Category: Walking Truth

Weekly theological insight to a broad audience on living out Christianity, published every Thursday.

Justification By Faith: Unconditional Good News or the “Accursed Gospel”

The gift of the Reformation and of Martin Luther to the world is recovery or rearticulation of the unconditional, free grace of the gospel which can be summed up as “justification by faith.” The problem is, this same phrase can be used to describe the opposite; namely conditional salvation defined and bound up with the base line condition of the law. The unconditional good news is easy to understand, but the goodness and joy of the good news can and has been twisted so that this simple gospel truth, justification by faith, has (most?) often been made to fit Paul’s description of “the accursed gospel” (Gal. 1:6-8) which is no gospel at all but the human problem repackaged as the solution. It may be easiest to start with the good news, as this is uncomplicated, unconditional, singular, and straight forward but we (certainly I) may have missed it due to all the obstacles thrown in the way. So, the implications of this good news and the ways in which it may be twisted into bad news needs to be spelled out so as to secure the love, peace, and profound joy that comes with the unconditional gospel of Jesus Christ.

Alvin Kimel has done us the favor of gathering up and gleaning through a variety of sources, and through 40 years of effort as he describes it, “the unconditionality of God’s love for humanity.”[1] Kimel describes his discovery of the work of the Torrance brothers, James and Thomas (which first came to my attention through the work of Douglas Campbell), Robert Jenson, and Gerhard Forde – two Reformed and two Lutheran theologians, respectively. He describes his moment of awakening in encountering James Torrance’s description of the significance of the Reformation (worthy of extended quotation):

The important thing is that in the Bible, God’s dealings with men in creation and in redemption—in grace—are those of a covenant and not of a contract. This was the heart of the Pauline theology of grace, expounded in Romans and Galatians, and this was the central affirmation of the Reformation. The God of the Bible is a covenant-God and not a contract-God. God’s covenant dealings with men have their source in the loving heart of God, and the form of the covenant is the indicative statement, ‘I will be your God and you shall be my people’. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God who has made a covenant for us in Christ, binding himself to man and man to himself in Christ, and who summons us to respond in faith and love to what he has done so freely for us in Christ. Through the Holy Spirit, we are awakened to that love and lifted up out of ourselves to participate in the (incarnate) Son’s communion with the Father.

Two things are therefore together in a biblical understanding of grace, the covenant of love made for man in Christ, between the Father and the incarnate Son. (a) On the one hand, it is unconditioned by any considerations of worth or merit or prior claim. God’s grace is ‘free grace’. (b) On the other hand, it is unconditional in the costly claims it makes upon us. God’s grace is ‘costly grace’. It summons us unconditionally to a life of holy love—of love for God and love for all men. The one mistake is so to stress free grace that we turn it into ‘cheap grace’ by taking grace for granted—the danger of the ‘antinomianism’ against which Wesley protested. The other mistake is so to stress the costly claims of grace that we turn grace into conditional grace, in a legalism which loses the meaning of grace.

The fallacy of legalism in all ages—perhaps this is the tendency of the human heart in all ages—is to turn God’s covenant of grace into a contract—to say God will only love you and forgive you or give you the gift of the Holy Spirit IF . . . you fulfill prior conditions. But this is to invert ‘the comely order of grace’ as the old Scottish divines put it. In the Bible, the form of the covenant is such that the indicatives of grace are prior to the obligations of law and human obedience. ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, I have loved you and redeemed you and brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, therefore keep my commandments.’ But legalism puts it the other way round. ‘If you keep the law, God will love you!’ The imperatives are made prior to the indicatives. The covenant has been turned into a contract, and God’s grace—or the gift of the Spirit—made conditional on man’s obedience.[2]

The foundational shift Torrance describes is from contract to covenant. A contract describes a condition, such as payment or an “if” statement (if you do this, I will do that), where a covenant is an unconditional promise without prior obligation or requirement. God has acted in Christ to redeem the world and to deliver all people from bondage. This apocalyptic, cosmic deliverance is nothing short of recreation, new birth, or death and resurrection. Torrance carefully describes, this is neither antinomianism nor legalism but is “unconditional in the costly claims it makes upon us.” This gift requires our life but of course it is not an exchange of life for life, but the relinquishing of the grip death has upon us in order to live. Costly grace costs everything, but this everything amounts to nothing as we have invested ultimate value in a lie.

Part of the problem in receiving and fully comprehending this good news is the confounded (deceived) nature of the bondage. “The house of bondage” from which God delivers is a full-blown “reality,” inclusive of a world economy and psychic reality. That is, the full extent of the unconditional, apocalyptic and universal nature of the deliverance may not be appreciated apart from an accurate description of the bondage. Legalism, in Torrance’s description, captures a prime manifestation of this reality but the all-inclusive nature of the bondage (constituting its own world) undergirds legalism.  But before turning to describing how covenant may fall back into contract, the absolute unconditional, free grace needs to be clearly staked out.

Kimel turns next to Gerhard Forde, who expresses the absoluteness of unconditional grace, asking, “What must we do to be saved?” His answer:

absolutely nothing! We are justified freely, for Christ’s sake, by faith, without the exertion of our own strength, gaining of merit, or doing of works. To the age old question, “What shall I do to be saved?” the confessional answer is shocking: “Nothing! Just be still; shut up and listen for once in your life to what God the Almighty, creator and redeemer, is saying to his world and to you in the death and resurrection of his Son! Listen and believe!” When one sees that it is a matter of death and life one has to talk this way. The “nothing” must sound, risky and shocking as it is. For it is, as we shall see, precisely the death knell of the old being. The faith by which one is justified is not an active verb of which the Old Adam or Eve is the subject, it is a state-of-being verb. Faith is the state of being grasped by the unconditional claim and promise of the God who calls into being that which is from that which is not. Faith means now having to deal with life in those terms. It is a death and resurrection.”[3]

Forde seems to recognize that his “nothing” may raise questions, but the point is to firmly drive home the unconditional nature of grace. He says, the “‘nothing’ must sound, risky and shocking as it is.” We have entered into new territory, a new way of thinking and conceiving the world, thus the silence that should follow the “nothing.” Once one is grasped by faith, this becomes the lens through which everything is perceived. No longer does retribution, punishment and fear determine reality, and no longer can anyone claim advantage over another, as all have fallen short, all have walked according the ways of the prince of this world, all were in bondage, and the same “all” are those who are delivered. When asked why this makes people so angry, Forde gives the following response:  

Why indeed? Because it is a radical doctrine. It strikes at the root, the radix, of what we believe to be our very reason for being. The “nothing,” the sola fide, dislodges everyone from the saddle, Jew and Greek, publican and pharisee, harlot and homemaker, sinner and righteous, liberal and orthodox, religious and non-religious, minimalist and maximalist, and shakes the whole human enterprise to the roots. It strikes at the very understanding of life which has become ingrained in us, the understanding in terms of the legal metaphor, the law, merit and moral progress. Justification, the reformers said, is by imputation, freely given. It is an absolutely unconditional decree, a divine decision, indeed an election, a sentence handed down by the judge with whom all power resides. It is as the later “orthodox” teachers like to say, a “forensic” decree: a flat-out pronouncement of acquittal for Jesus’ sake, who died and rose for us…

The gospel of justification by faith is such a shocker, such an explosion, because it is an absolutely unconditional promise. It is not an “if-then” kind of statement, but a “because-therefore” pronouncement: Because Jesus died and rose, your sins are forgiven and you are righteous in the sight of God! It bursts in upon our little world all shut up and barricaded behind our accustomed conditional thinking as some strange comet from goodness knows where, something we can’t really seem to wrap our minds around, the logic of which appears closed to us. How can it be entirely unconditional? Isn’t it terribly dangerous? How can anyone say flat-out “You are righteous for Jesus’ sake”? Is there not some price to be paid, some-thing (however minuscule) to be done? After all, there can’t be such a thing as a free lunch, can there?

You see, we really are sealed up in the prison of our conditional thinking. It is terribly difficult for us to get out, and even if someone batters down the door and shatters the bars, chances are we will stay in the prison anyway! We seem always to want to hold out for something somehow, that little bit of something, and we do it with a passion and an anxiety that betrays its true source—the Old Adam that just does not want to lose control.”[4]

One’s very being or ontology is changed by the breaking in of love and grace. This is a different way of conceiving God, the world, and humans. Prior to the work of Christ death was the controlling factor in life, and this was the condition put upon everything. The law seemed to provide a measurement or condition to deal with death, just as idolatry attempted similar negotiations. Psychology drives home the point, revealed in the Bible, that the fear of death (sometimes called God) which may be conscious or unconscious, is determinative of the psychic struggle. No one but God has the power to deliver from death and this has occurred in the death and resurrection of Christ. Reality is on a different ground, producing a new world order and a recreation of the human psyche.

The relinquishing of the old order may be disturbing, as some like Paul, may have exceeded their peers in religiosity, moral progress, and attaining heaven, but now all of this is counted as garbage. The human salvation system, which promised life, only produces death and this may be anger provoking news for those who invested everything in saving their own life. The reality may be slow in sinking in as the enslaved have found security in their enslavement. For Adam, the reality of death is determinate and this reality seemingly must be negotiated. A contract must be drawn up, consciously or unconsciously, and the terms of exchange enacted. This fear of death reigns, and only in Christ can we defeat this enslaving fearful orientation. To simply break open the tomb (the tomb which makes life conditional), and give life where death was the bottom line, means the conditions we have negotiated no longer apply.

As Kimel concludes in regard to his approach to ministry, “This liberation requires nothing less than our death and resurrection. The preacher is so much more than an encourager to live well and do good works. He is a prophet of the Kingdom, speaking the Word of God that accomplishes what it proclaims (Isa 55:11); he is a priest of the eschaton, giving to communicants the Body and Blood of the glorified Lord.”[5] This is the good news that the preacher, evangelist, and prophet proclaims. Everything must give way in support of this gospel message, which will mean a redefinition of what it means to be human, a reworking of epistemology, and a relinquishing of every form of conditionalism, with its focus on death, punishment, and retributive justice.

The problem in apprehending free grace lies in the failure to reorder and apprehend everything in light of its unconditional nature. In short, this unconditional gospel is universal, apocalyptic (or a breaking in to a world and system of a different order.) It is not retributive, imagining that suffering is required for penalty and payment, and thus it is not focused on God’s anger but on the love of God (and wrath as a subcategory of love). There is no room for God being eternally angry and there cannot be a category of eternal punishment. Most importantly, the nature of human bondage is directly tied to death, law and punishment, so that the manner in which justification by faith may be misconstrued, is simply an example of the universal human bondage to sin, death, and the devil from which unconditional grace saves.

 Douglas Campbell works out this misconstrual, working in close conjunction with the Torrances, but he calls this failure “justification by faith.” Paul, after all, initially accords the name gospel to those who are preaching what he then says is no gospel at all, but is an accursed message. So too there is “justification by faith,” the answer to the problem, and then there is “justification by faith,” the problem repackaged as the solution. Though it may appear a confounding of problem and solution, sorting out the two simply means following Paul’s argument concerning a law-free gospel, and that “gospel” which the false teachers bind to the law. The law always requires conditions and the gospel frees from every form of conditionalism. “Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:24–26). The law is not the standard for faith, but faith, trust, and covenant are primary.   

The false teachers’ accursed gospel makes the law primary and Christ secondary, so that Christianity is reduced to a contract rather than a covenantal relationship, and though we are still calling it justification by faith, both justification and faith have taken on a different meaning. In short, justification is measured by the law. Rather than justification or righteousness referring to the world changing apocalyptic breaking in of the love of God, righteousness is measured and distributed according to the law. Faith, in turn, is defined in conjunction with Christ’s meeting this condition in his death (his life, resurrection, the church, and the Holy Spirit, are rendered secondary), so that the death of Christ becomes the primary and perhaps singular focus. One is saved by applying the legal benefits of Christ’s death to one’s personal law books. One is not saved by taking up the cross and following Christ and being loving and faithful with and through his extended body. One might or might not do such things, but this does not pertain to salvation.   

In brief, according to this understanding, Old Testament law and natural revelation are a system in which one is justified or made right in the eyes of God through works of the law. No one can keep the law perfectly, and therefore everyone fails to be justified. This produces feelings of guilt and depression, but the gospel allows justification, not by works but by faith, which is the new condition (in Arminianism at least). Whenever anyone hears the gospel, they are so happy to be relieved of their burden of guilt for sin. Now they realize that all they have to do is have faith and their sin problem is taken care of. The exchange between the Father and the Son has taken care of the condition, and now one believes this fact and they are saved.

There are several problems in this system, in that law is the standard of measure for Christ and faith, rather than Christ setting aside the law. Justification or righteousness, rather than referring directly to God, refers to law (perhaps a kind of secondary manifestation of God), leading to a depersonalized or fictional element to the entire procedure. Faith consists in believing Christ has met the conditions of the law, and in this sense, faith goes nowhere, as it seems to reduce to faith in faith (that which meets the condition). In this system, to speak of imitating the faithfulness of Christ makes no sense, as Christ’s primary work is in conjunction with meeting the requirements of the law, which is inimitable. Again, faith is not so much participation in or being joined to Christ, as it is the application of an imputed righteousness (a kind of legal fiction).

At the same time, this justification by faith sets a very high standard on both human capacity and incapacity. Jews have the law through revelation and scripture, but what the Jews have through special revelation, everyone else has through the law written on the heart or natural revelation. Under this system everyone, both Jews and Greeks, recognize that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and just and that he has a law which everyone must obey perfectly, if they are going to be justified. So, all have the capacity to recognize God and his absolute standard, but no one has the capacity to live up to this standard.

In the doctrine of Original Sin, as we get it from Augustine, everyone knows enough about God to know his perfect standards, but no one knows enough or can do enough to keep this standard. We all know enough to feel really depressed about our situation in life. In fact, if one does not feel guilty and depressed they have missed the first condition of coming to Christ. They may feel proud, and they may be stubborn, a particular problem with the Jews, but most people finally reach the condition of feeling bad, then they are prepared to hear the gospel message. Luckily, Christ died to meet the requirements of the law, and now the problem with the law, the reason for the guilt and depression, is resolved.

I suppose we can all adjust our conversion story to fit this model, just as Paul’s conversion is pictured along the lines of Luther’s. On the road to Damascus, Paul must have been struggling with his introspective conscience, feeling guilty and miserable until he meets Jesus, who relieves him of his guilt and depression. He meets Christ and understands deliverance is now provided from the requirement of the law, as Christ has met the requirements, paid the penalty, and grace is now available in place of wrath and punishment.

Misery may be the anteroom to many forms of conversion, and perhaps we can chalk misery up to some form of consciousness that we have broken the law. However, after more than twenty years in Japan (a place largely unexposed to justification theory) I never met anyone who had this perception of God, sin and the law, and this is not the way Paul describes his former pride in his religious achievement. Paul narrates his pre-Christian understanding as guilt free and “without fault” in regard to the law (in fact, this fits common Japanese self-perception). As he describes in Philippians, he considered himself righteous, zealous beyond his peers, and bearing the highest qualifications and impeccable credentials: “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless” (Php 3:5–6).

Romans 7 might be cited as support of Paul’s guilty conscience, but this chapter is Paul’s retrospective view, about either himself or Adam, from the perspective of a Christian. This is not a narrative about conversion, but about being trapped, and deceived. There is no clear route from Romans 7 to Romans 8, apart from the appearance of Christ and the breaking in of a new order. Romans 7 describes the pre-Christian condition and the nature of deception, and it is a lie that includes Paul’s notion of self-salvation as a Pharisee. It is a lie in which one is entrapped by the law of sin and death, and the law is the object of deception, and the deception is such that one is not aware of his own condition.

The question arises as to exactly what law both Jews and Gentiles share, and obviously, it is the law of sin and death (the law of deception). But in justification theory, law plays a key role in making one guilty about their sin, so the law is a primary force in prompting acceptance of Christ. But what law? If it is something along the line of the ten commandments, do we expect everyone to know about sabbath keeping, and the details about sexual morality? If it concerns the details of the Jewish law, should we expect everyone to know in their heart about not eating blood, about not cutting the forelocks, and about circumcision?. Can we glean a universal ethical standard from the Jewish law, separate from the details of this law?

Maybe there is not one law code but two, and then not one ethical system but a mix, but then we end up with a tightly regulated and specific ethical system, and a more general natural law. Since the law directly reflects the character of God (in this theory), and all infractions are duly punished, the two-system method seems flawed.  As Douglas Campbell concludes, “Either the model must claim that the Jewish law, in all its detail, is derivable from the cosmos through natural revelation or it must work with two ethical systems – one a more general set of ethical principles applicable to all and discernible in the cosmos, and the other a more extensive set with additional distinctive practices incumbent only on Jews and accessible primarily through revelation and texts.”[6] This system is grounded in retributive justice, so that according to how well people do with the prescribed rules, this will determine their punishment. But is this retributive justice on the basis of two distinct standards – the Jewish and Gentile standard? The exact perfect standard by which all are judged is unclear.

On the other hand, if the law is posited, as Paul explains in some detail in Romans and Galatians, not as the anteroom to the gospel but as the law of sin and death, then the universality of deception in regard to the law (Mosaic or otherwise) is accounted for. The law does not set the condition for salvation, but is what unconditional salvation delivers from.

There is clearly a problem in the presumed disjunction between what all people are capable of knowing and what none of them are capable of doing. On one hand they have intellectual capacities, I am suspicious are non-existent. Is it really the case that all people can derive the same basic facts about God, such as his omniscience, his omnipotence, and his righteousness, from nature? Can they then go on and deduce the same uniform ethical requirements – and then, though they are capable of all of this, are they completely incapacitated to do what they know is right? All of this feeds into the false gospel’s notion of faith and justice. “Justification theory posits a God of strict justice who holds all people accountable to a standard they are intrinsically unable to attain, and this seems unjust.”[7]

Or could it be that this perception of God, as law-giver, punisher, and destroyer is the pagan equivalent of deifying death? Isn’t this the lie from which Christ delivers rather than a truth he verifies and satisfies?

There is a further conflict in exactly what it is everyone is expected to know and how this connects to faith. Christianity and Judaism are based on historical revelation, yet the presumed universally shared knowledge is not historically specific but more of a philosophical understanding. That is, the criteria by which people are judged are universal, yet no one can live up to these criteria, so we have Christianity, which is historically specific. So, we have one criterion to condemn and another to save, but what is key is both criteria serve as a condition. As Campbell concludes,

 It is of course a much less arduous criterion than the rigorous demand under the law for ethical perfection (or even for 51 percent righteousness), but it is a criterion nevertheless. It is Luther’s own incapacity, now ruthlessly exposed, that demands this significantly reduced criterion, but the need for a criterion per se is grounded in the model’s opening assumptions. Justification is a voluntarist model throughout, focused on the deliberations of a rational individual, so any such individual must at the crucial moment do something![8]

The answer to Luther: faith saves, not due to the prior criterion of the law nor on a presumed capacity and incapacity for knowing and doing, but on the fact that death reigns in the sinful, deceived orientation to the law, and Christ delivers from sin and death and this is, as Paul describes throughout his gospel, universal, cosmic, for all people and creatures, and is the consummating fact of the eschaton when: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Php. 2:10-11). Faith is not a condition for salvation, it is salvation enacted in the life of the believer. In the justification system, faith does not seem to address any issue, or change the person beyond believing a set of facts. And the question arises, why these particular facts? But in unconditional salvation, faith is the uprooting of the orientation to death, in that being found in Christ is to be found in his resurrection life.

I conclude where Alvin Kimel concludes, with the Apostle Paul:

In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col 2:11-14).

This circumcision is not of the law but that performed on the heart by Christ. In the same way baptism, with its death and resurrection, is not an act of the one being baptized but a being acted on by Christ. Forgiveness is freely granted in the “making alive” of God through Christ. “The old Adam has been slain, and we now live in the Eucharist of the eschaton. We are saved by the nothing of grace because God’s love is absolute and unconditional: God wills our good, and he will accomplish it. He has sealed his commitment in the death of his Son.”[9] Through faith God is saving, cancelling the condition of the law (and its death dealing deceit) through the cross.

(Sign up for our next class, Romans: Salvation through the Body of Christ A theological study of the faithfulness of God revealed in Christ Jesus as articulated in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Focusing on Paul’s exposition of God making the world right through Christ. Starting September 4th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings) 

[1] Alvin Kimel, David Bentley Hart, Destined for Joy: The Gospel of Universal Salvation (p. 103). The Gospel of Universal Salvation. Kindle Edition.  

[2] James B. Torrance, “The Unconditional Freeness of Grace,” Theological Renewal (June/July 1978): 7-15. The article has been reprinted in Trinity and Transformation (2016), ed. Todd Speidell, pp. 276-287. Cited by Kimel, 104-105.

[3] Gerhard Forde, Justification by Faith—A Matter of Death and Life (1990), p. 22. Quoted in Kimel, 22.

[4] Forde, 22-23. Quoted in Kimel, 107-108.

[5] Kimel, 109.

[6] Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (p. 41). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

[7] Campbell, 45.

[8] Campbell, 25-26.

[9] Kimel, 112.

Watching Oppenheimer with Bulgakov: American Prometheus or American Adam

The lesson of Genesis 3, proven in human history, is that knowledge of the good or the depth of insight into God’s good creation, is tied to evil manipulation of this insight. More than this, as in the original deception, the knowledge of good and evil was and is taken as spiritual insight (a step toward becoming god). Through the elements of the world man presumes he can ascend to deity, but the “fruit” of this insight is deadly. The fundamental elements are used by Cain to bludgeon his brother to death so that he might displace Abel in the spiritual hierarchy. Having penetrated the depths of the knowledge of good and evil he descends into the world, imagining he is ascending to deity. As Sergius Bulgavov describes the fall: “Thus the deception of Satan was a grandiose ontological provocation,” in that material means are presumed to gain spiritual ends and spiritual death is presumed to be entry into spiritual life.[1]

This might be illustrated in the history of war and science. The course of human history has been shaped by warfare (with some historians claiming history can be written in terms of decisive battles) and warfare has been shaped by technological and scientific innovation. Mathematics, engineering, metallurgy, astronomy, chemistry, navigation, have each contributed simultaneously to civilization and to warfare, with progress in the former being synonymous with the latter. This is clearly illustrated in the case of physics.

Three-hundred years of research into physics revealed in the past century that the physical universe is relative to an observer, that there is an uncertainty principle or the sense in which the universe is not a determinate structure, but is impacted by observation. The universe is not a machine, and the laws of the universe are open, pointing to atomic freedom. The indication is that there is an incompleteness to the atomic world and that there is room not only for human manipulation, but divine care. On the other hand, the culmination of three hundred years of physics, and the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics, resulted in the atomic and hydrogen bomb.

The list of those working on innovation in theoretical physics is nearly synonymous with those who turned to working on the bomb, while those who refused this work can be counted on one hand (including, Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission, and Isidor Rabi, who served in a limited way at Los Alamos and was Robert Oppenheimer’s close friend). This raises the question of the connection between good and evil, in that those who peered deepest into the truth and goodness of the universe, instead of developing deep moral and spiritual sensitivity, were responsible for creating weapons of mass destruction.

We recently saw the film, Oppenheimer, about Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” who oversaw its production or invention at Los Alamos New Mexico, and its explosion at Alamogordo. The book, upon which the film was based, is entitled American Prometheus, and both the book and film convey the moral contradictions and struggle faced by Oppenheimer (brilliantly portrayed by Cillian Murphy). Maybe one of the premiere intellects of his generation, not only an outstanding scientist, but cultured and well read in a number of fields, nevertheless he may not have resembled Prometheus so much as the first man, Adam. Prometheus, the god that would civilize man by sharing fire from the sun, may be the wrong image, as Oppenheimer fails to break the bureaucratic and moral prosaicness (the whisperings of the earth-bound serpent) by which he is grounded.

As Bulgakov writes,

Prometheus symbolizes the struggle with metaphysical “petit-bourgeois” mediocrity, (this is man with a conservative imagination) with the self-satisfaction of this world. He misses the higher principle of life, the kingdom of God. The usual Luciferian “petit-bourgeois” interpretation of this symbol reduces it to the level of a struggle for the immanent empirical values of this world, whereas it actually summons man to a higher vocation, to the kingdom of God. It is this “petit-bourgeois” (conventionalism, conservatism) spirit that perpetuates good and evil in their interdependence as the sole path of life and ascent. The fallen state of man with the possibilities that it contains is therefore considered to be the supreme and unique state.[2] 

Rather than struggling against the petit-bourgeois values of his contemporaries (Bulgakov’s picture of Prometheus’ symbolism), Oppenheimer displays “satisfaction” with “immanent empirical values.” As Bulgakov notes, “Evil first presents itself before man in the guise of the natural world.” The serpent arises from the earth to engage the humans in an earthy, earth bound, and return to the earth dialogue. They confuse this earth-wisdom for spiritual insight. “The beginning of evil in man is therefore connected not with revolt or usurpation, but with misunderstanding, naivete and ignorance. Our progenitors did not know how to recognize or to terminate the poisonous conversation with the serpent.” [3] The serpent arises from the earth and speaks and returns to the earth, the earth seems to indicate he can serve as his own deity. There is a gullibility and curiosity – yet the knowledge of good and evil – continues to raise its head.

Oppenheimer is content to filter his scientific genius into building a bigger rock or larger weapon. He thus perpetuates the conventional spirit of “good and evil in their interdependence as the sole path of life and ascent.” This one, we might expect to be among the spiritually enlightened and morally adept, channels his imagination along the rut carved out by the progenitors of the race. Like Adam and Cain, Oppenheimer would employ the elementary particles to play god (as one of his contemporaries accuses). Rather than breaking free of the dance between good and evil, Oppenheimer embodies and proves the principle. Who, more than the father of the atomic bomb, demonstrated that human fallenness is as good as it gets in the petit-bourgeois value system.

So, we might picture Oppenheimer, as the American Adam, rather than as Prometheus. The knowledge of the good, of God’s good creation, is tied by Oppenheimer and his generation of physicists, to the worst sort of conventional evil. Though Oppenheimer has his doubts, and will later lay moral responsibility on the politicians, he never hesitates in building the bomb and agrees the bomb must be used on Japan (even helping in the selection of targets, and despite the fact his colleagues questioned the decision). Instead of imagining total freedom, which is one of the implications of high energy physics, Oppenheimer and his generation pick up where Cain left off. Using the most fundamental elements of the world, they bludgeon their brothers (along with their children and their wives) to death.

Instead of an enlightened, intelligent, freedom, what we get is completely devoid of this freedom.  In man is born the thought that through the elements of the world he is capable of ascending to the highest levels of spiritual life and knowledge. His consciousness of his spirituality has grown dim and the equilibrium between his flesh and his spirit has been disrupted.[4]

The universe at its core indicates both a guiding intelligence and an atomic ground for freedom but this spiritual freedom is not through the elements of the world. The descent of modern physicists into apprehending the elemental particles, the stuff of the universe, while it provided insight it also demonstrated instability or the possibility of disrupting, splitting, or exploding the world with death. Man can interfere with the world at its atomic level, but what he finds is not ascent into the spiritual. He does indeed find a gap indicating the universe marks his presence. The observer is reflected in the observation. The experimenter has to take account of himself in the experiment. But this also introduces the possibility for splitting, implosion, chain reaction and the infection of all with mortality.

The great insight into physics which is tied to most modern innovations is also tied to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the possibility of world destruction. The battle between good and evil, their necessary mutual implication is captured in Oppenheimer. The man is torn between the depth of insight into the good, and the recognition that with this knowledge he has the power of the sun – atomic power – to become the destroyer of the world. The image of the mushroom cloud over Alamogordo, and then duplicated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bears with it the image of skin melting off thousands, and hundreds of thousands of victims. People are still dying of radiation poisoning and cancer in New Mexico, and surrounding states. And every year the number of dead killed by the atomic bombing in Japan continues to increase.

Man, Adam, has the capacity for depth of insight, but this capacity for truth comes with the simultaneous capacity for destruction. God called man to be fruitful and to multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it, and (to) have dominion (Gen. 1:28). But with this power to dominate and manipulate arises the power not only of good but of profound evil. The universe is such that humans can feed into it, manipulate it, control it, and destroy it. Where God brings forth the universe out of the nothingness of the Big Bang, we recognize humans can reverse the process. Man has the power to return the world to the nothingness from out of which it came, and nuclear explosion perfectly illustrates the point.

Thus, Oppenheimer’s reflection upon the success of the Trinity test is fitting: “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” Oppenheimer, in the spirit of the first command, subdued the earth and took his place of dominion, but he too reduced it to thorns and thistles. The thorn of nuclear holocaust and the thistle of atomic power threatens to choke all life out of the world. The American Adam, like his progenitor, turned from the task of cultivating and extending the kingdom of God, to displacing it with the kingdoms of this world.

In this sense, the film Oppenheimer captures the biblical proportions of the human struggle enacted in Robert Oppenheimer and his race.

[1] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Kindle Edition) 162.

[2] Ibid, 189-190.

[3] Ibid, 162.

[4] Ibid, 162.

“I Stand at the Door and Knock”: Sergius Bulgakov and Encounter Between Divine and Human Personhood

Sergius Bulgakov’s description of the image of God in humans fulfilled can be captured in the movement between Romans 7, with its depiction of the image as an unfulfilled trinitarian potential, and Romans 8 with its depiction of participation in the Divine reality. The former, or created Sophia in Bulgakov’s description, is meant for the latter, uncreated Sophia or direct participation in Trinitarian reality. Created Sophia, apart from the fulfillment of this potential, still contains the infinite but as in a Lacanian psychoanalytic understanding, it is a bad infinite. This bad infinite, as with Friedrich Schelling and Jacques Lacan, is nothingness taking the place of divine reality. This dynamic of nothingness, that choice posed in creation ex nihilo (God or nothing), is a non or anti-reality serving in place of the positive reality of God. It is not that anyone can truly be alone or remain solitary. There is no complete separation from God – deism or atheism notwithstanding. Even in humankind’s imagined aloneness God provides for the integrity of human personhood, in that he does not overwhelm or violate or overpower, but as Christ says, “I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come into him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3: 20). God convinces “not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit” (Zech. 4: 6). He convinces by Divine love, which presumes the freedom of the person. As Bulgakov writes, “The freedom of the person remains inviolable and impenetrable even for God. Voluntarily, by His kenosis of Creator and Provider, He suspends His omnipotence before the person.”[1] God comes to us in Christ presuming that the image in which we are created is already correlated, already desirous, already made for Divinity.

In Bulgakov’s depiction, the displacement of the Divine image (unlimited sophianization always approximating – participating – mirroring the divine image) can never lead to a complete break or to a “complete fading of the image,” as it always “bears the stamp of eternity.”[2] This “creaturely eternity,” in and of itself, may not be open to explanation apart from recognizing that for which it was made, which is to say the bad infinity of Romans 7 or the isolated psychoanalytic subject, is an impenetrable mystery, if explanation is sought within itself. Just the notion of the limitlessness of eternal life contained in the image, creates a series of paradoxes or antinomies, if explanation for this limitlessness is sought within finite possibilities.

The impossibility of the infinite in the finite, or the negative mystery which this creates, can itself become the lure (the lure of the obstacle cause of desire). For example, sexual difference, or loading infinite weight on male/female difference, creates an obstacle to fulfilment. As Bulgakov puts it, creation “contains infinite possibilities of ascending and descending motion, of deceleration and acceleration,” in which, apart from grace or providential interaction, there is incompleteness – but “dissatisfied with itself” the created “thirsts for fulfillment” in the divine for which it was made.[3] The human image is a receptacle for union with God, but plugging other things into this receptacle creates a short circuit or a bad infinity, in which absence and nothingness are invested with infinite weight (see my two blogs on Bulgakov tracing why antinomies? here and here). We may be familiar with the short circuit (picturing Romans 7 as the norm), but this creaturely infinity only finds fulfillment, according to Bulgakov, in being joined to the Divine.

As Bulgakov notes, this being joined to God or the “sophianization of man by grace,” which is called salvation, is not simply a by-product of the fall of man. “It is generally thought that salvation is something extraordinary that comes from outside, that it transcends man’s natural vocation, his creaturely sophianicity.” But this “salvation” or deification “is predetermined by the very creation of man in the image of God.” Being created in the image of God, means humankind was made to be joined to the Divine, in the manner in which Christ brings together Divine and human in his person. It is not that the individual becomes something other than herself, but she becomes fully herself. Christ’s Divine-humanity is the pattern set for all of humanity. The incarnation of Christ, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the world, are not counter to the individual or her image, but the correlate of what it means to have been created in that image. This possibility is contained in the image, and the fall is not the explanation for the need for grace, but the image itself calls for the fulfillment of its potential in the work of Christ. “The fall of man here signifies only deviation from the straight path of his ascent, which leads him to deification, or sophianization, by virtue of the image of God in him. Man’s state before the fall does not in any way correspond to the postulates of deism concerning the total separation of man’s life from God and the abolition of God’s leadership.”[4]

The joining of the Divine and the human was not complete with creation, but in the Genesis scene, the image was already dependent upon God’s presence and participation. Genesis indicates the necessity of a synergistic relationship as God’s breath is breathed into the first man. The tree of life (or tree of breath) pictures this synergism as not only present in the the original image but also dependent on the necessity of its fulfillment outside of itself (through access to God or the tree of life). Bulgakov’s project aims to return, through his doctrine of Sophia, to an understanding of the human image as a “co-imagedness, since the creature contains the living image of the Creator and is correlated with Him.” The repetition of God in the human image calls for continued life and repetition. Prior to setting forth his notion of this co-imaging human capacity, Bulgakov makes the case that the failure of Western theology in regard to the most basic questions in regard to cosmology and ontology, is itself an argument. It is, he says, “a negative argument in favor of the sophiological statement of this question as the only possible statement for overcoming the aporias” in Western theology.[5]

Genesis pictures the freedom to refuse the fulfilment of this relationship, but theology subsequent to Augustine, focused as it is on God’s sovereignty, does not allow for either this freedom or any significant survival of the Divine image in humanity.  That is, the significance of the human image is lost and left unaccounted for in subsequent theology. This will result in a conceptualization of salvation, peculiar to the West, which cuts itself off from understanding salvation as fulfillment of the original image and the completion of creation. As a result, sin and salvation are made mysterious. What replaces the biblical picture of personhood (the personhood of humans and the personhood of God) Bulgakov describes as something like a mechanical force. “This entire doctrine of the first and second causes, the doctrine of God as the cause of the world, which acts upon the world but also interacts with it in some way, is only a monstrous misunderstanding, a theological temptation, which replaces the revelation of the living and personal God with the doctrine of an impersonal mechanism of causality.”[6]

The Augustinian doctrine of original sin and predestination did not leave room for freedom but it really left no room for sin and salvation in conjunction with persons or the human image. The problem inherited and furthered by Thomas, in his depiction of God as first-cause, ends in a deterministic understanding in which human freedom and the divine image in man are rendered moot or inconsequential. As Bulgakov describes, there may be a semantic preservation of creaturely freedom, but there “is no ontological place in the system of determinism” for any real freedom. “If a mountain (Mt. Blanc, say) settles with all of its weight upon a thin nail that enters into a soft tree, it is meaningless to speak of the possibility of resistance or of choice for this nail: the choice of entering into the tree or of resisting. But the relation between the omnipotence of God and creaturely freedom is incommensurable even with the hugeness of Mt. Blanc in relation to the nail: creaturely freedom is simply annihilated.”[7]

Bulgakov traces the subsequent attempts to rescue human freedom, as in Molinism, but he judges this theology and philosophy a failure in its rejection of a fulsome understanding of the image. “From this point of view, the difference between Thomism and Molinism, so exaggerated in Catholic doctrine, is purely fictitious, insofar as both are forms of inconsistent determinism, trying to save themselves in different ways from their own inexorability.” Bulgakov shows that the turn to Aristotelianism in Thomism leaves theology with the problems of Greek philosophy. “Strictly speaking, there is a place here neither for the distinction between the first and second cause nor for the distinction (which is the same thing) between God and the world, since God is introduced here into the causal logic of the world and the world is absorbed by God’s being. In this monism, there is neither God nor world in their correlation.” [8]

There is no explanation of how God and world can be in relationship, without destroying or absorbing either God or the world. God does everything, in much of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, as there is a loss of the possibility of the divine image in man due to determinism. Augustinian predestination raises the specter, not only that God predestines some to heaven but its correlate, that some are predestined to hell. “To the question, What explains this election of some and the reprobation of others? Augustine responded that he did not know, referring to the unfathomability of the ways of God. The inevitable conclusion that follows and was drawn later is that Christ brought redemption and came into the world only for the elect.”[9] Augustine makes no attempt to explain, apart from the fact of God’s will. Thomas, following Augustine, offers the non-explanation that the saving of some is brought out and appreciated most fully against background of the majority being condemned: “God wished to show his goodness to people, in relation to those whom he predestined, sparing them according to grace and punishing them according to justice.”[10]

Though Augustine and Thomas will attempt to ward off the doctrine of double predestination, John Calvin fully embraces it, along with the perverse understanding of God this entails. “Having the courage of consistency, Calvinism took all the horrifying conclusions of predestination to their extreme.” Calvin refuses all the subtleties attempted by Augustine and Thomas, and enthusiastically embraces that, which apart from long religious training and attenuation must appear abhorrent – the most perverse doctrine ever formulated. “Calvin proclaims his doctrine of double predestination, to glory and to perdition, as God’s inexorable will (thereby making the Gospel approach the Koran). It is clear that such an absolute predestination completely eliminates the freedom of the will (although good works are retained), election or reprobation being logically considered an inevitable fate (Inst. 3, 22, 2).” To deny this obvious conclusion in regard to reprobation is, in Calvin’s estimate, “childishness.” This conclusion is quickly followed by the adult decision (?) that God wills evil: “’He established with the decree of his will’ the fall of the first man (Inst. 3, 23, 81). Adam fell because of a divine predestination. ‘God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him of all his descendants; he willed it’ (Inst. 3, 23, 7).”[11]

The conclusion, drawn from assuming God as cause rather than as Creator – setting both salvation and creation in a causal mode, is “a monstrous misunderstanding” in which the “living personal God,” to say nothing of living personal humans, is replaced by an “impersonal mechanism of causality.” “Here, the idea of creation, of the Creator and creation, is replaced by the concept of a well-adjusted mechanism of causes; and into the motion, established from the foundation, of the moving parts, one wishes to inject freedom. In this doctrine, neither man, the image of God, nor God, man’s Proto-image and Creator, exists.” Despite the best of intentions, freedom is lost, God is lost, and human personhood is lost, all replaced by a sovereign machine.[12] This negative argument indicates the need for a more positive development.

For Bulgakov, the turn from God as cause to God as Creator is the means of rightly understanding personhood and the possibility of God entering into creation and his creatures. As he sums it up, “In the creation of the world, God, in becoming the Creator, repeats or doubles his own being beyond the Divine Sophia in the creaturely Sophia.”[13] The illustration of what Bulgakov might mean, is found in the divine breath repeated by and in the first man. This repetition of the breath or life of God in the man, gives man his own life, which is indistinguishable, in certain aspects, from the life of God. The man has personhood, free choice, a capacity for relationship, and a capacity to name, order, and exercise his will on the world. Of course, with the fall, there are delimitations set upon this life and personhood, but the original image, in its direct association with God, remains. Just as with the breath, repeated in the Hebrew poetry of Genesis (in God, in the man, in the tree) so too “the creaturely Sophia is the self-repetition, as it were, of the Divine Sophia outside of divine being, in the “nothing” “out of” which or in which God created the world. Having the force of divine being, the creaturely Sophia, in herself, as the “Beginning” of creaturely being, does not need a “first” cause and cannot even have one.”[14]

Bulgakov pictures the human person as retaining the eternality of the divine image, such that birth, or parentage, or physical origins, do not explain personhood. The origin of humans is the eternal image shared by all of humanity, and this eternality is reflected in the repetition of the divine image in the multiplicity, becoming, or potentiality of all human persons. Even the recognition of finitude (mortality and death) points to an eternal reflexive capacity – an infinite capacity for reason and for choice. Thus, the confrontation with Christ does not describe a passive relinquishment of will, personhood, and reason, but their active engagement. “By their very nature, precisely by virtue of creaturely freedom, creatures cannot receive their being in a purely passive manner. They are endowed with free activity and are individually qualified in the reception of their being. They absorb grace, and this absorption of grace is an ongoing sophianization, actualization of image in likeness.”[15] We must imitate Christ, walk as he walked, exercise active choice (opening the door) in following and reflecting to a greater degree his likeness – forever completing our own image. “Creaturely freedom, modal yet authentic within its limits, encounters divine suggestions which graciously flow into it and are ‘synergistically’ united with it. Man wrestles with God, like Jacob, in his freedom, but he also asks for and receives God’s blessing, also like Jacob.”[16]

In the passage from Romans 7 to Romans 8, it is not that human will or personhood are relinquished or absent in either case, but in Romans 7 the misdirected will is split, frustrated, and caught up in death (the infinite turned in upon itself). There is a threefold absence in the I, of Trinitarian proportions. The law serves in place of the Father, meaning the divine-human relation is disrupted. The ego or I serves in place of being in Christ, such that the reflexive image only reverberates in the interior dimension. This refracts into “the body of death” such that the I is an antinomy, split from within. Chapter 7 is filled with the peculiar suffering of the psychoanalytic subject. The individual is driven by jealousy (7:7), a living death (7:9), deception (7:11), bondage (7:14), frustrated willing (7:18), summed up in Paul’s cry of agony: “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (7:24). This is not someone devoid of eternity in their hearts, but haunted by it and yet unable to grasp it. The answer to this eternal, agonizing suffering, is found in Christ. In Romans 8 the person is redirected: “For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace” (8:6). The incapacity exposed in 7, “not doing what I want” (7:15) is displaced by an ability to walk “according to the Spirit” (8:4), and the relation with the law is replaced by a relationship with the Father: “you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, Abba! Father!’” (8:15). The synergistic relation is restored as one dwells in Christ and the Spirit melds with the human spirit: “The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him” (8:16-17). In the language of Bulgakov, created Sophia (the created image) is filled with Divine Sophia (the person of God) in and through the love of God fulfilling the human image. The created image is melded with the Divine image and here is predestination of holistic, choosing, free, persons (8:29-30).

[1] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Kindle Edition) 226.

[2] Ibid, 203.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 203-204.

[5] Ibid, 221.

[6] Ibid, 220.

[7] Ibid, 208.

[8] Ibid, 211-212.

[9] Ibid, 214.

[10] Quoted in Bulgakov, 216.

[11] Ibid, 217.

[12] Ibid, 220-221.

[13] Ibid, 222.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid, 225.

[16] Ibid.

Sophia as Deliverance from the Sin of Gnosticism, Dualism, and Monism

Sergius Bulgakov defended himself against accusations of Gnosticism with the simple statement, that is definitive of his work, that he in no way endorsed dualism.[1] His utilization of philosophy has one overriding point, the point of his work – the antinomies (giving rise to Gnostic dualism and monism) which present themselves in philosophy are characteristic of the sinful human predicament. Philosophical antinomy expresses the antagonism, alienation, agonism, and violence which poses itself in the human condition (human wisdom) as ground. Gnosticism is a case in point of the human problem. His work is the resolution, not only to the Gnostic dilemma, but to the human dilemma (represented by Gnosticism) – namely, that beginning with the world, irresolvable contradiction and dualism (giving rise also to monism) are the result. This is the tragedy of philosophy, but the tragedy of philosophy is the tragedy of the human condition. Understanding the scope of the problem Bulgakov is addressing may be the prerequisite to trusting his orthodoxy, even in those daring passages which an uncharitable reading might consign to Gnostic heresy.

What we learn from Bulgakov, is not that Gnosticism per se is the human problem, though Gnosticism or some form of proto-Gnosticism or Gnostic-like understanding (the term may have limited usefulness) is the primary heresy the early church confronted and which much of the New Testament is written to combat. To call this heresy Gnosticism may be not only a historical inaccuracy but a delimitation of the human problem, which the various Gnostic cults represent, but which they in no way exhaust.  To imagine that it is Valentinian Gnosticism that is the source of Hegelianism, Russian Sophiology, or simply modern tendencies, is to get the cart before the horse.[2] Gnosticism is a case in point of the dualism which inevitably attaches itself to human thought, and Bulgakov is addressing this larger problem. He understands the problem is not simply philosophical, but pertains to events like the Russian Revolution, to world war, or to the unfolding of world history. His vision is that the pervasive manifestation of the human problem is addressed at its root in the work of Christ and the Church: “The truths contained in the revelation of Divine-humanity, particularly in its eschatological aspect, are so unshakable and universal that even the most shattering events of world history, which we are now witnessing, pale and are nullified in their ontological significance in the face of these truths insofar as we perceive these events in the light of that which is to come. And that which is to come is the Church in its power and glory, together with the transfiguration of creation.”[3] Dualism is not simply the problem posed by the abstractions of philosophy, but these abstractions articulate the moving force, the “shattering events” of world history,” which are nullified in the revelation of Divine-humanity. The philosophical arena is the prelude to theological insight in its articulation and demonstration of the problem.

Thus, Bulgakov begins his work on eschatology and ecclesiology by describing the problem inherent to taking human wisdom as an end: “it is first necessary to exclude two polar opposites: pantheistic, or atheistic, monism on the one hand and the dualistic conception of creation on the other.”[4] The nature of Sophia or wisdom in its created form, divine-like as it is, thus gives rise to the characteristic forms of human religion, philosophy, and psychology. Human identity is through sameness (monism) and difference (dualism), and these do not really constitute two alternatives, as every thesis/antithesis is aimed at its synthesis. Monism, in its materialistic form would resist (obliterate) the spiritual, and in its spiritual form it would deny materialistic reality. “On the other hand, dualistic atheism is a kind of subjugation to satanism, where the prince of this world, the black god, pretends to occupy a place alongside God.”[5] Avoiding these two extremes defines Bulgakov’s project.

Created Sophia alone, and in his estimate philosophy only has this resource, cannot account for the world and God. The Greek philosophical effort is aimed at providing an independent integrity for the world, “where the world can find existence for itself alongside God’s absoluteness. The world does not want to become nothing in the face of this absoluteness, but instead seeks its own something. It finds this something in a kind of anti-god or minus-god.”[6] There is a reification of the nothing, from out of which the world was created, or in Platonic terms the chora is the eternal ground of the world.

To posit a god alongside God, or an absolute alongside the Absolute is, in Bulgakov’s estimate, clear nonsense. “Every system of dualism falls apart from internal contradiction, is ontological nonsense, which one does not have to take into account in the general problematic of the world. It is impossible to accept that God exists and that, alongside Him and besides Him, there exists a pseudo-divine principle, a “second god,” expressly directed at the world.”[7] While religion and philosophy built upon dualism can be dismissed, what is undeniable is the goal of finding a place for the world and the problematic this poses, even for Christian theism. The tendency in overcoming dualism is to return to various forms of monism – proclaiming there is nothing outside of the world or that there is nothing existing alongside God (discounting the reality of the world). This is the problem Bulgakov addresses, which accounts for his unique approach in describing the God/world relation as that found in Creator and creation.

Either the world directly has its being in the divine act of creation or it is imagined to have its being in nothing (the contradictory impossibility implicitly posed in Platonism):

The world relates to God not as equal to Him, not as a mode of being coordinated with Him, but (if one can say this) as a heterogeneous mode of being. The world is created by God; it is His creation. The world’s existence is a special modality of being. This being is one; it is precisely divine being. And for the world there is no other ground, or “place,” of being except this createdness by God, except this special mode of divine being. And the fact that the world is created out of nothing means only that the world exists in God and only by God, for the world does not have within itself the ground of its own being. In itself, the world is groundless; it is established on top of an abyss, and this abyss is “nothing.”[8]

The created being of the world is not a fact available in the world but only through Christian revelation. Platonism has no answer as to how the “ideal, intelligible ground” of the world is connected to the world. At least, this is the Aristotelian critique of Platonism, but Aristotle then posits the unconditional eternality of the world and his Unmoved Mover as impersonal force. So the choice is a Platonic dualism or an Aristotelian monism.

Aristotle makes the supreme principle of the world, the prime mover, so transcendent that it appears to be separated from the world, above it. But at the same time, this principle is only the world, although taken to its highest power. Aristotle’s theology therefore has a cosmological character, and his cosmology passes into theology. Strictly speaking, his theocosmism has a real place neither for God nor for the world, because it does not really distinguish between them. The world continues into God, so to speak, and God descends to the world, is immanent in it, as its (impersonal) foundation.[9]

Depending upon one’s preference, Aristotelianism amounts to either a dualism between a distant God and the world or a monism in which the world includes its cause. Aristotle’s Sophiology “is a doctrine of divinity without God and apart from God, of divinity in place of God, in the capacity of God.”[10] Platonism divides created and uncreated Sophia and Aristotelianism allows for ambiguity. Bulgakov concludes:

Thus, all that both Plato and Aristotle (each in his own way and in his own language) have to report about the divine or sophianic foundation of the world is true as an intuition of human philosophy. However, this foundation remains uncomprehended and unexplained in its special nature as Sophia or divinity in relation to God. Sophia is directly equated with God here, and sophiology is considered to exhaust both theology and cosmology. Plato and Aristotle are both sophiologists, but they are unable to complete their sophiologies in a theology. Indeed, they do not even have a theology. In this they are burdened by the limitedness of paganism.[11]

The project of Bulgakov’s Sophiology is to “overcome the world’s isolation” while still distinguishing the world from God. The danger is the world will be lost in pantheism, in which God is everything, or God will be lost in the world (“abstract cosmism”).

Thomism and various trends in scholastic and patristic thought turn to the Aristotelian notion of causality (to attempt to cross this bridge), positing God as first cause or prime mover and the world is what is moved. But the unmoved mover reduces to contradiction as causality causes and is caused and a mover moves and is moved and the unmoved mover is neither moved nor moving. Causality and motion “both belong to the world of uninterrupted, unruptured, unitary being, continuous in motion and in causal connection.”[12] Cause and motion do not transcend the world. The first cause is part of a causal chain, supposedly linking God and the world, yet we do not encounter God in the world or as part of this causal chain. Either God is erased as part of a causal chain, or there is an infinite gap between God and the world. Laplace proposes there is no gap and no need for the hypothesis of God in the causal chain, and inasmuch as God is simply first cause in a series this must be true – God is not needed.  

God, however, is not simply the “cause” of the world but its creator, and this is quite different, in that he stands outside the being of the world. The world is not God and God is not present as part of the being of the world. To project the being of the world upon God, a bottom-up apologetic, inevitably reduces God to part of the furniture of the world. He is simply another link in the causal chain, and if the chain is long enough, God need not be posited as its end. Creator and creation speak of a very different sort of God/world relation. “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the visible came from the invisible” (Heb. 11: 3). Causality and motion are visible aspects of the being of the world and they do not touch upon divinity or reach the notion of creation and Creator.

The Creator is a person not merely an impersonal cause, yet the Aristotelian notion taken up by Thomas displaces God with the mechanism of cause and motion. “But God’s Person, who is a Doer, not a cause, does not fit at all into this category.”[13] The Creator-creation relationship, inclusive of the fact that God sustains the universe, sets God outside of a cause and effect or mover and motion sort of mechanics. Causality is impersonal and “dead” where the creativity bringing forth creation is “alive and life-bearing” and, far from the blind emptiness of causality, it is guided by a person and this person is working out creative goals. Creation has a telos that pulls it forward and not simply a blunt cause that pushes it along.[14]

God’s life, or who God is, is the creative force behind creation. God’s life extends into the very breath or life at the center of the universe. And here Bulgakov makes a clear departure from Thomism and much of western theology, in that he pictures creation as an essential part of God. God is not by chance or accident Creator, but Creator is God’s nature.

The roots of the world’s creation lie in God’s eternity. It is usually considered that the world’s creation is something nonessential, additional, and as if accidental in God’s being. It is thought that God did not have to become the Creator, that He does not need the world, that He could remain in the solitude and glory of His magnificence (cf. Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics; see above).[15]

Along with this notion, that God became the creator at some point in time, there is not only a positing of a time before time, but the posting of a difference between God’s freedom and any “necessity” coordinate with his nature.

 In Thomism creation is not a necessary part of God’s nature, but Bulgakov suggests this leads to contradiction in that “all such attempts to measure God’s being by time, namely before and after creation, or to define different modes of necessity and freedom in God, as well as their degree, are exposed as absurd, as contradicting God’s eternity and unchangeability. In general, the intention, in God Himself, not only to distinguish but also to separate and even to oppose God in Himself and the Creator is wholly fallacious. God’s all-simple essence is one and unchanging, and if God is the Creator, He is the Creator from all eternity.”[16] God is, as part of his essence, Creator and this means creation is included in God’s life. Creation from nothing indicates creation’s ground in the life of God. While creation may have its own sort of created being, the divine life and being are its ground. The world does not simply exist alongside God, though God has granted the world its own autonomy, but this autonomy arises directly from the work of God and arises from the intra-divine life. In turn, God is not limited by the world but who he is extends into the world.

Thus, God is both God in Himself and the Creator, with a completely equal necessity and freedom of His being. In other words, God cannot fail to be the Creator, just as the Creator cannot fail to be God. The plan of the world’s creation is as co-eternal to God as is His own being in the Divine Sophia. In this sense (but only in this sense), God cannot do without the world, and the world is necessary for God’s very being. And to this extent the world must be included in God’s being in a certain sense. (But by no means does this inclusion signify the crude pantheistic identification of God and the world, according to which God is the world and only the world.) [17]

Necessity and freedom are not opposed in God, but are inseparable. On a human scale, we come to total freedom, not through resisting the will of God, but by submitting to this will, as this is the fulfillment of our nature. This “necessity” is freedom, and there is no antagonism or contradiction. So too, the divine nature exercises total freedom by acting in accord with this nature, thus there is not a distinction in God, as he naturally is, and God as Creator. God could no more not create than he could not be God. It is his nature to create. “For this reason, we must consider inadmissible and contradictory the anthropomorphic principle that God “freely” (i.e., in the sense of the absence of necessity, not compulsory but inner necessity, of course), or accidentally, as it were, created the world, and that the world therefore did not have to be created.”[18]

This does not mean that creation “completes God” or that the world is divine in a pantheistic fashion. 

 The Divine Sophia exists in a dual mode: in her own mode, which belongs to her in eternity; and in the creaturely mode, as the world. Only such an identification of the two modes of Sophia, with their simultaneous differentiation, can explain why, although God is the Creator, this does not change his divinely sophianic being or introduce in the latter a non-divine or extra-divine principle.[19]

Creation is founded on the wisdom of God, and this wisdom or Sophia, as in Christ, has both its created and uncreated mode. “The LORD possessed me at the beginning of His way, Before His works of old. From everlasting I was established, From the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth” (Proverbs 8:22-23). Wisdom, eternal and uncreated, first puts forth its energy in creation, then becomes incarnate and created. This wisdom is both “from everlasting” or from out of eternity, and then, in subsequent verses, it is conceived or given “birth” (ESV), or “brought forth” (NRSV). As the NRSV translates it, “The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.” God creates from out of himself, or to say the same thing, from out of nothing.[20] Divine Sophia is the mode in which creation was brought forth and it is through this wisdom that the divine foundation is provided, but this ground in eternity is not itself divine.

In this sense, creaturely being exists alongside God and not in God. Being is conferred by God onto the world, and thus is laid “a foundation for being in itself.”[21] As Bulgakov puts it, “The trihypostatic God has the divine world in and for Himself. But the being of this divine world contains yet another mode of its being in itself: as content that is independent of its belonging to God.”[22] There is a hypostatic Sophia (joined directly to divinity), and a non-hypostatic Sophia granted being in itself.

Christ is the ideal (telos) of creature and Creator brought together, and Christ’s incarnation is the dynamic goal being worked out (it is in process) in all of Creation. Creation has its own “temporal-creaturely being” and is in the mode of becoming, but this is not alien to the divine foundation, though it is distinguished from the unchanging Being of God. In creation’s being completed the creaturely Sophia is taking on her identity with Divine Sophia.

Bulgakov resorts to a psychological picture of this process. He pictures the I, in language that resembles Freud’s fundamental fantasy, as imagining itself without origin and as self-positing. This has a double sense, in which the self-positing I simply calls upon its own sophianic resources, and reduplicates the fall – or the attempt to have life within itself. As Bulgakov points out, the I is confronted with limitations, and thus its creaturely and divine likeness contradict one another. This contradiction is resolved only where the creaturely consents to being completed in the divine likeness – the universal consent given in Christ.[23]

Divine and creaturely Sophia are joined perfectly in Christ: “Revealed in this world are the same words of the supra-eternal Word that make up the ideal content of the Divine Sophia, the life of God: ‘All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1: 3).’”[24] The life of the Word in the Spirit pervades all of creation – giving being to the Word and through him being to the world. “One and the same Spirit of God gives them being. It is necessary to affirm and understand with all one’s power this identity of the divine and creaturely world, or (what is the same thing) the identity of the Divine and the creaturely Sophia, in their essence, and thus the eternal, uncreated, divine foundation of the world in God.”[25] This is not Gnosticism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, or Thomism, but is explanation of how Christ saves, reduplicating the hypostasis of the first born in the extended family of God.

[1] Fabian Linde, The Spirit of Revolt: Nikolai Berdiaev’s Existential Gnosticism (Stockholm University, Stockholm Slavic Studies 39, 2010) 106.

[2] See the work by Richard Lee May, Gnosticism and Modernity: An Archaeology of the Influence of Valentinian Gnosticism on Modern Systems of Thought Through the Theological Theme of Sophiology (unpublished Dissertation, Canterbury Christ Church University, 2015).

[3] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition) Introduction.

[4] Ibid, 3.

[5] Ibid, 5.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 6.

[8] Ibid, 7.

[9] Ibid, 11.

[10] Ibid, 11-12.

[11] Ibid, 14

[12] Ibid, 35.

[13] Ibid, 35.

[14] Ibid, 37-38.

[15] Ibid, 44.

[16] Ibid, 44-45.

[17] Ibid, 45-46.

[18] Ibid, 46.

[19] Ibid, 46.

[20] Ibid, 63

[21] Ibid, 63.

[22] Ibid, 48.

[23] Ibid, 88-89.

[24] Ibid, 50.

[25] Ibid, 50.

Cluster Bombs for Jesus: The Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit 

The demonization of Jesus by the Pharisees (in Matthew 12:23-29) will ultimately result in his crucifixion. This, combined with Jesus’ teaching, exposes their blind hatred, their taking good for evil and evil for good. He exposes the murderous scapegoating mechanism, which is the true heart of their religion. They have confused God and the devil, such that they would destroy God incarnate in order to save their nation, religion, and themselves. Killing God to save the nation (Israel, in this instance), is the satanic strategy and law of the universe which Christ exposes. The Creator submits himself to the law of his creatures, submitting himself to murder – their salvation system. The strategy is evident in the nuclear strategy (mutually assured destruction), entailing the destruction of the world (in nuclear winter) in order to win a nuclear war, pointing to the law of blind hatred, demonization, and scapegoating always at work in war. Every war is the result of “ultimate injustice,” a desperate “necessity” in which there are no options and all out destruction is the only alternative. The enemy has the power to destroy the nation. They have nuclear plans, weapons of mass destruction, and the devil himself is on their side. The demonized other is beyond the pale – with negotiation or forgiveness unimaginable. The positing of satan – the demonized other – is the satan, which makes forgiveness or empathy or balance impossible.

In the eyes of the Pharisees, Jesus is an evil enemy devoid of the good. His movement must be destroyed. He is the devil, Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Stalin, Mussolini, and Putin, or the equivalent of every demonized devil, who must be obliterated. However, the charge against Jesus is not yet the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The age of the Spirit is ushered in by the Messiah, inclusive of His rejection and death, exposing once and for all the blind hatred that would kill him and for which he pronounced forgiveness on the cross.

Demonizing Jesus, calling the good evil, and glorifying evil as good, allows no room for the work of life-giving power of the Holy Spirit or forgiveness, but this is not the blasphemy to which Jesus refers. The attack on the Son of Man is not itself the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, as demonizing Jesus, calling the good evil and evil good, is not a peculiar problem of Pharisees or Romans. Demonization is the universal human problem giving rise to violence and war. This is the law and organizing principle of the world which killed Jesus, and this is the mechanism Jesus exposes.

The mechanism of blind hatred, of scapegoating, and sacralizing murder, are forever exposed by the work of Christ, which ushers in the age of the Spirit. The age of the Spirit, or the age of forgiveness, are made possible by the work of Christ. The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is demonization and scapegoating in spite of Christ’s work. The forgiveness of God is contingent (as outlined in the Lord’s Prayer) upon forgiveness (may I be forgiven as I forgive), most especially of the enemy or the unforgiveable other. Demonization of the enemy, in the age of the Spirit, is the unforgivable sin as it cancels the possibility of forgiveness. The unforgiveable sin, in other words, is projecting the impossibility of forgiveness upon the demonized other.

In church history, the demonization of Jesus is soon reversed, so that the very motive that killed Jesus is turned on the Jews during the crusades. The contagion of violence that killed Jesus, in the ultimate rejection of the Gospel, is taken up in the name of Jesus. Could it be that among the first to commit the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit were those Christians who trampled on the cross of Christ by demonizing and murdering Jews in the name of Jesus? Rather than obeying the gospel command (the forgiveness of the enemy demonstrated and instituted by Christ), Christians, in their antisemitism, cancelled the very heart of the gospel. They are among those who go on “sinning willfully.”

As the writer of Hebrews indicates, it is one thing to set aside the Law of Moses but “How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace?” The next verse indicates clearly, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay” (Heb 10:28–30). The unwillingness to suffer, the seeking of vengeance (not allowing for God’s vengeance), the demonization of the other, all in the name of Jesus, tramples upon the cross and the Spirit of grace it provides.

This is frightening at a personal level, as it is easy to demonize the enemy, but it is also frightening at a corporate level, as the contagion of demonization sweeps over people and there seems to be no resisting it. The gospel is the singular point of resistance, the singular place where we should be able to stand back from the hysteria of scapegoating and recognize that all-out violence, that which killed the savior, is the blasphemy from which he would save.

The problem or impossibility of Christian nationalism, is that nations work according to the logic of the scapegoat while Christianity is the exposure of the scapegoating mechanism. The nation state depends upon demonization, while Christianity is premised upon its defeat. The lie of demonization, apart from its exposure by Christ, never sinks in. The projection of evil necessary for war, is the lie which is only incrementally exposed, apart from Christ.

It is obvious that the various military fiascoes of the United States, in Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine are built on a hollow demonization. Evil must be destroyed no matter the cost, or at least this is the narrative which justifies yet one more war. To protect human rights and establish international order there is no end to the human rights violations and chaos required. The justifications are lies, but few seem to notice. Germany had no nuclear weapon, the Japanese were set to surrender before the nuclear holocaust unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the communist domino effect was a hoax, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Noriega was an American puppet, etc. etc. etc.  The past justifications now stand exposed, and the lying prognoses of easy victory are set aside as the next demon arises. The hoax is forgotten, and pure evil is projected on the next enemy. As Chris Hedges argues, “The U.S. public has been conned, once again, into pouring billions into another endless war. They lied about Afghanistan. They lied about Iraq. And they are lying about Ukraine.”[1]

Yes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war crime, but have we forgotten it was provoked by NATO expansion and by the United States backing of the 2014 “Maidan” coup? Could it be, as Hedges argues, that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war serving U.S. interests? “It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is irrelevant.” Hedges concludes, “The war will only be solved through negotiations that allow ethnic Russians in Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s protection, as well as Ukrainian neutrality, which means the country cannot join NATO. The longer these negotiations are delayed the more Ukrainians will suffer and die. Their cities and infrastructure will continue to be pounded into rubble.[2]

Indeed, negotiation is the only possible outcome, short of Ukrainian absorption by Russia, yet the United States may reap benefits in resisting the inevitable. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell admitted as much: “First, equipping our friends on the front lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way — in both dollars and American lives — to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States.” Hedges makes the case that the Ukrainian war is not without vested U.S. financial interests, as “most of the money that’s been appropriated for Ukraine security assistance doesn’t actually go to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense manufacturing. It funds new weapons and munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace the older material we have provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this assistance means more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American servicemembers.”[3]

In the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven, the old gunslinger is familiar with the sort of demonization that has had to occur to give rise to murderous impulses, but he needs the money. He recognizes the humanity of his victims, and his own cold-blooded willingness to kill is made obvious. Forgiveness is neither given nor a possibility in this black and white world, yet the entire edifice is exposed as a lie, in this most unwestern of westerns.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has taken on the aura of a white hatted good guy, but is his banning of eleven opposition parties justified, or is his allowing of fascists and right-wing militias to flourish truly serving democracy? Is it even possible to question his saintliness or to question the goodness of Ukraine? Hedges raises the questions,

Why did the Ukrainian parliament revoke the official use of minority languages, including Russian, three days after the 2014 coup? How do we rationalize the eight years of warfare against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region before the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022? How do we explain the killing of over 14,200 people and the 1.5 million people who were displaced, before Russia’s invasion took place last year? How do we deal with the anti-Russian purges and arrests of supposed “fifth columnists” sweeping through Ukraine, given that 30 percent of Ukraine’s inhabitants are Russian speakers? How do we respond to the neo-Nazi groups supported by Zelenskyy’s government that harass and attack the LGBT community, the Roma population, anti-fascist protests and threaten city council members, media outlets, artists and foreign students? How can we countenance the decision by the U.S and its Western allies to block negotiations with Russia to end the war, despite Kyiv and Moscow apparently being on the verge of negotiating a peace treaty?[4]

What becomes obvious, is the bad guys may not be as demonic or the good guys as saintly as there black and white hats indicate. Apart from the necessities imposed by scapegoating, the necessary divisions of one kingdom against another as the logic of this world, the need for enemies might be exposed for what it is. War requires demonization; thus demonization and scapegoating are required for nation building. Where an enemy is lacking one must be created.

If Russia did not want to be the enemy, Russia would be forced to become the enemy. The pimps of war recruited former Soviet republics into NATO by painting Russia as a threat. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, reconfigured their militaries, often through tens of millions in western loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware. This made the weapons manufacturers billions in profits.[5]  

On Friday, the Biden administration announced it would start delivering cluster bombs to Ukraine. Declared weapons of mass destruction and outlawed by 123 nations – including all of America’s allies – cluster bombs are the short-term equivalent of all out warfare, in which blind destruction of the enemy boomerangs back to kill noncombatants. The bomblets are notorious for producing duds, or the equivalent of small, unexploded grenades which can lie around for years or decades before someone – very often a child, spots the brightly colored objects and sets them off. [6] The weapons pose a severe and lingering risk to noncombatants, having killed or injured an estimated 56,000 to 86,000 civilians since World War II. The Nazi developed weapon, was heavily deployed by the United States in Vietnam, where in an eight-year period the Air Force dropped some 350 million bomblets, which accounted for some 75-90% of American casualties (early in the war) at the hands of the Viet Cong, as recovered duds provided their primary source for explosive devices.[7]

One might suspect, with Hedges, that it is the cabal at the center of the military-industrial-complex that keeps the U.S. engaged in endless conflicts. He claims it is the “pimps of war who orchestrate these military fiascos” and that they “migrate from administration to administration.”[8] While there may indeed by these Dr. Strangeloves, plotting continual war and potentially if not inevitably set to ignite the war which will end civilization, I presume there is a more sinister force at work, a force so powerful as to be the guiding logic organizing human civilization.

The grand tragedy is that this force uncovered and defeated by Christ is thought to be in the service of the good. Cluster bombs, weapons of mass destruction, and ultimately nuclear weapons, may be called for so as to defeat the enemy. It may be that only through final war and world destruction that the battle can be won. This is the lie being posed. Apart from the Gospel, the lie of scapegoating, demonization, violence, and war, are the only alternative. The necessity of violence is only countered in Christ who has defeated and exposed the lie from the Father of Lies.  

[1] Chris Hedges, “They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine,” <chrishedges@substack.com> July 2, 2023

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] The Editorial Board, “The Flawed Moral Logic of Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine,” The New York Times (July 10, 2023)

[7] John Ismay, “America’s Dark History of Killing Its Own Troops With Cluster Munitions,” New York Times (Dec., 4, 2019).

[8] Hedges, Ibid.

Bulgakov’s “The Tragedy of Philosophy” as Entry into Sophiology

MAN WAS CREATED IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF God. This means that the image of the Holy Trinity is imprinted upon every part of his spiritual nature. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen. 1:26). So says the word of God, precisely pointing, by means of this plural number, to the trihypostaticity of the Divinity and the triunity of the image of God – which after all, is also the human image.”[1] Sergius Bulgakov

To attempt to describe the atmosphere or texture of Sergius[2] Bulgakov’s theology in doctrinal terms is in danger of missing the warmth and spiritual excitement of his theological project, and yet the attempt to simply restate or summarize his theology without reference to its doctrinal significance also falls short, as he is demonstrating a revolutionary shift in the very tenor of his writing. Rather than writing analogously about God (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) he presumes to speak directly of divine love (Sophia). There is no presumed gap or distance between creator and creation as Jesus Christ brings together the divine and human (Bulgakov sees Maximus as central to this development).[3] He is doing theology in a different key, and this shows up even (or especially) in his early work laying out his Trinitarian Sophiology in contrast to the philosophical project. Even as he describes the particular failings of philosophy, the failures illustrate the necessity of the Trinitarian Personhood reflected in the human image. His philosophical critique is so interwoven with his personalism and Sophiology, that this may be the place (his The Tragedy of Philosophy) to start with Bulgakov. Rather than beginning with being (or with presumptions of the economic and immanent Trinity, his description of the western failure characterized by Thomas Aquinas) or with reason, Bulgakov’s starting premise is the Trinity or a trinitarian holism necessary for reason, which cannot be subjected or reduced to reason but apart from which reason fails.

Presumed throughout is the eternality of the humanity of Christ, so that the truth of the intra-Trinitarian relationship is the truth of God and humans, and there are not two realms of truth (the presumption not only of philosophy – e.g., noumena/phenomena, act/being, – but of western theology, e.g., economic and immanent Trinity, Creator and creation, as a divide). There is one necessary realm of truth which reveals itself in human personhood, pointing to the Divine Person. What gets obscured, according to Bulgakov, and what he aims to recover is the focus on personhood (the person of God revealed in Christ and taken up in the human image) and the manner in which the person of Jesus Christ, in particular, bridges or brings together the antinomies of creator and creation (as developed in his Sophiology).[4] He presumes to develop a Chalcedonian orthodoxy (on the order of Maximus) but to more completely illustrate and define its parameters.

 His Sophiology develops as an overcoming of the antinomies of reason as expressed in philosophy, which provides a platform or insight (negative though it is), as spelled out in The Tragedy of Philosophy. The book traces the three characteristic mistakes found in philosophy, against the background of a Trinitarian theology and dogma, which in the description sounds fairly dry, but in the execution traces psychoanalytic and experiential reality such that human thought, perception, and experience, correctly perceived, is integrated directly with the reality of the Trinity. Philosophy is a tragedy but it is a tragedy awaiting and pointing toward the particulars of a Trinitarian solution.

Bulgakov applies Trinitarian theology, very much in the pattern of Paul in Romans 7, in that the tripartite reality of human experience and the human subject, absent the Trinity, does not hold together, but chapter 7 of Romans may be the necessary prologue to the heights of chapter 8, and so too Bulgakov’s philosophical engagement opens the path to his Sophiology. Throughout Bulgakov’s tracing of the problem, the light of the answer (the equivalent of Rom. 8) shines through. As Paul depicts in Romans, one might begin with the law, with the ego, or with the body of death, but what is specifically missing, as detailed in Romans 8, is the Trinity. The negative moment points to its singular resolution in Christ. Paul fills in the functioning of the human subject as a participation in Christ, by which we realize God as Father, and thus have life and being in the Spirit. Bulgakov carries out the same project in his depiction of the three-fold mistake of philosophy, and of course this Threeness is that of the Trinity absent this acknowledgement.

The philosophical project (and the human project) is always striving to bring together that which, outside of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, cannot be made to cohere. Philosophy begins with a basic mistake, the premise of his book, in its focus on human choice (Greek hairesis), so that philosophy is by definition a heresy.  All philosophy bears the singular characteristic of “arbitrary election, the choice, of some single thing or part instead of the whole: that is precisely a one sidedness.”[5] Rather than beginning with the reality of God in Christ, philosophy begins with choices or perspectives or an elected portion of this reality. Rather than beginning with the reality of God and extrapolating reasonably from this reality, philosophy begins with reason and attempts to describe reality (inductively or deductively). As a result, there is a philosophical drive to reduce plurality (all things) to a singular thing (monothematism).

He raises the question as to why this should be, and answers, “It is the spirit of system and the pathos of system; and a system is nothing other than the reduction of many and all into one, and conversely, the deduction of all and many out of one.”[6] He describes the drive as the human sickness or a manifestation of original sin. As the title of this chapter indicates, “The Nature of Thought,” this chapter and the first portion of the book is about fallen human thought as evinced in philosophy, but philosophy is simply a case in point of the human predicament. The philosopher “has desired a system. In other words, he has wished to create a (logical) world out of himself, out of his own principle – ‘you shall be as gods’ – but such a logical deduction of the world is not possible for a human being.”[7] The philosopher, like every human, has taken up the appeal of the serpent, to make of the dialectic of knowledge a replacement for living reality. Reason or philosophy as its own origin and end betrays signs of the human malaise: “Sickness, corruption, the perversion of all human existence which presented itself in original sin, also, in other words, afflicts reason, and makes it impossible for reason to gain access to the tree of heavenly knowledge, since access is denied by the fiery sword of the cherubim – the antinomies.”[8] Philosophy puts on display, not a personal pride, but the objective role of hubris, in that the philosopher, like the legalist, has no sense of the limits of the system. This then gives rise to the contradictions or antinomies of the system.   

In Pauline terms, this starting point reduces God to the system of the law. In psychoanalytic terms (which is to say the same thing in different terms), the human sickness is to interpolate the self (and with the self, all of reality) into the symbolic order. The law, the logos, the symbolic, or philosophy, would serve as its own end, displacing the divine Logos with a human word. Bulgakov traces the philosophical impetus, but he has in mind the general human orientation toward deception, violence and sin: “Logical continuity, or, what amounts to the same thing, the continuous logical deduction of all from one, making the whole system circle around a single centre which can be passed through in any direction, and which admits of no hiatus or discontinuity of any kind: this is the task which human thought naturally and inevitably strives to complete, not stopping short of violence, and self-deception, of evasions and illusions.”[9]

Logical monism, or the attempt to bridge subject and object, subject and predicate, noumena and phenomena, or to create a synthesis out of the antinomies, demands a full investment of faith (a violent bringing down of reality to fit it into the system). Every philosophy “dimly or distinctly, instinctively or consciously, timidly or militantly” claims “to be the absolute philosophy, and each of which regards its own sketch of what is as the system of the world.”[10] Hegel’s system is the characteristic illustration of overcoming the antinomies: “Hegel – and in his person, all philosophy” supposes it can bind reality into a system.[11] It presupposes what is impossible – to begin from itself, or generate from itself what can only come from what truly exists. The impossibility shows itself in the characteristic failure of philosophy, of taking one arm of tripartite reality as an end in itself.

 As Bulgakov describes, philosophy will choose either “(1) hypostasis, or personhood; (2) the latter’s idea or ideal form, logos, thought; (3) substantial being as the unity of all moments or states of being, as the self-actualizing whole.” These three philosophical moments can be summed up in the formula, “I am Something (potentially everything).”[12] This is a true enough statement, but philosophy “incessantly” cuts apart this indisseverable statement. “Philosophizing thought produces heresies through the arbitrariness of these disseverations, and through its choices of discrete beginnings; and the style of philosophizing is determined by the way in which this dissection is made.”[13] Philosophy takes what exists and that which is a necessary component of human consciousness and attempts to enter into this reality by segmenting and privileging a particular component.

The classic example is Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” The thinking thing is privileged over being. Being is subject to question and doubt, and is presumed to be determinate only through the predicate of thought, the second I. The first I and the second, (the thinking thing and that which exists as the predicate) are only conjoined in thought. This presumption cuts off the subject from its predicate and copula, as if the subject precedes predication and existence. Descartes is using his formula as a foundation to arrive at the certain proof of his existence and the existence of God, performing a dissection of thought in order to reduce it to the parameters of reason.

 In one form or another, this dissection of subject, predicate, and being indicates the history of philosophy. “Every philosophical system . . . is governed by an attempt of this kind: the subject, or the copula, or the predicate is announced as the single beginning, and everything is made to derive from it or to lead towards it. Such a ‘deduction,’ whether of the subject from the predicate, of the predicate from the subject, or of both from the copula, in fact presents philosophy with its principal task, and, thereby presents an insoluble difficulty to philosophical thought, which strives toward monism, strives to reduce everything to a first unity, no matter what.”[14] Bulgakov’s book is mostly dedicated to proving this point in three philosophical moments or movements, through engaging a wide range of philosophical thought, but focused most intensely on Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (I will return, in future posts, to the specifics of his proofs).

Though Bulgakov is focused on philosophy’s denial or dissection of a triadic unity and the tragedy which results, the same story could be told in the register of psychoanalysis or theology. The psyche strives to unify the self, experienced as mind and body, or as the objective I in the mirror and the I of experience. For Jacques Lacan, the Cartesian dilemma is the human dilemma, in that every subject is split by language. The enunciating subject is split from the subject of the statement (the enunciated) and thus the subject is inescapably split or castrated by language. By taking up and defining the self through language, there occurs a three-way split between the symbolic (language), the ego or imaginary, and the dissonance of nonbeing or death drive created in the relation between the two. Here, the tragedy is not a philosophical or metaphysical mistake, but the human sickness and neurosis which arises from trying to make the self a synthesis out of an antithesis. The compulsion to repeat, the death drive, human violence toward the other and self-destructiveness, can be traced to the psychoanalytic sickness.

The point is universalized in Paul’s use of the law, which pits the subject against itself. “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). The philosophical and psychoanalytical is captured in Paul’s depiction of the I split by the law, but Paul includes the religious, the legal, the sexual and the social, or every aspect of the human predicament. What Bulgakov claims about philosophical systems seems to be a particular instance of Paul’s point, that could be described as the drive to a legal monism, in which the law is the system of the world, and the split between the two ‘I’s (Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free, mind/flesh, body/spirit) caused by the law would also be resolved through the law.

 Bulgakov, like Paul, will not so much resolve the dilemma of the split as address it through the reality of the Trinity. His presumption is that humans are created in the image of God and it is only on the basis of the divine image that the human image can be approached (if not comprehended). Like the Divine Person, the human person cannot be defined. “The essence of the hypostasis consists precisely in the fact that it is indefinable and indescribable; it stands beyond the limits of the world and of the concept, even though it continually reveals itself in them.”[15] It is not that the self cannot be named, but the I is not merely the subject of thought and reason, but thought and reason arise from the subject. The subject, transcendent as it may be, is revealed through the immanence of its predicates. “The subject, the hypostasis, is always revealed, always expresses itself, in the predicate. It goes without saying that the hypostasis in this sense is not the psychological I, psychological subjectivity, which already defines the hypostasis as a predicate, not as a subject.”[16]

The life force or spirit of the human subject is no more definable than the divine Spirit. Just as the Son bears the image of the Father, so too every child of God is defined in this relationship: “Eternity belongs to the hypostasis; it is eternal in the same sense as eternal God, who Himself breathed His own Spirit into humanity at the latter’s creation. The human being is the son of God and a created god; the image of eternity is an inalienable and indelible part of him.”[17] Humankind bears eternity in the image, and Bulgakov suggests that even suicide is not actually aimed at annihilating or extinguishing the I (“suicide attempts represent a kind of philosophical misunderstanding, and are directed not at the I itself, but only at the way in which it exists, directed not at the subject, but at the predicate”). As Bulgakov sums up, “The hypostatic I is the philosophical and grammatical Subject of all predicates; its life is this predicate, endless in its breadth and depth.”[18] The Father, Son, and Spirit, are the reality of subject, predicate, and copula of being. The Father is revealed through the Son, and this lived out realization is the work of the Spirit. This participation in the divine is the reality behind human thought and experience, and even a failure of thought points to its completion in this reality.

[1] Sergij Bulgakov, The Tragedy of Philosophy (Philosophy & Dogma), trans. by Stephen Churchyard (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2020) 91. Many thanks Jim, for the gift of this book. It is a key into Bulgakov.

[2] Or Sergij, or Sergei, among some 9 possible variants.

[3] See Jonathan R. Seiling, From Antinomy to Sophiology: Modern Russian Religious Consciousness and Sergei Bulgakov’s Critical Appropriation of German Idealism (PhD Dissertation, Toronto School of Theology, 2008) 229-233.

[4] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 35. Cited in Katy Leamy, “A Comparison of the Kenotic Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergei Bulgakov” (2012). (Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 211. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/211), 36.

[5] Bulgakov, 3.

[6] Ibid. To miss this point will not only amount to missing the thesis of the book, but is the characteristic theological mistake. The issue is on the order of that of Jordan Wood in his departure from David Bentley Hart, or the tradition through Origen to Maximus, taken up by Bulgakov. The antinomies of heaven and earth, God and human, subject and object, are only resolved in the concrete case of the God/Man Jesus Christ. Reason cannot overcome these antinomies but Christ (in reality), in who he is, brings them together. Thus, reason begins with Jesus Christ as ground. Otherwise, it is not clear what a subject or reason might be.  

[7] Ibid., 5.

[8] Ibid, 7.

[9] Ibid, 3.

[10] Ibid, 3-4. Bulgakov has passed through commitment to Marxist Hegelianism, then with his conversion and the Russian Revolution, at this writing, he is without a job or a library in Crimea.

[11] Ibid, 6.

[12] Ibid, 9.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 10.

[15] Ibid, 11.

[16] Ibid, 12.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

Blood Meridian and The Doomsday Machine: Cormac McCarthy as Explanation of the Secrets Exposed by Daniel Ellsberg

On June 13th the novelist Cormac McCarthy died and three days later, on June 16th, Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who provided the Pentagon papers to the Washington Post and the New York times, died. The two men moved in completely different circles with seemingly different interests and temperaments, yet McCarthy’s focus in his novels on the human worship of war and violence, and Ellsberg’s revelations concerning the futile wantonness of the Vietnam War and the nihilistic commitments to nuclear war, both deliver the message that war and destruction are deeply embedded in human political commitments and the human psyche. The political and almost religious need for war arise from an unconscious need, according to McCarthy, or secretive and manipulative political purposes, according to Ellsberg. Both record a nightmare scenario in which violence, war and death are pursued beyond reason and ultimately to the point of extinction to those who bear the germinating need for violence.

Of the two, the facts reported by Ellsberg may be the most dark and incomprehensible in the pure insanity of the doomsday nuclear holocaust scenarios put in place by the United States (which he was to help enable and test). As he describes in the Prologue of his book, The Doomsday Machine, “One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my thirtieth birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the earth itself, not – so far as I knew then, mistakenly – nearly all humanity or life on the planet, but the destruction of most cities and people in the northern hemisphere.”[1] This was not in case of an accident or a response to a Soviet launch of nuclear weapons, rather the United States was putting in place plans for a first strike and was willing to pay the price of “a hundred holocausts” or at least 325 million deaths as part of its plan. What neither Ellsberg nor anyone understood at this point was that the plans put into place by the United States, if executed, would result in nuclear winter and the destruction of all human life on earth (his book records the fact that these plans are still in place in spite of this understanding). To win a nuclear war would require the destruction of life on earth. Yet Ellsberg’s actions are hopeful. He puts his life on the line (facing more than 100 years in prison) and has his two children help him in photo-copying top-secret documents and teaches them the lesson, there is a time when following law and order is evil and people must commit to good despite the sacrifice. Ellsberg’s determination to do the good in the face of overwhelming odds, like the evil he describes, is nearly incomprehensible.

McCarthy, in his key novel, Blood Meridian, is unrelentingly dark and nihilistic. Every landscape is menacing, every encounter an occasion of violence, and every character is swept up in a violent destiny. Much of the novel takes place in the desert and the harsh reality of this landscape reflects the existential human condition: “This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.”[2] The edifice of nature as represented in the desert and the edifice of war and violence are made of the same stuff. Both preexist humans and will subsist with their demise. As the Judge, the embodiment of the logic of violence and war intones, “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”[3] War, in the explanation of the Judge, is the motive force and meaning of all human activity. “All other trades are contained in that of war.” It is the deepest of motives: “It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.”[4] In fact, war and killing create meaning where it would otherwise be absent:

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.[5]

The Judge pictures war as like a card game between two players in which the loser forfeits his life. In the turn of a card, with life on the line, “What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one.” The meaning is created by the investment and thus agency is lent to otherwise random events. “This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”[6] War provides purpose and meaning and is thus the true god driving the game of life through the valuation created by death. McCarthy verges on theological and psychoanalytic insight.

The darkness of his novel performs in the form of art something like Ellsberg’s exposure of secrets, bringing to consciousness the evil dependent upon unconscious drives. Articulating evil, describing it, exposing it, is the first step in confronting it. Thus, it may be that McCarthy in exposing the imperative for violence in the human condition provides an entry point into otherwise benign looking figures (e.g., the administrations of President Truman and every presidential administration that follows) who have plotted to destroy the world in order to win the war. Naming this evil and describing this darkness exposes the madness, but left as nuclear war plans, government policy, or as Ellsberg describes it, a single graph of destruction, the notion is impenetrable. The interior world of those who could plot mutually assured destruction is out of reach in mere data. That is, the fiction of McCarthy provides the truth, repressed and unconscious in data alone.

The novel is based on historical events surrounding John Glanton and his militia who were hired by Mexican authorities to eliminate Apaches in northern Mexico (and what is now the Southwestern United States). The gang were paid according to the number of scalps secured, and they quickly learned that any dark head of hair (whether Mexican, male or female, child or adult, Apache or friendly native) would do. Eventually they are chased out of Mexico and begin a Ferry business in Arizona where they murder potential passengers for their money.

 McCarthy bases his main characters on the historical figures of John Glanton, and his second in command, Judge Holden. The key character, The Kid and then The Man, is presumably based on Samuel Chamberlain who records his exploits with the Glanton gang. The novel begins with the bleak description of The Kid’s origins, which loosely fit the trajectory recorded by Chamberlain: “At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape.”[7] In short, Glanton is a mindless killer who is continually conferring with the mysterious Judge, who directs his murderous instincts to full effect, and the Kid is swept up in their violence.

In McCarthy’s one nonfiction article, he suggests that the human subconscious is much older than language and is singularly geared for the individual’s survival. Ordinary functions like talking demonstrate that the unconscious allows for everyday conscious activity: “If I am talking to you then I can hardly be crafting at the same time the sentences that are to follow what I am now saying. I am totally occupied in talking to you. Nor can some part of my mind be assembling these sentences and then saying them to me so that I can repeat them. Aside from the fact that I am busy this would be to evoke an endless regress. The truth is that there is a process here to which we have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness.”[8]  The unconscious is responsible for most all activity of survival, from the mundane scratching of an itch to working out problems of life, posed, yet unanswerable by the conscious self. McCarthy, without appeal to Freud, raises the question if the unconscious knows it is going to die? His fiction comes close to the Freudian notion that the unconscious knows no mortality and in this refusal of mortality enter death drive or the devil, according to the ex-slaver who has gotten religion.

No. It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.[9]

This self-perpetuating evil machine, posited on page 20, is one the rest of the novel explains. Once the gears are set turning, the murder set in motion, the game plays itself out by consuming its participants. It is mutually assured destruction writ in incremental decisions which ultimately trumps every morality, every law, every form of justice, as war and killing are the reigning logic, morality, and law.

Tobin, or the ex-priest, presumes that the demonic or hell is somehow directing their steps. “Where for aught any man knows lies the locality of hell. For the earth is a globe in the void and truth there’s no up nor down to it and there’s men in this company besides myself seen little cloven hoofprints in the stone clever as a little doe in her going but what little doe ever trod melted rock?” They are passing through a field of hardened lava and he presumes to have seen the footprints of evil. “I’d not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world.” He speculates that the hellish world somehow intersects the plane they are travelling. “Aye. It’s a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other. And somethin put them little hooflet markings in the lava flow for I seen them there myself.” The next line of the novel casts suspicion on the Judge, “The judge, he seemed not to take his eyes from that dead cone where it rose off the desert like a great chancre.” Though McCarthy never pins down the provenance of the Judge, his looming height, his voracious desire for knowledge, power and control (as he explains at one point, “The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.”[10]) and his capacity for evil, along with his soliloquies on violence, suggest early on the Judge is no ordinary mortal.

The Judge uses the example of a duel in which the outcome determines judgment: “The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof.” The argument and its specifics do not matter in light of the broader court of life and death (the trial of the historical absolute), yet the ready willingness to put all at stake in this higher court indicates human willfulness and pride is the determining factor.

Man’s vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.[11]

Historical law (death pitted against life) subverts every form of moral or spiritual law. The last man standing has called upon the ultimate power, the god of violence, and in sacrificing the other has proven his cause according to historical reality. It is not that the dead are somehow proven wrong in their views or their morality, rather they have submitted themselves to the higher court of history by taking part in the duel. Morality or immorality, error or correctness, religion or irreligion, have been submitted to a higher judgment.

In the Judge’s description there is only one game or one dance and one tune and the price of entry is everything. The Judge maintains that in the end, he alone will be left dancing. Only the one who offers up himself entirely can join the dance, but finally only the annihilating power itself will be left. “And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?”  The Kid feebly tries to resist the logic of the Judge, “You aint nothin.” But the Judge admits as much: “You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.” But each man’s dance is but for a moment until each is ushered off the stage: “There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps.”[12]

The Judge turns to the one he dubs the Priest to illicit a counter opinion, but the Priest refuses to argue. “The priest does not say, said the judge. Nihil dicit. But the priest has said. For the priest has put by the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor. The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself.” The Priest points out that he was only a novitiate and never ordained, but Holden counters, “Journeyman priest or apprentice priest, said the judge. Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.” The Priest tells Holden not to look to him to confirm his argument but the Judge says he has already done so: “Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you’ve not already given?”[13] The Priest is embodied proof, by his presence in the violence, that his true religion is that of war, and in laying aside his robes to do battle he has bowed to the god of war – “the higher calling which all men honor.”

 The court of annihilation and survival is final, the ultimate justification, and as McCarthy’s novel slowly reveals, this is the impetus behind mutually assured destruction. Only those willing to put everything at stake, to bring down the world, can enter the game, and by entering the outcome is decided. The Judge argues the Anasazi, those people completely annihilated in the past, represent the destiny of those who play the game. These people left the remains of a culture superior to the natives who follow, and yet their achievement marks their end: “The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.” These vanished people mark the way of those who play the game. “He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.”[14]

The one hope throughout the novel is The Kid or The Man, as he seems to withhold himself from the bloodlust of his peers, and the Judge notes as much. He accuses The Man of thus missing out on the fulness of life’s meaning. “If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay. Even the cretin acted in good faith according to his parts. For it was required of no man to give more than he possessed nor was any man’s share compared to another’s. Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me who that one was?” The Man turns on the Judge to suggest he was behind everything, including the destruction of the group. “It was you, whispered the kid. You were the one.” The Judge suggests The Man has misunderstood: “What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. But if I was your enemy with whom would you have shared me? With whom?” Violence cannot be refused, war cannot be made an enemy, as there is no fellowship in this refusal. “For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?”[15] War and violence were the only choice, the only holy ground, and this both constituted the group and its destruction.

The conclusion of the novel makes the point, after The Man has been eliminated by the Judge, only the Judge remains out of the original party, but it is not clear that the Judge is anything other than the embodiment of violence. His survival is not human survival, but the triumph of the logic of destruction left dancing to the tune he plays:

Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.[16]

In conclusion, Ellsberg’s exposure of the Pentagon papers demonstrates the insanity, hubris, wanton destructiveness, and near perfect nihilism connected with secret violence and covert plans. McCarthy’s fiction demonstrates the pure horror and evil which roots the human need for violence. As his novel unfolds, violence might be seen as a means to an end (opening up new territory, exterminating the savages, making money) but by the end of the novel violence is its own purpose and end and the violent inclination represented by Judge Holden literally embraces and squeezes life out of the main character.

There is another who has borne this fate and exposed the lie of its finality. The revelation of Christ directly and singularly addresses war, violence, and the self-destructive instinct – exposing what is unconscious and bringing it to consciousness or addressing what is hidden and exposing it in light of Truth and peace. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

[1] Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) 1.

[2] Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) 348.

[3] Blood Meridian, 262.

[4] Blood Meridian, 262.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Blood Meridian, 262-263.

[7] Blood Meridian, 3.

[8] Cormac McCarthy, “The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?” in Nautilus (April 17, 2017).

[9] Blood Meridian, 20.

[10] Blood Meridian, 209.

[11] Blood Meridian, 263-264.

[12] Blood Meridian, 349.

[13] Blood Meridian, 264.

[14] Blood Meridian, 154.

[15] Blood Meridian, 323.

[16] Blood Meridian, 354.

The Sophiology of Death as Explanation of Salvation and Trinity

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might; for there is no activity or planning or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.” Ecclesiastes 9:10

There is nothing more personal than death. Death is a failure of personhood, a loss that cannot be abstracted, as it happens to concrete persons who can only know of this pervasive reality as it happens to “me.” Death isolates and individuates so that we all die alone. While life and love are shared experiences, death is the opposite. Death is a pure negation, a complete absence, a total loss. It is a loss of connectedness, of love, and obviously of life and the effort and struggle of life. As Koheleth records, struggle with all your might now, for the grave ends all possibility of strategizing. Death, in the small doses that we all experience it, is familiar. The moments of shame in life are small bits of dying, while the total loss that is the shame of death is an undoing and loss beyond comprehension. We cannot think our own dissolution and undoing, and so denial of death is not a conscious choice but an inevitable orientation, but this orientation comes at a price in its reifying and absolutizing of the finite and mortal. The transcendent and immortal cannot be accommodated in the “immortalization” of the mortal. The incarnate and fleshly, immortalized, is a refusal of the world – a striving toward the disincarnate – and this is dying. The dying begins where embodied, incarnate, fleshly living, is refused. Struggle then with all of your life against death – this is dying. So, death is not simply a problem at the end of life, but an ending that pervades all of life. This orientation to death marks all of life as a dying. The unconscious struggle to have life, to hold onto life, to gain a fulness of life, as an insurance against the grave, is to submit completely to the orientation to death.

This orientation and this dying are against God and his intention for humans: “God didn’t make death. God takes no delight in the ruin of anything that lives. God created everything so that it might exist. The creative forces at work in the cosmos are life-giving. There is no destructive poison in them” (Wisdom 1:13-14). God permitted death, which means he permitted free will refusal of himself and of life and of love. He permitted sin, and death entered in through sin. It is not that all sinned in Adam, in spite of the Latin translation of Romans 5:12. Rather: “just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man, and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all sinned” (Rom. 5:12, DBH). For Adam, the order was sin to death, but for the rest of sinful humanity (which is not all of humanity in Paul’s explanation – Rom. 5:14) it is ordered from death to sin.

As Sergius Bulgakov describes, “Death entered the world through the path of sin, which destroyed the stability of human existence and as it were separated within man the uncreated from the created. The created, since it did not possess in itself its own power of being, became mortal, having acquired an undue independence from the uncreated. Such is the nature of death.”[1] This “undue independence” is nothing short of a lie. It is the presumption of life where there is death and the presumption of being where there is nonbeing. The separation of the created from the uncreated is an unreality. As Jordan Wood has summarized Bulgakov in conjunction with Maximus: “Rational creatures by definition actualize themselves in the mode of self-determination, of freedom, and somehow that mode can and is in fact misdirected to absurd and absolutely irrational proportions: we make ourselves unmade, we incarnate pure fantasy, we interpret the world and give our very selves, parasitically, to breath (sic.) life into a world that is against the divine will; and anything against the divine will is no creation of the divine will.”[2]

Jordan recognizes in Bulgakov the same refusal of abstraction as he found in Maximus. There is no dying in the abstract – it is always personal. “So the ‘problem’ of sin and its wages is that actual persons are in an actual state of pseudo- and anti-actualization, ‘discarnate or ‘anti-incarnate.’” The work of fallen humanity in its pursuit of life through death (the disincarnate) is countered by the work of the Trinity which, always and in all things, is Incarnation. The work of Incarnation counters the anti-incarnate or false incarnation which is the lie of sin. Incarnation always and in all things (or recapitulation) meets “the actual persons to be saved precisely where and how they are: in a state of anti-incarnation.”[3]  

It is not as if death has the final word, as in the image of Ecclesiastes. In Christ the limitation of the power of death is disclosed. As Bulgakov describes it, Christ’s death reveals the limitation of death: “Death is neither absolute nor all-powerful. It can only tear at and fracture the tree of life, but it is not invincible, for it has already been conquered by the resurrection of Christ.”[4] To realize this defeat of death in the resurrection of Christ, the death of Christ must become the manner of one’s life. He took our death upon himself, so that the “death of humanity is precisely Christ’s death, and we must take part in the fullness of this death, just as he partook in our death after becoming enfleshed and human.”[5] Death and dying and thus living become His manner of death and life.

Bulgakov pictures the full realization of Christ meeting us in death as occurring only in our actual dying. He ends his article on the Sophiology of Death with a description of his near-death experience due to cancer, and then in the pain of having his throat sliced open without anesthetics, having the feeling of being suffocated. The feeling of complete helplessness that is the experience of dying, is the place Christ meets us. The place we would refuse, out of fear, is the place of revelation.  

And to the extent that we know, or rather, will know our own particular death, in it and through it shall we know the death of Christ too. But until we have reached the very threshold of death and have drunk the cup of death, we can only foreknow our death, and in it and through it Christ’s death as well. Such foreknowledge is accessible to us and necessary, for it reveals to us our own— as well as Christ’s— humanity, in its depths and in its terrible abyss; in the light of death it manifests to us our very selves. And to whom it is granted by the will of God to approach this edge of the abyss, let him from thence become a herald, that thence which for each person will at some point become a thither and a there.[6]

The mystery of God and the incomprehensible mystery of death are conjoined in the God-man. In his humanity there is the dying, but his humanity is completely united with his deity. Our dying with him is not a point of separation, isolation, and forsakenness, because he has taken upon himself forsakenness and defeated it. Thus, that which defeats and destroys God’s good creation becomes the point of life, love, and being joined to God. “The God-man dies in the image of man, and man dies in the image of the God-man, in a marvelous mutuality.”[7]  This “impossibility” that God would die in Christ – this point of incomprehension in which incomprehensible death and incomprehensible God takes up dying, this becomes the moment of enlightenment and comprehension. Jesus meets us at the edge of the grave. He is there in the dying and this is the assurance that imparts a new form of living.

This is salvation, atonement, expiation and new life. His being poured out, his kenotic self-giving, is organically tied to the problem and its resolution. His incarnation and dying joins him to the dying of all persons. “(If) Christ redeems and raises every person, then it is only because he co-dies in every person and with every person.”[8] His being with us in his humanity is the point in which he imparts the uncreatedness and life of his deity. “Clearly, we can speak here of “dying” only in a completely unique sense, different from human death; specifically, it is some kind of passivity, an inactivity, which permits the death of the human nature on account of a certain incompleteness in the latter’s divinization.”[9] Christ undertakes divinization in his life’s journey, through death and resurrection, and imparts to all the path he has taken. “Divinization comes into its fullness only in the resurrection and is accomplished only by the Father’s power through the action of the Holy Spirit.”[10]

Bulgakov approaches the possibility of the death of the God-man, the possibility of human entry into the divine, and the divine entry into the human, in his picture of Sophia (wisdom) or what he calls Sophiology. The Psalms picture wisdom as consisting of both a created and uncreated aspect: “The LORD created me as His first course, before His works of old. From everlasting I was established, from the beginning, before the earth began” (Psalms 8:22-23). Wisdom, in both of its forms, according to Bulgakov, is Wisdom embodied in Christ.

The humanity of Christ is created Sophia, permeated by Divine Sophia and in this union with it already pre-deified. . .. Created Sophia, as the human nature of Christ, admitted of further sophianization or divinization, which is exactly what was accomplished through the resurrection of Christ and in his glorification. The latter is the fullness of divinization, the sophianization of created Sophia in Christ, its full penetration by Divine Sophia, perfected divine-humanity.[11]

The course of Christ’s life bringing about the fulness of the Divine Wisdom in his life contains the order and course of the universe – “the union of eternity and time, of fullness and becoming.”[12]

Bulgakov, like (or with) Maximus, not only avoids abstraction surrounding death, but also abstractions which would explain the humanity and deity of Christ. Theoretically or abstractly deity and humanity, time and eternity, God and death, cannot be joined, but what are opposites theoretically are brought together concretely in the person of Christ. The theoretically impossible is not impossible in Christ. Bulgakov expresses this in terms of the peculiarity of what has occurred in Christ. This human and divine life and death is one of a kind. The kenosis of Christ is a possibility for divinity but it is temporary and transitory, and it is a death like no other. Bulgakov admits that the decaying condition, of being turned over to the grave is an impossibility in the death of the God-man. He is susceptible to dying but: “Nevertheless, this dying, while not representing the genuine death of decay, is still that condition of death in which the Lord rests in the grave. The God-man fully experiences death, he partakes of it, although he is not handed over to its power in his divinity and in his divinized humanity. His divine-humanity enters into the fullness of power and glory precisely through dying.” The manner of his death is not being left in a state of death, though he is turned over to the power of death but death cannot hold him.

Kenosis is nothing more than a state that may be adopted by divine being— temporary and transitory, as the path to resurrection. But kenosis is not mortal existence itself, which is what divine existence would be transformed into in such a case. In the depths of kenosis there is a weakening, as it were, of divinity, but only until the end of kenosis, when this weakness is overcome. Such is the immanent dialectic of kenosis in divine-humanity. In its kenosis it is capable of dying, but the death of the God-man can only be a victory over death: “having trampled death by death.”[13]  

Through Divine Sophia, Bulgakov explains the joining of deity and humanity in the person of Christ. Where otherwise one might pose some form of Docetism, or (in the case of Rowan Williams) an “asymmetrical christology” in which the deity of Christ is privileged over the humanity of Jesus. (In Williams description, the divine Word could be apart from Jesus, who “contributes nothing extra to that identifying esse” of the Word.)[14] In Divine Sophia the fulness of the humanity and deity of Christ, including the death of Christ and glorification at the right hand of God, not only exist in one person but are the constitutive aspects – the full deity and humanity – of this person. Sophia explains how, the apparent and necessary division between deity and humanity, are conjoined in a singular person:

In the divine abandonment of Christ, the Divine Sophia becomes, as it were, inactive in him; what remains in full force is only the human nature, created Sophia, although in a state of suffering and mortal frailty. This sophianic kenosis— which prima facie appears to be a division of the natures, as it were, in the humanity’s loss of divinity— is the path to their fullest union in the resurrection. Humanity, created Sophia, needed to be revealed in the depths not just of the positive power belonging to it as the image of Divine Sophia, but also in its Adamic nature, weakened by the fall and communing with death. But in this union with Divine Sophia, created Sophia communes in this divine nature, and in this union she reaches the greatest depth of kenosis: the depth of human frailty is disclosed to the utmost through Christ’s voluntary acceptance of humanity’s fall for the sake of humanity’s restoration and salvation.[15]

Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, both divine and human natures in one person, and because this is who he is there is the possibility of restoration and salvation.  

So too, what Christ reveals about the Trinity, is that God in three persons is involved in the kenotic giving of the Son: “the Father sends the Son, and this sending is an act of Fatherly sacrificial love, the kenosis of the Father, who condemns to the cross the beloved Son, who in turn takes on himself this feat on the cross. The feat of the Son is also the self-denying love of the Father who, in ‘sending’ the Son, condemns his very self to co-suffering and co-crucifixion, though in a manner different than the Son.”[16] The Father and the Son “possess one life, one joy and suffering, although in a different manner.” The Father does not remove himself from the suffering of the Son – “both co-suffer together.” “The Son accomplishes the will of the Father, and this unity of will and of mutual knowledge (“no one knoweth the Son, but the Father, neither doth anyone know the Father, but the Son” [Matt 11:27]) testifies to the unity of life and the unity of suffering in their common— although distinct for each— kenosis of love.”[17]

The person of Jesus Christ involves the fulness of the Trinity. Bulgakov distinguishes the economic and immanent Trinity, but not so as to make a division within the person of Christ or within the persons of the Trinity:

The love of the Father through the Spirit in the life of the Son “is unbroken and there can be no room for any sort of mutual abandonment. But “economically,” in the relationship of God to the world, as Creator to creation, there occurs, as it were, a division of the hypostases because the very hypostasis of union, the Holy Spirit, in “abandoning” the Son, ceases, as it were, to unite the Son with the Father and instead remains with the Father.[18]

The Spirit, which “blows where it wills” (John 3:2), momentarily and manifestly (economically) “stops blowing on the Son.” But this death of the Son is experienced by each of the persons of the Trinity as the “Father co-dies” and the “Holy Spirit co-dies” with the Son. Bulgakov assures that this is not a division, though it has that appearance, but a union: “a union in dying for each of the hypostases in its own way, true both individually and for all of them in conjunction.”[19]

The movement of salvation in Christ is not then, an event removed from who God is, but is bound up with the Trinitarian reality. The revelation exposing the fiction of a life oriented to death, the life giving revelation, simultaneously is a revelation of God as Trinity. The one does not exist apart from the other.

[1]Sergius Bulgakov, The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal (p. 117). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] Jordan Daniel Wood, “The Lively God of Sergius Bulgakov: Reflections on The Sophiology of Death” (Eclectic Orthodoxy Blog, December 15th, 2021). https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/12/15/the-lively-god-of-sergius-bulgakov-reflections-on-the-sophiology-of-death/

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bulgakov, 117.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 133.

[7] Ibid., 118.

[8] Ibid., 132.

[9] Ibid., 122.

[10] Ibid., 123.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 130-131.

[14] This is Jordan Woods description in reviewing Rowan Williams’, Christ the Heart of Creation. “Against Asymmetrical Christology: A Critical Review of Rowan Williams’s ‘Christ the Heart of Creation’” (Eclectic Orthodoxy, August 4th, 2019) https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/08/04/against-asymmetrical-christology-a-critical-review-of-rowan-williamss-christ-the-heart-of-creation/

[15] Bulgakov, Ibid., 131-132.

[16] Ibid., 124.

[17] Ibid., 125.

[18] Ibid., 128.

[19] Ibid., 129.

Zen Versus Jesus

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. —Hannah Arendt

Philosophy may safely be left with intellectual minds. Zen wants to act, and the most effective act, once the mind is made up, is to go on without looking backward. In this respect, Zen is indeed the religion of the samurai warrior. —D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture[1]

The humble appreciation that God is working through all peoples, cultures and religions does not mean relinquishing the critical faculty of thought. While it is true the Christian can learn about Christ more completely through encounter with other cultures and religions (this is the very point of mission), it is also true that this humility still calls for a fulness of understanding. It was not uncommon in my experience to encounter in Japan (having spent more than twenty years there), the westerner (or even the western missionary) infatuated with all things Japanese, particularly Zen Buddhism, but what these connoisseurs of all things Japanese usually failed to understand was the xenophobic nationalism often attached to Japanese religion and identity. This in no way cancels out some of the insights to be gained in Zen but it also severely qualifies those insights should one be willing to critically examine the religion, yet the uncritical acceptance of the authority of the Zen master and Zen teaching (particularly about the critical faculty) is the ground for Zen practice.

It is not just that wholesale acceptance of Zen practice entails acceptance of a diagnosis of the human predicament and its solution based on a worldview very much counter to an orthodox Christian understanding, but this practice has been involved from its inception in Japanese militarism, colonialism, and ultimately war crimes (which Japanese Buddhist and Zen authorities have acknowledged and for which they have apologized). As Brian Victoria notes, “The fact is that Zen leaders who supported Japanese militarism did so on the grounds that Japanese aggression expressed the very essence of the Buddha Dharma and even enlightenment itself. Thus, until and unless their assumptions are closely examined and challenged, there is no guarantee that Zen’s future, whether in the East or West, will not once again include support for the mass destruction of human life that is modern warfare.”[2]

Far from Zen being only peaceful it is directly connected to Bushido (the Way of the Warrior) and Bushido and Zen are thoroughly enmeshed in “the essence of Japan.” In the description of Nitobe Inazō, in his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Bushido and Zen are integral to one another: “I may begin with Buddhism. It furnished a sense of calm trust in Fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, that stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, that disdain of life and friendliness with death. A foremost teacher of swordsmanship, when he saw his pupil master the utmost of his art, told him, ‘Beyond this my instruction must give way to Zen teaching.’”[3] Nitobe, a Christian, describes Zen as awakening one “to a new Heaven and a new Earth.”[4]

Victoria details the key instances when Zen was used to mobilize the country to war. The Chief Abbot of Eiheiji, Sōtō Zen master Hata Eshō (1862–1944) wrote on behalf of the “national spiritual mobilization” the following:

Buddha Shakyamuni, during his religious practice in a former life, participated in a just war. Due to the  merit he acquired as a result, he was able to appear in this world as a Buddha. Thus, it can be said that a just war is one task of Buddhism. Likewise, achieving the capitulation of the enemy country may also be counted as the religious practice of a Buddhist…. I believe the brilliant fruits of battle that have been achieved to date are the result of the power of the people’s religious faith [in Buddhism].[5]

Two Zen scholars, both affiliated with the Sōtō Zen sect, put forth a doctrinal understanding of the relationship between Buddhism and war which enabled institutional Buddhism to directly support Japan’s war effort:

In order to establish eternal peace in East Asia, arousing the great benevolence and compassion of Buddhism, we are sometimes accepting and sometimes forceful. We now have no choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of “killing one in order that many may live” (issatsu tashō). This is something which Mahayana Buddhism approves of only with the greatest of seriousness…. We believe it is time to effect a major change in the course of human history, which has been centered on Caucasians and inequality among humanity. To realize the true happiness of a peaceful humanity and construct a new civilization, it is necessary to redirect the path of world history’s advance from this false path to the true path. Rooted in this sublime view of history, the mission and responsibility of Mahayana Buddhists is to bring into being true friendship between Japan and China.[6]

Zen and Buddhism in general were utilized to mobilize Japan’s invasion and colonial domination of China and much of east Asia. In this mobilization Zen teachers appealed to a long history in which Zen supported warfare and it was common in the process to claim as Furukawa Taigo did, that Japan was not simply the most advanced Buddhist country but the “only Buddhist country.” Thus a means of spreading Buddhism most directly was through colonization, since all of Japan’s neighbors were lacking in true Buddhism. Japan is “presently using the sword in Manchuria to build a second divine country [after Japan], just as it would go on to do in China and India.” Furukawa appealed to all of his fellow believers: “All Buddhists in the country! Resolutely arise and participate in this rarest of holy enterprises. What difference does it make what the League of Nations does? Just who do England and the United States think they are anyway? The arrow has already left the bow. Do not hesitate in the least. A firm will makes even demons run away. The only thing is to push on resolutely.”[7]

Nonetheless Japanese Zen Buddhism is often perceived to be nothing more than a peaceful set of practices through which one can attain an enlightened understanding bringing about harmony and healing.[8] It is not unusual for western Christians to believe that Zen (which accords with both claims of Zen Priests and also Shintoists, who will also claim the same thing about Shinto) is so lacking in doctrine that it can be melded without disturbance with Christian faith. The focus on practice, of course, is not unique to Zen but is the way most religions (outside of the Christian west) are perceived by their practitioners but the mistake would be to imagine that practice does not entail an implicit or explicit worldview. As Bernie Glassman writes, “So if your definition of enlightenment is that there’s no antiSemitism in the state of enlightenment. If your definition of enlightenment is that there’s no nationalism, or militarism, or bigotry in the state of enlightenment, you better change your definition of enlightenment.”[9]  

The Zen practitioner begins with acceptance of “Buddhist” understandings of “enlightenment,” based on the authority of the Buddha (to even use terms like “Buddhist” and “Buddha” is already to have taken a modern stance in regard to the religion which will tend to cover the explicitly polytheistic world assumed by the Buddha).[10] Belief in Buddhist “enlightenment” entails belief in the authority of the Buddha who claimed:

Nobody is my teacher. Nobody is comparable to me. I am the only perfect buddha in the world. I have attained supreme enlightenment. I am conqueror over all. I know everything. I am not contaminated by anything at all… I have all the powers of the omniscient. I am an arhat (someone who has attained the goal of enlightenment) in the world. I am unrivaled in all realms, including those of the gods. I am the victor who conquered Mara.[11]

Being a practitioner at a minimum means taking the Buddha at his word: “Accept what I did not explain as ‘unexplained.’ Accept what I did explain as ‘explained.’”[12] Enlightenment begins by holding to the authority of Sakyamuni’s words; thus, one must rid themselves of metaphysical speculation or any subject the Buddha did not explain. This   subjugation to the authority of the Buddha will be utilized by the Japanese State in its creation of imperial-way Buddhism which translated subjugation of the Buddha into unquestioning subjugation to the Japanese Sovereign.[13]

Setting aside for the moment the fact that the New Testament claims Christ is the light that enlightens all men (John 1:9), one might wonder if the Buddha’s absolute claims are warranted? Buddha spoke these words to Upagu, who if he had caught the vision could have been Sakyamuni Buddha’s first disciple, but Upagu thought the man was a megalomaniac. Richard Cohen raises the possibility of two responses: “Would you have recognized the man as enlightened? Would you have discerned a spirit of universal peace, beyond politics, in words that valorize hierarchy, celebrate raw power, and speak well of battle?” Or would you be “puzzled that anybody would answer these questions in the affirmative. . ..”[14]

Sakyamuni’s claim is beyond the political or the religious as he alone dominates the world, and the claim is that his domination opens the way to full enlightenment. The question, particularly as it works out in the Japanese context, is whether the supposedly apolitical and areligious nature of Japanese Buddhism is simply a means for demanding its universal acceptance. As Victoria notes, “The ‘selflessness’ of Zen meant absolute and unquestioning submission to the will and dictates of the emperor. And the purpose of religion was to preserve the state and punish any country or person who dared interfere with its right of self-aggrandizement.”[15]

Zen has largely been received in the west from writings and evangelism of D. T. Suzuki, who is revered as the “true man of Zen,” yet Suzuki wrote that “religion should, first of all, seek to preserve the existence of the state.” Suzuki was thinking of the state’s invasion of the Chinese mainland and used Zen as a motivating factor as, “the Chinese were ‘unruly heathens’ whom Japan should punish ‘in the name of religion.’”[16] The oft quoted (in both east and west) Zen master Harada Sōgaku wrote, “[If ordered to] march: tramp, tramp, or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom [of Enlightenment]. The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest reaches of the holy war [now under way].”[17] The uncritical seeker after enlightenment must shoot and bang away, not pausing to consider the morality of what he is doing or the strange exclusiveness and inevitable “uniqueness” of the Japanese faith.

Japanese Buddhist practitioners, who are not alone in the pantheon of buddhisms claiming uniqueness throughout Asia, claim to be the one and only true purveyors of Buddhism. Fukuda Gyōei notes “that it was in Japan where “pure Mahayana [Buddhism]” was to be found. According to him, this is because Saichō (767–822), the eighth-century founder of the Tendai sect in Japan taught that “all Japanese had the disposition of bodhisattvas.” As bodhisattvas they were both “treasures and benefactors of the nation.” According to Gyōei, Buddhism in Japan was not Indian or Chinese Buddhism transplanted. The Tendai sect had been established “based on a deep understanding of the Japanese national character . . . as a religion to pacify and preserve the nation,” and this was made possible by the “gracious wish” of successive Japanese emperors.[18]

Dr. Shiio Benkyō (1876– 1971), a Jōdo sect priest who later became president of Taishō University declared that the Buddhism left in India and China is a failure and only in Japan is it “possible to draw near to a Buddhism like that of the time when Buddha Shakyamuni was alive.”[19] Benkyo explains, “Buddhism in India collapsed due to [the nature of] Indian culture. Buddhism in China collapsed because it ran directly contrary to the history and nature of the Chinese state, and was therefore only able to produce a few mountain temples. On the other hand, thanks to the rich cultivation Japanese Buddhism received on Japanese soil, it gradually developed into that which the Buddhist teaching was aiming toward.”[20] Japanese Buddhism is the only authentic Buddhist teaching, precisely because it has grown up in Japanese soil and has been shepherded by the Emperor: “The priceless customs and manners of our country are the fundamental reasons for this occurrence. These customs and manners are to be found throughout the land, but their heart lies with the emperor and the imperial household, through whose efforts they have been guided and fostered.”[21]

Thus all Japanese Buddhism is called “imperial-way Buddhism.” Since the emperor embodies the state, and Buddhism and the state are one, then the emperor and Buddhism are one.

In looking at the past we see that imperial edicts from successive emperors taught us the proper way to make offerings of even a single flower [to the Buddha], or offer even one stick of incense, or read the sutras with the correct pronunciation, or worship in the Buddha Hall. The power to select and protect each of the sects, to determine each and every temple observance—all have their roots in imperial edicts. Japanese Buddhism acts on the basis of imperial edicts. This is what distinguishes it from the Buddhism of foreign countries.[22]

In turn the practice of Buddhism entails a reverence for the edicts of the successive emperors “To venerate the Three Treasures [of Buddhism] means to revere imperial edicts without question.”[23] Japanese Buddhism is melded with Japanese imperialism, xenophobia, and nationalism.

Cohen claims Buddhist enlightenment is on the order of the “Enlightenment” of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe which “provides the political context for understanding Buddhist enlightenment as the simultaneous, coequal, perfection of rationality, religiosity, morality, and humanity, beyond politics.”[24] Just as western enlightenment is the occasion for marking other peoples and times as part of the darkness (to be set aside or forcibly enlightened), so too in Japan, Buddhist enlightenment is beyond questioning and the politic connected to this enlightenment, associated as it is with the Japanese Emperor, is beyond question. As Saeki Jōin, a Hossō sect priest and chief abbot of Hōryūji, one of Japan’s oldest and most famous temples, writes, “If you receive an imperial edict you must revere it, for the ruler is heaven and the people are the earth.” Jōin concludes: “The emperor, being holy and divine, is inviolable…. The emperor’s edicts, being holy and divine, are inviolable … and they must always be revered.” Jōin defends this on Buddhist grounds,

As expressed in the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha in his compassion regards [beings in] the three worlds [of desire, form, and formlessness] as members of his family. That is to say, he doesn’t think of his family as composed of just his blood relatives, or only the few members of his immediate family, or simply those in his local area. No, his family includes everyone in the whole world, in the entire universe. For him, everyone in the world is a member of his family. In fact, he does not limit his family members to human beings alone. Even animals and all living things are included…. There is nothing that the Tathagata [fully enlightened being] in his great compassion does not wish to save…. There is no one who he does not consider to be his child…. When this faith in the great compassion and mercy of the Tathagata is applied to the political world, there is not a single member of the Japanese nation who is not a child of the emperor…. This expresses in the political realm the ideal of a system centered on the emperor.[25]

Being apolitical and areligious is the means of asserting an absolute and universal hegemony. The Zen practitioner may or may not be fully aware of submitting to the final authority of the Buddha, but anything less than total submission disenables the practice. One either steps into the path of enlightenment, suspending critical thought concerning Buddhist enlightenment, or one does not enter that path. Accepting the practice is itself a metaphysical presumption in that the pragmatic, practical, surface, is given priority.

Cohen compares it to Martin Luther’s nominalism: “surfaces are able to sustain the burden of reality because, in fact, they do re-present an occult reality” beyond comprehension.[26] As he concludes, “let us recall how Luther coaxes readers to adhere to the surface of the Word, thereby avoiding a dangerous fascination with the transcendental unknown.” The commands and practices of the Buddha are like the literal plainness of Scripture. The good Calvinist also, has “the ability to take scripture at face-value, without wrapping it in enigmas,” and this “is possible only for one illumined by the Spirit. Only the elect can accept that god saves some and damns others gratuitously; only the elect can praise this god as perfectly just, when from a human perspective, he appears cruel, random, and malicious.”[27] In the Japanese code of the warrior, the cruelty and bloodletting of the sword must be understood as the loving prerogative of the master, and the Zen Samurai can no more question than a Calvinist the morality of his god.

Cohen defines a Buddhist, “as someone for whom a buddha is an ultimate authority; a Buddhist trusts that, because a buddha is perfectly enlightened, his command dharetha must always lead to beneficial results.” One may have to endure, like the good Calvinist, the seeming contradictory, but there is no questioning of enlightenment as set forth by the Buddha. “Insofar as one is a Buddhist, one’s abstract ideals, concrete cosmologies, economic pursuits, clothing and bodily comportment, even diet, can be traced back to one’s trust in enlightenment.” There may be disagreement among Buddhists over the details, but all agree there is a Buddha who realized unexcelled and complete enlightenment.[28]

This is not to say the Christian should not expect to find God at work in other cultures and religions, but this expectation should not include suspending critical judgment. Too often nationalism, religious fanaticism, and genocidal violence, are overlooked (perhaps set aside as having nothing to do with the religion), and Zen is a key example. The reality of Japanese Zen has a very different history than the popularized version of the religion which accords it only peace and healing.

[1] Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2006) quoted from the epigraph.

[2] Victoria, x-xi.

[3] Inazō Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, 11. Cited in Victoria, 114.

[4] Nitobe, 11-12, Cited in Victoria, 115.

[5] Buddhist magazine Daihōrin, 36-39. Cited in Victoria, 111-112.

[6] Hayashiya and Shimakage, Bukkyō no Sensō Kan, 4. Cited in Victoria, 104-105.

[7] Taigo Furukawa, Rapidly Advancing Japan and the New Mahayana Buddhism (Yakushin Nihon to Shin Daijō Bukkyō), 51. Cited in Victoria, 110.

[8] For example, Ruben L. F. Habito, The Healing Breath of Zen (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2006).

[9] Bernie Glassman Buddhist magazine “tricycle” (1999) Cited in Cohen, xi.  

[10] As Richard Cohen remarks, “What are we to say of a doctrine which is sometimes represented as one of almost perfect Theism; sometimes as direct Atheism; sometimes as having the closest analogy to what in a Greek philosopher, or in a modern philosopher, would be called Pantheism; sometimes as the worship of human saints or heroes; sometimes as altogether symbolical; sometimes as full of the highest abstract speculation; sometimes as vulgar idolatry?” Richard S. Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment: Buddhism, religion, modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) 151.

[11] Raniero Gnoli, ed., The Gilgit Manuscript of the Sakghabhedavastu (Rome: ISMEO, 1977), 1:132. Quoted in Cohen, xii.

[12] V. Treckner, ed., The Majjhima-Nikaya (London: Pali Text Society, 1935), 1:432. Cited in Cohen. 154.

[13] Victoria, 95.

[14] Cohen, xii.

[15] Victoria, xiv.

[16] Victoria, Ibid.

[17] Victoria, Ibid.

[18] Quoted in Ōkura Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo, Gokoku Bukkyō, pp. 185-209. Cited in Victoria, 97.

[19] Gokoku Bukkyō, 33, Cited in Victoria, 98.

[20] Gokoku Bukkyō, 50, Cited in Victoria, 98.

[21] Gokoku Bukkyō, 50, Cited in Victoria, 99.

[22] Gokoku Bukkyō 50-51, Cited in Victoria, 99.

[23] Gokoku Bukkyō, 130-131, Cited in Victoria, 100.

[24] Cohen, xiii.

[25] Gokoku Bukkyō, pp. 159-160. Cited in Victoria, 97.

[26] Cohen, 157.

[27] Cohen, 157.

[28] Cohen, 161.

Gregory of Nyssa: The Liberating Work of Salvation

For our sakes, who had lost our existence through our thoughtlessness, he consented to be born like us so that it might bring that which had left reality back again to reality. This one is the only begotten God, who encompasses everything in himself, but also pitched his own tabernacle among us. [1]

The theme of Scripture as the liberating work of God is captured in the central motif of Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt, which the New Testament explains as completed in the liberating work of Jesus from sin. The presumption is that Christ deepens and expands this liberating work to include overturning every form of enslaving power. Gregory of Nyssa develops a definitive link between the liberating work of Moses and Jesus in his theology. He (as in the epigraph) equates the imagery of Moses’ tabernacle with the incarnation and will appeal to the life of Moses (as one of continual progress in virtue) as key in understanding the incarnation (providing for direct participation in the divine nature). It is no accident then, that Gregory (after the Apostle Paul) makes one of the earliest arguments against slavery.

Gregory, like Paul and Origen, presumes that the Word that Moses encountered is the incarnate Christ. “The much desired face of the Lord once passed Moses by, and thus the soul of the lawgiver kept ongoing outside its present condition as it followed the Word who led the way.”[2] He sees the life of Moses as a journey toward learning to be like Jesus: “He was always becoming greater and never stopped in his growth. He had attained growth even at the beginning when he considered the reproach of Christ more exalted than the kingdom of Egypt, and chose to be ill-treated in company with God’s people rather than to enjoy for a time the pleasures of sin.”[3] In tying the journey of Moses (and exodus from slavery) to the Christian journey, Gregory is focused on the development of virtue but he is also focused on the acting and doing of God, especially in his creative and liberating activity through Christ.

In short, Gregory’s Christocentrism (focused on the incarnation) develops a particular understanding of participation in God through Christ, a particular metaphysic, and in the titles of Christ, a particular set of virtues and liberating power, which would serve to counter the failures of modern theology, both Catholic and Protestant. Before turning to Gregory it may be necessary to point out where exactly the sort of corrective he brings is needed.

If the theme or thesis of Scripture (the very meaning of Christianity) is liberation, then measuring where Christianity has or has not been enacted can be measured by where liberation has or has not occurred. Obviously, there are many forms of enslavement and oppression, but a simple test of a particular theology or form of Christianity is to ask, what form of the faith is most responsible for the modern trans-Atlantic slave trade? The fact that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was introduced by “Christian” Europeans and the Church was the “backbone of the slave trade” would seem to indicate there may have been a theological as well as a moral failure.[4] The added fact that most slave ship captains and slave traders were “good Christians” illustrates the blindness of certain forms of theology. “For example, Sir John Hawkins, the first slave-ship captain to bring African slaves to the Americas, was a religious man who insisted that his crew ‘serve God daily’ and ‘love one another.’” His ship, ironically, was called ‘The Good Ship Jesus.’[5]

Stacy Brown argues that Catholicism was the primary culprit in the trans-Atlantic slave trade as, “The five major countries that dominated slavery and the slave trade in the New World were either Catholic, or still retained strong Catholic influences including: Spain, Portugal, France, and England, and the Netherlands.” (Brown also notes that in 2016, Georgetown University offered a public apology after acknowledging that slavery saved the school, when 188 years prior, Jesuit priests sold 272 slaves to save the school from financial ruin.[6])

On the other hand, the Anglican Church invested in slavery and profited directly from the slave trade: “A report commissioned by the church found last June that a predecessor of its investment fund, called Queen Anne’s Bounty, invested significant amounts in the slave-trading South Sea Company in the 18th century.” Gareth Mostyn, chief executive of the Church Commissioners said, “There’s no doubt that those who were making the investment knew that the South Sea Company was trading in enslaved people, and that’s now a source of real shame for us, and for which we apologise.” As a result, the Anglican Church “plans to spend $121m to take action to address ‘our shameful past’ for involvement in the 18th-century slave trade.”[7]

Beyond the slave trade, slave owners represented a number of different denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, came into being in 1845 as the church of Southern slaveholders. Alexander Campbell, one of the founding leaders of the Restoration Movement wrote concerning slavery in 1845: “There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting it, but many regulating it. It is not, then, we conclude, immoral.” Frederick Douglas, describes one of the men that owned him as a devout Methodist. Edward Covey “would make a short prayer in the morning, and a long prayer at night; and, strange as it may seem, few men would at times appear more devotional than he.”[8] Covey would take the slaves of other masters and break them for slave service (mainly by regularly whipping them), which is how Douglas came under his service. “Added to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion–a pious soul–a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church.”[9] This is Douglas’ ironic way of indicating he was a religious brute.

Other than groups like the Quakers and Seventh Day Adventists, most every denomination was complicit in slavery. The point may be simple and even crude, but it seems clear that Jesus’ continuation of the liberating action of God in Moses seems to have gotten lost among those who could enslave and oppress their fellow humans in the name of Jesus. There were and are several ways of getting around this accusation: slavery is not sin itself but a metaphor for sin; the enslaved are improved in being exposed to their Master’s Christianity, etc. Or maybe, as I pointed out in my last blog (here), Jesus saving activity is concerned primarily with the kingdom of heaven, and the temporal kingdoms are left to violence, coercion, and slavery, as part of God’s plan (as in Luther’s two-kingdom theology). White supremacy and Christian nationalism, like Nazi National Socialism, work out of the same theological matrix of two-kingdoms that arises originally with Augustine, and may have seemed a necessary conciliation with Constantinianism. At any rate, the crudest of markers for the success or failure of particular forms of Christianity, indicates the church has mostly failed. But I presume this crude failure is indicative that many forms of sin’s enslavement have been left unaddressed. Sin enslaves morally, psychologically, socially, and arises in various, more subtle forms than chattel slavery, but a theology that cannot prevent literal slavery is probably not up to preventing or countering its more subtle forms. In other words, white Christians in the United States have inherited a theology that is more enslaving than liberating.

To put a finer point on it, virtue, discipleship, and being made in the image and likeness of Jesus, does not figure into the western, white, theological inheritance. Whether it is the fault of the reformers or the failure of a corrupt Catholicism, the loss of the development of the virtues, the loss of a practical discipleship, the loss of enactment of a real-world righteousness as part of salvation, creates a fundamental shift from the New Testament, not only in the texture of the Christian life but in the perception of God. The notion of two kingdoms, the legal theory of atonement promoted by Anselm, or Luther’s shift to an imputed righteousness or a faith that saves apart from “works,” creates a fictionalized version of the faith in which the forces of oppression – the personal forces of sinful oppression and the structural forces of societal oppression – are left unaddressed. As a result, being Christian is no predictor of one’s moral aptitude or manner of life. This stands in sharp contrast to New Testament Christianity and the Christianity of the early church. It may be that it is Gregory of Nyssa who best sums up this early form of the faith.

Gregory presumes that to be called a Christian means that one becomes like God through Christ. Not only the name of Christ, but all the various titles and names of Christ, are taken up by the Christian. He illustrates with the title of “king”: “authority over all things is hinted at by the name “kingship,” while purity and freedom from all passion and all evil are specified by the names of virtue, each one both thought and spoken in a higher sense.”[10] The Christian then also inherits the title and virtue of kingship or rule over the passions. By the same token all of the characteristics of Christ, included in his various descriptions and titles, are transferred to the Christian: “so Christ is righteousness itself (cf. Heb 7:2) and wisdom and power (cf. 1 Cor 1:24) and truth (cf. John 14:6), both goodness (cf. John 7:12; Mark 10:18) and life (cf. John 11:25; 14:6), and salvation (cf. acts 4:12) and incorruption (cf. 1 Cor 15:53–57), both immutability and changelessness, and every lofty concept whatever indicated by such names—all these Christ both is and is called.”[11] Each of these titles and characteristics are included in the name of Christ and by extension in the one calling herself a Christian.

For if we, united to him by faith in him, are named together with him who excels the names interpretive of the incorruptible nature, it is entirely necessary that as many concepts concerning that incorruptible nature as are contemplated with the name should also become those conforming to our having the same name. For just as we have obtained the title of Christian by participating in Christ, so too it is fitting that in conformity we should be drawn into sharing all the lofty names.[12]

One puts on Christ by putting on the virtues of Christ or by doing what Christ did and participating in who he is. It is not that one is left to do this apart from Christ: “Certainly whoever pursues true virtue participates in nothing other than God, because he is himself absolute virtue.”[13] God in Christ shares salvation and virtue with his followers and this is the meaning of the name Christian:

For just as by participating in Christ we are given the title ‘Christian,’ so also are we drawn into a share in the lofty ideas which it implies. Just as in a chain, what draws the loop at the top also draws the next loops, in like manner, since the rest of the words interpreting His ineffable and multiform blessedness are joined to the word ‘Christ,’ it would be necessary for the person drawn along with Him to share these qualities with Him.[14]

The name “Christ” and the various titles and descriptions which go with the name are not just inclusive of the incarnate Lord, but what is found in Christ (and these titles) is the revelation and perfection of the divine nature. As Jonathan Bailes states it, “Those who are called to become like God must imitate Christ because Christ himself is the perfect manifestation of divine perfection and, therefore, the names that are given to him are not simply descriptors of his humanity.”[15] Gregory assumes a direct equivalence between the titles given to Christ and the divine nature and the perfection of that nature. His Christology is such that God is not who he is apart from the perfections of Jesus Christ found in the incarnation. God’s perfection is the perfection of Jesus Christ. As Bailes concludes, “it is for this reason that Gregory sees no tension whatsoever in saying that whoever imitates Christ by conforming herself to his various titles—kingship, righteousness, wisdom, power, goodness, life, salvation, etc.—has fulfilled the goal of Christianity and the virtuous life, namely, imitating the perfection of God.”[16] The Christian becomes perfect as Christ is perfect and thus  becomes perfect like the Heavenly Father.

If one does not imitate the virtue of Christ, Gregory wonders if such a one truly shares in the name: “If, therefore, someone puts on the name of Christ, but does not exhibit in his life what is indicated by the term, such a person belies the name and puts on a lifeless mask . . .. For it is not possible for Christ not to be justice and purity and truth and estrangement from all evil, nor is it possible to be a Christian (that is, truly a Christian) without displaying in oneself a participation in these virtues.”[17] The incongruity of taking the name Christian without participating in the reality of Christ was inconceivable to Gregory and early Christians.  

Gregory writes point blank: “If one can give a definition of Christianity, we shall define it as follows: Christianity is an imitation of the divine nature.”[18] He understands this may sound difficult, but this putting on of the divine nature in Christ is the defining point of Christianity:

Now, let no one object to the definition as being immoderate and exceeding the lowliness of our nature; it does not go beyond our nature. Indeed, if anyone considers the first condition of man, he will find through the Scriptural teachings that the definition does not exceed the measure of our nature. The first man was constituted as an imitation of the likeness of God. So Moses, in philosophizing about man, where he says that God made man, states that: ‘He created him in the image of God,’ and the word ‘Christianity,’ therefore, brings man back to his original good fortune.[19]

It brings him back to his original goal not simply through (though not exclusive of) imitation, but through participation in Christ. Gregory speaks of both imitation and participation and seems to mean the same thing by the two terms. As Torstein Tollefsen observes, “ontological structure” of the imitation of God in Gregory’s writings is indistinguishable from Gregory’s theology of participation, so that when Gregory speaks of the imitation of God, he does not intend by this to imply merely an imitation of an external model, but a genuine participation in divine activity.”[20]

The imitation of the divine nature, as Gregory explains, is the definition of what it means to take on the name Christian: “Now if humanity was originally the likeness of God, I shall probably not have missed the mark in my definition by claiming that Christianity is the imitation of the divine nature.” The Gospel “commands the imitation in our way of life of good actions, as far as that may be possible.” The actions this involves are clear: “Our being made strangers to every wickedness as far as may be possible, to be pure from its defilements in deed and word and thought—this is truly the imitation of the divine perfection and of what has to do with God in heaven.”[21] God commands that his children be perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect, and with the command the possibility presents itself: “For it is just as impossible to make ourselves equal in appearance to heaven’s greatness with the beautiful things in it as to liken humanity from earth to God in heaven.’ But the explanation of this problem is clear, because the Gospel does not command the comparison of one nature to another, I mean the human with the divine.”[22] The original image was set to receive the divine likeness, not due to its own nature, but because God’s nature is one that can be shared.

Along with this imitation, participation is that which makes imitation possible: “This is because the divinity is equally present in all things and in like manner pervades the entire creation, and nothing would remain in existence if it were separated from the One who is. Instead, the divine nature takes hold of each one of existing things, as of equal value, since he encompasses all things with his own inner all-embracing power.”[23] By “minding the things of heaven,” one not only thinks of heavenly things but participates in the heavenly virtues: “Consequently, the person who wants it has the life of ease in heaven, even though he is on earth, just as the gospel explains by telling us to mind heavenly things (cf. Col 3:2) and to store up in the treasuries there the wealth of virtue.” This participatory ontology not only indicates the avenue to God but indicates that Christ is an extension to humankind of the divine nature. Thus, the Christian is called to the perfection of God: “’Be perfect, as also your heavenly father is perfect’ (Matt 5:45). For when he called the true father the father of those who believed, he wanted also those born through him to be like the perfection of goods contemplated in him.”[24]

This notion of obtaining the perfection of God is blocked by a great deal of modern theology. It is counter to Catholic and Protestant nominalist conceptions of God (in which the divine nature is inaccessible) and amounts to an alternative understanding of salvation. This form of salvation is no mere legal fiction, nor is it strictly tied to the church’s sacraments, nor is it concerned primarily with escaping hell and going to heaven, but it is a putting on of the righteous nature of God. Gregory’s Christology is his soteriology in that Christ’s person entails salvation. What God is doing in Christ in turn, is not extraneous to the nature of God, but is part of who God is. Gregory and the early church left no room for an immoral Christianity consisting of failed virtues.

There is no room, for example, for slavery in Gregory, who considers it the height of pride to presume one can own fellow humans. “So, when someone turns the property of God into his own property and arrogates dominion to his own kind, so as to think himself the owner of men and women, what is he doing but overstepping his own nature through pride, regarding himself as something different from his subordinates?”[25] He is among the earliest of the church fathers to speak out against the institution providing a scathing criticism of slavery in his homily on Ecclesiastes entitled: “The evils of slave-owning.”[26] As Chris de Wet argues, “This homily is probably one of the most potent late ancient reactions against institutional slavery.”[27] Gregory argues that one cannot live a virtuous life while participating in the prideful practice of slaveholding and slave management. “For what is such a gross example of arrogance in the matters enumerated above – an opulent house, and an abundance of vines, and ripeness in vegetable-plots, and collecting waters in pools and channeling them in gardens – as for a human being to think himself the master of his own kind? . . . This kind of language is raised up as a challenge to God.” As Gregory describes it, the slaveholder denies the human nature of the slave and presumes to play God:  

I got me slaves and slave-girls. What do you mean? You condemn man to slavery, when his nature is free and possesses free will, and you legislate in competition with God, overturning his law for the human species. The one made on the specific terms that he should be the owner of the earth, and appointed to government by the Creator – him you bring under the yoke of slavery, as though defying and fighting against the divine decree.[28]

The slaveholder has forgotten the first command of God and has forgotten his own place in God’s creation:

You have forgotten the limits of your authority, and that your rule is confined to control over things without reason. For it says Let them rule over winged creatures and fishes and four-footed things and creeping things (Gen. 1,26). Why do you go beyond what is subject to you and raise yourself up against the very species which is free, counting your own kind on a level with four-footed things and even footless things? You have subjected all things to man, declares the word through the prophecy, and in the text: it lists the things subject, cattle and oxen and sheep (Ps 8, 7-8). Surely human beings have not been produced from your cattle? Surely cows have not conceived human stock? Irrational beasts are the only slaves of mankind. . . . But by dividing the human species in two with ‘slavery’ and ‘ownership’ you have caused it to be enslaved to itself, and to be the owner of itself.[29]

Gregory’s conclusion is decisively clear:

I got me slaves and slave-girls. For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put: on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling the being shaped by God? God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image and likeness’ (Gen 1,26). If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or rather, not even to God himself . For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable (Rom 1:1,29). God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God’s?

. . . He who knew the nature of mankind rightly said that the whole world was not worth giving in exchange for a human soul. Whenever a human being is for sale, therefore, nothing less than the owner of the earth is led into the sale-room. Presumably, then, the property belonging to him is up for auction too. That means the earth, the islands, the sea, and all that is in them. What will the buyer pay, and what will the vendor accept, considering how much property is entailed in the deal?[30]

Gregory’s theology proves itself in his abhorrence of slavery. To arrive at this understanding entailed a theology set upon imitating and participating in Christ as integral to the Christian life. As Bailes concludes, “The virtuous life consists in the imitation of Christ, in conforming oneself to all of the distinct virtues that are attested to in the biblical titles of Christ, and only by doing this can one attain to the goal of Christian virtue, which is to become like God.”[31] This definition of Christianity leaves no room for the failed (immoral, virtueless) forms of the faith but liberates from every form of enslavement.

[1] Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. Translation and Introduction by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978) 97-98.

[2] Quoted in the Introduction to the Life of Moses,  20. In Cant. 12, Vol. 6, pp. 354, 8—356, 16

[3] Ibid.

[4] This is the point of Stacy M. Brown, “The Major Role The Catholic Church Played in Slavery,” New York Amsterdam News (September 18, 2018). Brown is Referencing the website AfricaW.com.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Aljazeera, “Church of England admits ‘real shame for us’ over slavery ties” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/11/church-of-england-says-it-knew-of-slavery-links

[8] Frederick Douglas, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Electronic Version, 1999) 62.  https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html

[9] Douglas, 57.

[10] Gregory of Nyssa, One Path for All: Gregory of Nyssa on the Christian Life and Human Destiny, Compiled and introduced by Rowan A. Greer and Assisted by J. Warren Smith (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 2015), 19.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid. 20.

[13] Life of Moses, 31.

[14] Gregory of Nyssa: The Ascetical Works, trans, Virginia Woods Callahan (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 84-85.

[15] Jonathan Michael Bailes, “Becoming Like God in Christ: Nicene Theology and Christian Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa” (Boston: PhD Dissertation, 2020), 142-143.

[16] Bailes, 144.

[17] The Ascetical Works, 85.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Torstein Tollefsen, Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 163. Cited in Bailes, 133. As Tollefsen notes, “Gregory’s works abound in the terminology of imitation. When he speaks of likeness and archetype, the likeness is an imitation or reflection of the archetype…I think this is just another way to express the central idea of participation. To imitate God is to participate in God. In principle, the logic is the same.”

[21] One Path for All, 20-21.

[22] Ibid, 21.

[23] Ibid, 22.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version with Supporting Studies (New York and Berlin: Waiter de Gruyter, 1993), 73.

[26] Ecclesiastes, 73.

[27] Chris L de Wet, “The Cappadocian fathers on slave management” http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/she/v39n1/17.pdf

[28] Ecclesiastes, 73.

[29] Ecclesiastes, 73-74.

[30] Ecclesiastes, 74-75.

[31] Bailes, 145.