Gregory of Nyssa – Forging Ploughshares

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

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

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

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

Creation Ex Deo

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

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

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

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

Jesus Christ as Mediating Divinity to Humanity

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

Salvation as the Means of Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Blowers, 176.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[10] Blowers, 174.

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

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

[13] Ibid.

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

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

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

[17] Ibid.

[18] Blowers, 181.

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

[20] Blowers, 182.

Gregory of Nyssa: The Trinitarian Economy of Salvation in Baptism

According to the Nicene Creed, as expanded upon by Gregory of Nyssa, the economy of salvation, as set forth by Christ in the baptismal formula (Matt. 28:19), is Trinitarian as God is Trinity and salvation is entry into the life of the Trinity. God’s abiding presence in Christ through the gift of the Spirit in baptism, shapes – informs – is the substance of, human transformation. This makes orthodox belief a direct correlate of salvation, and it also identifies the failure of belief connected with particular failures of salvation. “Therefore, since the power that gives life to those who are reborn from death to eternal life comes from the Holy Trinity upon those who are deemed worthy of the grace through faith, and likewise the grace is imperfect if any of the names of the Holy Trinity are omitted in saving baptism (cf. Acts 19.2–3)”[1] Just as salvation consists of a certain dynamism of the Trinity, so too heresy and sin consist of a dynamism of ignorance, self-love, and darkness in the absence of life coming from the Father by the Son and Spirit. For example, Gregory argues that Macedonian subordinationism will result in a deformed faith lacking in a true formation of piety. In turn, a failure of belief surrounding the Holy Spirit is the equivalent, according to Gregory, to a still born baby; “not a living human being” but “bones in the womb of a pregnant woman.”[2] If any person of the Trinity is not recognized, as in the baptismal formula, a failure of life results: “the mystery of rebirth is neither perfected without the Father by the Son and the Spirit alone, nor does the perfection of life come through the Father and the Spirit in baptism if the Son is passed over in silence, nor is the grace of the Resurrection perfected by the Father and the Son if the Spirit is omitted.[3]

In the Nicene Creed (325 A.D., revised in 381) the essentials of belief about the Father as Creator, the Son as Savior, and the Spirit as the giver of Life, are encapsulated in Christian belief about baptism, and may have been based on a baptismal creed. This is made clear by Gregory, who was involved in the revision of the original creed, and of whom it might be said, his theology is shaped by the baptismal formula given to the disciples by Jesus.[4] Gregory pictures all of the “Lord’s doctrine” of the gospel as summed up in Jesus baptismal formula: “Now the Lord’s doctrine is this: Go, he said, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Mt 28.19).”[5] This doctrine “is the foundation and root of right and sound faith (Tit 1.13, 2.2), and we do not believe there is anything else surer or more sublime than that tradition.”[6]

In combatting the early heresies of Arianism and Sabellianism, Gregory continually appeals to the understanding conveyed in baptism to sort out both the distinct role of each person of the Trinity, and their necessary contribution to the singular life of salvation thus conveyed. A baptism or a faith that is not fully Trinitarian cannot be said to be saving, as it is the Father, Son and Spirit who perfect the giving of life. The life conveyed in Baptism is Trinitarian in its origins and reception: “Thus when we heard ‘the Father’ we have heard the cause of all; when we learnt of ‘the Son’ we were taught the power shining forth from the first cause for the upholding of all things (cf. Heb 1.3); when we acknowledged ‘the Spirit’, we understood the power that perfects all things brought into being through creation by the Father through the Son.”[7] This understanding unfolds from the beginning of the letter, where Gregory once again quotes the baptismal formula.

As he succinctly spells it out, “because the life which comes to us through faith in the Holy Trinity is one, taking its source in the God of all, issuing through the Son, and effected in the Holy Spirit.”[8] The life of the Trinity is singular, and a mystery, but it is this singular mystery which, as in the image of water gushes from the Father in the life-giving bath in the Spirit through the entry into the death and resurrection of the Son. Baptism is the basis for receiving salvation and correctly apprehending the nature of the Trinity: “For this reason we place all our hope and the assurance of the salvation of our souls in the three hypostases acknowledged by these names, and we believe in the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1.3) who is the fountain of life (cf. Ps 35.10), and in the only-begotten Son of the Father ( Jn 3.14, 18) who is the Author of life, as the Apostle says (Acts 3.15), and in the Holy Spirit of God, concerning whom the Lord said, it is the Spirit who gives life ( Jn 6.40).”[9]

Gregory, deploying baptism and the baptismal formula, argues against the Macedonians who would make the Son and Spirit servile. “This bears the stamp of grossest impiety—to conceive of some weakness or powerlessness, whether in smaller or greater degree, concerning the only-begotten God (Jn 1.18) and concerning the Spirit of God. For the word of the truth hands it down that both the Son and the Spirit are perfect in power and goodness and incorruptibility and in all the sublime conceptions.”[10] As he sums up in the next paragraph:

If we piously confess the perfection of all good in each of the persons in the Holy Trinity in whom we believe, we cannot at the same time say that it is perfect and again call it imperfect by introducing scales of comparison. For to say that there is a lesser with regard to the measure of power or goodness is nothing else than to affirm that in this respect it is imperfect. Therefore if the Son is perfect and the Spirit is also perfect, reason does not conceive a perfect ‘less perfect’ or ‘more perfect’ than the perfect.[11]

Using the same formula, Gregory counters the charge of Sabellianism aimed at himself. He argues that there are three distinct and unconfused persons but One life which comes by the Three. While there is only ‘one life’ that comes to the believer through the three persons, its transmission follows the differentiated order of names that were handed to the disciples by Jesus (cf. Matt. 28:19-20). “For it is not possible that the Father be called his own Father, for the title is not validly transferred from his own Son to the Father, or to suppose that the Spirit is not one of those named so that by addressing the Spirit the hearer is led to the thought of both Father and Son. The hypostasis individually and exclusively signified by each of the names corresponds to the titles accorded them.”[12] While the Three are One in the Life they share, they are distinct and unconfused in their hypostasis or personhood. The Father is the “cause of all” while the Son “upholds all things” and the Spirit “perfects all things.”[13]

Gregory’s conclusion: the sound faith is transmitted in baptism and the baptismal formula handed down by Christ. “It has no need of subtle interpretation to assist its truth, since it is able to be grasped and understood in itself from the primary tradition. We received it from the Lord’s own voice when he imparted the mystery of salvation in the washing of regeneration (Tit 3.5). Go, he said, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you (Mt 28.18–20).”[14] Salvation and Trinitarian orthodoxy are established together, as Jesus’ doctrine of salvation is established in baptism.

[1] Gregory, “Letter to those who discredit his orthodoxy, requested by those in Sebasteia,” (hereafter, To those in Sebastia), Anna M. Silvas, Gregory of Nyssa: The Letters: Introduction, Translation and Commentary, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 83. Leiden: Brill, 2007, 138.

[2] Alexander L. Abecina, Christ, the Spirit and Human Transformation in Gregory of Nyssa’s In Canticum Canticorum (The University of Cambridge, PhD Dissertation, 2021), 71. The reference is to Gregory’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, 11:5.

[3] Silvas, Ibid.

[4] This is the argument of Abecina, Ibid.

[5] Silvas, Ibid.

[6] Silvas, Ibid.

[7] To Heracleianus, Silvas, 192.

[8] To those in Sebastia, Silvas, 138.

[9] Ibid, 138-139.

[10] To Heracleianus, Silvas, 195.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid. 192.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid. 191.

The Completion of Creation in Christ: Sergius Bulgakov, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor and Jordan Wood

God’s pronouncement in Genesis chapter one that creation is good, inclusive of the creation of humankind, is amended in the second chapter of Genesis with a “not good” concerning the man. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus, presume that the original story must be inclusive of the entire scope of creation (its Alpha and Omega), while the second enters into the process already completed in chapter one, with all of human history, but particularly the incarnation and work of Christ, completing creation. As Gregory puts it, “In the case of the first creation the final state appeared simultaneously with the beginning, and the race took the starting point of its existence in its perfection.”[1] The goodness of creation, or its completion, cannot have occurred apart from the completion of the first Adam in the second Adam. The not-good, the incompleteness, and the possibility of failure, are only introduced in chapter two. The goodness of God being all in all – reflected in Genesis one, is accomplished only when humanity is brought to the fulness of its image bearing capacities in Christ. Adam, or humankind as the crown or caretaker of God’s creation, impacts all of creation so that the goodness and fulness of the cosmos is accomplished only in the completion of the human image. Thus, chapter one of Genesis gives us the eternal perspective, while chapter two of Genesis works within the immanent frame of the cosmos. We find ourselves then, in the midst of creation being completed.

In the meanwhile, though we can point out much that is good, the “not good” is pervasive and seems predominant. Given the brutal slaughter of children, the ravages of disease, the suffering of the innocent, and the general depravity of the human condition, which can be summed up as the reign of death, creation is “not good.” Though it has its bright spots, to call creation, as we have it, good, would be a kind of blasphemy. The notion that goodness has or ever will prevail, is not evident or immediately demonstrable from within the death laden present.

Genesis chapter three, provides an explanation, which may be unapproachable historically, in that it bears more weight than the story allows. According to Sergius Bulgakov, “In this sense, although it is a history, the Genesis 3 narrative of the fall is meta-historical in nature; and in this capacity it is a myth, which is grander and more significant in its generalized and symbolical images than any empirical history.”[2] The creation for us, unfolds with the realities of Genesis 3 already in place. The notion that there has been a fall, or that death has not always reigned, or that there is final goodness, is a faith position. There is nothing within this world, absent the story of Christ, that indicates entropy, slaughter, and death, have not always been the case. “An event is described that lies beyond our history, although at its boundary. Being connected with our history, this event inwardly permeates it. But this event cannot be perceived in the chain of empirical events, for it is not there. It took place, but beyond the limits of this world: After the expulsion of our progenitors from Eden, its gates were locked, and an angel with a fiery sword protects this boundary of being that has become transcendent for us.”[3]

The very fabric of human experience would put ultimate valuation, not on some mythical dream time in the eternal past or future, but on this time and place. Goodness in this understanding, is never unadulterated, never pure, but established through the “not-good.” War brings peace, violence ensures justice, death is the means to establishing ongoing life. Faith, even for those that claim it, must be tempered by the reality of this world. This is the “only reality” we have, and the before and after of eternity, are as disconnected as Genesis-one-goodness is from the shameful murderous condition that unfolds from chapter three. Experientially, practically, and realistically, we cannot live as if goodness has the final word. To do so is to ignore the prevailing reality of this world. Or at least, that is the existential choice and investment with which we are presented. The incompletion of the world poses itself as its own form of reality. Time’s entropy, nature’s death, and the absolute limitedness of phenomenal existence are the created order. This reality is not good, not God-connected or infinite, but poses a bad infinite.

In biblical terms, the choice is that between the first Adam and the reality of this form of humanity, and the second Adam and the reality of this form of humanity. In either case, it involves an existential investment of life. With the first Adam, the world is a closed cosmic order in which the pleasures, “successes,” passions, and value systems of the phenomenal world order, are the final truth. This truth may not be rational or transcendental, but it accords death its proper centrality. In this light, the work of Christ is a fabrication spun out of the web of human sorrow in an attempt to find significance in what cannot be assigned final meaning. The suffering and evil of the world have no explanation, no counterpoint, no resolution, and certainly no possible justification. The world as we have it is the best argument that there is no final goodness, no eternal purpose, as death has the final word and is the ultimate reality. In the world, far from encountering the incarnation as the truth of creation “we typically meet ephemera, flux, deceit, self-love, greed, corruption, death—in a word, ‘slavery to time and nature.’”[4]

The creation as we know it is generated not from the goodness of Genesis one, but from the beginning instituted by Adam. This creation is fallen upon arrival, in that death, suffering, shame, finitude, ignorance of God, violence, antihumanism, and anti-creation, are its structuring principles. There is no direct route from Genesis chapter three, back to Genesis one. The goodness, the eternal perspective, the image-bearing capacity, are obscured, rendered incomplete and inadequate in the new order of reality. Adam has instituted creation of a different kind, and we find ourselves in this Adam. As Jordan Wood describes, “We, each and all, endeavor to incarnate in ourselves—in our concrete existence, in our hypostases—what is in itself pure illusion. Evil possesses no essence or hypostasis or power or activity, certainly. But the ‘dishonorable passions,’ which constitute the mixed fruit of our erroneous judgment about this world, acquire in us ‘a dependent, parasitical subsistence’ (παρυπόστασις).”[5]

The divine perspective and its sense of goodness and meaningful existence, gives way to a senseless world based on the sensuous and the senses. That which is good for the eyes, desirous to eat, and offering its own wisdom, obscures the eternal perspective. The limited and finite only has itself as ground. “The flux and finitude of the world has only the grave as a stable and sure foundation. More precisely, it is our free, impassioned attachment to pure phenomena, our deluded judgment that sheer limitation might yield limitless bliss—it is, I mean, our frenzied strife to make this contradiction actual that prevents the world’s true creation and generates in its place a world of our own making, a world of brute boundary.”[6] As Maximus puts it, “In the beginning, sin enticed Adam and persuaded him to transgress the divine commandment, and through transgression sin hypostasized pleasure, and through pleasure sin affixed itself to the very foundations of our nature, condemning the whole of our nature to death, and through man it was pushing the nature of all created beings away from existence.”[7]

In turn, in light of the second Adam, it is the first Adam who created an irrational fantasy world. In the death and resurrection of Christ, in which Christ is true Adam, the perfection of the image, and the finalization of creation, humanity is clearly made for divinity and life, not death and finitude. In the Alpha and Omega of the second Adam, the eternal perspective of the good creation takes hold in human nature. Here is rescue from sin and death, but also Resurrection life imparted as the principle of a new form of completed humanity. The fleshly perspective of a completely immanent frame still tempts, but its reality is shattered by the Resurrected body, the empty tomb, and new life. Christ’s passion, the power of Resurrection, the life of Christ, intersects with and transforms the concrete possibilities, the “pure nature,” of human experience. This is not simply an abstract possibility, but Christ is becoming all in all, the true beginning and end of every person, such that the fictional world of the first Adam – in its universal form, is being displaced for all of humanity.

Here we encounter the completion and fulness of the sixth day. As Jordan sums up:

That is, he received, in his Passion, the entire burden of the errant motions of every individual rational being, and by making them his own—he who is essentially God—endowed the very false “principles” our sin falsely incarnate, namely the “law of death,” with the deeper principle of providence, the complete deification of even this universe and of the “me” I make in vain. His true Incarnation, always and in all things, destroys all false incarnations from true beginning to true end—for he is both.[8]

Either we live in the wake of a cataclysmic eruption in which life sprang from death, or the cataclysm is, as pictured in Genesis, the intrusion of death into life. The incarnation centers creation on a new form of life, amounting to a re-creation, in which all things are made new: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor. 5:17). There is a transformation of creation from the inside, beginning with Christ. The “natural” world is subject to a futility, which can be taken as its own end and reality but Christ has relativized this meaninglessness. “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Rom. 8:20–21).

Genesis chapter one has no record of this corruption, as it is undone in Christ, the perfector of creation. His beginning and end join the eternal perspective of Genesis one with the New Jerusalem of Revelation:

Then He said to me, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. . . Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nation. . . God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Rev. 21:6; 22:1-2; Gen. 1:31).

(Sign up for the course, The Theology of Maximus the Confessor with Jordan Wood. https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings. The course will run from 2024/3/25–2024/5/17 and will meet on Saturdays.)

[1] Gregory of Nyssa, Hom. in Cant. 15, GNO 6:458, trans. Norris, 487: “ἐπὶ μὲν οὖν τῆς πρώτης κτίσεως ἀδιαστάτως τῇ ἀρχῇ συνανεφάνη τὸ πέρας καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς τελειότητος ἡ φύσις τοῦ εἶναι ἤρξατο.” Quoted from Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (p. 171). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (p. 170). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

[3] Bulgakov, 170.

[4] Wood, 175.

[5] Wood, 168-169..

[6] Wood, 170.

[7][7] Q. Thal. 61.9, ed. Laga and Steel, CCSG 22, 95, slight modification. Quoted from Wood, 168..

[8] Wood, 186.

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.

Can John Deliver Us from the Modern Gnostics?

Charles Hill’s examination of the reception of the Johannine corpus demonstrates that modern reception of John is more a reflection of the modern theological situation than it is a historical reality about the early reception of the Johannine literature. That is, the “Johannophobia” that Hill traces is a projection of the modern period upon the past which speaks of the modern fear or failure in regard to John.[1] In turn, the supposed gnostic “Johannophilia,” which Hill debunks, describes how modern reception of John has amounted to a reception of the book on the basis of a gnostic sensibility. My hypothesis is that the fear and love of the book of John, as Hill finds it in the early church, is precisely the opposite of what has been projected and this is because moderns tend to fear or reject a true reading of John and have succumbed to a gnostic reading. That is, the heretics feared and avoided the book and the orthodox made it central but in the modern period the book is mostly reduced to a heretical reading as the basis for its acceptance.

Part of the evidence that this might be the case is in the universal consensus which has developed around John in the modern period. As Hill describes it, before the Valentinians appropriated the Gospel through their novel interpretation of the Prologue, John was offensive to the heretics in its emphasis on the deity of Christ and the eyewitness testimony to this effect.[2] Yet, in modern scholarship the opposite has been presumed to be the case:

As is apparent from this review, the phenomenon of orthodox Johannophobia has been for several decades a generally recognized principle among scholars working in Johannine studies, and in New Testament and early Christian history. It has been endorsed by most of the trusted names in Johannine studies, one of whom declares it to be supported by ‘all our evidence’. Many of these scholars shaped Johannine studies, and New Testament studies in general, in the last half of the twentieth century. Others are highly qualified and respected historians of early Christianity. Their work is quite naturally relied upon by other Johannine scholars and by specialists in related fields. When one scholar wrote that ‘It is well known that the orthodox were unwilling to quote the Fourth Gospel in the second century, for it was much the preserve of heretics’, she was stating what is, in the mainstream of the academic community, utterly non-controversial.[3]

Hill meticulously refutes this modern consensus and concludes:

Surely one of the most striking results of this investigation, but not of this only, for other studies have been at least tending towards the same conclusion, is that the major use of the Fourth Gospel among heterodox or gnostic groups up until the Valentinians Ptolemy, Heracleon, and Theodotus, is best described as critical or adversarial. This exposes and should correct the tendency of earlier scholarship to assume that any Johannine borrowings or allusions in gnostic literature are evidence of gnostic/Johannine affinity, or of a common family history.[4]

But Hill leaves his readers wondering how modern scholarship and modern sensibility could make such a mega-blunder.

After Hill’s book and the earlier work of Martin Hengel, according to John Behr, the idea that John’s Gospel was viewed with suspicion by the orthodox church should be a dead letter,[5]but the fact that this notion has been given life and continues to survive seems to speak of the strange theological situation in which we find ourselves. The major influence which John exercised on the early church is largely read out of the history of modern scholarship, and one can only speculate that this is due to the silencing of John in the modern period. This silencing is not an overt exclusion of the Johannine literature but is an exclusion of a Johannine theological approach.

My own, admittedly anecdotal, witness to this silencing of John comes from teaching John to undergraduates. John’s theological approach to the life of Christ, as I am sure I inadequately presented it, either opened students to a new way of reading the Bible or it made them angry. Students attenuated to a flat reading of the life of Christ through a flat reading of the synoptics were not used to finding the sort of theological significance and depth which are unavoidable in John. The strange yet blatant theological echoes of the Hebrew scriptures, the linking of the divine name and action to Jesus’ miracles and identity, the cosmic dimensions of recreation through Christ, the time-bending apocalyptic nature of John, the peculiar theological focus upon the manner of the death of Christ (an accomplished fact that pervades the Gospel), the implication of all the apostles in the sin of Judas as definitive of darkness, etc. etc.; these themes either created excitement or brought out defensiveness. In other words, the Johannophobia which Hill traces among academics is present at a popular level among ordinary believers.

John is not normally read in the universally accepted manner in which the early church read him and this serves to blunt his message, which is directed at the heresy which has the modern church in its grip. The flat reading of the Logos as the disincarnate Christ, the heaven and earth duality, the legal abstractions which pass for atonement theory, the focus on the individual, the elitism of the saved, the focus on souls going to heaven, and the denigration of this world and the flesh amounts to a form close to Gnosticism. Is the peculiar scholarly reception of John and the popular misreading of John a reflection of the fact that the modern church has succumbed to gnostic tendencies against which John writes?

The offence of John against gnostic sensibilities is the focus on the incarnation or the divine Word becoming flesh. The Gnostics believed matter was evil and it would be impossible for the divine to become flesh. The Word made flesh and the high view of the deity of Jesus made John repulsive to the early Gnostics. Only disembodied spirit could be divine and only those who, through special knowledge linked to an original divine spark, gained gnostic knowledge.

What renders John inoffensive in the modern period is a downplaying of John’s anti-gnostic themes. The incarnation is muted in modern sensibility as focus is put upon the pre-incarnate Christ. In turn, the goodness of creation or the sense in which it is a fit-dwelling for God, is displaced by the notion that redemption amounts to abandonment of God’s creation (rather than recreation, as portrayed in John). Focus on individual assent of the believer to a doctrinal formula accords with disembodied gnosis as adequate for salvation, which also fits with a focus on the inward and “spiritual” as standing over and against the outward and fleshly. This all fits with the peculiar elitism of the Gnostics (of the first and 21st century): only a special few are saved and most are damned and there is no cosmic salvation or cosmic recreation in gnostic-like readings of John.

What Hill finds, in contrast to a phobia of John in the early church, is the profound influence of John in every sector of the early church:

After the Johannine Epistles, the influence of this Gospel is evident in the writings or oral teachings of Ignatius, Polycarp, ( John) the Elder, Aristides, Papias, the longer ending of Mark, the later portions of the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistula Apostolorum, the Ad Diognetum, all before about 150. These represent the Great Church in at least Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. The witness of Papias and his sources is of particular magnitude, as it seems to represent a substratum of tradition about the four Gospels which became widely diffused. This witness is consistent with the eminence of the four Gospels which is assumed by the longer ending of Mark, well before the comments made by Irenaeus in the 180s.[6]

Hill goes on to describe what must have been the universal appeal and shaping force of John in the early church. John’s “strong representation among the surviving papyrus fragments of early Christian writings” and the very early testimony of Aristides (in the 120s) and Justin (in the 150s) that the reigning emperor read John. Hill maintains that, “By the middle of the century, when Justin Martyr, Tatian, Valentinus, Ptolemy, and Hegesippus were in Rome, this Gospel must have been quite a well-known and prominent Christian authority.”[7] Hill argues, contrary to the received consensus, “there is no good evidence that any of the writers of the Great Church opposed or rejected the Gospel according to John in the second century, least of all for being gnostic or docetic, and not even for being inauthentic.”[8]

He points to the early catacomb paintings in Rome (around 200 A.D.) which testify to the unique influence of John in depictions of Jesus as the good shepherd (John 10), the conversation with the Samaritan woman (from John 4), the healing of the paralytic (from John 5), and the raising of Lazarus (from John 11). The use of “good shepherd” chalices (in the third century), and popularity of depictions of the wedding at Cana and the healing of the man born blind in baptistries, in Christian tombs, in glass and ceramic art, and in mosaics, testify to the popularity of the Gospel of John.[9] Far from a heretical love of John and an orthodox fear, Hill concludes that John was a “stubborn obstacle to docetism” or the denial that Christ was fully human. John preserved the orthodox church against the heretics, rather than providing an opening for their split between the humanity and deity of Jesus.

John’s focus on the eternality and deity of Jesus, as described in the work of Herbert McCabe, Robert Jenson, John Behr, and Rowan Williams, has been largely subdued if not lost in the modern sensibility, and this may account for the peculiar gnostic-like malaise of the church. The failure of Johannine scholarship seems to be the manifestation of a broader failure of appreciation of the theological focus of John which preserved the orthodoxy of the first church. What we find in the early church, and what has been largely lost in the modern period, is the centrality of the Gospel of John.

Maybe the prime representative of a Johannine theological approach, today condemned as a heretic, is Origen of Alexandria. My point in turning to Origen is to suggest that what has been lost in the modern church, in its flat reading of John, is best represented in the theological richness of Origen, which is today an understanding often reviled and repudiated.

As Ronald Heine describes in his introduction to Origen’s commentary on John, “Perhaps no book of the Bible, certainly none of the New Testament, was so suited to Origen’s exegetical approach as the Gospel of John. In his Commentary on the Gospel of John we have the greatest exegetical work of the early church.”[10] Ambrose directed Origen to write on John, as he had been saved out of Valentinianism by Origen, and apparently the Gospel had become key in his understanding. Origen’s spiritual exegesis of Scripture takes its inspiration from John and Paul. He referred to them as the “princes” of the New Testament and he refers to John as the “high priest” of religion of the Logos, as it was John who attained to a spiritual vision. He credits Revelation 14:6 as inspiring his understanding of the spiritual gospel, and his reading of John provides an abundance of examples of this spiritual reading.

In the commentary he will refer (in Book 6) to the crossings of the Jordan as a type of baptism; to the paschal lamb as a type of the crucified Christ (Book 10); to the tabernacle and the temple as types of Christ (Book 10.60); and in his discussion of John 2:13 he proceeds from the Passover in Exodus to Christ to I Corinthians 5:7 to Jesus words in 6:53-56 regarding eating his flesh and blood.[11] Origen finds Jesus Christ in the Law and the Prophets and is the center of his interpretation of every book of the Hebrew scriptures. In other words, Origen sets the pattern in a theological interpretation, inspired by John, that would become common in the early church.

Eusebius (260-339 A. D.) calls him the greatest Christian theologian, while Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215 A. D.) calls him the true gnostic. Gregory of Nyssa considers Origen his theological master while Gregory of Nazianzus demonstrates a primary reliance of Origen. According to David Bentley Hart, it is Origen and Origen’s reading of the Bible that will exercise the key influence on the early church:

After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was Origen who taught the Church how to read Scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative spirituality, and who—simply said—laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought.[12]

And as Hart continues, it is Origen who is most disgracefully treated as a heretic by both East and West.

What is lost to us in the critical reception of Johannine literature in modern scholarship and in the flat reading of John with its gnostic-like presumptions, is the richness of the theological program inspired by John and passed along by Origen. Apart from the recovery of John’s theological reading it is not clear that deliverance from modern Gnosticism is possible.

[1] Charles Hill, The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[2] Hill, 444.

[3] Hill, 56.

[4] Hill, 466.

[5] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 43.

[6] Hill, 465.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Hill, 468.

[9] Hill, 469.

[10] Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John Books 1-10, Translated by Ronald E. Heine (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 3.

[11] Origen, 14-15.

[12] David Bentley Hart, “Saint Origen,” in First Things (October 2015). Thank you Matt for the reference and for your great enthusiasm for Origen.

Engendered Female by the Spirit of Thanksgiving

The primary issue in relating God and gender pertains to God’s engendering qualities, which necessarily refers to both male and female characteristics. The issue is not God’s gender but whether God begets, brings about, catalyzes, creates, effectuates, generates, produces, spawns, or breeds or whether he primarily impedes, limits, restricts, squelches, quashes, represses, smothers, stifles, punishes, and arrests. There is a gendered quality to the two sets of actions but the word is deployed differently in each instance. Gender in the first instance refers literally to producing and propagating and in the second instance the words are metaphorically gendered masculine as these are connected to qualities associated with a father or with God perceived primarily as lawgiver.

The problem in trying to speak of God without gender or in terms of a singular gender is that the engendering quality of God tends to be traded for what is death dealing rather than life giving. That is, God viewed simply as Father or as law giver will be primarily perceived in negative terms of punishing and restricting. God perceived as female, apart from the masculine, does not engender in others but enfolds all multiplication and propagation within herself. In the first instance (God as male), God might be perceived as absolutely transcendent on the order of the Aristotelian unmoved mover. In the second instance (God as female), God is completely immanent and perceived in a pantheistic monism as the womb and consumer of all things. God as purely male or female loses engendering power.

The contrast between Romans 7 and 8 might be characterized, as I have pointed out (here), as a contrast between male and female but this is not entirely accurate. Romans 7:7-25 is about sin and the law and the implication is that God perceived through the law will take on masculine characteristics of dividing, punishing, alienating, and ultimately of being a cold, inaccessible, transcendent figure. Of course, this is not God in reality but God misperceived (due to the deception of sin) as equated with the law. Romans 8 displaces this law of sin and death or this false understanding of God (the law of sin and death) with the reality of God (the law of life in the Spirit). The feminine qualities of the Spirit are accentuated in this exchange, but it is only with this accentuation that the proper role of God as Abba – Father is realized.

The real issue is the receptivity and openness of those who are the objects of God’s engendering activity. Should they take the law as the orienting factor in their relationship to God, then theirs will be a Romans 7, and not an engendering, sort of experience. To conceive this as an experience of God is to miss Paul’s point, as experience of the self is the focus. Where God is presumed to be known through the law what occurs is a relationship to the law which alienates, proscribes, and punishes – God does not really enter into the picture. It is not simply that God is excluded or that the law is felt as an outside and oppressive force, but the force of the law excludes one part of the self from another part of the self. The “I” experiences his own body as if he has a body rather than as if he is his body. The opposite of engendering occurs.

Where God’s birthing, engendering, fructifying activity is realized, the recipient of this activity takes on a feminine openness. Christians become metaphorically female as the bride of Christ, as they become impregnated with life from God and give birth to the fruits of the Spirit (Romans 8:23). The indwelling Spirit engenders life and peace (8:6), and is equated with the indwelling of the Son (vs.9-11). The Spirit incorporates into the familial relation with the Father and Son (vs.15-17), and the believer becomes womb-like in bearing fruit for God (v. 23). As each of the persons of the Trinity converge upon her, with the Father searching the mind of the Spirit who has interpenetrated the mind of the believer (vs. 26-27) as it is being conformed to Christ (v. 29), the believer groans in the Spirit in the pangs of childbirth (v. 23).

I am not sure we need go so far as Gregory of Nyssa who imagines that prior to the fall humans were non-sexed and angelic like, and that in redemption they will no longer bear sexualized bodies but will all become quasi-female in relation to God. The imagery of becoming the bride of Christ, of bearing fruit for Christ, of being the subjects of the incorporating activity of God, may not literally involve the sexual organs but it does refer to a feminine receptivity. This receptivity however, may simply contrast with the impenetrability of one oriented to the law. This masculine sort of orientation is not subject to being conformed, shaped, or reoriented or re-conceptualized. The possibility of being conformed to Christ and of receiving the indwelling of the Spirit may simply reference gender in that there is a feminine receptivity to the character of Christ.

In both Romans and Thessalonians, the shape of this reception is described in terms of a reversal of the way in which we may conceive of prayer. We often picture prayer as an articulation, originating in our own minds, directed at a distant deity, who may or may not hear or answer. Paul pictures prayer as a dynamic exchange in which the persons of the Trinity intermingle, converge, and bring about the incorporation of the believer into the life of God. Even this imagery may be too weak, if we are simply thinking of the cold breath of speech. Prayer, for Paul, is a constant, which already indicates it is not a constant articulation but a constant openness giving rise to a characteristic emotion calling for and flowing out of a continual gratitude.

In I Thessalonians (5:16-18) Paul describes the Spirit as a flame which is not to be quenched, but if allowed to burn, rather than consuming oxygen, produces the breath of life. If the flame is not quenched or suppressed, or stilled, or restrained – that is if the flame of life is not doused by the death dealing law – it lights up the various seats of human personality – the will, the mind, the emotions, the character. Paul aligns a series of exhortations regarding one’s continual state of mind which fold into a singular command, not to quench the Spirit. The way to let the Spirit flow in life is to “rejoice always, pray continually, and give thanks in all circumstances.” The engendering reality of life in the Spirit shows itself as one is caught up in a continual dynamic of life flowing through the individual – receiving and gratefully acknowledging life.

Do Not Give Way on Your Desire: Comprehending Sexuality Through the Trinity

The Church, in its various institutional forms, is in the midst of a sexual crisis in which both married and supposed celibate clerics are not keeping their vows. Could it be that the ordering of desire around a misconstrued image of ultimate reality (God and human) is playing into this crisis?

At the heart of what is considered the most theologically developed portion of the New Testament, Paul brings together sexuality, desire, and Trinity that depicts the deepest “groanings” of human longing as a direct communion with the Holy Spirit. Desire gone bad and then rightly channeled is the substance of Paul’s depiction of redemption. For a variety of reasons, this economy of desire once developed and appreciated in the early church, is often no longer accounted for in standard depictions of salvation, God, and what it means to be human.

The extra-biblical discourse on the Trinity, for example, is typically abstract and esoteric or it is presumed that God’s inner life is completely closed off to us (apophaticism). But in passages like Romans 8, which most clearly depicts God as Trinity, there is also a depiction of human entry into the divine life on the basis of this intra-triune relation. Here there is no clear demarcation between immanent (who God is in himself) and economic (and who God is for others) Trinity. In fact, it is not clear that these categories are adequate, as what is being depicted is that who God is for himself opens his life to others.

At the same time, the God who is become man incorporates humankind into his life on the basis of who he is but also on the basis of what it means to be human. That is, prayer “groanings” (Ro 8:26), inclusive of the depth of human desire and need are the point of communion with God through the Spirit. It is not the setting aside or thwarting of desire but the mediation of desire which opens into participation in the inner life of God. God’s desiring love, his incorporating communion, is the ontological ground and fulfillment of human desire.

In this use of the word desire, we have passed beyond gender, though human desire is always initiated in gender. It is engendered bodily, but to limit it to gender is on the order of explaining thought as a mere product of the brain. The embodied and enabling factor of thought and desire, for all but the crudest reductionist, is not its ultimate explanation. Paul accounts for this tendency to reduce desire to gender as the law of sin and death (a law of desire – Ro 7:7). A “married woman is bound by law to her husband” so that her husband, representative of the law, constricts her desire.

Paul is not advocating adultery or celibacy but he is describing how desire can be ordered and channeled, such that one becomes a slave to law/desire (“I did not know desire apart from the law” 7:7). That is, both things (desire and law) arise simultaneously as a form of bondage in which all that one is and does is defined by this dynamic. Those who channel their desire into gender alone are on the order of those who have made the law the ultimate point of mediating relationship to God. The law bound are also the gender bound, so that one is controlled by their relationship to the law/husband. To state it in different terms, one’s love is constricted by the marks of maleness or femaleness.

Becoming united with Christ amounts to a breaking free of this dynamic: “you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another” (7:4). The love of God experienced in Christ is a release from the slavery to the law: “But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Ro 7:6). Gender and with it, desire, is not an end in itself but is the medium to a relationship which transcends gender and erotic love. In the words of Sarah Coakley, “desire is more fundamental than gender, and the desiring, trinitarian God ultimately ambushes all attempts to fix and constrain gender in worldly terms.”[1]

It is on this basis of a transcendent desire that Paul describes a communion with God through the direct intervention of the Spirit in prayer. Prayer, the expression of “eager longing,” is the occasion in which there is evoked and realized adoption into the family of God: “you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (8:15). All three persons of the Trinity enable this communion. “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” and “fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him” (8:16-17). Prayer is both the entry point and defined by the communion with the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit.

This realization of Trinitarian agape love is not on the basis of a sublimation or refusal of erotic or gendered desire but the realization that gender, desire, and marriage, are a human economy which is to be conjoined with the divine communion in which the Spirit engenders Sonship. The divine communion opened to humanity through the Son links all of creations groanings in a cosmic sort of childbirth in which human desire is drawn into the divine economy so as to bring about the full adoption of humanity into the life of the Trinity (8:22-23).

Sex, gender, and desire, disconnected from this life in the Spirit, is on the order of a disembodied agape love or a prayer life that always seems to be speaking into the void. Prayer as a monologue to a distant patriarch is like an empty eroticism or a desire defined by gender and law. The communication, the groaning, the desire is not answered by God but is left to itself – which describes life in the law; relationship, not to a person, but to an impersonal and mechanical-like symbolic order.

In describing the Trinitarian communion Paul also describes a world participating in the purposes of God in which the deepest human “eager longing” is not closed in on itself. Primordial desire left to itself becomes the law of sin and death, but this same primordial desire opened to Christian hope is channeled beyond “life in the flesh” to hope of adoption as “children of God.”

A common theme of the church fathers is that the incorporation of the believer into the life of the Trinity through the Spirit is on the order of being incorporated into marriage through sex. As Sarah Coakley describes it, “For Origen, agape simply is Eros, by another name; whereas for his rather different successor in the Song-commentary tradition, Gregory of Nyssa, Eros is agape “stretched out in longing” toward the divine goal.” Just as the sexual bond makes of the two one flesh, so too the binding together in the Spirit is a fulfillment and ordering of desire. As Dionysius the Areopagite describes it, “’desire’ becomes an ontological force inherent to the divine life itself, an ecstatic capacity of God to go out and return, always ‘carried outside of himself’ whilst also “remaining within himself.”[2] Just as one is incorporated into the marriage relationship through the fulfillment of desire, so too the desire of God (the desire originating in God) describes this same self-transcendence or going outside of himself in an overflowing love.

Gregory of Nyssa, in Homilies on the Song of Songs describes the kinsman/Christ as drawing his lover/disciples through a reflected beauty in which desire is the power of the Spirit: “the Bride has dedicated herself to her kinsman and in her own form has taken on the beauty of her Beloved.” Andrew was led to the Lamb by the reflected attraction in the voice of John. Nathanael attracts Philip through the same allure that the maidens find in the kinsman’s lover – perfect in her comeliness. This reflected “’glory’ means the Holy Spirit, if account is taken of the Lord’s words; he says, after all, ‘The glory that you have given me, I have given to them.’” That is, the eroticism of sexual attraction in the Song translates directly into the attraction of Christ through the Spirit (Homily 15). “For it is obvious that where she is concerned the Word is pointing to this: that the soul, through the upward journey she has completed, has been exalted to the point where she is straining forward toward the wonders of the Lord and Master.”

There is a passage into desire in which “childishness” is left behind as the “disposition shaped by erotic love” is joined to God – “such were the souls of David and Paul.” David says, “But for me it is a good thing to cleave to God” and Paul says, “None shall separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, not life or death or what is present or what is future, or anything else.” Gregory calls those who stifle this desire through a misbegotten virtue, “concubines” (as they do not share in the divine Spirit of kingship) as it is out of fear, rather than by rightly directed desire, that they refuse evil: “by drawing near to the good through servile fear rather than through a bride’s love—she becomes a concubine rather than a queen because of her fear.”

Gregory, unlike Augustine, in no way denigrates marriage or sex. “We are well aware that it is not a stranger to God’s blessing” (de virginitate, chapter VIII). As Gregory describes it, however, one can either be a “Pleasure-lover” or a “God-lover.” The problem is not desire per se but whether desire is rightly ordered or given its proper telos (as a God-lover). It is not a matter of setting aside desire but of channeling it and even preserving it. That is, one should not spend desire solely on the earthly but channel it toward the heavenly.

Imagine a stream flowing from a spring and dividing itself off into a number of accidental channels. As long as it proceeds so, it will be useless for any purpose of agriculture, the dissipation of its waters making each particular current small and feeble, and therefore slow. But if one were to mass these wandering and widely dispersed rivulets again into one single channel, he would have a full and collected stream for the supplies which life demands. Just so the human mind (so it seems to me), as long as its current spreads itself in all directions over the pleasures of the sense, has no power that is worth the naming of making its way towards the Real Good; but once call it back and collect it upon itself, so that it may begin to move without scattering and wandering towards the activity which is congenital and natural to it, it will find no obstacle in mounting to higher things, and in grasping realities. Gregory of Nyssa (de virginitate, chapter VII)

He goes on to explain, desire rightly regulated and channeled will burst upward against the constraining force of gravity: “in the same way, the mind of man, enclosed in the compact channel of an habitual continence, and not having any side issues, will be raised by virtue of its natural powers of motion to an exalted love.” This is the way God ordained “that it should always move, and to stop it is impossible.” Thus, to spend desire on “trifles” is to introduce a leak into a stream which would otherwise speed one “toward the truth.” This does not entail setting aside sex and marriage. “That in the cases where it is possible at once to be true to the diviner love, and to embrace wedlock, there is no reason for setting aside this dispensation of nature and misrepresenting as abominable that which is honorable” (de virginitate, chapter VIII). It is a matter of arriving at “due proportion.”

Purity is not a matter of ridding oneself of desire but of not dissipating desire on trifling rivulets. Much as in a Lacanian frame, Gregory equates desire with the life force. Lacan’s singular ethical imperative (“Do not give way on your desire”), understood in this light is the empowerment to remain in the right channel of life. “If, as an inexperienced and easy-going steward, he opens too wide a channel, there will be danger of the whole stream quitting its direct bed and pouring itself sideways” (de virginitate, chapter VIII). So, the sexual passion, which he compares to a “trifling debt of nature” need not and should not consume one in “over-calculating.” Rather, through “the long hours of his prayers [he] will secure the purity which is the key-note of his life” (de virginitate, chapter VIII). This purity is a desire preserved and propelled by the Spirit, bent not on sexual union alone, but on the ultimate “blending” by “sharing in the place the Spirit holds between Father and Son.”[3]

William of St Thierry, reflecting Gregory of Nyssa, in his Exposition on the Song of Songs freely depicts an erotic spiritual love: “his left hand is under my head, and his right hand shall embrace me” (Song 2:6): “This embrace extends to man, but it surpasses man. For this embrace is the Holy Spirit. He is the Communion, the Charity, the Friendship, the Embrace of the Father and of the Son of God; and he himself is all things in the love of Bridegroom and Bride.” He describes the full consummation of this desire in union with God: “Then, I say, it will be the full kiss and the full embrace, the power of which is the wisdom of God; its sweetness the Holy Spirit; and its perfection, the full fruition of the Divinity, and God all in all.”[4]

This understanding of the Trinity leaves behind the apophatic and lifts up the human condition as preparation and mediation for participation in the inner life of God. God is known through an empirical order, rearranged and redirected by its inclusion in the love of God.

[1] Sarah Coakley, “Pleasure Principles” in Harvard Divinity School Bulletin Archive (AUTUMN 2005 (VOL. 33, NO. 2) https://bulletin-archive.hds.harvard.edu/articles/autumn2005/pleasure-principles

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Quoted from Coakley, Ibid.

The Wrath of God Proceeds from His Love

Christ came to address the problem of sin and not the various consequences of sin, such as the wrath of God, guilt, shame, or the list of consequences spelled out in Romans 1 (degrading passions, greed, unrighteousness, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossiping, slander, hatred of God, arrogance, boastfulness, etc.). To miss the root problem underlying these consequences is to miss why Christ came and the role of God (he “turns them over to their desires” (Ro 1:24)), in these consequences. Christ did not come to turn away the wrath of God, which would mean he would be turning away God’s love as well. Christ came to do away with what gives rise to wrath. Likewise, he did not come to resolve the problem of guilt but to do away with what causes guilt – and so on down the list. These consequences flow from the root problem of shutting ourselves off from God, and of course in addressing the root problem these consequences are addressed up to and including, particularly, God’s wrath.

To imagine the wrath of God is the primary problem is to miss the way in which it is also a necessary part of the cure. Paul describes sin (the root cause and not the results) as the exchange of the truth for a lie in which the creature displaces the creator as the object of service and worship (Ro 1:25). He seems to be referencing the early chapters of Genesis, but the same prognosis is repeated in each contemporaneous setting Paul addresses. The progression outlined in Ephesians introduces the same sequence of events. People have given themselves over to the “Archon of this world order” (2:2) and as a result they are “godless in the cosmos” (2:12). In other words, they have exchanged creation for the creator, becoming children of wrath (2:3), and this then results in their “being given over to their desire.” The wrath of God is unleashed in sins consequences in both passages, and this results in “walking in darkness” and being “dead in trespasses and sins.” God’s wrath or his vehemence against sin reveals itself in the fact that sin is a despoiling, dying, passing, circumstance.

Romans 1 specifies where the wrath of God is specifically directed: “against all the impiety and injustice of human beings” (Ro 1:18). Paul speaks of an immediate revelation of this wrath from heaven in its unfolding consequences oriented to and deserving of death (Ro 1:32). In Ephesians, walking according to the course of the Prince of this world, and thus being dead in sin, are synonymous with being “children of wrath.” Where love is an enduring state and God’s love endures forever, the experience of his wrath is a passing state (death being, by definition, unenduring) as the dross of sin is burnt away by the wrath which works in sin.

The wrath is interwoven with being dead in sin but it is also immediately conjoined to the love of God: “because of His great love with which He loved us even when we were dead in our transgressions” (Eph. 2:4-5). The children of wrath are still children and are not simply consigned to wrath as an end point but are destined to pass through wrath to love. Paul is talking about himself and other Christians, who have passed into full experience of the love of God by way of wrath.

As George McDonald has described it, the passage from wrath to love is not a change in God (from wrath to love) but a passage through a purifying love: “For love loves unto purity,” and this is often experienced as wrath, “as the consuming fire that will not be content until our sinful nature, everything that separates us from God, is burned away.” According to McDonald, “God’s anger is at one with his love.” Mercy and punishment, love and justice, are not opposed, “for punishment—the consuming fire—is a means to an end, that we might be the creatures he intended us to be. God’s punishment, his justice, can be his most merciful act.”[1]

The Hebraism “sons of death” (“sons of wrath” or “sons of stripes”) occurs in several places in the Old Testament, and as in Psalms 102, these children seemingly consigned to death are to be set free so as to constitute “kingdoms to serve the Lord” and to “tell of the name of the Lord in Zion” (Ps. 102:20-21). Ephesians seems to be echoing this tradition of building a kingdom by its purifying passage through the love/wrath of God. The “sons of wrath” are those very ones who will be shown mercy and who “are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit” (2:22). As Hebrews puts it, “Wherefore, we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:28-29). This unshakeable kingdom is established in and through this purifying fire. In each instance, the point is to pass from walking in darkness and works of death so as to walk in the “good works, which God prepared beforehand” (Eph 2:10).

If salvation is a harmoniously functioning kingdom united under Christ (the thematic picture in the New Testament is of being “in Christ” as part of his body), then the image would seem to also account for the entire movement from damnation to salvation. That is, the disparate elements of the divided kingdom (split in two by the dividing wall of hostility) will come to constitute the stuff of the united kingdom. “He himself is our peace” and this means that hostility, enmity, hatred, and violence will be burned out to make way for this enduring peace among the objects of his wrath. He “abolished in his flesh the enmity,” which means we might speak of his having passed through the fire of wrath but he has turned it into purified love: “because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, [he] made us alive together with Christ” (Eph 2:4-5). The making alive due to love redirects from within the orientation to death definitive of experience of God’s wrath (i.e. wrath is a passage to love enacted by Christ).

As David Bentley Hart has written, “The wrath of God in Scripture is a metaphor, suitable to our feeble understanding, one which describes not the action of God toward us, but what happens when the inextinguishable fervency of God’s love toward us is rejected.”[2] As Hart notes, this is the understanding passed down from the Church fathers. Origen writes, “If you hear of God’s anger and wrath, do not think of wrath and anger as emotions experienced by God. Accommodations of the use of language like that are designed for the correction and improvement of the little child. We too put on a severe face for children.”[3] In Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, the wrath of God proceeds from his love, so that “even hell itself is not a divine work, but the reality we have wrought within ourselves by our perverse refusal to open out — as God himself eternally has done — in love, for God and others.” Sin is a shutting ourselves off from God, being lost in the cosmos (in a paraphrase of Paul), or being lost within ourselves such that “the fire of divine love cannot transform or enliven us, but only assail us as an external chastisement” as a hell of our own making. [4] But what is sinful cannot endure the flame of God’s love. As McDonald puts it, “There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.”[5] Or in Harts phrase, “Our God is a consuming fire, and the pathos of our rage cannot interrupt the apatheia of his love.”[6]

[1] George McDonald, “The Consuming Fire,” from Unspoken Sermons – http://www.online-literature.com/george-macdonald/unspoken-sermons/2/

[2] David Bentley Hart, “The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics” p. 62

[3] 1. Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer, eds., Documents in Early Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1975), 7–10

[4] Hart Ibid.

[5] McDonald Ibid.

[6] Hart Ibid.

The Logos is the Incarnate Christ – The Openness of God

The implication of John’s and Paul’s focus on Christ incarnate is that we not only identify who God is through the incarnation, but we begin here because this is who God is. As John Behr notes, the early Church did not presume to start with the pre-incarnate Word – in fact he claims, the term “pre-incarnate” is absent from patristic literature.[1] The order of identification in Gregory of Nyssa, for example, begins with the cross and from the cross (in reference to Ephesians 3:18) the height, depth, breadth, and length, of all things unfolds and returns. As Gregory describes it, the cross is divided into four parts because the One upon it binds together in Himself all forms of existence. The apprehension of all things and the reality of all things converge on the cross.[2]

It is not that the Word became incarnate and then suffered on the cross, but rather the One on the cross is the identity of the Word. The mystery of God revealed as Trinity does not unfold from a fleshless (asarkos) heavenly realm. According to Behr, there has been a serious departure as the subject of Christian theology has changed, from Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord proclaimed by the Gospel, to the narrative of the Word of God somehow devoid of the content of the Gospel. This false narrative pictures an unfolding consecutive order occurring in God. The pre-incarnate Word descends to put on flesh, something like a space-suit, and it is this disembodied Word that is the secret behind the life of the Messiah.

The simple failure here is to recognize that the Word in the Prologue of John is already, by the time of the writing of the Gospel of John, synonymous with the Gospel. The Word, like the Gospel, is about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The “word of the cross” (I Cor. 1:18) upon which apostolic preaching is centered is precisely the details leading up to the passion, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus. The Word is not, for Christians at least, determined by Greek philosophy, the Wisdom of the Old Testament, or even the tetragrammaton (the four-letter name for God which is unpronounceable) which appears under the Aramaic equivalent of Word in the Targums. As Cyril of Alexandria makes clear, Word refers to Jesus Christ: “We say that there is one and the same Jesus Christ, from the God and Father, on the one hand, as the God Word, and, on the other hand, from the seed of the divinely-inspired David according to the flesh.”[3] There is no division in the subject of Christ before and after the incarnation, rather: “One is the Son, one Lord, Jesus Christ, both before the incarnation and after the incarnation.”[4]

Both Cyril and Hippolytus describe a putting on of flesh, but this is not pictured as having been inaugurated from the conception or birth of Jesus but is generated backward in time, having been woven from the sufferings of the cross. Hippolytus, commenting on Revelation 12, pushes the metaphor to suggest this weaving of flesh is an unceasing function of the Church, “bearing from her heart the Word that is persecuted by the unbelieving in the World.” The male child she bears is Christ, God and human, as announced by the prophets, “whom the Church continually bears as she teaches all nations.”[5]

The significance of this focus on the incarnate Christ is spelled out by Irenaeus of Lyons in his insistence that each of the major metaphors for God’s entry into the world – Word, Life, Light, etc. – should not be separated out, or reified as a self-constituting entity, but must be taken as referring to Jesus Christ. The Word, the Light, the Life, is the one who became flesh. Jesus Christ is the Word in the beginning.

What John and the New Testament are conveying is that God has no story but that of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus Christ is the only Son of God. It is not that the pre-existent Christ and God have a life story, a secret divine story, other than the story of the incarnation or that the Son of God had spent a very long time in eternity – before the incarnation – doing God knows what. Eternity is not a very long time during which God was otherwise preoccupied. Eternity is not time at all and time (an unfolding story) and eternity only intersect in the Son. So, to speak of the Son of God as coming down from heaven is a metaphor that cannot be literally true. The Creator is not subject to spatial (up and down) or temporal (before and after) movement as these are created realms that do not refer to the divine reality.[6]

There are multiple implications to recognizing that the cross and the incarnation are eternal facts about God. Time and eternity, the human and divine, intersect in Christ. History’s center is open to the immanent Trinity and all of history is an unfolding of this intersection in the incarnation and the Church. Jesus Christ is not one episode among many in the story of the Word but is the singular story of God.[7] To imagine God as primarily apophatic, impassive, or apathetic, may be a way of speaking of some God we do not and cannot know, but it is by definition not the God we know through the Word.

This in turn, lends a profound significance to our interaction with the Word through our participation in this story, our continuation of the incarnation as the body of Christ. The specific connections and connectedness we develop in the body of Christ are a participation in who God is, giving our communion, our relationship, our interconnectedness an enduring eternal significance.

[1] John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 15.

[2] Gregory of Nyssa (c 335 – after 394): The Great Catechism, 32

[3] Cyril of Alexandria, That Christ is One (ed. Pusey, 371.12–14) quoted from Behr, 16.

[4] Cyril of Alexandria, First Letter to Succensus, 4. Quoted from Behr, 17.

[5] Hippolytus, Antichrist 4, Behr, 18.

[6] Behr, 19 ff.

[7] See Herbert McCabe, “The Involvement of God,” in McCabe, God Matters (London:Continuum, 2012), 39–51. Noted in Behr, 19.

Christ Defeated Sin, Death, and the Devil – Not God’s Wrath

The predominant New Testament and early Church picture of atonement, Christus Victor, is that the death of Christ defeated the powers of evil and brought about liberation from the bondage of sin, death, and the devil. For a variety of reasons Christus Victor was displaced. The rise of Constantinian Christianity left no room for identifying state powers, the emperor, the principalities and powers, with real world evil as the archon or ruling prince, which would have normally been identified as a minion of the world archon (the Prince of this World), was now a Christian. Maybe it was simply that Christus Victor was sometimes ill conceived and poorly illustrated. Origen presumes that if we were bought with a price then it was the devil who demanded and received the payment of the blood of Christ. Gregory of Nyssa pictures the devil as a “greedy fish” and Jesus as the bait; “For he who first deceived man by the bait of pleasure is himself deceived by the camouflage of human nature.” God “made use of a deceitful device to save the one who had been ruined.” Augustine’s original sin mystified sin (see here) and opened the way for a semi-mysterious theory of atonement (divine satisfaction). The crude depiction of a too powerful devil and a deceitful God, the political and sociological shift with the rise of Christianity as the state religion, the development of a competing notion of sin (original sin), resulted, in the West, with a displacement of Christus Victor.

Anselm’s notion of divine satisfaction bears the allure of reasoned argument couched in the implicit metaphor of Roman law. Anselm’s genius is often overlooked, coming as he does between the giants, Augustine and Aquinas. However, it is Anselm who marks the shift to a philosophical-like argument which, like his ontological argument and his cosmological argument, functions in a necessarily closed system (pure reason). Both divine satisfaction and penal substitution are focused on an exchange between the Father and Son: an infinite offence against the infinite honor of God requiring an infinite payment so as to avoid infinite punishment. The infinite and divine exchange (between the Father and Son) is such that it tends to leave out finite human concerns, lived reality, and permits no further insight but it succeeds in shifting focus to pure reason. Instead of being ransomed from sin, death, and the devil, the focus shifted to reasoned abstractions – law, the mind of God, justice – so that we are saved from transcendent categories rather than pressing realities. Salvation becomes an exchange removed from the sickness unto death, as the wrath of God (certainly in Calvin but wrath and anger play a key role also for Anselm) is presumed to be the real problem.

As Gustaf Aulén has noted, penal substitution and Christus Victor present opposed views: the Son bears the anger of the Father (the focus of the Cross) in penal substitution, but in Christus Victor the Father and Son are united in the work of the Cross in defeating evil, death, and the devil. Where the resurrection is a natural consequence as the sign of this accomplished defeat, the resurrection seems to be an addendum to the main event in penal substitution. Instead of a ransom price paid to the devil, it is now God who requires and receives payment – a failed or mistaken notion compounded. Though Satan is depicted as “the prince of this world” (Jn 12:31; 14:30; 16:11) possessing “all the kingdoms of the world” and deciding upon who administrates his power (Lk 4:5-6) as “god of this world” (II Cor 4:4), penal substitution seems to leave this power in place. The state (including legal, political, and administrative apparatuses) is now part of the divine order rather than minion of the prince (archon) of this world. Roman law and Mosaic law are so integral to the logic of both systems that rather than displacing the law (summed up by Paul as the law of sin and death) both divine satisfaction and penal substitution leave the law in place as it is the logic of these legal systems which called for the death of Christ, rather than the death of Christ suspending, displacing, or rendering the law unnecessary. In Paul’s language this would amount to a continuation of the rule of the law of sin and death.

Where penal substitution renders the teaching of Christ pre-Christian and thus not an integral part of the salvation of the main event – the Cross, Christus Victor joins the narrative of the Gospels as Jesus casts out demons displacing the Satanic (Math 12:22-29), challenges the principalities and powers at every turn – Roman and Jewish, heals the physically and spiritually sick under the power of evil. This is the inauguration of the displacement and defeat of the dark kingdom with the kingdom of light (continued in the Church). Gospels and epistles are joined in a singular narrative movement of the defeat of evil, death, and sin through Christ and the Church. Instead of sin being a mysterious guilt posing a problem in the inaccessible reaches of the mind of God, sin is here understood to pertain to enslavement to death and evil as administered by the Evil One. We can witness and explain the hold evil has upon us as the Cross exposes the working of the sin system.

Paul describes sin as a fearful slavery from which Christ defeats and frees us (Ro. 8:15). As Hebrews puts it, he freed “those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Heb 2:15). The Gospels picture Jesus confronting this enslavement in myriad forms: for Nicodemus and the Pharisees the security of their religion provides life (life in the law); for the woman at the well the security of sexual love is life (looking for love and life in all the wrong places); for Pilate security is provided by Rome (life through state identity). All have entered into a covenant with death in which pride of place, of identity, or of association, wards off death (death as the loss of pride (shame), the loss of place, the loss of identity). In each instance, the encounter with Christ exposes the emptiness of the covenant with death.

In his life and death Christ continually enters that place or circumstance violently resisted by all. His is the poverty of no place (Nazareth, a peasant, a Jew), the humility of being a nobody servant, the shame of associating with social outcasts. As he enters the jaws of death by walking into Jerusalem his walk of death acceptance overcomes and defeats the myriad forms of death denial that would kill him. Peter’s denial is precisely a refusal of death, but so is the betrayal of Judas who most obviously illustrates denial of death as a succumbing to evil.

The Cross is a confrontation, not between the Father and the Son, but the forces of evil (the Jews, the Romans, Judas, and the Judas in all the disciples) which killed him. It is a defeat of the death resistance which would kill the one (the scapegoat) that the Nation might be saved. It is precisely a defeat of nationalism, racism, ethnocentrism, egocentrism, and all forms of evil that would deal out violence and death as salvation.

It is not God’s violence that kills Jesus but the violence of evil. His death confronts and defeats evil and binds the evil one whose singular weapon is exposed as empty by the empty tomb.