steel-mans the position of his interlocutor.

Eventually, in Romans 7:7-25, Paul describes the human condition according to his own analysis of the nature and function of law. The description of the human condition in Romans 1 is woefully bereft of the analytical depth Paul offers in Romans 7. The contrasting relationship of these two passages ought not be overlooked, otherwise the unity of the entire argument is lost. Romans 1 and Romans 7 cannot be synthesized or assimilated to one another as statements made from the same voice or vantage point. This is why Protestant era readings fragment the structure of Romans 1-8 as if Paul were addressing two different aspects of the gospel, first the legal, then the practical.

Romans 1:18-32 is familiar and resonant to Protestant era Christian insiders, yet it feels uncharacteristic and troubling to outsiders, unbelievers, and dissenters. Romans 1:18-32 has been mistaken by both groups to be Paul’s actual voice and therefore his basic, final account of the universal human condition. Meanwhile, the passage where Paul actually gives his own final and accurate account of the universal human condition, Romans 7, is rendered obscure and irrelevant to the gospel. Moreover, it is often read as a description of normal Christian life, even though it is actually a description of enslavement to the law of sin and death apart from Christ.

Atheist psychologists, philosophers, and outliers within Protestantism, have not missed the plain meaning of Romans 7. Paul Axton brilliantly presents this point in his understated, overlooked, and invaluable contribution to any future rereading of Romans, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul.[4] Axton’s teaching ministry at Forging Ploughshares and Ploughshares Bible Institute has been the catalyst to this writer’s rereading of Romans. Douglas Campbell’s work on Romans 1-4 and Paul Axton’s work on Romans 5-8 converge decorously to expose and elucidate the characteristic mistakes of the Protestant era about law.

The subtle deceit granted character and voice in Romans 1:18-32 is apropos, as the conventional voice it represents is surely that of the serpent. We ourselves within Protestantism have been deceived even as we have read Romans in earnest. We have completely missed the fact that this passage gives voice to an incomplete picture of the human condition, one that is recorded precisely because it represents conventional wisdom. The position having been steel-manned by Paul, we ourselves are easily deceived by it (not purposefully by Paul, of course). The conventional view is partially true and partially complete, both of which are characteristic qualities of the serpent’s voice in Genesis 3. Although Romans 1:18-32 may sound right to many of us at first, it gives voice to a view that is twisted, wrongheaded, and incompatible with the gospel. In Romans 2:1-3:20, Paul proceeds to expose the conventional view as such. This passage will be the focus of my next post, Rereading Romans, Part 2.


[1] C. S. Lewis, Introduction to On the Incarnation, by St Athanasius, St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1998, pp. 4-5.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. Eerdmans, 2009.

[4] Paul Axton, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul, T&T Clark, 2015.

A Sermon by Mr. Michael Hardin, PreachingPeace.com

Preached at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Kingsville, MD Christ the King Sunday, November 22, 2015

Scripture: John 18:33 – 37


33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ 34 Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ 35 Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ 36 Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ 37 Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’

Sermon
Pilate might seem like the ultimate 21st Century Post-Modernist. “What is truth?” he says. What indeed is truth?

In Pilate’s time, of course, there were plenty of philosophies floating around the ancient world: Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Syrian, Egyptian and more, many more. And here’s Pilate, the Curator of Judea, confused by the whole mess, standing before a Galilean peasant who has the audacity to challenge him, challenge his authority but very covertly. If you have a Bible, you might like to follow along in this text. Now, I told Dan I don’t think I have ever preached on this particular text before, although when I was a pastor I did follow the lectionary cycle so there is a chance that back in the day I did.

But I was really struck this week in my work as I reflected and prepared for today. Here’s what’s really interesting from this particular text for us today. It’s not a question of what constitutes some sort of generic philosophical truth. And that’s how the tendency of preachers is to read this text. What is truth? Who can know the truth? How can you know the truth? How is truth even to be known? Is there such a thing as truth? And this is the dilemma the plagues the academy that I’ve been involved in for 30 years reading thousands of books by philosophers and theologians, and they all scramble really, really hard to try and figure out.. what is the truth? But in our Gospel, it’s already been said that the truth is not a concept. The truth is a person.

This changes everything because it takes the category of truth out of some sort of way to divide good and evil, right and wrong, true and false. It places it right into the category of the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who he is and how he lived his existence. And in this text, right here before Pilate is going to come the key element of that which constitutes truth.

Truth is non-violent.

Jesus will say to Pilate in response to his question “Are you a king?” And Jesus says, “If I was a king of this world, my foot soldiers would have fought in the garden.” There’s an irony here, isn’t there? Because we know that Peter himself drew a sword in the Garden of Gethsemane to protect Jesus, slicing off the ear of a young man named Malchus, a servant of the Chief Priest. So, the fact is, Peter in the garden perceiving himself as a foot soldier of the truth, drew a sword and chopped off the ear of a man. And it’s a good thing he didn’t just run him threw. He just managed to miss this poor guy’s head. Peter was looking to behead the man. Think of this in terms of where we’re at politically today. Peter is no different than anyone in ISIS at that point in the garden. He thinks he’s going to protect Jesus by taking his sword and chopping the fellow’s head off. He misses, thankfully. The guy only loses an ear, which, according to the text, Jesus immediately replaces.

But when Jesus stands before Pilate, he’s very, very clear that his foot soldiers, that is, his true followers… do not bear arms. His followers will not take up weapons to protect him. Now there’s a double irony here. Not only does Peter take up the sword, but in this last week since the bombings in Paris, on Facebook, on Twitter, in the news, on blogs, and webcasts, Christian preacher after Christian preacher and lay people have said unequivocally that we have to take up arms against ISIS. And to that I want to say “Blasphemy!” The follower of Jesus does not take up arms, because the way he reigns, is not of this world.

Jesus is a substantively different leader than President Obama or Vladimir Putin or any other leader on the planet. Every single leader on the planet that runs a nation state or any government, with few exceptions, has a standing army and that standing army is there to protect the people. There is no way a civilized leader with a standing army or the power to push a red button and drop nuclear bombs or to command drones that kill innocent civilians can call themselves a follower of Jesus. They are just kings of this world just like Pilate, and they don’t get that truth has nothing to do with retaliation, nothing to do with violence.

When Christians come to the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of John, our tendency is to say “Oh. The people rejected Jesus because they wouldn’t accept his divinity, they wouldn’t accept his claim to be God.” That is not the case. What they specifically rejected was his claim to represent a non-violent God, a non-retaliatory God, a God who would have nothing to do with justice as “eye for eye’ and “tooth for tooth.” That god doesn’t exist. That god is an idol. That’s the god that was believed in by Second Temple Judaism. That’s the god that was believed on in Rome in its many forms. The only God to ever claim non-violence is the God and Father of Jesus, so much so, that this God alone of all the gods forgives.

The great critic of the New Testament, Rudolph Bultmann, was even able to say “Only the God of the Gospel forgives.” Forgiveness is not a category that’s used of figures like Zeus or Apollo. Only God forgives. Only the Maker of heaven and earth loves, forgives and chooses to lay down God’s own life and in the resurrection, not to come back as a retaliatory figure. And that’s what absolutely scared the disciples spitless on that Easter Sunday. They were waiting for vengeance. They had fled, they had betrayed, they had denied Jesus; it was their own people that crucified the Messiah. And surely sittin’ in the room that night when Jesus appears to them, all they can think of is the structure of their theology which requires justice, which requires vengeance, which requires god to satisfy god’s own honor. And so Jesus’ first word to them is the last word that will ever be spoken. “Shalom. Peace. Don’t be afraid. My Papa does not respond to violence with violence, and neither do I.”

And that is the truth that Pilate had in front of him, and that is the truth that confused him. How could this person claim to be a king and yet not take up arms? How is that truth? How is it? How is it that Christianity for almost two thousand years… and one could in fact argue this could be traced to the Jerusalem Church, but I won’t do that. I’ll just go seventeen hundred years with Constantine, not worry about the first three hundred. How is it that for seventeen hundred years we have managed to merge and mingle that which the Gospel has kept apart: God and violence? How is it that we as Christian theologians, as Church, as Christianity have married the two things that God has rent asunder: life and retaliation?

The Gospel text for today is so loaded with irony that if we look at our own historical situation right now as Church, all we can do is repent, because it is in the Name of Jesus that George Bush took this country into Iraq. It is in the Name of Jesus that Christian preachers on the radio and TV would have us sacrifice our young men and young women in Syria. It is in the Name of Jesus that the Airforce Academy in Colorado with its chapel shaped as F-16 jets sits and plays its video games and drones and kills innocent civilians right and left. We as Americans, we’re not just killing foreign terrorists, my friends.

Two days ago, we bombed a house that killed a two year old girl. A two year old girl. We did. That was done in our name. We, a Christian nation, killed this little girl. We don’t know the truth. We are so far from the truth in American Christianity, we’re no different than Pilate, or Peter in the garden, or James and John who would call down violence on a Samaritan village. And like them, we, too, are confronted with the Risen Christ who does not come back with revenge. Jesus did not come back with revenge and retaliation on Easter Sunday, and he’s not coming back in the future with revenge and retaliation.

Some years back, where I live in Lancaster, I drove by a church sign out front – you know all those church signs you read when you’re driving past churches – it said “Jesus is coming back and boy is he pissed.” I don’t worship that Jesus. The Jesus I worship is the Son of the Father. The Jesus I worship is homoousius, of the same substance, of the same reality as the Father. The Jesus I worship is non-violent. The Jesus I worship is forgiving. The Jesus I worship is loving, and nurturing, and compassionate, and merciful, and generous. And so is Papa.

The God who now looks down upon you does not look down upon you with hatred. The God who looks down upon you now doesn’t look at your life and demand or require some atonement from you. The God that makes heaven and earth looks down upon you as His precious children. And He looks down upon the ISIS terrorists as His precious children. And looks down upon that two year old that we killed in His Name as His precious child.

We are all on trial today in American Christianity. We are all on trial. It’s not for us to sit and equivocate about the nature of the truth – Well, Jesus got angry in the temple. Well, Jesus said why don’t you buy a sword – and to try and find a way out, a way back to the kingdom of this world. It is our place to listen only to his voice and recognize that he alone, he alone reveals the character of God. And he alone is the one who comes in that revelation and reconciles us by being crucified on a Roman cross.

How many crosses do you suppose there are in this sanctuary, pictures and icons? And from that cross he prays, “Father. Don’t forgive them! Get them back! Send some bombs on them! Kill them!” Does he do that? Does Jesus say that?….. He says “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.” And that is our problem. We don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to the issues of violence and justice, retaliation and revenge.

If we are going to follow Jesus, there is only one way, only one way. And that way is the same way he went. “If you would be my disciple, take up your cross.” To take up your cross doesn’t mean to suffer. It means to learn to live with the same measure of forgiveness that Jesus himself preached and taught his whole ministry. As he died, over and over again from that cross he was saying “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

René Girard, the great thinker that just passed recently, said “There are only two things that can reconcile: violence and love.” Violence does reconcile, my friends. When we take our anger and hostility out together against someone, when we as a group blame someone for our woes, when someone in our family systems we perceive is the trouble, we blame them for all the woes in the family, when we scapegoat others,.. we can be reconciled. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Violence does reconcile.

But that’s not God’s way. Love is God’s way. Love reconciles. Love absorbs the pain. Love absorbs the violence. Love say “You can kill me, but I believe in a God of love. I believe in a God that raises the dead. I believe in a Kingdom to come. Your liturgy is suffused with this language, the language of truth, the language of the reign of God. Listen to what you just said in the prayers. Listen to what you’re going to say next.

God is good. And this is the Gospel of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

(Register for the class with Michael Hardin: René Girard and Nonviolent Atonement here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings). The course will run from the week of October 7th to December 6th.)

Eschatology And Ethics Today

Guest Blog by Michael Hardin

I am inviting you to a thought experiment. I am going to ask you to consider the
implications of your particular eschatological position. That there are implications may not seem so clear since eschatology has to do with the future, not the present. However, as we shall see, one cannot separate eschatology from ethics because they inform each other. Now which comes first, eschatology or ethics? I want to begin with a quote from a lesser known Swiss theologian, Leonard Ragaz, who I cited in The Jesus Driven Life:

The notion is quite untenable, that Jesus built a kind of ethic and theology upon his expectation of the imminence of the kingdom of God. This sort of thing may well happen in the study of a theologian or philosopher…the relationship is quite the reverse from what the eschatological systematizers imagine. It is not the eschatological expectation which determines Jesus’ understanding of God and man…but, conversely his understanding of God and man which determines his eschatological expectation. To fail to see this one must have already put on a professor’s spectacles.

Now the way eschatology is popularly done is as an exercise in what “things”(logoi) happen at the end (eschatos) of time and history. As a doctrine that comes at the end of all our other doctrines (for this is how systematic theology usually arrays doctrine), in American Protestant theology we find that the usual connection between eschatology and other doctrines, say creation, redemption, Christology, sin, the church, etc., is tenuous; that there is an eschatological element to each of these examples of doctrine, yet one is hard pressed to find an exposition where eschatological considerations are taken into account when engaging such doctrines. If they are considered at all, they are usually appendages validating the transactional character of the Janus-faced god. So, when considering the doctrine of eschatology, we must recognize that it has hermeneutical implications for other doctrine.

Second, we might ask about some of the hermeneutical implications, the kind of “So What?” questions. Does it really matter if we hold to dispensationalism, ECT, some form of universalism or annihilationism? Does our view of the end matter, and if so, how is that view formed? If, as Karl Barth says, “Christology is eschatology and Christology that is not eschatological is no Christology at all”, we might want to ask the question asked by Adrio Konig: How did Jesus become eclipsed in modern eschatologies? For a little perspective we might note that church history seems to be a bit of a roller coaster when it comes to eschatology. The first six centuries saw a decided anti-eschatological bent, at least in those groups influenced by John’s Apocalypse like the Montanists or second-third century millenarianism. For the most part one could say that eschatology in terms of a ‘timeline’ did not exist in most of the early church. At best one finds the ‘return’ of Jesus muted and some form of amillennialism prevalent. The original creed of Nicaea simply has that “he [Jesus] will come to judge the living and the dead.”

Eschatology comes back around near the end of the first millennium with Joachim of Fiore, and quiets down again through the Renaissance and Thomistic scholasticism but rears its head again at the cataclysmic shifts occurring during the 16th century (the Reformation). It quiets down again for the next several hundred years as we progress into the Enlightenment but comes to the fore in America with the revival movements of the mid nineteenth century. The early twentieth century saw a renewal of interest in eschatology on several fronts. The popular front of dispensationalism was being pieced together by Larkin, Scofield and others. The scholars had turned their interest to Jesus and the work of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer in Germany shifted the discourse from the ‘gentle Jesus who taught love’ (von Harnack, What is Christianity?) to Jesus the apocalyptic prophet who came to herald the coming new age in his own person. Then, with the advent of the first World War (1914-1918), the eschatological explosion sounded in a small parish church in Switzerland as Karl Barth read the epistle to the Romans from his own unique Kierkegaardian eschatological perspective. It was as the Catholic theologian Karl Adam remarked, “an explosion in the theologians sandbox.”

After the second World War (1941-45), Oscar Cullmann introduced the world to a perspective of overlapping ages in his book Christ and Time, and scholars began speaking of salvation history. C.H. Dodd would suggest (in his book on the parables of Jesus) that Jesus preached a realized eschatology, viz., that everything from the future was now here in the present time. Joachim Jeremias would modify this to speak of “eschatology in the process of realization.” thus preserving the temporal element of the future in Jesus’ teaching. These scholarly interactions, which included reflection on rabbinic Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls, made eschatology a subject for exposition: was the son of man an apocalyptic figure or not? Some said yes (e.g., Schweitzer, Weiss, Bultmann [?]), then the tide turned to no (Vermes), then back again to yes for some, then back again to no for many members of the Jesus Seminar (the ‘enter-exit the apocalyptic son of man debate’). Of course, beginning in the late 1960’s, American dispensationalism began its march toward an indoctrination of all fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. While its success has been somewhat muted by Calvinism’s a-millennial thinking, Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth would eventuate into a non-stop proliferation of dates of Jesus’ return, and the publication of the best-selling books of all time, the Left Behind series.

All of this to say that the history of Christianity has been a reckoning with the eschatological implications of the Gospel. The problem is that transactional eschatologies like we find rampant in Second Temple Judaism, replete with judgements and determinations as to who goes where and what benefits or punishments are doled out have come into Christianity in a myriad of ways that include over-realized eschatologies (charismatics) to timetables (as in dispensationalism) to utopias (as in most forms of universalism). But rarely do eschatological visions (doctrines) have anything to do with this life.

Jesus’ eschatological vision was quite different. His was an ethical eschatology. He lived in the present the way he would live at the end. His is a life that is self-consistent, he is the “same yesterday, today and forever.” His eschatological vision of the reign of God, how God, whom he called his Abba, reigned in mercy and kindness and peacemaking led directly to his call to the peacemaking (pacifistic) life. It is impossible at this point to unknot Jesus’ eschatology and ethics, they are two sides of a coin. This is an implication that can be demonstrated over and over again in Jesus’ teaching.

Most of us on this page have rejected all forms of the penal substitution theory of Calvinism preferring a universalist approach based upon the later authentic Pauline letters (excluding I and 2 Thess, and the Pastorals). We have been able to show that there is nothing penal about the atonement. We hope to also show there is nothing penal about eschatology preferring to speak of restorative judgment rather than retributive judgment. And our vision of the ‘cosmic Christ’ or our exegesis of Christ as the Second Adam (Romans 5:12-21 where “all” means “all”) encourages us to consider that at the end all things will be put right, or so is our hope. And so we rightfully have rejected any theory that sees humans consciously being tortured for eternity.

However, most do not realize the implications for this life of having a universal eschatological salvific perspective. When the Risen Christ returns he says two
things:

  1. Peace
  2. Do not Fear

Have you ever wondered about this? The Risen Christ is the bringer of a message from beyond death and that message is good. It not only speaks peace but his very non judgmental presence is peace; from the perspective of Jesus, the disciples are still his little lambs. Second he tells them not to fear; for they had an eschatology of judgment and Jesus’ presence and word blows that eschatology away as wind blows fog away.

Peace is the final word. Peace, the making of peace between persons in relationship, the unity of all with all, this is the Gospel eschatological vision and it not only began in Jesus’ life but it continues in our lives. If you are a universalist you are de facto a pacifist. If we are not a pacifist in this life and we claim to be a universalist, our eschatological vision has no power, and we live a lie. Universal salvation (eschatological vision) and the ethical implications of that constitute the Christian Life.

If you claim to be a universalist and do not love your enemies in this life what good does it do you to be a universalist? If we seek retribution, reparation, tit for tat justice, if we engage in or justify the use of violent force in this life for ourselves or others we have no right to claim to be universalists. At best all we have is a “shoot to kill and let God sort it out at the end” eschatology.

So I challenge everyone who claims to be universalist to follow Jesus, to forgive the enemy, even if it means doing so all day long, seventy times seven. I challenge you not to take sides in mimetic conflicts but to find ways to be peacemakers. I urge you to live out your eschatological vision in the same manner as did Jesus of Nazareth. Turn your swords, your guns, your resentments, your griefs into plowshares and help illumine a peaceable kingdom.

(Register now for the class: Rene Girard and Nonviolent Atonement, taught by Michael Hardin, from October 7 to December 6th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

Bedrock

Guest blog by Brian Sartor

Celebrating twenty-five years of a critically acclaimed cult classic, New York Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson’s “Here’s Why ‘The Matrix’ Is More Relevant Than Ever”[1] helped me reframe political polarization and family infighting in the Trump era. My twin brother, Brad, and I were of the same mind earlier in life. We were both in divinity school when The Matrix came out, thinking alike and voting alike. Twenty-five years before that, as monozygotic twins, for two weeks in utero we shared the exact same biological identity, a single fertilized egg, one human cell.

Now we no longer seem to share the same reality. For eight years we have debated each other over politics, philosophy, history, theology, and biblical interpretation. Deep scrutiny of our differences throughout the Trump era has exposed what cannot be denied: the guiding narrative of Christianity for us now appears to have two different meanings.

Wilkinson normalized this experience for me in the last line of her review: “…great art never has one fixed meaning, and because of that, it’s always a little dangerous.”[2] She refers to the alt-right’s use of the red-pill trope to meme their socio-political vision of reality, a national identity based on race. She also refers to other groups finding meaning in the film, including transgender people who take obvious nods from lines in the movie “about Neo’s very existence inside a literal binary system.” Whether the red pill awakens you to deep state control, gender binary, tech-saturated existence, woke corporate capitalism, or the patriarchy, Wilkinson says the identity of the false reality system, the matrix as one sees it, “depends, ironically enough, upon which system you’re most interested in dismantling.”[3]

According to this insight, two meaning systems in the same country, culture, church, or family see each other as a false meaning system to be dismantled. In such a scenario both factions forget that the common ground of a common identity is the only foundation for truth. Wilkinson notes an essential idea articulated by philosopher Jean Baudrillard upon whose thought The Matrix is based: “[I]t does no good to point out ‘the truth’ from within a system that denies or suppresses reality. In those circumstances, your only tool to combat oppression is violence. You can only fight nihilism with nihilism.”[4] Human freedom and difference implicitly subject us to futility and violence. Whenever art, or human meaning, is interpreted in a new way, the natural response to the split, like a newly divided zygote, is that the two cells define themselves in violent opposition to one another.

Wilkinson also notes that Baudrillard did not like The Matrix as it did not accurately represent his philosophical use for the concept of simulation. The writers of The Matrix themselves also parted ways with Baudrillard’s nihilism in their film script by allowing the power of love to have a reality-shaping role. The Matrix is latent with Christian imagery and symbolism and is therefore itself a new interpretation of an old meaning system, a modern narrative for an ancient faith.

Consistent with Baudrillard’s philosophy and Wilkinson’s point that the matrix “you see depends… upon which system you’re most interested in dismantling” is the observation that any new depiction of Christian meaning naturally opposes the older depiction, which counter-opposes the new, and both systems then lapse into twin forms of nihilism locked in opposition. Wilkinson layers in the interesting twist that during the past twenty-five years both writer-directors of the film, born biological brothers, surnamed Wachowski, have each come out as transgender women. One of the Wachowski sisters, Lilly, said, “[W]hile the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work, the bedrock that all ideas rest upon is love.”[5]

This is certainly a Christian insight, but whenever we treat love as a categorical imperative, a universal ethic, or a fixed moral law, its unique power dissipates and leaves us with only a free-floating idea and not bedrock. There is no reason to assume that Lilly Wachowski or her sister, Lana, would disagree with the previous statement, but even alt-right nationalists could claim love as the bedrock of all ideas. Christian love is not an emotion, motive, intention, principle, nature, essence, ethic, law, abstraction, or absolute. Love, the bedrock of reality, much more than the summation of divine or human law, is always modeled and never coded.

Baudrillard is right: each system that denies or suppresses reality is simply its own matrix. Where love is merely the higher law of Christian humanism coded into a matrix, choosing that new “reality” over the old simulation is “to reject one narrative and adopt another.”  As Wilkinson says, “The red-pilled person is just accepting a new matrix.”[6]

Life imitates art, so while reading the last line of Wilkinson’s review, (“…great art never has one fixed meaning, and because of that, it’s always a little dangerous.”)[7] something clicked. I realized that twin brothers who take up Christianity believing its meaning is fixed will proceed to beat each other senseless trying to convince each other about what is true. Such violence can be avoided in one of two ways: 1) by both twins accepting the imposition of an arbitrating authority over the shared original (or other agreed upon) fixed meaning system, or 2) by at least one of the twins exercising the power to resist seeing Christianity as a fixed meaning system. The mode of operating to be resisted here, which is operating according to the letter of the law, includes making clear distinctions, identifying the self and the other according to those distinctions, and then defending the self, attacking the other, or both.

An alternative mode of operating, which is operating according to the spirit of the law, circumvents violence by exercising the power to operate directly according to love, not making distinctions and divisions by which to identify the self and the other. “Walking according to the spirit”[8] is a Christ-like mode of unity, resonance, and communion with God and the world. It is an experiential knowledge that grounds us, defines us, and identifies us, both the person and the newly formed human community. This tacit, embodied, and personal knowledge of God is an experience that cannot be transmitted through a fixed meaning system, nor can it be used to dominate the will of the other without being corrupted. The spirit of the law is therefore elusive to all systems and surprisingly diverse in both insight and application. Words, even creeds, cannot contain it. Ideas rest upon it and take flight. Systems, institutions, and “Christian” empires built by human hands remain external to it, easily ossify, and eventually fade away.

St Paul says that the (fixed) letter of the law kills while the spirit of the law (love) gives life. In Romans 2, in Romans 7, and in 2 Corinthians 3, Paul says:

“…he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter…”[9]

“…now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.”[10]

“[God] made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life…”[11]

The spirit is wholly other than the letter of the law. One is a shadow or copy,[12] and the other is the real thing. The spirit of the firstborn divine-human person, as anticipated by ancient Israel, has written the law directly on our hearts.[13] There is nothing inherently wrong with the letter of the law written in stone, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with any outward national, ethnic, gendered, social, or cultural identity written in flesh or ink. However, these things are free-floating identity markers and not bedrock. The shared, personal, experiential, and embodied knowledge of God written on our hearts is bedrock. The original model of love, Jesus of Nazareth, the Anointed One, his spirit alive within us, his body, the ecclesia, is bedrock. Twins and diverse cultures therefore need not fight over fixed meaning. Jesus taught his disciples another way based on the bedrock of a personal identity: “Who do you say that I am?” [14]

There is still time and opportunity to approach all personal and political differences in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness—in true unity and freedom—not leaning on our own understanding, distinctions, and naturally opposed external identities. The real world has always implicitly subjected us to violence, but real-world freedom and diversity no longer necessarily lead to violence. When we start with a common identity grounded in the spirit and not in the letter of the law, the thin layers of futility crumble to expose bedrock. On that foundation, the oneness of a single human cell is a oneness that pales in comparison to what twins may experience after seventy-five or a hundred years of living. The entire human race and cosmos united through the Spirit of Christ as one body with many members may take a little longer than that. Either way, eight years of futility are a blip on the screen.


[1] Alissa Wilkinson, “Here’s Why ‘The Matrix’ Is More Relevant Than Ever”, The New York Times, July 31, 2024. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/movies/the-matrix-ai-film.html?unlocked_article_code=1._U0.YHLw.h0jchd2X93p-&smid=url-share

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Romans 8:4.

[9] Romans 2:28-29.

[10] Romans 7:6.

[11] 2 Corinthians 3:6.

[12] Hebrews 8:5; 9:24; 10:1.

[13] Jeremiah 31:31-34; 2 Corinthians 3:4-6.

[14] Matthew 16:15; Mark 8:29.

Joy

In Scripture the path to joy is to be found in and through the presence of God (Psalms 16:11, Isaiah 61:10, Psalm 9:2), through being present with/to others (Romans 15:32, Romans 12:15) and this joy is integral to salvation (1 Peter 1:8-9). Joy is linked to ecstasy (Acts 15:32), or going outside of the self, which accords with being present with and loving others. There is a mutual indwelling, a giving, a going outside of the self, which is definitive of love, joy, and peace. The reason the presence of God is linked with joy is that God is, by definition, continually pouring himself out in Kenotic self-giving love (Philippians 2:7). As Dionysius describes, “He who is the cause of all, in His beautiful and benevolent longing (eros) for all, is carried outside Himself in His providential wills for all creatures through the superabundance of His loving goodness, being, as it were, beguiled by goodness, love, and intense longing.”[1] God is by definition, ek-static, or always going outside of himself (in the self-giving of the Father, through the Son by the Spirit). Though some may think of God as above all and removed from all, He comes to all in Christ. This ecstatic power of love is inseparable from who He is. God is defined as love (I Jn. 4:7), and this intense love is a longing for the beloved, and thus we are drawn to Him as His great love attracts us to Him. As David describes, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God” (Ps. 42:1). We were made for God and for love, and this love is as necessary to our spiritual well-being as water is to our bodies. God moves us as he moves toward us, or as Maximus puts it, “He thirsts to be thirsted for, and longs intensely to be longed for, and loves to be loved.”[2] As John says, He ignites in humanity a desire for Him: He “will draw all men unto Me” (Jn. 12:32).

But there is a reciprocity in this drawing, in that those drawn to and by the love of the cross, must take up their crosses and follow Christ (Matt. 16:24-26). There is a giving and receiving, in which the receiving calls for a giving, and this reciprocal identity (in and through the other) nurtures an outward bound, and continually expanding love. Just as Christ is consubstantial with the Father and Spirit, we are conjoined in a body whose identity is ever-enlarging. Just as we are drawn into the love of God, so too others are drawn into the love we carry (John 13:35). As we open our life to the life of others, we expose the lie of self-contained self-sufficiency (the world’s definition of happiness). Whether we know it or not, everyone seeks mutuality, reciprocity, the sustenance of life with the other.[3] True eros or desire recognizes the infinite opening of love, true desire, true love. As Rowan Williams states it, “this means that finite being tends towards being spoken, being apprehended, represented, regenerated in human response and engagement.”[4]  We are made for communion and interpersonal love, which means that like God, we are to be continually moving out of ourselves, beyond our person, beyond our nature. In the explanation of Maximus, “man is not his person, nor his nature, nor even a sort of an addition of them, but his wholeness. . . (is) something beyond them, and around them, giving them coherence, but itself not bound with them.”[5] To be fully human (like Christ) is to be in continual synthesis, moving toward the other, toward mutual indwelling, toward participation.

The Bible gives us a variety of metaphors or pictures of this synthesis. Baptism is to be joined to Christ in his death and resurrection (Romans 6:3-4); communion is a partaking of Christ (Mark 14:22–24); the Holy Spirit is for indwelling (I Corinthians 3:16); to be joined to Christ (as pictured by Paul) is on the order of being joined in marriage (Eph. 5:31-32). Christ as Logos is God’s way to ecstatically offer himself. He offers himself in the incarnation as Logos (Jn. 1:1) but this Word is interwoven in Creation: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3). The Logos, the person, “upholds all things by his powerful Word” (Heb. 1:3); “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). He is the ordering person or arche behind all things. He is the world’s reason, at multiple levels, to be experienced intellectually, erotically, or emotionally. He is for apprehending, speaking, and consumption.

As I have written previously (here), Michael Polanyi, a scientist and philosopher, describes the research scientist as being drawn in by the world, in a kind of longing for satisfaction, in which a presence in the world seems to look back at the scientist looking into the world. “Potential discovery may be thought to attract the mind which will reveal it inflaming the scientist with creative desire and imparting to him a foreknowledge of itself; guiding him from clue to clue and from surmise to surmise.”[6] Nature, in Polanyi’s description calls out to be realized. “In this light it may appear perhaps more appropriate to regard discovery in natural sciences as guided not so much by the potentiality of a scientific proposition as by an aspect of nature seeking realization in our minds.”[7] There is a presence, a deep joy, a profound satisfaction, in discovery, understanding, and meaning, all of which can be attributed to synthesis with the Logos, which is all-inclusive.

As Paul says, there is “the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph. 1:10). There is only one person, one energy, one principle operating in and through all things. God interpenetrates the universe and he also interpenetrates persons, and the realization of this synthesis is holistic – knowing God, knowing others, knowing the world. Caught up in this exchange, we lose our enclosed egos and are made alive in Christ: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20). I or ego is crucified, opening the self to life in Christ (inter-Trinitarian love), and escaping the bonds of self-enclosure.

If participation in God is joy, then non-participation is hell. Hell seems to be a world of our making, inspired by the devil (Matt. 25:41) as the one who would be God, envies God, who refuses to participate in God, and who declares that freedom is self exploration.[8] The danger is in being seduced by something less than the divine, perhaps our own image, our own ego, and instead of being drawn to life, love and ecstasy, we are drawn into a suffocating finitude. In our sin, we would obtain being, obtain life, obtain self. In Christ’s warning in each of the Gospels, those who would save themselves lose themselves (e.g., Matt. 16:25). The rivalries, the imitated desire, the jealousy, the earthly, all describe a failure to escape the self. Paul describes this stifling world as compulsive, neurotic, law bound, Godless, spiritless, and ultimately as the body of death (Rom. 7:24). This self-enclosed ego is split between the law of the mind and the law of the body, and no Other appears on the horizon for this sick soul (of Romans 7). The lost treasure of self requires a constant turn inward. All one can do is enjoy their symptom, and compulsively repeat, in the deadly drive toward possessing the self. Instead of ecstasis, there is stasis in the refusal to enter into dialogue with God, the world, and nature. Here there is no history, no movement, no growth, no reciprocity, no meaning, and certainly no joy.

This dark picture (summed up in Romans 7), stands in contrast to the joy of chapter 8. This joy, which resonates throughout the chapter, is built upon being joined to the love of God in Christ (8:38-39). In Paul’s description, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Throughout, he is describing a metamorphosis as we are “set free” (v. 1), through mind transformation (v. 7) and through the gift of the Spirit (v. 9) “made alive” (vv. 10-11) and adopted as God’s children and enabled to call God Abba (vv. 15-16) as we are transformed into the image of the Son (v. 29) through love. Being joined to God, participating in the body of Christ, finding love, means transformation through this inter-hypostatic, synergistic, reciprocal, joyfulness.[9]   


[1] On the Divine Names, IV.13, PG 3: 712AB. Cited in Nicholas Loudovikos, “Analogical Ecstasis: Maximus the Confessor, Plotinus, Heidegger and Lacan” (https://www.academia.edu/20373350/_Analogical_Ecstasis_Maximus_the_Confessor_Plotinus_Heidegger_and_Lacan), 1-2.

[2] Ambigua, PG 91: 1206C. Cited in Loudovikos, 2.

[3] See Rowan Williams, “Nature, Passion and Desire, Maximus’s Ontology of Excess”  In Studia Patristica, LXVIII, 267-272.

[4] Ibid, 271.

[5] In the summation of Nicholas Loudovikos, “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will” in Participatio: The Journal of the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship (https://tftorrance.org/journal/v4/participatio-2013-v4-14-Loudovikos-258-286.pdf) 285.

[6] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, (London: Oxford University Press) 19.

[7] Ibid, 21.

[8] Nicholas Loudovikos, “Ecstatic or reciprocal Meaningfulness?: Orthodox Eschatology between Theology, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis” (www.academia.edu) 6.

[9] Ibid, 11.

Paul Blowers: From Creation Ex Nihilo to Creation Ex Deo or From Being to Well-Being in Maximus the Confessor

In Genesis the formless void, or the chaos of creation, in the view of Tertullian[1] and Gregory Nazianzen,[2] did not mean that matter was intrinsically formless, but apart from the light of Christ, which illumines and tames it, matter carries the possibility of lapsing into chaos and the nothingness from which it arose. This means Christ creates and sustains in the same self-giving love by which he saves, with death and nothingness as the other possibility. To state it clearly, creation and saving are part of the same kenotic self-giving of God in Christ. In the words of Paul Blowers, a leading specialist on Maximus the Confessor (who is the premiere innovator on the Chalcedonian Formula), there is a passage from being to well-being, inclusive of eternal well-being, as part of the same gift of grace flowing from God.[3] God calls from out of death and nothing in creation and salvation, and this is the all-inclusive work of Christ.

There is a progression of creation through salvation which unfolds not only in the Bible’s first chapters but its final chapters in which the purposes of creation are met in salvation. That is the eternal – joined to, shaping, holding together, from out of the ex nihilo is realized through Jesus Christ. The summing up (ἀνακεφαλαίωσις) of Ephesians 1:10, ties the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, directly to the incarnation. The death and nothingness which Christ overcame in his life, death and resurrection, is that which is continually overcome, through him, in creation. Or to say the same thing differently (if a bit redundantly), God’s grace in Christ is one, in salvation and creation. The sin which gives way to death, opens creation to the nothingness from which it arose and which Christ in his saving work turns back. This turning back is the completion of creation’s purpose. This is the mystery, hidden since the foundation of the world, revealed in Christ: “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him” (Eph. 1:9). The purposes of creation are found in incarnation.

This is the clear teaching of the New Testament, which has profound ramifications. Obviously, there is no nature grace duality or an ungraced nature, but it also implies a radically different understanding of the relationship between God and creation and time and eternity.

Creation Ex Deo

Creation ex nihilo is primarily a negative statement and is not meant to describe the how of creation, nor does it convey the positive interpenetrating relationship of God with his creation. The ex nihilo, even in the work of Aquinas, plays the primary role of combating both the doctrine of the eternality of the creation, or the notion that creation was made from out of some pre-existent matter. The doctrine does not refer to creation being called from out of nonbeing, but refers to the Creator as the cause, the source, or the power behind all being.[4] Nothing exists apart from Him, but He exists and the universe is a result, in one way or another, of His existence. This is not an explanation of how God did it but is simply a pointer to the fact that creation is His doing. According to A. Maryniarczyk, “the Creator is the cause of everything that is – form, matter, properties, and substance – and that nothing exists apart from Him that did not come from Him. The universe was and is a work of creation (creatio continua).”[5]

The danger with creation ex nihilo is that the nihilo will be conceived as an actually existing void or nothingness, or that creation will be pictured as something separate from God. The point of the doctrine is, that apart from God, nothing exists. All things are created and sustained through his active presence. According to Irenaeus, “God drew matter, and the very substance and form of things, ‘from himself’ (a semetipso) by willing the creation into being.”[6] Gregory of Nyssa argues that apart from God’s active willing matter has no existence. He assigns it to an “ineffable intellection” but does not speculate as to how this might be, but clearly there is the sense of ex Deo, or creation coming from out of God.[7] Dionysius the Areopagite directly explains the ex nihilo through the ex Deo. He asserts that God has brought the universe into being out of his goodness, and that “the Divine who transcends being is the being of all that is.”[8] As Blowers points out, “Dionysius adds the crucial caveat that God is creatures’ being only in the sense of their relative participation in him, and that the God who “is all things in all (1 Cor 15:28) is no-thing among any existent.”[9]

The passage from nonbeing to being is a possibility only through the direct act and continuing activity of God. As Blowers puts it, “In creating, God not only produces and shapes matter and bodies, he already saves them from nonbeing, from unfulfilled potential.”[10] The nothing or what is not, is filled in by what is and what is becoming in the creating/saving work of Christ. According to Gregory of Nyssa, the power of the Creator-Logos is “creative of what is, inventive of what is not, sustaining of what has come into being, and foreseeing of what is yet to be.”[11] There is a teleological purpose in which what we will be has not yet appeared (I John 3:2). This unrealized potential is not yet, but in Christ will be. It is only in contrast to what is and what is becoming, through Christ, that nothing or what is not can be posited. So creation ex nihilo is another way of saying that all that is has its being through Christ.

This then raises a series of problems (recognized by Dionysius), in that creation might be thought to be an emanation from God in a Greek sense, and that ultimately all things reduce to God (pantheism). God might be pictured as a multiplicity of beings, though everything is just his one Being (producing a plurality) with a loss of distinction between Creator and creation. The resolution to this potential (and real) misconstrual is a proper understanding of the role of Christ.

Jesus Christ as Mediating Divinity to Humanity

Maximus the Confessor goes further than his predecessors in distinguishing creation from a Greek emanation, but also in explaining how it is that Christ completes creation (through incarnation) while maintaining a creation/Creator distinction. He notes that beings become, through his being “all in all” (1 Cor 9:22), but that God never becomes. He cannot be said to be a being: “In this way he can in no way be associated by nature with any being and thus because of his superbeing is fittingly referred to as nonbeing. For since it is necessary that we understand correctly the difference between God and creatures, then the affirmation of superbeing must be the negation of beings, and the affirmation of beings must be the negation of superbeing.”[12] Both being and beyond being (or nonbeing) must be ascribed to God. “In one sense they are both proper to him, one affirming the being of God as cause of being, the other completely denying in him the being which all being have, based on his preeminence as cause.”[13] Maximus creates a sharp divide between Creator and creation, or between the divine and the human, but this divide is bridged by the one who is both Creator and created, both human and divine. These categories are absolutely separate, but this separation is overcome by the one bearing both realities in his singular personhood.

Salvation as the Means of Creation

For Maximus, not only are salvation and creation the work of Christ, they are of the saving work. Maximus posits the saving work of Christ as having precedence over his creating work: “insofar as [the Creator] preexisted as the one who saves, it was necessary that what would be saved should also come into existence, in order that the Savior should not exist in vain.”[14] He describes the incarnation of Christ as a “’a super-infinite plan infinitely preexisting the ages,’ with a view to which God created the very essences of all creatures.”[15] In other words, Christ as savior is the Creator. As Peter puts it and as Maximus notes, “But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (I Peter 1:19-20). The slain lamb manifest at the end of time is the foundation of creation. His sacrifice in the middle of history serves as the arche at the beginning and the goal realized at the end of history.

As Maximus writes, “The mystery of the incarnation of the Logos holds the power of all the hidden logoi and figures of Scripture as well as the knowledge of visible and intelligible creatures. Whoever knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb knows the logoi of these creatures. And whoever has been initiated in the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose (logos) for which God originally made all things.”[16] He goes on to note, one cannot abstract from the slain lamb to the arche of all things through either the intellect or the senses. That is, it is this particular person, and not an intellectual (in the Greek sense) or sensible abstraction, that accomplishes creation in incarnation:

All visible things require a cross, meaning the capacity of preempting the attraction to them of those who engage them by sense experience. And all intelligible things need a burial, meaning the complete immobilization of those who engage them by intellect. For when all activity and stimulus toward all (sensible and intelligible) things is suspended together with all inclination to them, the Logos, who alone exists in and of himself, appears anew as if rising from the dead, since he encompasses all those (created) things that come from him, though none of them has any intrinsic connection to him at all by natural relation. For he is the salvation of the saved by grace and not by nature.[17]

The logoi or undergirding arche by which Christ creates and sustains are not extrapolations, abstractions, intellections, senses, apart from who he is. Thus, though Maximus may occasionally sound Greek, he is not appealing to a Greek sort of Forms, but is appealing directly to Jesus Christ as forming the logic, the purpose, the arche or the logoi of creation. Christ’s embodiment in incarnation is the same presence found throughout creation. As Blowers sums up,

Through the logoi, the Logos has pre-evangelized all things and prepared them for the Christophany in which all things are ‘recapitulated’ according to their proportionate participation in the work of Christ. Maximus frequently speaks of this ongoing work of recapitulation as the ‘mystery of Christ,’ within which the creation of the cosmos ex nihilo is perpetually culminating in the deification of humanity and the transformation of all creatures.[18]

The participation in Christ of the Christian is the creation power which gave the first birth but which leads to the second birth. According to Maximus, “Indeed, this divine power is not yet finished with those beings created by it; rather, it is forever sustaining those – like us human beings – who have received their existence from it. Without it they could not exist. This is why the text speaks of the riches of his goodness (Eph 2:7), since God’s resplendent plan for our transformation unto deification never ceases in its goodness toward us.”[19] God’s creative purposes encoded in the logoi are part and parcel with his salvation purposes worked out in the incarnate Logos. In the pithy phraseology of Blowers, “When Christ spoke of ‘working still’ along with the Father, he was speaking in his own role as Creator, effecting a new integrity of creation, a new unity of its universals and its particulars, and a new condition in which creatures that are by nature moved by the Creator move on their own toward well-being.”[20]


[1] Tertullian, Contra Hermogenem 29.1–6; 33.1 (SC 439:140–50). Cited in Paul Blowers, “From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being: Creation ex nihilo in the Cosmology and Soteriology of Maximus the Confessor,” in Light on creation: Ancient Commentators in Dialogue and Debate on the Origin of the World, eds. Geert Roskam and Joseph Verheyden [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017], 173.

[2] Gregory Nazianzen, Poemata arcana 4 (De mundo) (Moreschini, 16). Cited in Blowers, Ibid.

[3] Blowers, 176.

[4] See Daniel Soars, “Creation in Aquinas: ex nihilo or ex deo?” (New Blackfriars, DOI:10.1111/nbfr.12603)

[5] Andrzej Maryniarczyk, ‘Philosophical Creationism: Thomas Aquinas’ Metaphysics of Creatio Ex Nihilo’, Studia Gilsoniana 5 (2016, 217–68), 240. Cited in Soars, 4.

[6] Adv. haer. 2.30.9 (SC 294:318); 4.20.1 (SC 100:626). The Citation and full quote are from Blowers, 175.

[7] De hominis opiicio 24 (PG 44:212D–213C). Blowers, Ibid.

[8] De caelesti hierarchia 4.1 (PTS 36:20); cf. Ep. 8.1 (PTS 36:173–4). Blowers, Ibid.

[9] Blowers, 175, referencing Dionysius De divinis nominibus 7.3 (PTS 33:198).

[10] Blowers, 174.

[11] Oratio catechetica (GNO 3/4:16, ll. 20–2). Cited in Blowers, Ibid.

[12] Mystagogia, prooemium (CCSG 69:9, ll. 106–19), trans. George Berthold, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985), 185 (altered). Cf. Cap. theol. et oecon. 1.4 (PG 90:1084B–C). Cited in Blowers, 175.

[13] Ibid.

[14]Adversus haereses 3.22.3 (SC 211:438). Cited in Blowers, 179-180.

[15] Blowers, 180 referencing Quaestiones ad Thalassium 60 (CCSG 7:75–7).

[16] Capita theologica et oeconomica, 1.66–67 (PG 90:1108A–B). Cited in Blowers, 180.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Blowers, 181.

[19] Q. Thal. 22 (CCSG 7:143), trans. Paul Blowers, in Paul Blowers – Robert Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 118. Cited by Blowers, 181.

[20] Blowers, 182.

The Teleological Argument: The Maximian Answer of Michael Polanyi to Paley and Kuhn

William Paley’s version of the teleological or design argument, pictures someone discovering a watch in a field and presuming that the watch was made by a watch-maker. So too, the universe displays a complexity that implies a universe-maker. If someone is walking over the heath and kicks up a stone, he might presume the stone has always been there, but if he kicks up a watch, he cannot make the same presumption. The watch is put together for the purpose of telling time through the motion of the hands, and all the gears and springs of the watch serve this purpose, and it all speaks of human artifice. Yet every manifestation of design found in the watch is displayed by the universe, with the universe far exceeding the complexity of the watch.

I mean that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity. . . [1]

Notice the focus on “mechanical” and “mechanism” in Paley’s argument, which are very much interconnected with the rise of the clockwork universe and a deistic understanding of God (which will in turn give rise to a pervasive atheism). While Paley’s argument is a fine argument for limited purposes, his image of a clockwork universe had captured his age, not simply because of Paley but because the revolution in time surrounding the development of mechanical clocks reframing basic perceptions of time, the universe, and the role of God. As in the kalam argument, the implicit assumptions of the teleological argument (which are developing not simply due to the argument but arising with the beginnings of the industrial and scientific revolution) will have an impact on religion, science, and human experience, and it is in this context that Paley’s argument seems so convincing. God is the divine clockmaker who relates to his creation like a mechanical engineer, who may need to occasionally adjust the mechanism, but otherwise is a hands-off machinist.

This conclusion is driven by a scientific and social revolution which captured and included the best scientific minds (Galileo, Newton, Hooke, Leibniz, Huygens, and Pascal himself), the best mathematicians (the brothers Bernoulli, La Hire, and Leonhard Euler) and the finest master clock- and watchmakers (Solomon Coster in the Hague, Isaac Thuret in Paris, the Fromanteels and Thomas Tompion in London).[2] Meanwhile there is a shift, largely due to the watch, to a privatized sphere (no longer subject to the time kept by the church), to a separation between natural and mechanical time, and to a separation between perception and ultimate reality (the sun is not the ultimate timekeeper but time controls and exceeds the limitations of this natural marker).

Isaac Newton, who is very much involved in the developments of the mechanical clock (sitting as one of the judges who would award the 20,000 pounds to whoever could develop a timepiece which would work at sea, on the deck of a rolling ship) is also behind the revolution in science, in which the laws of the universe are perceived as absolute and independent entities. For Newton (an anti-Trinitarian) space is the “sensorium of God,” the organ through which he perceives the universe and flowing through space “equably without regard to anything external,” is time.[3] Newton’s entire science functioned like a teleological argument, but as with Paley’s watch, the implications outpaced the need for God. Within the next generation Pierre-Simon de la Place proposed a purely mechanical universe, making God superfluous. Napoleon is said to have asked Laplace, “Newton spoke of God in his book. I have perused yours, but failed to find His name even once. How come?’. To this came Laplace’s famous reply, ‘Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.”[4]

The next revolution in time, arising with Einsteinian relativity, brings in its wake two competing models of science and two very different notions of the universe, but also two very different notions of teleology. Michael Polanyi writes a groundbreaking work, and yet will spend most of his life in relative obscurity, compared to Thomas Kuhn, who borrows many of his ideas (though he is inconsistent in acknowledging his debt to Polanyi). Both left their work as scientists (Polanyi as a chemist, and Kuhn as a physicist) to take up philosophy of science. They both rejected Newton’s and Paley’s mechanical universe, with its positivist notions of “objectivity” and its refusal to recognize the biases which it allowed to foster. Polanyi had experienced both the fanaticism of National Socialism and Soviet Communism and he laid the blame directly on the doorstep of mechanical science. “The mechanical course of history was to bring universal justice. Scientific skepticism would trust only material necessity for achieving universal brotherhood. Skepticism and utopianism had thus fused into a new skeptical fanaticism.”[5] The lesson he learned was that science and human knowledge is not based on a detached impartiality, but is derived from an acknowledged “rootedness” in the universe. His picture of “tacit knowledge” is that we always know more than we can say. We recognize faces, we ask questions, we intuit understanding, in a way in which we are not fully aware. There is no positivist, impersonal, grounding to knowing.

Both Kuhn and Polanyi see the key role of persons and the personal in the scientific enterprise. Where the mechanical science of Newton counted the human observer out of the observation, relativity theory depended upon noting the location and perspective of an observer. Kuhn and Polanyi not only take the observer into account in the specific sense of Einstein, but both recognize that science as a whole depends upon human perspective, belief, culture, community, and intuition. Kuhn captures this in his notion of paradigms, as he traces the history of science through paradigms, with paradigm crises, paradigm shifts, and normative science, in which there is a reigning paradigm accepted by the majority. These paradigms are very much like worldviews, though it seems Polanyi recognized this and built upon it, where Kuhn did not account for his own worldview or even his notion of truth. Thus, though Kuhn will deny it, his theory seems to end in a kind of fideism, without any role for objective truth.  

The clear difference between the two thinkers concerns their basic understanding of the universe, with Polanyi acknowledging his theistic understanding, and Kuhn denying any objective ground for truth. Thus, Polanyi will found a new order of knowing, based on persons but also imagining a personal dimension to the universe. In the first instance there is the fittingness of the personal, as the only means of arriving at discovery.  “I have shown that into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge.”[6] Polanyi finds the person and his insight as standing at the center of a literal Copernican revolution. Though the Copernican revolution is often read as a displacement of a man centered perspective, Polanyi takes the opposite tact. He acknowledges that Copernican theory is more objective, but not because it displaces the egocentric view of Ptolemaic theory. The Copernican theory is more intellectually satisfying, thus, “We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses-but only in favour of a more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason.”[7] Human thought, embracing all of what it means to be human is enabled to comprehend the entire cosmic array, not through mere observation, but through a depth of consciousness.

His understanding of science and knowledge is grounded in a larger picture of meaning. In the book entitled, Meaning, he pictures freedom and meaning as contributing to intellectual freedom and perspective.[8] Scientific meaning takes part in a larger dimension of truth and meaning grounded in the eternal. Polanyi’s vision, partially shared by Kuhn, takes on a broader meaning, with Polanyi encompassing the whole of human life in his theory. He had experienced Nazi persecution, and the impingement of Soviet Communism upon freedom, and he saw scientific freedom as dependent upon an all-inclusive (political, intellectual, religious) understanding of human freedom.

In The Tacit Dimension, he tells of his encounter in Moscow with a Soviet scientist, soon to be executed, who said that pursuit of pure science “was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to problems of the current Five Year Plan.”[9] A society built upon a presumed independent scientific thought had produced a “mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science and history itself.”[10] Polanyi agrees that the pursuit of science for its own sake had ended badly in the fanaticism by which he was surrounded in Germany and the Soviet Union. So, he seeks to set science on a firmer foundation:

I SHALL re-examine here the suppositions underlying our belief in science and propose to show that they are more extensive than is usually thought. They will appear to coextend with the entire spiritual foundations of man and to go to the very root of his social existence. Hence, I will urge, our belief in science should be regarded as a token of much wider convictions.”[11]

As Polanyi writes in the conclusion to The Tacit Dimension,

Men need a purpose which bears on eternity. Truth does that; our ideals do it; and this might be enough, if we could ever be satisfied with our manifest moral shortcomings and with a society which has such shortcomings fatally involved in its workings.

Perhaps this problem cannot be resolved on secular grounds alone. But its religious solution should become more feasible once religious faith is released from pressure by an absurd vision of the universe, and so there will open up instead a meaningful world which could resound to religion.[12]

In this meaningful world, Polanyi, very much in the mindset of Origen and Maximus (in speaking of the meaningful particulates of logoi), describes the meaning of the universe reaching out to persons. “Potential discovery may be thought to attract the mind which will reveal it inflaming the scientist with creative desire and imparting to him a foreknowledge of itself; guiding him from clue to clue and from surmise to surmise.”[13] The conditions for discovery unfold or emerge slowly, not through the strained efforts of the scientist, but almost in spite of them. After giving up the frantic measurements and operative actions, during a cup of tea perhaps, things begin to emerge. “All the efforts of the discoverer are but preparations for the main event of discovery, which eventually takes place if at all by a process of spontaneous mental reorganization uncontrolled by conscious effort.”[14] Suddenly the climber finds himself elevated to the top of the mountain, after relinquishing his efforts, his mind transformed.

Nature, in Polanyi’s description calls out to be realized. “In this light it may appear perhaps more appropriate to regard discovery in natural sciences as guided not so much by the potentiality of a scientific proposition as by an aspect of nature seeking realization in our minds.”[15] As in Maximus’ doctrine of the logoi, which Dionysius had called “paradigms” and “divine wills,” Polanyi speaks as if the discoverer is not only looking into the world, but the world looks back and calls to him. The thoughts and will of God found in the logoi, in the Maximian notion of creation’s purpose found in incarnation, specifically identifies this beseeching presence with Christ. As Balthasar puts it in regard to Maximus, there is a “teleological structure to all being, and especially of conscious, finite intellectual being,” and in turn the transcendence of this teleology shows itself in all being, in the call to theosis.[16] As Balthasar clarifies, this is not a pantheism, but the realization of synthesis with God, an “incorporation and initiation of the Christian into him, Christ.”[17]

Where Kuhn had disparaged Polanyi’s “occult” like picture of intuition, Polanyi pictures this tacit dimension as the very substance of discovery. “The solution of riddles, the invention of practical devices, the recognition of indistinct shapes, the diagnosis of an illness, the identification of a rare species, and many other forms of guessing right seem to conform to the same pattern.”[18] In his list he includes “the prayerful search for God.” They all share the same “creative rhythm” shared by both artists and explorers. “It suggests that great discovery is the realization of something obvious; a presence staring us in the face, waiting until we open our eyes.”[19] The waiting presence seeks to make itself known, and seeks realization in our minds. It is a spiritual realization, which Polanyi connects to every mode of discovery, but particularly the natural sciences.

Polanyi notes that these significant “meanings” in the universe seem to reveal themselves simultaneously to a community or plurality of persons, with the interesting result that all may arrive at the same meaning, but may tend to portray it differently. In regard to quantum mechanics he says, “Thus we may think of Heisenberg and Schrodinger both penetrating to the same meaning but drawing different pictures of it; so different that they did not themselves recognize their identical meaning.”[20] In regard to electrons: “In 1923 de Broglie suggested that electrons may possess wave nature and in 1925 Davisson and Germer, not knowing of this theory, made their first observations of the phenomenon soon after to be recognized as the diffraction of these waves.”[21] He provides several examples, but one more must suffice: “And we may add the prediction of the meson by Yukawa’s theory of nuclear fields (1935) and its contemporaneous discovery in cosmic rays, finally established by Anderson (1938).[22] He concludes, “Could it be that the same intuitive contact guided these alternative approaches to the same hidden reality?”[23]

Polanyi, unlike Kuhn, anchored discovery to an external reality, but this reality is not simply external but extends into and appeals to the knowing subject. He recognizes with St. Augustine that all knowledge is “a gift of grace” and that depth of insight depends upon guidance through this antecedent belief (“Unless ye believe, ye shall not understand).”[24] Polanyi concludes, that belief must be acknowledged as the source of all knowledge. He concludes, “It says . . . that the process of examining any topic is both an exploration of the topic, and an exegesis of our fundamental beliefs in the light of which we approach it; a dialectical combination of exploration and exegesis. Our fundamental beliefs are continuously reconsidered in the course of such a process, but only within the scope of their own basic premises.” There is a continual dialectic occurring in exploration as we arrive at a proper exegesis. He claims,

We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.[25]

Michael Polanyi may have been too far ahead of his time, or too far behind, depending on one’s perspective. His deep insights into scientific method were overshadowed by the weak imitation of his thought found in Thomas Kuhn. As Martin X. Moleski puts it in contrasting Kuhn and Polanyi, “From my point of view, all that is good in Kuhn’s position is found in Polanyi, while there is no trace in Kuhn whatsoever of Polanyi’s orientation toward purposes which bear upon eternity. Polanyi’s worldview goes far beyond Kuhn’s in its orientation toward truth as a metaphysical prerequisite for the progress of science.”[26] In contrast, “Because of his empiricist outlook, truth is not something that can appear in Kuhn’s system—it is not something that can be ‘observed’ impersonally.”[27]

Polanyi would be obscured as Kuhn’s more postmodern notions were embraced in nearly every field of human endeavor. As Moleski writes, “After immersing myself in the story of Polanyi’s life, it seems to me that I can feel his anguish at seeing a limited and inadequate philosophy of science sweep the field, bring Kuhn the accolades and fame that Polanyi never enjoyed in his own lifetime.”[28] Polanyi wanted to change the worldview of his scientific peers in such a way that science could be carried out with a teleological purpose, which it often lacks, but Kuhn’s a-teleology has won the day.


[1] William Paley. Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Parker, 1802.

[2] David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983) 112.

[3] Query 31 of the Opticks (1718).

[4] Stephen D. Snobelen, Newton’s Heterodox Theology, 1.  https://isaac-newton.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/newtons-heterodox-theology-and-his-natural-philosophy.pdf

[5] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966) 4.

[6] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, ( Routledge & Kegan Paul 1962) Preface.

[7] Ibid,  4-5.

[8] Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning, (University of Chicago Press 1975), 3.

[9] The Tacit Dimension, 3.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, (London: Oxford University Press) 7.

[12] The Tacit Dimension, 92.

[13] Science, Faith, and Society, 19.

[14] Ibid, 20

[15] Ibid, 21.

[16] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, Translated by Brian E. Daley, S. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) 148.

[17] Ibid, 283.

[18] Science, Faith, and Society, 20

[19] Ibid, 21.

[20] Ibid, 22.

[21] Ibid, 23.

[22] Ibid, 23.

[23] Ibid, 23

[24] Cited in David K. Naugle, “Michael Polanyi’s Tacit Dimension and Personal Knowledge in the Natural Sciences” Summer Institute in Christian Scholarship, 5. mp_eerdmansbook.pdf (dbu.edu)

[25] Personal  Knowledge, 267. Cited in Naugle, 6.

[26] Martin X. Moleski, “Polanyi vs. Kuhn: Worldviews Apart” in Tradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 33:2, 21. https://polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD33-2/TAD33-2-fnl-pg8-24-pdf.pdf

[27] Moleski, 22.

[28] Ibid.

Origen’s Completion of the Kalam Cosmological Argument

My claim in this blog, is that the particular failures of William Lane Craig’s version of the Kalam Cosmological argument inadvertently point to something like Origen’s picture of the relation between time and eternity as found in Christ. The fact that Origen is wrongly accused of believing in the transmigration of souls may be an indicator of the flatness of the reason by which he was judged and the difficulty of recognizing the orthodoxy he represents.

The standard cosmological arguments (which usually make no reference to Christ) depend upon arguments which confirm, rather than challenge, the standard order of reason. The revolutionary realization of the New Testament pertains to how creation reconceived (as ex nihilo) in light of the resurrection of Jesus, gives rise to an entirely new order of rationality. These two beliefs (creation ex nihilo and resurrection) are at the center of a new identity (resurrection faith) and worldview, which arise together historically. The cosmic order and its material make-up are reconceived in the full recognition and meaning of Jesus is Lord. His Lordship demands a reconceptualization of all things (including time and eternity), and yet the standard arguments making this case tend to betray resurrection rationale, though this failure itself can be enlightening.  One of the premiere apologists in the Western world, Craig and his Kalam Cosmological argument, demonstrates the point.

Craig states the argument as a brief syllogism: Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause. This cause is God. Throughout Craig’s argument the contradiction of an actually existing infinite series is indicated (the universe cannot be infinite but must have a beginning). For example, it cannot be rationally conceived that there is an infinite library, because if half the books go missing, there are just as many books (which is a contradictory outcome). By the same token there cannot be an actually existing infinity before creation commenced, as the point of the start would never be reached.

But then Craig, absent any reference to Christ, moves this contradiction, unwittingly, into the mind of God. “His timeless intention to create a world with a beginning, and His power to produce such a result” are conceived as two distinct points. The distinction is between, “His causal power in order for the universe to be created” and “God’s timeless intention to create a temporal world.” Causal forces exist in time (this side of the nothing in creation ex nihilo) and exist over and against the eternal (prior to nothing) and so the thought (which is eternal), and “God’s undertaking to create” (which has a definitive beginning), must be differentiated.[1] 

Wes Morrison points out that Craig maintains that “’prior’ to the beginning of the universe God was outside of time.” As he writes, “Craig makes it sound as if God ‘used to be’ outside of time, but ‘then’ he created the world and put himself into time. But this can’t be right if there is no time prior to the beginning of the universe.”[2] Craig posits a point prior to creation when God decides to act, but he is dependent upon the sequence of before and after, which do not pertain in eternity. Is God temporal or non-temporal, in time or out of time. Can God cause the universe in time prior to the time of the universe? Can something “begin to exist” without there being a time before it began to exist? The way in which time and eternity are interrelated in Craig’s argument, creates a picture of time and eternity as related consecutively or sequentially. There is a divide between the “before” the beginning and the beginning, as a point in the decision making of God. Morrison’s critique of Craig is as stilted as Craig’s argument but neither of them relates time and eternity, through Christ, in the manner of Origen.

In Origen’s picture, it is the Logos, or Jesus Christ alone, who bridges the gap between time and eternity. Jesus Christ is simultaneously created and divine and in him all things (time and eternity) hold together. The “logoi” or “eternal things” or Wisdom of God or the Body of the Logos, pervade all of creation. All things hold together through the constituent parts of the eternal wisdom which Origen calls “logoi.” As Panayiotis Tzamalikos describes, “Since the logoi are the object of creation and make up the Body of Logos, the logoi are the means through which the Logos becomes History. They are incorporeal causes (hence, they stand outside of time and space), and yet it is by means of them that Time is realised; indeed, in a hypothetical absence of logoi, Time would be blind and meaningless, actually, it could not exist at all.”[3] The reality of time continually takes place in and through its beginning. Christ is the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, the source of reality.

Christ is not the beginning in a temporal sense, but in the sense of John 1:1 – the source (άρχή) of reality. Christ is the continual resource, the continual beginning, or the wisdom of God applied to the world. In Him there is an intersection between time and eternity: “In this Wisdom, who ever existed with the Father, creation was always present in form and outline and there was never a time when the prefiguration of those things which were to be hereafter did not exist in Wisdom.”[4] The Logos is the ordering matrix of eternity imprinted upon time.

Origen distinguishes between wisdom and Logos in that the Logos is the communication of God enacted. “Speaking either of Wisdom or of Logos one actually refers to the same person, namely the son of God himself. The difference nevertheless is that Wisdom indicates the living incorporeal personal substance in herself, without any allusion to the world or to anything else, while the Logos is the Wisdom conceived in her communication to rational creatures.[5] In Tzamalikos explanation, “Origen’s notion about ‘conceptions’ of the son is exactly what allows him to portray his perception of the correlation of timeless God to the temporal world. This correlation is possible through the assertions of Origen’s about the Logos. For the Logos actually becomes a kind of span, through which this relation is established.”[6]

In Origen’s description:

…it is along those ways that the son of God is moving decorating, taking thought for, making benefaction, favouring, into this [sic. the world] which was made in wisdom. In saying therefore that the Logos was in άρχή it is not implied that the Logos is different from her (sc. the άρχή, that is the wisdom) in terms of substance, but only in terms of conception and relation, so that it is the same being who in named in the scripture and who, in as much as she is conceived in her relation to God himself, is named wisdom, and again, in as much as conceived in her relation to creatures she is called as Logos the creator.[7]

 In Origen’s conception, “Creation flows perpetually from the Godhead in the same way that rays of light flow from the sun.”[8] There is an eternal aspect to all of creation, though Origen certainly confirms creation ex nihilo. The corporeal world has a beginning in time, but its true beginning or resource for existence is beyond time in eternity. Origen holds that time arose with creation and did not precede it, so that the picture of a six day creation is simply to accommodate human capacities. He states emphatically that “everything was made at once…. but for the sake of clarity a list of days and their events was given.”[9]

The Logos created the world and sustains it, and is constantly related to it, and yet the world is external to God. “Hence we should conclude that Origen conceives the Logos as being both ‘in’ wisdom, that is to say into timelessness, and into the world, that is ‘out’ of the Trinity.”[10] The Logos is the mediator between the timeless God and the temporal world. The Logos is with God but also in the world, though not identified with the world. (Though He is identified with each rational being created in his image.)

So the distinction which Craig would attribute to God’s intention and God’s acting on that intention can be directly attributed to Christ. There is no “before” creation any more than there is a before Christ. According to Tzamalikos, “There are no turning points nor moments nor succession nor temporal flux in timelessness. Subsequently, any question pertaining to timelessness and involving notions of this sort is groundless and misleading.” [11] Succession, change, before or after, may be necessary to human thought, but are not proper to timelessness or eternity. It is not that the world is eternal, or that Origen thought as much, but God acts directly in the world through his Son who is divine and human.

The person of Jesus Christ explains how there is a beginning coming out of a timeless corporeal nothing. Science, and big bang cosmology do not presume to describe the big bang (in scientific terms as science breaks down). There is no actual, knowable, “infinite density” (describing what existed before the big bang) anymore than there is an actually existing nihilo. In this Origen accords with the Einsteinian notion that time and space are singular. As Gerald Bostock states, “Origen . . . would be quite happy with the concept of a ‘Big Bang’. He would also, to judge from his writings, be happy with modern scientific theories about the nature of matter.”[12] As modern theories indicate, and Origen would concur, matter is not fully knowable: “By the intellect alone the substance which underlies bodies is discerned to be matter . . . when our mind by a purely intellectual act sets aside every quality and gazes at the mere point, if I may so call it, of the underlying substance in itself, then by this artificial mode of thought it will apparently behold matter.”[13] But this is a theoretical exercise, on the order of modern physics. Matter can take on every possible form but it is the nonmaterial which makes its imprint. God can transform matter “into whatever forms and species he desires, as the merits of things demand. The prophet points to this when he refers to God making and changing the form of all things (Amos 5:8).”[14] As Bostock notes, “It is through the interplay of subatomic randomness and of transcendent causes that all the potentialities of life are actualized and the wonders of creation emerge. Whether we are looking at the indeterminacy of the electron and the stability of crystal or the interaction between genetic mutations and the ordered structure of a biological organism we are seeing the polarities of chaos and cosmos.”[15]

Just as God imposed order on the chaos of the primal waters, Origen sees God as continually bringing order into the cosmos. The order of the universe is God’s transcendent cause continually at work. “A cause is not the physical antecedent of a physical process but an active force impinging on a passive subject and, because reality is ultimately spiritual, such a force must be of a spiritual character. It is given expression in Origen’s concept of transcendent λόγοι or intelligible forms, which determine both the nature and the meaning of created things.”[16] As Origen writes: “the works of divine providence and the plan of this universe are as it were rays of God’s nature. . . . our mind understands the parent of the universe from the beauty of his works and the attractiveness of his creatures.”[17]

There is not a divide between time and eternity, in the manner conceived by Craig, but creation relies upon eternity in Christ. In turn, the world is comprehensible (Einstein called the world’s being comprehensible the most incomprehensible thing about it). It is comprehensible through the Logos bridging the creation and Creator in all who are made in His image. In Origen’s description, “The life added to us, when the logos in us is brought to fulfilment through our participation in the primary Logos, . . . becomes the light of knowledge . . . with some a potential light and with others an actual light.”[18] The light of Christ is available potentially to all, as this is the eternal image in whom all are made, and He is the eternal rationale undergirding the world.


[1] Wes Morrison “Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?: A Rejoinder,” forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy, 151. accessed at https://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/kalam-not.pdf

[2]Ibid.  

[3] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Guilty of Genius: Origen and the Theory of Transmigration (New York: Peter Lang, 2022) 248.

[4] Origen, De Principiis 1,4,4. Cited in Gerald Bostock, “Origen’s Doctrine of Creation” THE EXPOSITORY TIMES February 2007. Vol.118, No.5, 2.

[5] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, The Concept of Time in Origen (University of Glasgow, PhD Thesis, 1986) 142.

[6] Time in Origen, 143.

[7] Origen, Commentary on John John, 1.  Cited in Time in Origen, 143-144.

[8] Bostock, 5.

[9] Origen, FrGn 2,2. Cited in Bostock, 3.

[10] The Concept of Time, 144.

[11] The Concept of Time in Origen, 142.

[12] Bostock, 3.

[13] Origen, De Principiis 4,4,7. Cited in Bostock, 3.

[14] Origen, De Principiis 3,6,7. Cited in Bostock, 4.

[15] Bostock, 4.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Origen, De Principiis 1,1,6. Cited in Bostock, 7.

[18] Origen, CIo 2,24. Cited in Bostock, 7.

The Stunting of the Imagination and its Renewal

But the human possibility of knowing is not exhausted by the ability to perceive and comprehend. Imagination, too, belongs no less legitimately in its way to the human possibility of knowing. A man without imagination is more of an invalid than one who lacks a leg. Karl Barth[1]

The sharp contrast between the early church and late modern western Christianity centers on the different sensibility surrounding the body and the world. The meaning of bodily resurrection and the kingdom of God is obscured by western notions of a body/soul dualism and the rational autonomous subject. Theology is often focused on interiority (upon propositions, and rational foundations), which has led to a split between doctrine and ethics, faith and works, and ultimately, I would claim, to a loss of theological imagination. The tendency toward a disincarnate form of the faith shows itself in failed practices of discipleship and a failure to develop or even talk about the virtues. The world, the body, the virtues, but perhaps most profoundly, a speculative and imaginative theology are left no place in this atomistic, interiorized faith.

Meanwhile, in a mostly eastern Christianity, there has been a preservation and development of the implications of incarnation, bodily resurrection, and a participatory ontology (theosis, apocatastasis) which might be described as a continuation of incarnation (the Church). A key thinker in the preservation (of Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, and a Johannine theology) and development of this embodied Christianity is Maximus the Confessor. Maximus’ Christocentrism is cosmic, as he thinks the entire world must be conceived in relation to the Trinity. God’s purpose is to unite the world to Himself and this unity is not in some disembodied bliss: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[2] As Maximus explains: “it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[3] Maximus’ starting premises light up every aspect of the God, human, cosmic relationship.

For Maximus, the Word is present and revealed in the Christian in a manner analogous to the hypostatic union. The situatedness of this Word in the body of Christ, the body of the Christian, and the cosmic body, equates embodiment with truth. The embodiment of the Word in the incarnation and in the Christian is truth incarnate – the meaning, the communication, the realization of this truth in and through the body.

For Maximus this is the truth about God. As Torstein Tollefsen puts it, “When Maximus says that God ‘always’ has this will to embody Himself, it means that God willed His embodiment from eternity. Even the historical Incarnation, according to Maximus, has its origin in the super-infinite plan that infinitely pre-exists the ages of time.”[4] Creation and incarnation are God’s eternal plan as Creator and Father are who God is. As Maximus writes, “God will be wholly participated (in) by whole human beings, so that He will be to the soul, as it were, what the soul is to the body, and through the soul He will likewise be present in the body (in a manner that He knows), so that the soul will receive immutability and the body immortality.”[5] This embodiment includes pursuit of virtue, squelching of the passions, or a life of ethics as part of being in Christ. “The aim is that what God is to the soul, the soul might become to the body.’”[6] Or as he says to Thalassios, the Word first creates faith within us, and then, becomes the son of that faith, from which he is embodied through the practice of the virtues.”[7]

While the body, in Maximus, is the means to participation in the person and work of Christ, in the west the body has often been made an obstacle. Body/soul dualism is the background to much western Christianity, and unless contrasted with the view of the body in the early church and in the east, this may not be obvious.

Fergus Kerr, in his discussion of the of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, has written the classic work detailing the pursuit of certainty in modernity, beginning with the Cartesian turn toward interiority. In Descartes’, The Meditations, the proof of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul is part of an interlocking argument which only needs thought or soul to arrive at God. Descartes, in his first Meditation, wipes away the embodied world: “I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he (the devil) has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”[8] Descartes concludes that he can doubt everything other than his doubting, even if the devil is deceiving him, which leads to his famous conclusion:

“In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”

At last I have discovered it — thought; this alone is inseparable from me…I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or  intelligence, or intellect, or reason … a thinking thing.”[9]

Descartes thinks away not only his embodiment but his humanity, he no longer thinks of himself as a man or even a rational animal, as he is a “thinking thing.”

Immanuel Kant, a devout Lutheran, will incorporate Cartesian rationalism into the heart of his Christianity, presuming he must attend to reason even before he looks to Christ. The problem with Kant and Descartes and pure thought, is that there is no content to this thought other than an imagined self-presence, but this presence is ephemeral, impossible to grasp, and always on the point of disappearing. It is upon this sandy foundation that modern theology would build. Kerr provides multiple examples of the continuing impact of Cartesian dualism and why Wittgenstein’s questioning of the view of language is key for future western theological developments.

Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations with Augustine’s view of language. Augustine’s understanding of how he learned to speak “secretes the myth that the infant arrives like an immigrant in a strange land, already able to speak but completely ignorant of the alien language” which his parents and those around him speak.[10] “Gradually I realized where I was, and I decided to display my wishes to those who might fulfil them, and I could not, because my wishes were inside and they were outside, and powerless to get inside my mind by any of their senses.”[11] The little guy would shake his hands and try to gesture so as to make his wishes known, and this would end in a fit of rage. It is as if he has landed in a far country, arriving with a Platonic like power of thought preexisting within himself. At some point he is able to make himself understood in his parents language, and looking back, he realizes how he acquired language: “I was no longer a speechless infant, I was a talking boy. I remember this, and I afterwards saw how I learned to speak. For the grown-ups did not teach me, by offering me words, according to a standard method of teaching, as they were soon to do with the alphabet. With the mind that you gave me, my God, I decided to exhibit the thoughts of my heart so that my will might be obeyed. . .”[12] The capacity was already present in his heart it was simply a matter of translation:

When my elders named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.[13]

Thought and desire precede language, such that one’s primary mental state is a worldless wordless pinpoint. The infant arrives knowing what he thinks and wants, yet his primal conceptuality is devoid of words.

Wittgenstein starts here, with perhaps the most important of western theologians, as it provides an insight into the reigning understanding of the time. As Kerr explains, “For this picture of how an infant learns to speak, and hence the idea of language and communication, and so of how one human being is related to another, seems very much tied up with the idea of the self-transparent and autonomous subject. . . .”[14] Throughout, Wittgenstein clearly has the Cartesian ego in his sights, and as he notes he could have started with any number of philosophers (perhaps even his Tractatus) but Kerr thinks there is special significance in his choice of Augustine. “To probe the epistemological predicament of the soul in the Confessions was to open up a seam in the theological anthropology that has shaped Christian self-understanding since the fifth century. It is difficult to believe that Wittgenstein did not know what he was doing.”[15]

The story of Wittgenstein’s untangling of this understanding is well-known, with his picture of language as embodied, communal, and inseparable from thought and all that it means to be human, but this is only slowly appreciated. By starting with Augustine and ending with his own philosophical contemporaries, Wittgenstein challenges the form of thought which has thoroughly saturated the west. He concludes, “Nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity.”[16] Meaning is not some occult state inside the head, anymore than a person or an ego is concealed inside the body. He sees the problem as arising around the concept of the “I.”[17] “From the first-person perspective it is very easy to generate a sense of oneself as a thinking thing which shows obvious kinship with the portrait of the infant Augustine’s travails.”[18] The problem is a failure to understand relationship to language, and the relationship of language to the body:

This simile of ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the mind is pernicious. It is derived from ‘in the head’ when we think of ourselves as looking out from our heads and of thinking as something going on ‘in our head’. But then we forget the picture and go on using language derived from it. Similarly, man’s spirit was pictured as his breath, then the picture was forgotten but the language derived from it retained. We can only safely use such language if we consciously remember the picture when we use it.[19]

Kerr thinks the problem arises with ancient notions of the myth of the soul (the Apostle Paul locates the problem in an even more ancient and primal understanding of the relation between the individual and the law). The longing to escape the body, to free the self of constraint from what Plato called the prison house of the body, is the most ancient and instinctive drive. The desire to pass directly into impassable transcendence, to establish the self, is the desire to shed the body, escape the confines of language, and to know without the mediation of the world. As Kerr describes, in this understanding “the face becomes a veil, a mask that needs to be manipulated from behind, while the production of meaning retreats from the materiality of signs into the recesses of the invisible mind. In effect, a metaphysically generated concept of the human body, derived from the thought of the immateriality and invisibility of the soul, displaces our experience of the whole living man or woman.”[20] The desire is ultimately the desire for death, which Wittgenstein slowly and painfully uncovers, as he privately confides to his diaries his dawning belief in Christ.[21]

Nonetheless, in popular understanding and in the predominant forms of theological understanding the Cartesian ego remains. “As recently as 1967, for example, Karl Rahner reaffirmed that there must be no going back on ‘the transcendental—anthropological turn in philosophy since Descartes.’”[22] As he says, “The original self presence of the subject in the actual realization of his existence strives to translate itself more and more into the conceptual, into the objectified, into language, into communication with another.”[23] Rahner describes an ”original knowledge” and its concept which works its way toward language, as if the original thinking occurs outside of language. As Kerr summarizes, “Rahner’s natural assumption — that communication comes after language, and language comes after having concepts — is precisely what the Cartesian tradition has reinforced. His example suggests that, when I am in pain, I first have the thought that I am in pain, I then put it into words and finally I find someone to whom to communicate it.”[24] In some way we have an original non-linguistic experience, which we then translate into words.

In every order of knowing, Rahner pictures layers of “knowing”: there is the original act of knowledge, the self that is “co-known” with the object of knowledge – one’s self presence (all pre-linguistic), and all of this has to occur so that an object can make itself manifest to the mind of the knower. Kerr concludes (after more extensive examples) that “there surely is a prima facie case for suggesting that Rahner’s most characteristic theological profundities are embedded in an extremely mentalist—individualist epistemology of unmistakably Cartesian provenance. Central to his whole theology, that is to say, is the possibility for the individual to occupy a standpoint beyond his immersion in the bodily, the historical and the institutional.”[25]

Hans Kung, who may be more widely read than Rahner, likewise concludes that “The history of modern epistemology from Descartes, Hume and Kant to Popper and Lorenz has — it seems to me — made clear that the fact of any reality at all independent of our consciousness can be accepted only in an act of trust.”[26] We must doubt everything, following Descartes, so as to arrive at the nugget of knowing which is the inward “thinking thing.” He concludes, “Every human being decides for himself his fundamental attitude to reality: that basic approach which embraces, colours, characterizes his whole experience, behaviour, action. Innocent of all anti-Cartesian suspicions, he goes for individual decisions as establishing the foundations for belief in the reality of anything outside one’s mind: It is up to me to choose the basic attitude I adopt towards this radically dubious reality with which I am surrounded. I simply decide to trust the reality of other people and all the rest of the rich tapestry of life.”[27] There is no logical proof for a reality outside the body or for the reality of God. Belief in either is a decision sunk deep within the recesses of the Kantian will. It is not that belief in God is any more irrational than belief in anything else outside of the mind; all of it depends on interior decision.

Don Cupitt, another widely read theologian argues, “the principles of spirituality cannot be imposed on us from without and cannot depend at all upon any external circumstances. On the contrary, the principles of spirituality must be fully internalized a priori principles, freely adopted and self-imposed. A modern person must not any more surrender the apex of his self-consciousness to a god. It must remain his own.”[28] Certainly one can agree religion should not be imposed, but Cupitt argues the world, or all external circumstance, should not be imposed, as if one can check out and resort to his inward Cartesian realm.

Likewise, Schubert Ogden pictures the world of bodies, acts and deeds, as preceded by private purposes and decisions. Indeed, it is only because the self first acts to constitute itself, to respond to its world, and to decide its own inner being, that it ‘acts’ at all in the more ordinary meaning of the word; all its outer acts of word and deed are but ways of expressing and implementing — the inner decisions whereby it constitutes itself as a self.”[29] Ogden is not speaking metaphorically, but imagines the thinking thing and his world is prior to the world, and necessary for constituting the world.

As Timothy O’Connell has put it, in his attempt to reconstruct a moral theology (through a Cartesian ego): “In an appropriate if homely image, then, people might be compared to onions … At the outermost layer, as it were, we find their environment, their world, the things they own. Moving inward we find their actions, their behaviour, the things they do. And then the body, that which is the ‘belonging’ of a person and yet also is the person. Going deeper we discover moods, emotions, feelings. Deeper still are the convictions by which they define themselves. And at the very centre, in that dimensionless pinpoint around which everything else revolves, is the person himself or herself — the I.”[30] As Kerr notes, at least Descartes had his “thinking thing” but O’Connell is not only apophatic about God but about his own dimensionless inward self. His need to reconstruct a moral theology may itself be a sign of the sickness.

As Stanley Hauerwas notes, “To assume that a ‘relation’ between doctrine and ethics needs to be explicated unjustifiably presumes that something called ‘ethics’ exists prior to or independent from ‘doctrine’.”[31] Hauerwas argues, “Once there was no Christian ethics simply because Christians could not distinguish between their beliefs and their behaviour. They assumed that their lives exemplified (or at least should exemplify) their doctrines in a manner that made a division between life and doctrine impossible.”[32] As he points out, this correlate between ethics and doctrine is the premise of the faith: Paul’s formulation in Romans 12:1-2 encapsulates the New Testament vision: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and well-pleasing to God. And do not be conformed to this age; but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”

Theology often presumes a rational, disembodied foundation as it did in my theological education and that of my generation, which was an understanding I was not aware of. The stark contrast between modern western theology and Maximus and the early church, accentuates the strangeness of modern presuppositions and the need to pursue an imaginative reengagement with the body and the world. The exciting developments in western theology and philosophy, such as Karl Barth’s Christocentrism, Stanley Hauerwas and friends’ development of narrative theology, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s slow discovery that language is an embodied capacity, and Bernard Lonergan’s focus on embodied conversion, parallel and are often an unwitting rediscovery of Maximus’ form of thought. Maximus has played a direct role in the renaissance in Russian Orthodoxy (e.g., George Florovsky and Sergius Bulgakov) and in the ressourcement of the Nouvelle théologie movement. Hans Urs von Balthasar sees him as a bridge figure for east/west or ecumenical dialogue. Maximus is both a corrective and indicator of the need for further development of an embodied faith and recovery of an embodied imagination.


[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. Ill, part 1, p. 81.

[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 7.22.

[3] On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (abbreviated as QThal.) 60.3.

[4] Torstein Theodore Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 58.

[5] Ambigua 7.26.

[6] Ambigua 7.31.

[7] QThal. 40.8.

[8] Rene Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. ll, p. 15. Quotations are from Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986) 4.

[9] Descartes, 18.

[10] Kerr, 39

[11] Augustine, Confessions, Book I, chapter 6. Cited in Kerr, 39.

[12] Confessions, Book I, chapter 8. Cited in Kerr, 41.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Kerr, 42.

[15] Kerr, 42.

[16] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953) 693. Cited in Kerr, 42.

[17] He could very well have pursued the problem back to Paul’s entanglement with the “I” and the law, as this is the most ancient and universal of problems.

[18] Kerr, 43.

[19] Wittgenstein’s Lectures Cambridge 1930-1932, ed. Desmond Lee, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) 25.

[20] Kerr, 46.

[21] The Japanese translator of Wittgenstein’s diaries, Akio Kikai, characterizes his philosophical quest, given the spiritual journey detailed in his diaries, as more of a theological quest to rid himself of pride and to become a humble follower of Jesus. The diaries reveal his continual struggle both at Cambridge and then alone in the cabin in Norway to rid himself of his arrogant tendencies and it is in his philosophy that he puts forth his greatest effort in this regard, finally admitting in his diaries, only recently found, his belief in the resurrection.

[22] Kerr, 7.

[23] Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 16. Cited in Kerr, 10.

[24] Kerr, 11.

[25] Kerr, 14.

[26] Hans Kung, Eternal Life? p. 275. Cited in Kerr, 14-15.

[27] Hans Kung, Does God Exist?, p. 432. Cited in Kerr, 15.

[28] Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, p. 9. Cited in Kerr, 16.

[29] Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God, p. 177. Cited in Kerr, 18.

[30] Timothy O’Connell, Principles for a Catholic Morality, p. 59. Cited in Kerr, 20.

[31] Stanley Hauerwas, On Doctrine and Ethics, in the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 22.

[32] Ibid.