divinization – Forging Ploughshares

Putting on the Mind of Christ Through the Rule of Faith

To say, God is our problem, does not mean that our primary problem is that we deserve punishment and only God can take care of it, it means that our deepest gifts and problems, our neuroses, personality formation, attitudes toward ourselves and others, is caught up in belief or unbelief about ultimate reality or about God, and these beliefs and denials are often wrong. Belief may not capture it, because this may be prior to belief, it may be the impetus to unbelief, but it is our deepest conception about reality. What we project upon God, perhaps even the God we do not believe in, contains the human sickness, and coming to see God rightly is very much involved with the cure. We may have to begin with unbelief, or denial of God, or what we do not believe so as to say what is we believe. Our image of God pertains to our image of everything, and coming to conceive God rightly is the goal of our life and faith, precisely because this contains everything about our conception of the world. This interpretation of all things according to faith, rightly conceived, is captured in the biblical notion of the “rule of faith” (Rom 3:27, which the Church Fathers will also call the “rule of truth” or the “rule of love”). Paul is pitting his rule of faith against what is obvious about God, or seemingly so, as he is vengeful, law bound, and this is seen by everybody: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them” (Rom 1:18-19).[1] This legal, seen, naturally revealed, hermeneutic, working within everyone, stands juxtaposed to the “rule of faith” (regula fidei). This rule is the regula or the regulating mode of conception, a basic premise for reading scripture, and the premise in which scripture is constituted, which suspends a “works of the law” conception. We are naturally given, perhaps due to sin, to a perverse notion of God and the world, and this perception is to be relinquished through the gospel. How this works out in our lives may be a slow process.

Learning to See God Through the Rule of Faith: The Case of John Ashworth and Maximus the Confessor

This struck me in interviewing John Ashworth, a priest, missionary, and peacemaker working in Sudan in Africa. John was suffering from PTSD, having been put in front of a firing squad, after being kidnapped and held hostage. Having experienced many levels of horrific violence, the church gave him leave to undergo recovery. John described to us in an interview, and also describes in his autobiography, his work with a gifted therapist, an elderly nun, who offered “unconditional non-judgemental love” whose “favourite image of God was ‘Beloved’.” He writes, “She led me through a process of examining my own images of God, until one day I was able to say to her, ‘I don’t believe in God any more!’ She was delighted! ‘Excellent! Now that we have discovered the images of God that you don’t believe in, let’s begin to explore the God that you do believe in.’”[2]

John began to rebuild his image of God, and along with it his understanding of himself and his world. “I had to move on from childhood images of God the stern father, the strict teacher, the controlling judge, an object of fear. We anthropomorphise God but often choose from a very limited range of human characteristics.”[3] The childhood image of God as the enforcer of law, or even more benevolent notions, may still be bound by a letter driven imagery of the human imagination. The visual, the legal, the symbolic (as in Rom 1:18), or any particular representation, will fall short of the all-encompassing reality of the God in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). There are a wide range of images, none of which can capture the deep mystery of an all-encompassing compassion, truth, and relational reality, inclusive of much of human reality, but as Paul describes we only come to this realization by the controlling factor of faith: “Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law” (Rom 3:27–28).

John describes a renewed recognition of God interacting within his life, and acknowledging this presence as an act of prayer. “Experiences of community and relationship, the joys of friendship, marriage and family, eating together, working together, playing together, making love together – these can all be prayer. In them God is present whether I recognise that presence or not, and an explicit awareness of that presence is prayer.”[4] John describes a growing recognition, of what in conversation he referred to as divinization, or the Eastern notion of the working of the Trinity in all of creation but also within the self. “This is a God whom I need to find within myself and to allow out in a ‘letting go’ rather than a ‘letting in’. We are not unconnected with the God who created us and the God who became incarnate, the God who is Alpha and Omega, the first-born of all creation (Colossians 1:15) and the endpoint towards whom we are all evolving. Thus relationship is also at the heart of Christianity.”[5] John discovers a means of interpreting all things according to Maximus the Confessor’s version of the rule of faith, “the rule of love,” drawing all things to God.

In Maximus understanding, all of God’s activity has the single purpose of uniting the world to himself. As Torstein Tollefesen explains, “Maximus asserts that the creation and ordering of the world is an embodiment of the Logos: ‘Always and in all God’s Logos . . . God wills to effect the mystery of His own embodiment.’”[6] The Word of God at work in us produces the same impetus behind and in Scripture. In Maximus’ famous quote, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[7] Or as he describes elsewhere, “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[8] This is Maximus’ rule of faith, which precedes all things and is the purpose in all things, through which we rightly perceive all things. We are to put on the mind of Christ in our perception of ourselves and the world. There is a fusion of cosmology, soteriology, and psychology, in the activity of God’s unifying work. This rule of faith, for the early church, is not simply an interpretive method but it is the impetus behind the writing of the Gospels. The gospel truth precedes the truth of the Gospels, giving rise to their writing and this is what is to be encountered in the Scriptures.

The Rule of Faith as a Mode of Interpreting Scripture and All Things

As John Behr describes the rule of faith, this hypothesis of Scripture, enables “the demonstrations from Scripture to describe, accurately, the portrait of a king, Christ; it is a mode of interpretation delivered by the apostles in their proclamation of Christ.”[9] Scripture is an interpretation of the person of Christ (in both Testaments), and this is the substance of its unity and the point of departure, but Christ is the exegetical means of reading Scripture. Scripture is a confession of faith in the crucified and risen Christ, and this faith first arises in the Apostles and is being preached before it is written. The Church Father, Irenaeus, feels it is key that the apostles first preached the Gospel and subsequently wrote it down, as this indicates it is the continuous preaching in the Church of the tradition of the apostles. It is this word of the apostles that “has been handed down (‘traditioned’) in the Scriptures, as the ground and pillar of our faith.”[10] There is an encounter with a person in Scripture and this person, Christ, is not bound by the letters and writing, but is living. Scripture, tradition, and experience, arise from the authority of God in Christ and this becomes the means of an exegetical reason or explanation about God (Jn. 1:18).

Paul had spoken of the Church as the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Tim 3:15), but the living Word, which is Christ, is also rightly described as the foundation: “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). The Apostles possessed the fullness of the Word, and so Paul can also describe them as the foundation of the church: “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone“ (Ephesians 2:20). They first embody the Word constituting the continuing incarnation of Christ in the church, then they preach this word and subsequently write it down, but it is the living Christ that is to be encountered in this written word.

Irenaeus suggests that it is not writing per se that constitutes the gospel, as the illiterate “barbarians” who receive this gospel may have it written on their hearts though they cannot understand the words written with ink and paper. It is in fact meant to be an inscription on human character, in the human heart, and is only secondarily written in letters. Irenaeus is describing an encounter with the risen Christ, in the gospel, that is faith, the rule of interpretation. As he will describe, the rule of faith is inclusive of a specific understanding of God as creator, of Christ as unveiling and constituting the inspiration of scripture and delivering from death, and of the Holy Spirit who is being poured out making people righteous and forming a new unified people. One encounters God the Father, God the Son (as Word, Son of God, Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit in the gospel message, and this unity is the rule of faith. Rather than a dividing word of the law, this encounter brings about a transformed imagination, that is no longer shaped by what is obvious in this world (under heaven) but there is a “renewing of the mind” (Rom 12:2).

The rule of love or the rule of faith or the analogy of faith, or to say the same thing, the gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning provided in the Scriptures, but with this unveiling there is an unveiling, and unifying, of all things. As Paul explains to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). These events are not obvious in the Hebrew Scriptures, but given these events in the life of Christ, this make sense of Scripture (the Hebrew Scriptures). By the same token they provide an interpretive lens for all things. Given the reality of Christ, the Scriptures provide a vocabulary, a world, a history, which can be read in this light, but so too the experience of the world. The canon or measure of Christ certainly is a means of interpreting Scripture but it is the means of apprehending all things. There is a conversion of the imagination, a depth perception no longer delimited by “things under heaven.”

The Rule of Faith as a Mindset

There is the interworking of the apostolic preaching, the rule of faith, and the role of Scripture, but according to the New Testament and the early church fathers, this rule of faith is at once to be a personal mindset and an ethical orientation organizing, not just Scripture, but one’s life. That is, this rule is more than a proposition or rule in the ordinary sense, but is the means of seeing and measuring all things by the peace and love of Christ. The rule is linked with unity and peace, it is linked with apprehending rightly, and it is linked to making critical judgments, and all of these are linked with putting on the mind of Christ. Which is to say this rule of faith is taken up, cathected (to redeploy Freud’s word) into the self as part of one’s character and one’s apprehension of the world.

Paul explains that the “analogy of faith” works in conjunction with preaching and teaching and he wanted every prophecy and every teaching to be conformed to the analogy or likeness of faith (Rom. 12:6). The application or extrapolation of the kerygma may be the specialty of the prophet, but Paul calls every Christian to “appraise all things” according to the mind of Christ. Putting on the mind of Christ means that the individual is enabled to make authoritative judgments, informed critiques, “so that we may know things freely given to us by God,” so that we combine “spiritual thoughts with spiritual words” and thus come to understand those things that “are spiritually appraised” (I Cor. 2:12-16). This spiritual individual has the wisdom provided by God, where the natural man, or literally “a man of animal soul,” is incapable of discerning things according to the Spirit. Jesus promised that the Spirit would guide into all truth (Jn. 16:13) and Paul seems to be applying this to the individuals in the Corinthian church.

In dealing with those who are challenging his teaching and authority in Corinth, Paul explains that they are using the wrong measurement: “they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves,” thus “they are without understanding” (II Cor. 10:12). Where they measure by human, self-established measure (measuring themselves by themselves), Paul “measures by the measure which God has given me.” As he explains to the Ephesians this is “the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). This is the measure that, rather than stirring up human antagonism, is the means by which “we all attain to the unity of the faith.” Here is Maximus rule of love, drawing all things into the unity of Christ. Our usual measure, in which we measure ourselves against others, stirs up jealousy and violence. The force that killed Christ, namely the measure of man, is countered by Christ and the rule of faith. That is, the peace of Christ embodied in nonviolent love and nonviolent resistance, is the counter to the human rule and is the goal and means of the rule of faith, a deep transformative grammar preceding what is “clearly seen” (Rom 1:20).

From the Rule of Law to the Rule of Faith

There is a double meaning to this rule or canon, in that it is not simply a measure but is to “rule” or to be predominant in thought. It is an alternative to the rule of the law, both as measure and means, in that the law divides and diminishes but this rule speaks of a corporate identity in the Holy Spirit (no longer focused on “I” or law as in Romans 7), which has cosmic implications for those in Christ: “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (8:19), as they will reveal what is not now “clearly seen” or seemingly obvious. God understood in a relational identity, rather than a legal identity, is “Abba, Father.” The work of the “I” as measure and end, is displaced by the “rule” of the Spirit of life (8:2) which results in freedom from slavery to fear and a reconstituting the Subject as a child of God. The Pauline “body of sin” (6:6) or “body of death” (7:24) is displaced in the resurrection life of the Spirit (8:10-11) which is the beginning of cosmic redemption – “the redemption of our bodies” (8:23) and the redemption of the cosmos (8:21). This is not a condemning measure but redemptive. The measure and means that is predominant, is self-measure, how I measure up to others, or even within myself, or what is obvious to all, as if declared from what has been made (Rom 1:18ff). This natural measure belongs to the natural man, whose mind is captured by condemnation, but “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1).

The unification and participation Paul is describing is the realization of the rule of love. The law of life frees from the rule of law and letter: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom 8:2). There is a deep psychological shift in passing from measure of the law to the measure of faith, in and through which all things are reconceived. The law aroused an unquenchable desire, that is the desire for unity invoked or propelled by alienation. The fear and slavery under the law of sin and death, with its work through deceptive desire aroused by the law, became “another law” (Rom 7:23, ἕteronnόmon), but this law is now voided along with all of its various machinations. Law as measure and means seems to be part of the process of maturing, or being “tutored” (Galatians 3:24), but we pass from the tutor to a more fulsome reality that no longer requires this guide. The Spirit gives the righteousness of God or the promise of life indicated in the law, and the law’s “righteous decree” of life has been fulfilled. This then results in the capacity to “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (8:4). This walk is characterized in all of its phases by the power of life which enables the mindset and hope of the Subject in Christ.

The Rule of Faith and the Problem of Suffering

In our discussion with John Ashworth, he described a new way of viewing his own suffering and trauma. He had arrived at a moment of unbelief, or a denial of the God in whom he formerly believed, due to the violence he had witnessed and to which he had been subjected. It reminded me of the sort of protest atheism of Ted Turner, who had started as deeply religious, but with the prolonged illness and tragic death of his younger sister, Mary Jane, Turner turned to something of a protest atheism, as he was very angry at the God in which he did not believe. It is a story that could probably be repeated many times over, as in the case of Charles Darwin, whose oldest daughter, Annie, fell ill, or Samuel Clemens or Albert Einstein, all of whom came to unbelief due to suffering. The typical apologetic might attempt to explain, to make the suffering somehow beneficial, but there is really no answer of this sort, though suffering is thematic in Scripture.

John Ashworth describes an ability to see suffering in a different light: “Despite the hardships I regard it as a privilege to have shared the suffering, experienced the solidarity and camaraderie, and to have been part of something worthwhile. That’s what keeps me going and sustains me during difficult times, along with the knowledge that it’s not me who bears the responsibility of bringing peace and justice to Sudan and South Sudan.”[11] Or as he says elsewhere, “God is with us, not in an abstract and spiritual way, but in a very real and concrete way. God has experienced the sufferings of God’s people.”[12] He describes the work in analysis as realization that it may be in peak moments, “with a beautiful view, with joy or sorrow, with pain and suffering, with love and human relationships, with birth or death or other rites of passage” that we know God’s presence.[13] His book is a long meditation on suffering, and coming to recognize God in the suffering.

Where in Romans 7 Paul describes an unbearable suffering, in Romans 8, he provides the metaphor of childbirth, in which to couch and reframe human suffering. “For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom 8:22). Paul’s description of hope (the unseen, over and against that which is seen and obvious in Rom 1:18ff) allows for a full engagement with the vicissitudes of suffering as this suffering and even death is no longer definitive or determinative of life in light of the hope of certain glory. The “present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (8:18) as neither “death nor life” can separate from the love of God (8:38-39). Hope and faith embrace the dynamics of change, as it is focused on certain future fulfilment of a promise which cannot be obtained” within the framework (“under the heavens” (Rom 1:18, the possibilities inherent in the present). Faith and hope bear an unfinished (unseen, and beyond the heavens) embrace of the future, the possibility of growth and change. This hope directly counters the futility of sin (futility or matiotēs connotes what pseudos “lie” meant in Genesis and in Romans 1:25, “they exchanged the truth for a lie”). There is not an abolition of the present world so that heaven might take its place but a transformation on the order of birth, in which the pangs of suffering are fulfilling a purpose. With the “adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (8:23), the purpose of creation’s suffering will have appeared and the longing of hope and faith fulfilled.

Paul’s resolution to the alienation of the law is to become a child of God, the realization of faith. Where the sinful mind is by definition “hostile to God” the one adopted as a child by the Spirit has overcome this hostility enacted against the measure of the law (8:7). As in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the heart of stone will be replaced with a heart of flesh and God’s Spirit will indwell his people and enable them to keep the law (Ezek. 36:26-27). The move from law as alienating and oppressive to the law written on the heart (Jer. 31.33) is a description of the rule of faith, a character shaping way of apprehending. Paul’s cry at the end of Romans 7, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7.24), is followed by a cry of joy, “And by him we cry, “Abba, Father” (8:15). The measure and means have changed. The God who is law giver in ch. 7 is Abba in ch. 8 and this difference is wrought through “The Spirit himself who testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (8:15). This inward testimony is the measure of faith in the transformed mind.

(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

[1] Thanks to Brian Sartor for inspiring many of these thoughts. Listen to our podcast here, http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/brian-sartor-describes-pauls-deconstruction-of-the-teaching-of-the-false-teacher/

[2] John Ashworth, Journeying Toward Nonviolence: My Life in Sudan (London: Redhaven Books, 2026), 87.

[3] Ashworth, 88.

[4] Ashworth, 90.

[5] Ashworth, 91.

[6] Torstein Tollefesen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2.

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

[8] St. Maximus the Confessor’s Questions to Thalassius, question 60, paragraph 3

[9] John Behr, The Way to Nicaea (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 37,

[10] Behr, 39.

[11] Ashworth, 15-16.

[12] Ashworth, 61.

[13] Ashworth, 89.

“You Are Gods”: The Satanic Version

The point of Jesus’ statement, “You are gods” (John 10:34) might be summed up as theosis or being found “in Christ” or being filled with the Holy Spirit. That is, the explanation is inclusive of the New Testament doctrine of salvation. Christians, as Peter says, are “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) and so participate and are in union with God. The yeast that is integrated and assimilated into the whole batch of dough is divine. The union between a husband and wife marks the mystery of human and divine union (Eph. 5). As Irenaeus puts it, “For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God.”[1] Or as Athanasius succinctly put it, “He became man that we might become god.”[2] This may sound demonic, or at least Jesus’ contemporaries thought so: “Many of them were saying, He has a demon and is insane. Why do you listen to Him?’” (Jn. 10:20). Isn’t this demon talk or a near reduplication of the serpent’s temptation in Genesis?

The opposite of biblical deification, at least in the church fathers, is not what moderns might imagine post-Nietzsche, when we hear, “You are gods.” That is, we might think the satanic version is simply to say the same thing again, perhaps in a slightly different register (and without all the qualifications that have been made in order to help Jesus express himself better). The statement may conjure up images of Nietzsche’s superman, or of a completely autonomous individual – the captain of his own soul, churning out values and determining his world. We may imagine a kind of irreligion or atheism which gains freedom and power in throwing off all belief.

Even in the negative assessment of the statement we may be missing the original sense, as in, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” The supposed statement of Dostoevsky (it is actually Sartre misquoting The Brothers Karamazov) attributes a potency, hedonistic though it may be, to disbelief. Whether in its positive atheistic Nietzschean guise (“wiping the horizon clean,” etc.) or in its negative conservative ideological form (presuming religion and transcendental authority are necessary to set limits to human evil), there is a presumed freedom, either liberating or dangerous. In being god and displacing God, in this misunderstood demonization, there is a presumed empowerment that is fundamentally mistaken, and the error is exposed at multiple levels.

As Jacques Lacan put it, reversing Dostoevsky’s formula: “If God is dead nothing is permitted.” On its surface this may ring hollow, but the evidence Lacan is observing in the clinic is universally available. People are sick, twisted, and mentally ill. They kill themselves at almost the same rate they kill one another. People live under deadly constraints so that death is often the only option. Violence is not a choice but a necessity: there is random violence, national violence, religious violence, political violence, familial violence, or entertaining violence, but violence is the necessity that orders people’s lives. It may not be an overt physical violence, but simply a description of the life of the individual. Intrusive thoughts reduce many to marionettes controlled by their sick conscience which takes obscene delight in not allowing a moment’s rest. Of course, the conscience torturing them is their conscience – and any pleasure had in the sickness involves the ongoing suffering of the individual inflicting the pain. The more pain, the more divine satisfaction, so that one is continually working toward satisfying the god/voice in the head.

The source of this voice may be communal or individual, religious or irreligious; it matters not. The hedonistic command to enjoy is as deadly as the puritanical command to abstain from enjoyment. The command to sacrifice may come from the gods or it may come from the neighbor’s dog. The sacrifice may be the sacrifice of the first born, the sacrifice of a virgin, the sacrifice of the soldier, or the pedophile’s child sacrifice. People are sick, but they are not sickened by freedom but by enslavement. The gods they serve, personal or corporate, hedonistic or puritanical, demand constant vigilance, constant sacrifice, and human life is mostly spent in futile servitude to what is nonexistent.

Though Nietzsche railed against the slave religion of Christianity, he too succumbed to mental enslavement and ended his life a drooling idiot. The fact that his mental break came at the sight of a man beating a horse, indicates it was not freedom but human cruelty and evil – and perhaps the cruelty he inflicted upon himself – which he could not endure. The Übermensch turns out to be a pitiful wreck, and we live in the wake of this presumed freedom which induced an even heavier dose of enslavement. But the issue was never religion versus irreligion, or atheism versus theism.

In fact, one way of characterizing Jesus’ statement and the faith of the New Testament is as a form of irreligion (only a slight misnomer). The Romans presumed Christians were atheists, because they refused worship of the Roman gods. Judaism and Christianity are both characterized by their rejection of any form of idolatry (the only form of religion for much of the world). But Jesus statement gets at the fact that idolatry per se is not the root of the human problem (isn’t he guilty, one might ask, of the very idolatry Judaism condemns?). The Jews accuse Jesus of the worst form of irreligious blasphemy in claiming equality with God. Saul persecuted Christians for the same reason his Pharisee brothers accused Jesus of blasphemy.

Humans are enslaved, but what they are enslaved by is a deadly orientation, lust, or drive, which might take an infinite variety of forms. Paul characterizes it as an orientation to the law, in which the Jewish law is only a particular instance of the universal problem. His point to the Judaizers in Galatia is that a return to Judaism is the equivalent of a return to idolatry. The weight of the law might be felt in the inclusion/exclusion of the Jewish law, but this wall of hostility is not peculiar to Jews. It is not simply a “Jewish problem” or a “religious problem” but is the universal problem of suffering under the hostile condemnation of law.

To imagine God is doing the condemning, in the case of Jesus (and otherwise), is to miss the obvious fact that the world powers of Jerusalem and Rome are doing the torturing and killing of Christ. The killing of Jesus – revolving around his claim to deity – marks the source of the problem and the victim. The necessity to kill Jesus arises due to their respective gods. In Roman religion and Jewish religion, God incarnate must be killed to preserve the religion.

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor arrives at the same conclusion when Jesus happens to show up at the inquisition in Spain. After healing the sick and raising the dead, the Inquisitor has Jesus arrested and that evening enters his cell, so as to explain why the Church must burn him at the stake. Where Jesus had resisted the temptations in the wilderness, it is precisely those temptations which the Roman Church has utilized to steal human freedom. The Church will offer bread in exchange for worship: “give man bread and he will bow down to you, for there is nothing more indisputable than bread. But if at the same time someone else takes over his conscience – oh, then he will even throw down your bread and follow him who has seduced his conscience.” While freedom of conscience may be the lure, “there is nothing more tormenting” than this freedom. The Inquisitor explains to Jesus that his prime mistake was to imagine there were others like him, able to bear the weight of deity. In refusing the miracle of leaping off the Temple, you wrongly presumed “there are many like you” but “you did not know that as soon as man rejects miracles, he will at once reject God as well, for man seeks not so much God as miracles.” The Inquisitor explains that Jesus has expected too much of people, and luckily the Church has stepped in where Jesus failed. But now that Jesus has shown up, he must be silenced lest he presume to speak and interfere with the established religion of the Church. Everything has been handed over to the Church and now belongs to the pope, and “you may as well not come at all now, or at least don’t interfere with us for the time being.” [3]

The weight of freedom is too much so that enslavement to religion, to gods, or to human hierarchy, is the price most are willing to pay, faced with the responsibility Jesus places upon them. Better the self-binding enslavement of the common human condition; the condemnation Paul describes in Romans 7 and which the New Testament characterizes as both Jewish and pagan, which pertains to a human problem not a God problem.

To call it a legal problem, with Luther and Calvin, or to simply say it is a problem internal to the law, misses the point. The problem of the law is not a problem contained in the law but in people; in those who imagine life, identity, salvation, and being are in the law. But this law may consist of corporate or individual dictates. It may be a corporate law, as in the Kara tribe in which all babies whose top teeth come in before their bottom teeth must be killed, or it may be an individual compulsion to be tortured or to torture kill, rape or maim. It may be another that is destroyed, or it may be that the fervor or compulsion is directed at the self. What law is not the primary concern and abolishing the law is not the primary concern, but suspending the punishing effects of a particular orientation to the law is the point of the gospel.

But at this point the Lacanian and Dostoyevskian dictates may fold into one another. Nothing is permitted and everything is permitted may simply be two sides of the same coin. The law, individual or corporate, from God or from the individual, touches upon a drive which knows no limits and yet must be served unto death. To call this a religious or atheistic problem in our present circumstance is to miss the point that religionists and hedonists may serve the same god. Or should we imagine that Catholic and evangelical pedophiles and sex perverts, saved as they are, consist of a higher quality pervert than those dirty hedonists?

The difference may be that the religious perverts, unlike the Harvey Weinsteins of pagan Hollywood, have the corporate protection of the church to keep their proclivities from coming to light. Who is more enslaved and degenerate, the lone individual driven to sexual violence under the obscene command to enjoy, or an institution that produces and protects such an individual? Nothing is permitted on one side of the coin, but underneath all things are permitted, but both arise from the same destructive obscenity. As Slavoj Žižek has put it in regard to the Roman Church, “You must not have sexual pleasure, but you may enjoy all the little boys you desire.” Or as mega pastor Ted Haggard put it to Larry King, though he had heatedly preached against homosexuality and was then caught in a homosexual affair, “You know Larry . . . Jesus says ‘I came for the unrighteous, not for the righteous . . .’ So as soon as I became worldwide unrighteous, I knew Jesus had come for me.” Nothing is permitted and thus everything is permitted, but the same oppressive force reigns on both sides of the coin.

All of this to say, the satanic version of “you are gods” is to blind one to the source of life available in God and Christ, and the inherent moral responsibility this entails. The satanic lure is bent on selling a mediating knowledge in place of knowing God directly. Partaking of the knowledge of good and evil results in hiding, shame and fear, with idolatrous religion emerging only many centuries later. The turn from God cannot be described as empowerment (even of the evil kind). It is not the attainment of agency and freedom, but the turn to murder, mayhem and uncontrollable lust. But religion or irreligion may consist of the same punishing gods, and the point of “you are gods” is to not only name the idol, but the deep grammar from which it arises. In the context in which Athanasius and Irenaeus explain divinization this is their point.

In leading up to his succinct statement (“He became man that man might become god”) Athanasius notes, “The barbarians of the present day are naturally savage in their habits, and as long as they sacrifice to their idols they rage furiously against each other and cannot bear to be a single hour without weapons.”[4] He describes a fearful and enslaved people who are subject to gods of their own making, but these are not deities that empower but which enslave to warfare and violence. The turn to Christ and deification is aimed at relieving humankind of its impotency in the face of the demonic gods they have manufactured. “But when they hear the teaching of Christ, forthwith they turn from fighting to farming, and instead of arming themselves with swords extend their hands in prayer. In a word, instead of fighting each other, they take up arms against the devil and the demons, and overcome them by their self-command and integrity of soul.” They gain self-command by putting off their worship of idols and, in that wonderful turn of phrase, “they turn from fighting to farming.”[5] In realizing they are made for divinity they turn from demonic warfare to the creation care of the original dominion mandate.

Irenaeus, in his explanation of divinization and “you are gods,” points to the same impotency and enslavement. Those who miss the deity of Christ and assert, “He was simply a mere man” remain “in the bondage of the old disobedience” and “are in a state of death having been not as yet joined to the Word of God the Father, nor receiving liberty through the Son, as He does Himself declare: If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed” (Jn. 8:36). If they do not receive “the incorruptible Word, they remain in mortal flesh, and are debtors to death, not obtaining the antidote of life.” Irenaeus references both John 10 and Psalm 82, and explains that it is those “who despise the incarnation of the pure generation of the Word of God” who thus “defraud human nature of promotion into God.”[6] By refusing the Word of God and participation in deity they remain in the sickness unto death, and this constitutes subjection to the one who wields the power of death.

(To register for our next class “Reading the Bible in Community” starting the week of September 26th and running through November 18th register at https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.19.1.

[2] Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54.3.

[3] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990) book V, 250-255.

[4] Athanasius, 52.2.

[5] Athanasius is commenting on Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into sickles, and nation shall not take sword against nation, neither shall they learn any more to wage war.”

[6] Against Heresies, 3.19.1

“You are Gods”: According to Maximus the Confessor

In that Maximus is explaining Gregory the Theologian and referencing Origen and going beyond him, and accounting for the New Testament picture of the person of Christ (and refuting the Neo-Platonism of his day along the way), to summarize Maximus comes close to a summation of the view of the early church. Maximus provides an unparalleled explanation, not only of Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 82:6, but of the New Testament picture of Christ being “all in all” or the summation and goal of creation (so that creation and incarnation are mutually implied). On the other hand, to try to fit Maximus to some other frame is to miss the peculiarly Christian nature of his explanation. He makes constant appeal to the incarnation as the singular case for understanding the God/human relationship and Christian salvation. He is well versed in Platonism and Neo-Platonism and is precisely not a Platonist or Neo-Platonist but shows the inadequacies of Greek philosophy.[1] He is coloring in the lines set out by Chalcedon but Chalcedon, at least compared to Maximus, is more of a warning than explanation. The fact that his tongue is torn out, his right hand cut off, and that he is sent into exile points, not to his heterodoxy, but to the thin thread of orthodoxy in the East.

My minimalist picture of Jesus’ quotation and deployment of Psalm 82:6 (in the previous blog here) sets the parameters for the more fulsome explanation of Maximus. The picture in Peter, in the Psalms, and that given by Jesus, is that humans were made, as Peter says to “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). As Jesus says about himself, “I am the Son of God” (John 10:36) and in some fashion he extends his status to all humankind through quoting (Ps. 82:6), “You are gods.” In short, the New Testament teaches that humankind was made for union with God.[2] Maximus builds upon this conclusion and draws out its implications.

The focus of his work, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers (or The Ambigua) is, according to his translator, “unified around the experience of divinization, which Maximos characterizes as the deepest longing of the saints, the desire of human nature for assimilation to God, and the yearning of the creature to be wholly contained within the Creator.”[3]

Maximus takes up the specific notion and quotation, “you are gods,” in explaining Gregory’s oration on Paul’s being caught up into the third heaven: “Had Paul been able to express the experience gained from the third heaven, and his progress, or ascent, or assumption.”[4] Maximus explains that there are three ways of understanding the fact that some human person might be designated “God.” This might name a condition, an essence, or a grace. “Man” names an essence, while “wicked” or “foolish” name a condition, while “a name indicative of grace is when man, who has been obedient to God in all things is named ‘God’ in the Scriptures, as in the phrase, I said, you are Gods, for it is not by nature or condition that he has become and is called ‘God,’ but he has become God and is so named by placement and grace.”[5] This “grace of divinization” is not conditioned by anything preceding it as it is “completely unconditioned.” It does not refer to a faculty or capacity within the natural essence of man, as then it would no longer be grace.

Maximus thinks the word “assumption” best fits the estate achieved by Paul. It is a passive term and “not something that the apostle accomplished, but rather experienced.” Assumption takes into account both the passive quality but “the activity of the one who assumes” in that “the apostle left behind the names and qualities that had properly been his, for he transcended human nature virtue and knowledge.” And in this way “the name of God, which formerly stood at an infinite distance from him, he came to share by grace, becoming and being called God, in place of any other natural or conditional name that he had prior to his assumption.”[6] Grace does not work by nature or condition, as God himself sets the terms and condition: God is the condition.

I was reminded here and found helpful Barth’s picture of revelation (which I have written on here). God as Revealer, Revelation and Revealedness is not conditioned upon something else. God is the one who reveals, and he is the content of this revelation, and is the means of this revelation being received. But what Barth misses and Maximus takes into account is the link between redemption and creation. Divinization not only conditions revelation and redemption but describes creation’s logic and purpose. That is, in describing the Logos, Maximus is describing the logic of creation as well as of redemption.

The patristic understanding which Maximus assumes, that the Logos is the incarnate and not the preincarnate Christ, serves as his description of the Logic of creation: “for it is owing to Him that all things exist and remain in existence, and it is from Him that all things came to be in a certain way, and for a certain reason, and (whether they are stationary or in motion) participate in God.”[7] This Logos which stands behind creation’s purpose is the embodied Word: “For the Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”[8] The mystery of his embodiment is the abiding reason and explanation to be found throughout the created order.

Though the quote above uses the phrase “participate in God,” Maximus immediately turns, not to Plato or Aristotle but to the incarnate Christ, to explain this participation. The insight of Jordan Daniel Wood, is that participation, as it is understood in Plato or Neo-Platonism, does not go far enough: “The problem arises when we imagine that participation exhausts the God-world relation. More than anyone, Maximus challenges this assumption precisely because he always discovers that the contours of the cosmos are those of Christ.” As Maximus puts it (above), “the Logos of God wills always and all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.” Creation is itself an outworking of the incarnation, and as Wood puts it, “Maximus’s proper Christology really is his metaphysics or cosmology.” In other words, Christ is “the paradigm of creation” and “the perfect microcosm of the world.” Wood raises the question: “does participation describe the peculiar logic of the Incarnate Word?” He answers with a blunt, “No.”[9]

The danger is to imagine we might plug Maximus into some logic (such as Neo-Platonism) other than the specific and unique logic of the incarnation, which for him accounts for all of creation. Creation does not account for itself “naturally” but calls for the supernatural as both logic and end. The logic of Christ is its own logic and Maximus has no concern to relate it to anything else. In fact, quite the opposite: he is concerned to show that it is unrelated to any other account of knowing.

He lays out the parameters of “natural thought” and its end. “Natural intellectual motion,” as he explains, “has its relation to all relative objects of thought” but this eventually leaves one “with nothing left to think about, having thought through everything that is naturally thinkable.” Natural thought does not arrive at God through some natural given, only God himself provides the condition or experience for knowing him. As in Barth’s formula, so with Maximus, “God is not an object of knowledge or predication” such that he is grasped like other objects of knowledge, “but rather (he is grasped) according to simple union, unconditioned and beyond all thought.” He is knowing and the effect of knowing and the progress of knowing. “God made Him our wisdom, our righteousness, our holiness, and our redemption. These things are of course said about Him in an absolute sense, for He is Wisdom and Righteousness and Sanctification itself, and not in some limited sense, as is the case with human beings.”[10] Or as in Barth, God is the subject, object, and predicate of his revealing which, according to Maximus provide for being known “on the basis of a certain unutterable and indefinable principle” known “only to the One who grants this ineffable grace to the worthy.”[11]

The alternative is not nature, but what is “contrary” to grace in that it is attached to a “disposition” in those set “on a course to nonexistence, and who by their mode of life have reduced themselves to virtual nothingness.”[12] This is not to pit nature against grace, on the order of a two-tiered Thomism or pure nature before its time, as Maximus leaves nature intact but it is a nature which is properly itself only when imbued with grace.

The beginning and end of man consists of a cultivation of the seed of the Good. Man, from his beginning, “received being and participation in what is naturally good, and it is by conforming to the beginning that he received being and participation in what is naturally good, and it is by conforming to this beginning through the inclination of his will and by free choice, that he hastens to the end.” The origin and end cohere in one guided by the Word. “Having completed his course, such a person becomes God, receiving from God to be God, for to the beautiful nature inherent in the fact that he is God’s image, he freely chooses to add the likeness to God by means of the virtues, in a natural movement of ascent through which he grows in conformity to his own beginning.”[13] Created in the divine image man returns to this origin by adding the likeness through his own life course. This can be termed a “natural movement of ascent” as he grows in conformity to the nature in which he was created. Grace can be resisted or obstructed, but this has nothing to do with a pure nature but simply describes one bent toward nothingness.

Man owes his existence directly to God and he can be said to be a “portion of God” insofar as he exists, “for he owes his existence to the logos of being that is in God” insofar as he is good as “he owes his goodness to the logos of wellbeing that is in God; and he is a “portion of God” insofar as he is God, owing to the logos of his eternal being.” Maximus describes this in terms of a true ipseity, which he pits against false notions of movement and impassibility (as in Plato and Aristotle). “In this life he has already become one with himself and immovable, owing to his state of supreme impassibility” and in the life to come in an ongoing divinization “he will love and cleave affectionately to God Himself, in whom the logoi of beautiful things are steadfastly fixed.”[14] He arrives at his beginning and end and is fixed in his totality in the totality of God and is rightly called God in this divinization.

[1] Jordan Daniel Wood has laid to rest the notion that participation, in the Greek sense, adequately encompasses Maximus understanding of divinization. Jordan Daniel Wood, “That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus Confessor,” (Dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy, Boston College, 2018).

[2] A focus of the Bible, which is not absent in Maximus but not emphasized, is that the obstacle that would keep us from this realization is nothing less than a cosmic force for evil opposing God and ourselves.

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

[4] Ambigua 20.1.

[5] Ambigua 20.2.

[6] Ambigua 20.3.

[7] Ambigua 7.16

[8] Ambigua 7.22.

[9] Wood, 11.

[10] Ambigua 7.21

[11] Ambigua 15.9

[12] Ambigua 20.2

[13] Ambigua 7.21.

[14] Ambigua 7.22