Rowan Williams – Forging Ploughshares

Joy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[4] Ibid, 271.

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

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

[7] Ibid, 21.

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

[9] Ibid, 11.

Rowan Williams and the Rereading of Hegel

Perhaps there is no philosopher more blatantly misinterpreted than G.W.F Hegel. Hegel is said to be a pantheist, reducing all that is external to the self into possession of the rational self (“the same”) such that all difference is made univocal, monological, and subject to reason (synthesis). Hegel is made the boogeyman, whose pretensions must be opposed so as to preserve the Other, and the finitude of reason must acknowledge absolute difference and otherness, resisting synthesis (sameness). Hegel is portrayed, variously, as a super-rationalist or as marking the end of reason, and he is either an atheist or a heterodox Christian who imagines God in process. In much (most?) of what is written on Hegel, though there is not a lot of agreement, his Christianity and his self-description as an orthodox Christian working within the parameters of Trinitarian theology, is often not accounted for or mentioned. The exception to this reading, are those theologians reading him from an Eastern Orthodox orientation, such as Sergius Bulgakov, or even the Swiss Catholic, Hans Urs von Balthasar. In this list I would include Rowan Williams, who wrote his dissertation on Vladimir Lossky, though he credits Gillian Rose with his reconsideration of Hegel. Williams recognizes that Hegel is not effacing difference in synthesis and sameness, but in Christ this difference is preserved but overcome.[1]

This reconsideration of Hegel is important, as Hegel develops a full appreciation of the meaning of Trinity and the Trinitarian necessity for thought. As Williams points out in his key article on Hegel,[2] thought is ultimately dependent upon what God has done in Christ. For Hegel, “no otherness is unthinkable,” as “an unthinkable otherness would leave us incapable of thinking ourselves, and so of thinking about thinking – and so of thinking itself.”[3] God, in the tradition, is portrayed as completely Other to the world, which means he is unthinkable, discrete and independent. But this notion of God leaves out the fulness of a Trinitarian understanding. In his philosophy of religion, the culmination and final project of Hegel, “God is defined as ‘the living process of positing his Other, the world, which comprehended in its divine form is His Son.’”[4] The “consummate religion” in Hegel’s description of Christianity, in this final work of his life, is “the religion that is properly related to itself, the religion that is transparent to itself, thinks itself – spells out the inseparability of thinking God and thinking the reconciled consciousness; it also, very importantly, explains why such a religion can only be a historically determined (‘positive’ or ‘revealed’) faith.”[5] Consciousness and thought begin with the recognition of the self in and through the other. God is not an isolated Subject, but gives himself to the world in his Son. He gives himself for thought, and makes thought and self-consciousness possible.

Much like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy aimed at dispelling the notion of private language (specifically as illustrated in Augustine), Hegel pictures self-consciousness as dependent upon God’s self-consciousness shared/realized in the historical person of Christ, and given or realized in the Spirit. “To think myself is to discover my identity in the alien givenness of the past, and to think history is to find it in my consciousness (thereby discovering that there is no such thing as a consciousness that is ‘privately mine’).[6] Thus, Hegel defends the melding of thought and being, but this defense is part of his explaining the doctrine of the Trinity, the work of Christ, the meaning of createdness, “which leads to the full and mature thinking of God, as spirit in community.[7] The condition for thinking is nothing less than the doctrine of Trinity, creation, reconciliation, and incarnation.

This is why Hegel focuses on Anselm’s ontological argument, which in Anselm’s version he judges inadequate, but which he would rescue. While he is not unappreciative of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, picturing God in his simplicity as unthinkable, Hegel would transmute the Christian tradition of divine simplicity “into the terms of a process” rather than in terms of pure negation.[8] For example, Anselm would equate the greatest thought with God, and yet Anselm erases all content for this thought. The God that is thought (to be or to have existence) is absolutely different from any other existing thing, such that the world is rendered comparably nonexistent. Hegel’s point is that this notion of absolute otherness is at once contradictory, rendering thought an impossibility. “If there is what is not and could not be thought, there would be some sort of life or reality with which consciousness could not be in relation.”[9] Hegel may be thinking of Kant, but also Kant’s critique of the ontological argument, maintaining Kant is confused. “We should have no word or idea for such a ‘reality’ (we could not even call a reality what we could not in any way engage with).”[10] As in Anselm’s cosmological argument, in which he pictures God, in comparison to the world and normal thought, as “absolutely different,” there is a contradiction. If something is “absolutely different” than there is no comparison to be made and no thought of God whatsoever. “For Hegel, an otherness that couldn’t be thought would not even be a negation, because it would not negate anything that could be thought (if it did, it would not be absolutely other; part of its definition would be given as ‘not x’).”[11]

Anselm is in a line of thinkers who picture thinking absolute difference as the thought of God. Hegel’s point is this destroys thought itself, as God is Truth, the ground of truth and reason, and to leave God out of thought – as the impossible thought – destroys thought. The universal and eternal Truth of God holds all things together, and knowing anything is to enter into this relational understanding. “To say that there was thinking and . . . whatever, that there was no identity between nature, action, history, law, society or religion and thinking, would be to conclude that thinking is not what we do, and that therefore we cannot think what we are.”[12] Thinking is based on a relational understanding, in which thinking and knowing relate to the self, the other and to God, but where things are imagined to exist discretely (without relationship) than nothing is thinkable. “Thus to think is, ultimately, to step beyond all local determinations of reality, to enter into an infinite relatedness – not to reflect or register or acknowledge an infinite relatedness, but to act as we cannot but act, if our reality truly is what we think it is, if thinking is what we (just) do.”[13]

If God is beyond thought, Williams is quick to point out, this also means that not only thinking and knowing are rendered impossible, but sensation, emotion or love are also empty. Hegel’s point, in the Logic is, “there are no discrete and simple objects for thought . . . “ as “thought is bound to dissolve the finite perception, the isolated object, as such, moving from the level of diversity (a contingent multiplicity of things) to that of complementary opposition: each ‘thing’ is defined by not being another, lives only in the absence of another, and so ‘passes over’ from being a discrete object to being a moment in a complex movement.”[14] This complex movement allows for no final resting place for thought, no static presence, or no end to movement. Certainly the self, is not a discrete object for thought or something we come to possess. The self-presence which a misoriented desire is in pursuit of, is that static letter of the law, that immovable written word, that object in the mirror, and is not focused on a Person or the personal.

Again, it may be helpful to think of Anselm arriving at his final thought, the place of the word arising within himself, and yet this word cannot speak as it is before language (it is the place of language). He pictures an end to the movement of thought, but this end is no-thought, no-movement, no-place, but an unthinkable apophatic interiority. Anselm thinks the greatest thought by ceasing all other thoughts. As with Descartes, all relationality, all movement, all embodiment, is excluded. One is left with an empty, static thought, in which there is an end to thinking. Rather than demonstrating the existence of God, the God who is beyond thought, establishes doubt, darkness, and nothingness, as prime reality.[15]

In contrast, Hegel is picturing thought, in its dialectic form as that which “outlives and ‘defeats’ stable, commonsense perception, not by abolishing it from the outside, but by the penetration of its own logic and process.”[16] It opens up to and requires relating thought as that which is grounded in God. “Everything can be thought” and “nothing is beyond reconciliation” as thought is the “overall environment” establishing harmony and relationship between all things. God is where thought begins and, in this light, there “can be no such thing as unthinkable contingency.”[17] The particular is thinkable in its relational harmonies and this relational entry into understanding is made possible by the fact that God gives himself for humanity, for thought.

This is the power and love of God. “God’s goodness has to give way to God’s power – but to a power which acts only in a kind of self-devastation.[18] God’s kenotic self-giving love makes God available in the Son through the Spirit. “It means both that the life of God comes to its fullness in the world solely by the death, the stripping, of the human – the human, that is conceived as something solid in itself, as the finite negation or contradiction of the divine, and that human fragility and mortal weakness are not ‘outside’ God, in the sense that they do not prevent union with God. After Calvary, then, human self-awareness, the human knowledge of humanity as vulnerable and finite, becomes inseparable from awareness of God.”[19]

Human weakness is not the end but the beginning of human understanding. Weakness is not something alone (something in and of itself) but this weakness is “a moment in the life of God.”[20] It is the place God meets us and we meet God. The dispossession of the self and of the thought of self in self-emptying, is the entry into the life of the Spirit. “Only through a history of the emptying out or bringing to nothing of the fullness of Spirit” can “thinking establish itself, because only in such an event can we definitely lose the pretensions of the individual consciousness.”[21] The self as a thinking thing is beyond thought. Despite Descartes, and the confused reading of Hegel, this is not a fusion of subject and object (sameness) in some mystical synthesis. It is itself a sign of the limitations of thought without God, or of what Verstand (understanding) alone can only think fragmentarily or episodically.”[22] The Cartesian cogito splits thought and the reality of self, isolating thought from the body and the world.

The condition for thinking is impossible apart from God who is mediated through the Son and Spirit to himself and the world. The “Christian vision is of a God who is quintessentially and necessarily mediated in a divine self-hood that is simultaneously its own absolute other. And Hegel concludes, the complete transparency of self in the other that is God’s act of being (as ‘Father’ and ‘Son’) is what constitutes God as ‘Spirit’, as living consciousness proceeding into the determinate otherness of the world.”[23] In the words of Hegel, “The abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son—this then is death. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[24]

Hegel’s continual refrain in this final lecture, is the love of God, expressed through the Son and realized in the Spirit.[25] The “concluding message of the Philosophy of religion lectures is that concrete freedom is unimaginable, unrealizable, if thinking revolts against the triune God, against thought as self-love and self-recovery in the other, against thought as ecstasis.”[26] Thinking is the realization of self in reconciliation with God. “Hegel asserts that the ‘reversal of consciousness begins’ at Calvary. The beginnings of the Church have to do with the discovery of reconciliation, the discovery that freedom is realized on the far side of dispossession so total that it is now impossible to think of a God who claims the ‘right’ to be separate from humanity.”[27] “That this is so is the Holy Spirit itself, or, expressed in the mode of sensibility, it is eternal love.”[28]

[1] See the article on Williams by Matheson Russel, “Dispossession and Negotiation: Rowan Williams on Hegel and Political Theology,” in On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Cascade Books, 2014) 88.

[2] Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007).

[3] Ibid, 36.

[4] Ibid, 41.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 39 And here to avoid equating Hegelian theory with something like process theology, the Maximian formula, creation is incarnation, enters in. God is always creator, and always the Father of the Son.

[9] Ibid, 36.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, 36.

[14] Ibid, 37.

[15] Ibid, 47 “God’s ‘exceeding’ of thought cannot itself be thought or spoken, and, in this regard,” we see Hegel’s convergence with Wittgenstein.

[16] Ibid, 37.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 45.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid, 38.

[23] Ibid, 42.

[24] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, vol. 3, Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[25] It brings to mind the work of Julia Kristeva who pictures all dialogue as an act carried out in love (see here).

[26] Hays, ibid op. cit., 44.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid, 42. Williams is quoting Hegel, but provides no reference.

Reassessing Hegel in Light of Maximus

My reading of Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has been through the work of Slavoj Žižek, which obviously fails to grasp the theological centeredness, or even the possibility of the orthodox Christ centeredness, of Hegel’s thought. I realized my short sighted treatment of Hegel when Jordan Wood suggested in conversation (a conversation which will be published on Saturday, 3/16), Hegel is in line with the outworking of the Origenist, Maximian, theological project and is an orthodox Christian. This goes against the overwhelming consensus, and it is no surprise that even those of us who might be inclined to read Hegel in this light, have not done so (due to the consensus).

For thinkers like Derrida, Levinas, Adorno, Deleuze and Bataille, there is the “metaphysical” Hegel who, in Robert Pippin’s phrase, served as these philosophers whipping boy.[1] According to Gavin Hyman, “This was what has become known as the ‘textbook’ or ‘cliché’ Hegel, a caricature our ‘new’ readers (e.g., Rowan Williams) believe to be far removed from what is warranted by Hegel’s own texts.”[2] Far from being a postmodern Hegel, this is the modern, rationalist Hegel. “This is a Hegel too who represents the apogee of modernity’s omniscient aspirations. His all-seeing System, crowned with the concept of Absolute Knowledge, seems to deliver modernity’s totalising dream. It appears to be a ‘God’s eye view’ recast in the terms of a secularised modernity, to which all is subordinated, and in light of which all is intelligible.”[3]

Žižek’s is the opposite of this reading, in that he sees Hegel as the truth of the human condition, which is ultimately devoid of the metaphysical form of truth, in that it is purely symbolic and pragmatic. According to Pippin, “Žižek’s ambitious goal is to argue that the former characterization of Hegel attacks a straw man, and that, when this is realized in sufficient detail, the putative European break with Hegel in the criticisms of the likes of Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and the Freudians, will look very different, with significantly more overlap than gaps, and this will make available a historical diagnosis very different from the triumphalist one usually attributed to Hegel.”[4]

Then in the wake of the work of Gillian Rose, thinkers such as Rowan Williams read Hegel as working within a theistic and more orthodox ontology. What may be strange in these various readings, is that Žižek’s atheistic reading is closer to Williams theistic reading than the classical text-book reading. That is the extreme atheism and theism converge at key points.

This may account for my reaction to Jordan’s suggestion. I must admit, given my own slanted reading it had not occurred to me to consider Hegel the Christian. On the other hand, my reading of Žižek, who considers his work as an extension of Hegel, lands as close to the kingdom as possible (for an atheistic materialist). Beyond this, Žižek’s insights into the human condition, are derived directly from the deep psychology posed by Hegel, which I have understood (as has Žižek) as biblical insights. Thus, it is no surprise that Hegel’s depth of insight is, as with Žižek, directly related to the Apostle Paul.

So, Hegel’s reception may not mean much given the reception of Origen and Maximus. That is, there is a form of reason and thought implied in a Maximian speculative theology, which apart from a few thinkers such as Sergius Bulgakov, has mostly been written off (Bulgakov’s appreciation of German idealism is not surprising, in this light). An apocalyptic, universal, cosmic, Christianity has also been obscured or written off. Thus, it is no surprise to realize Hegel is also misunderstood, as he is promoting a form of Christianity unrecognizable to most Christians. In turn, given that Hegel’s is the first post-foundational, post-enlightenment, postmodern philosophical/theological project, it should be no surprise that a form of thought which by-passed the enlightenment-modernist project should converge (at least in part) with his form of thought.

According to Rowan Williams, Hegel’s philosophy coincides at key points with what has already been said by theology:

Dialectic is what theology means by the power of God, just as Verstand is what theology means by the goodness of God. Verstand says “Everything can be thought”, “nothing is beyond reconciliation”, every percept makes sense in a distinctness, a uniqueness, that is in harmony with an overall environment. It is, as you might say, a doctrine of providence, in that it claims that there can be no such thing as unthinkable contingency. But … thinking the particular in its harmonies, thinking how the particular makes sense, breaks the frame of reference in which we think the particular. God’s goodness has to give way to God’s power – but to a power which acts only in a kind of self-devastation. And, says Hegel, the “speculative” stage to which dialectic finally leads us is what religion has meant by the mystical, which is not, he insists, the fusion of subject and object but the concrete (historical?) unity or continuity or followability of what Verstand alone can only think fragmentarily or episodically.[5]

According to Gavin, “Williams shows how what Hegel speaks about philosophically is said religiously by the language of theology.” The deep grammar of theology “is what enables the truths of philosophy to appear; we would not be able to perceive the speculative truth of philosophy outside the light of the divine truth of theology.”[6] The modernist project came to an impasse, and Hegel affects a rescue of philosophical thought through theology. Thus, in William’s estimate, Hegel’s thought is an extension of a speculative theology.

Far from Hegel being an atheistic philosopher (per Žižek), it can be argued (and has) that his thought and reason begin with Christ, and specifically with the kenotic self-giving love of Christ described by Paul. Hegel turns, as the introduction to his early works indicates, from the law of Kant to the “Pantheism of Love.” “What Hegel rejected in framing the Pantheism of Love, he never reaffirmed later on. He found a new logic, a new rationalism to solve the problem insoluble by the rationalism he had overcome in his earlier years.”[7]

In his turn to love, he saw the inadequacies of the law, focused as it is on guilt and punishment. “A law has been made; if the thing opposed to it has been destroyed, there still remains the concept, the law; but it then expresses only the deficiency, only a gap, because its content has in reality been annulled; and it is then called a penal law. This form of law (and the law’s content) is the direct opposite of life because it signalizes the destruction of life. . .[8] Law speaks only of destruction of life and perpetual guilt. “For the trespasser always sees himself as a trespasser; over his action as a reality he has no power, and this his reality is in contradiction with his consciousness of the law.”[9] In the key text “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” Hegel broaches the alternative to law in kenotic sacrificial understanding. As the title of his heading indicates, “Love is the only thing which transcends penal justice.”[10] He seems to directly contradict a Calvinistic notion of penal substitution: “For this reason it is also contradictory to contemplate satisfying the law by punishing one man as a representative of many like criminals, since, in so far as the others are looked on as suffering punishment in him, he is their universal, their concept; and the law, as ordering or punishing, is only law by being opposed to a particular.”[11] Instead of seeing Jesus as satisfying the law, Hegel suggests love is entry into a completely different order: “Jesus makes a general demand on his hearers to surrender their rights, to lift themselves above the whole sphere of justice or injustice by love, for in love there vanish not only rights but also the feeling of inequality and the hatred of enemies. . .”[12] Hegel does not see a direct continuity between law and love since “law was opposed to love,” not “in its content but in its form.”[13] Love is of the Spirit, and it is Spirit alone that “can undo what has been done.”[14]

Hegel’s point of departure, like Luther and Paul, is captured in Philippians 2:7: “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interest of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself [ἑαυτòν ἐκένωσεν], taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:4-8). Hegel passes from seeing Christ as the embodiment of Kant’s categorical imperative and Kantian ethics, to the centrality of self-giving love described by Paul.

According to William Goggin, “Hegel’s retrieval of kenosis as the reflexive representation of sacrifice forms the core feature of the imaginary syntheses of religion as they are elevated into the conceptual necessity of philosophical comprehension.”[15] Hegel’s project is a reconceptualization of the atonement, which seeks to make cognizant the self-giving love of Christ. The meaning of the death of Christ in kenosis is the basis on which he turns to a revaluation of negativity – of tarrying with the negative. It is not any death, or death in general, but Christ’s death with which Hegel is concerned. “As seen in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel’s awareness of the pivotal role of kenotic sacrifice in the development of his system does not wane with time. If anything, it would seem, Hegel becomes increasingly clear on this point.”[16] As Hegel puts it, “When it becomes comprehended spiritually, this very death becomes a healer, the focal point of reconciliation.”[17] It is healing, not because it reconciles with the law, but because it works an immediate reconciliation in the Spirit.

Here, one can embrace Žižek’s understanding, that the first step in the Hegelian reading is suspending the punishing superego equated with God. Hegel goes to some length to demonstrate, there is no final reconciliation in the realm of law, retribution and punishment. While one might “picture,” as opposed to experience, “satisfaction” of the law, Hegel points to the “realization” of reconciliation. “Representing the kenotic self-sacrifice of God, the death of God points the way to a sacrifice of God as representation, to the negation of the absoluteness of the reflective, representational standpoint itself.”[18] The Christian in Christ can pass beyond representational picture thinking and experience, within herself, the reality of reconciliation.

Hegel describes alienation as an experience of the self, and in turn his project is to describe reconciliation. “The disparity which exists in consciousness between the ‘I’ and the substance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general… Now although this negative appears at first as a disparity between the ‘I’ and its object, it is just as much the disparity of substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and substance shows itself to be essentially subject.”[19] The self objectifies itself, as in the object in the mirror, creating an inner antagonism, cured only by self-giving love realized in the Spirit. There is an enacted unity in the Spirit as the I and its object, existence and essence, are unified. Through kenotic self-negation, Spirit is realized and grasps the self as its own – with the self becoming what it essentially is. There is an end to the antagonistic self-relation through the reconciliation of the Spirit. According to Hegel,

Spirit has two sides which are presented as two converse propositions: one is this, that substance alienates itself from itself and becomes self-consciousness; the other is the converse, that self-consciousness alienates itself from itself and gives itself the nature of a Thing, or makes itself a universal Self. Both sides have in this way encountered each other, and through this encounter their true union has come into being. The self-emptying [Entäußerung] of substance, its growth into self-consciousness, expresses the transition into the opposite…that substance is in itself self-consciousness. Conversely the self-emptying [Entäußerung] of self-consciousness expresses this, that it is in itself the universal essence…two moments through whose reciprocal self-emptying [Entäußerung] each become the other, Spirit comes into existence as this their unity.[20]

This resonates with Paul, Lacan and Žižek. Lacan and Žižek describe their psychoanalytic understanding in conjunction with Romans 7, in which self-consciousness forms in an alienation between the object or thing in the mirror, reducing to an object, viewed from the subject position. The I is split, and as Paul explains in Romans 8, it is only in the work of the Spirit that the self experiences reconciliation with self and God.

Christianity is “revelatory,” according to Hegel in that the problem of overcoming the antitheses of understanding is realized in passage into Absolute Knowledge. But Absolute Knowledge is not an abstraction or picture thinking but is the end point of a kenotically realized identity. “It is the moment of kenotic sacrifice that unites Substance with Subject.”[21] The I must die with Christ, in a kenotic self-giving love, which does not turn from death and sacrifice, but is a taking up of the cross of love.

Given this reading, one can quote Žižek’s favorite passage from Hegel, and recognize, Hegel is not describing death per se, but the death of Christ as accomplishing a healing reconciliation on the order of theosis.

“[T]he Life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather life that endures [erträgt] and maintains itself in it [in ihm sich erhält]. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment [Zerissenheit], it finds itself…Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called Subject, which by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e., the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.”[22]

The Subject of being is nothing less than divine or a participation in divinity. As Goggin states it, “Hegel understands his idealism as the conceptual clarification of Christianity. Hegel was, in good faith, interpreting Christian dogma as an idealist project, as depicting a logic of kenotic sacrifice that reshaped the space of reasons and made possible the emergence of the speculative system.”[23] This is not a wholesale endorsement of Hegel, nor is it to suggest that Hegel has fully achieved his goal of making kenosis the ground of cognition, but this can be said to have been his goal. This alone calls for a reassessment of Hegel.

(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] Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 4. Quoted in Gavin Hyman, “The ‘New Hegel’ and the Question of God,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (Spring 2020) 19:2, 276.

[2] Gavin, 276.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Robert Pippin, ‘Back to Hegel?’ Mediations 26.1-2 (Fall 2012-Spring 2013), p. 8. Quoted in Gavin, 277.

[5] Rowan Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’ in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (London: SCM Press, 2007), pp. 37-38. Cited in Gavin, 279-280.

[6] Gavin, 280,

[7] Friedrich Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, Trans. By T. M. Knox with and Introduction and Fragments translated by Richard Kroner (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1948) 12.

[8] Hegel, On Christianity, 225.

[9] Hegel, On Christianity, 227.

[10] Hegel, On Christianity, 224.

[11] Hegel, On Christianity, 226.

[12] Hegel, On Christianity, 218.

[13] Hegel, On Christianity, 225.

[14] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen, Band 5, 246; Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 467. Cited in William Ezekiel Goggin, Hegel’s Sacrificial Imagination, (PhD Dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2019) 284.

[15] Goggin, 278.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen. Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte Band 5, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, 249; Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Press, 467-468 (Translation modified). Cited in Goggin, 277.

[18] Goggin, 258.

[19] Hegel, Phenomenology, 21. Cited in Goggin, 244.

[20] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. 755 (Translation modified). Cited in Goggin, 255-256.

[21] Goggin, 255.

[22] Hegel, Phenomenology, 19. Cited in Goggin, 243.

[23] Goggin, 235.

The Sophiology of Death as Explanation of Salvation and Trinity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bulgakov, 117.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 133.

[7] Ibid., 118.

[8] Ibid., 132.

[9] Ibid., 122.

[10] Ibid., 123.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 130-131.

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

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

[16] Ibid., 124.

[17] Ibid., 125.

[18] Ibid., 128.

[19] Ibid., 129.

Marginalization and Restorative Justice

A guest blog by Jonathan Totty

In the parlor of a grandly decrepit Episcopal Church, we began to create a community of people becoming whole, integrated, healed. Like moribund flesh, as individual worshippers bound together by the felt need to allow the Protestant Episcopal Church to submit her doctrines and liturgy, along with the Holy Scriptures, as opinions to be considered by rational minds, we endured the malaise of mainline protestant decline. As a community of Christians, though, we grasped for the potency of ancient ideas reborn toward a politics of friendship, which constitutes the politics of God’s eternal community. Nothing loves death as much as itself. Busy and isolated people merely experience the decline and fall of humanity, whereas life manifests in relationships wherein minds meet, and hearts synchronize in desiring the good. So, we made our prayer, “Come Holy Spirit, come and renew the face of the Earth.” Against the odds of modern life, an eclectic group of folks met in a parlor, oddly resembling an undertaker’s lounge, to study and discuss articles, books, films, and lectures collected around the idea that Jesus’ incarnation, life, death, and resurrection establish a just and peaceful way of being human in the world.

We, a priest, a literature professor, an engineer, an attorney, a scientist, a social worker, and several folks who work in healthcare—about twelve of us in total—meet Sunday mornings, regularly, to discuss the Bible, the history of the Church, doctrines, but this time we met more purposefully and more committed to developing a robust self-understanding about Christian identity. As the priest, my parishioners delightfully surprised me by their willingness to commit to a rigorous course of study. We replaced what had amounted to a Sunday School hour with a course complete with syllabus, lectures, and course readings. Our materials included varied sources such as Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s Silence, writings about the Bible by the feminist theologian Susanne Scholz, and a lecture by Rowan Williams the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Our goal was to develop a self-understanding about Christian identity, derived from the witness of Jesus’ self-sacrificing life and death, that fosters peace and justice while opposing violence and oppression. My parishioners met my ambitious proposal with eager minds and supple spirits open to encountering God.

Throughout eight weeks of Sunday morning discussions, we became God’s beloved community, followers of Christ, people awakened to the forces, the principalities, and powers of demonic and human origins, and people committed to inculcating Christ’s spirituality of peace and justice within our own lives. We became a community by listening to diverging views and understanding the biases and social locations informing each other’s thoughts, opinions, and theories. By listening to one another, we developed a theological stance of openness, open even to meeting Christ in the other. We embodied the theology we hoped to understand. A theology of Christian identity resides within us; the Holy Spirit makes Christ’s life come alive in us by God’s grace infused within our person. Thus, a Christian identity does not exist as an impersonal standard of measure, rather Christian identity resides in Jesus as the one who reveals the Father by his kenotic incarnation and sacrificial death. In Jesus’ resurrection, God promises that our own creaturely personhood abides in the life of God. Consequently, we discovered Christ in ourselves as we recognized Christ in each other.

After weeks of attending to our surroundings and developing a vantage point for reflection by way of critical theory, we wondered how we might meet the demands of our consciences and the world as authentic followers of Jesus. For it is not only some historians, as Toynbee thought, who “hold that history is just one damned thing after another,” because we sometimes endure life as one damned thing after another. In contrast, the way of Jesus forms a straight and narrow path through suffering, through death, into the bright light of God’s eternal life in which all things cohere. We walk the way of Jesus in prayer, study, and service. When we walk the way of Jesus, we enter the flow of God’s love, which establishes the source and goal of all creaturely life. So, even as we became attentive to the powers, principalities, and forces of darkness, we turned to the traditional practices of the Christian spiritual life as a strategy of resistance. Sin and death hold sway by encouraging despair, whereas the Holy Spirit promises joy subsists in the fullness of God’s presence.

While leading our Sunday morning discussions, I decided the communal life we discovered at Grace Episcopal Church should be shared. So, I shared the materials I developed for my parish with Paul Axton. He, then, extended an invitation for me to adapt the course for Forging Ploughshares under the class title: Marginalization and Restorative Justice. Thus, under the auspices of Forging Ploughshares, I invite you to join a discussion about the Christian identity, and how Jesus’ life in us fosters the just, peaceable, and beloved community of God. The class, Marginalization and Restorative Justice, will create a space of discernment about the mission and life of God in us and in the world as we explore Christian social teaching from both Catholic and Protestant perspectives. By study and conversation will foment a realized and active spirituality, which constitutes an alternative peaceable way of life instead of the violent and oppressive norm. Together we will practice spiritual conversations that teach us a way of encountering God, a way of being formed as disciples of Jesus, a way of inhabiting the Peaceable Kingdom.

Therefore, even as I have described one theological conversation and offered an invitation to another, my ultimate purpose resides in the description of theological conversation. In theological conversation, we live and move and have our being in God as a community. We encounter God in dialogue with others. To be present to another, we must also be present to ourselves. Every conversation marks an opportunity for self-knowledge. Attentiveness to others and to ourselves along with the reasonable and responsible pursuit of truth fosters good conversation. The unqualified and unrestricted Good, which is God, fulfills the implicit question of every conversation, which is the human unrestricted desire to know. Consequently, if we seek the meaning of Christian identity honestly and responsibly, then we will together become Christians. The unrestricted nature of our conversation means our conversation ever and always occurs as dialogue approaching the Word of God. God invites our conversation into the divine life. So, let us dare together to talk about what it means to be Christian, and thereby invite the Holy Spirit to come, come and renew our lives in this world and eternity.

(Register for the Class Marginalization and Restorative Justice here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

The Politics of Jesus and the Determination of Reality

When we consider the world into which Christ was born, in which the emperor is worshipped as absolute sovereign, in which the state is prime determiner of reality and has universal power, we understand the threat Christ posed. The accusation of insurrection at his trial would make him the disturber of the peace, the disrupter of the pax Romana, or the challenger to the monopolistic sovereignty of imperial Rome. Given Roman presuppositions about the emperor as divine sovereign, the state of Rome as the determiner of justice and the instrument of peace, the sort of alternative truth Christ would pose would challenge the political, economic, religious, and social order of Rome.

Though the Jewish notion that the Messiah would defeat Rome through violent insurrection was mistaken, it was not a mistake to understand that the Messiah would usher in a different kingdom and a different order of truth and reality. Christ would indeed break the Roman monopoly on truth, and the way he would accomplish this would involve politics (he would be king); it involved government and power (he would rule); it would involve economics (Christians would share among themselves and render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s); and of course, it would involve religion (Christ is the divine Son of God). The difference between the truth of Christ and the truth of Rome involves every sphere of what it means to be human. To be Christian will involve entering a different order of reality. The truth of Christ sets free from the enslaving, wholesale delusion that is Roman Imperialism.

But isn’t it the case that this monopoly on truth, power and divinity claimed by Rome is the permanent condition of the kingdoms of this world. While it is true that Rome alone exercised a more or less universal power, isn’t it the case that throughout history, no matter the size of the tribe country or state that the same sort of monopoly is placed on the determination of reality. Think in our day of North Korea, Communist China, the former Soviet Union, or perhaps more difficult for us to see – the United States of America. Communism and fascism would obviously exercise a monopoly on the nature of reality, but doesn’t secularism, individualism, or capitalism, represent the same sort of monopolistic claims on reality and value as imperial Rome? We can readily understand it may be contradictory to claim to be a Nazi Christian, a fascist Christian, or a Leninist Christian, but is it any less contradictory to claim to be a capitalistic Christian, an individualistic Christian, a secular Christian, or to say the same thing, an American Christian. That is, secularism, individualism, autonomous rationalism, or capitalism, are no more accommodating to Christian truth than Roman Imperialism. Or to say it the other way round, to be grounded in fascism, capitalism, or rational individualism, is to be deluded in regard to ultimate reality (the truth of Christ). The delusion that the truth of Christ sets free from is a delusion about the nature of reality.

Many in our day imagine that Christian truth is meant to supplement other forms of truth. One (certainly not the only one) expression of this is far-right politicians in the United States and around the world advocating a church/state alliance, in which “Christian morality” (e.g., oppression of immigrants, feminists, religious minorities) would be implemented by Christian politicians. For example, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano maintains the nation should reclaim its Christian identity, and that the notion of separation of church and state is a myth. The truth behind this misunderstanding, is the apparent disempowerment of Christian faith. According to New York Times journalist, Elizabeth Dias, “Many dismiss the historic American principle of the separation of church and state.” She notes this is occurring in conjunction with the blending of Christian faith with notions of election fraud conspiracies, QAnon ideology, gun rights and lingering anger over Covid-related restrictions. According to Representative Lauren Boebert, “The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church. I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.” At this Patriots Arise event, Jenna Ellis, a former co-counsel for the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, told the audience that “what it really means to truly be America first, what it truly means to pursue happiness, what it truly means to be a Christian nation are all actually the same thing.”[1] What is being advocated is a return to a Roman Catholic or Constantinian form of the faith, in which the church is an arm of the state and Christian power is expressed in state power.

Christian nationalism is taking root, not only in the United States but the far right is currently ruling in Hungary with Viktor Orbán (who has come out against race mixing in Europe and was a speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas this summer) and Poland with the Christian nationalist party. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro, called indigenous peoples “parasites” and promoted the burning of the Amazon basin. He called Hitler “a great strategist” and believes Brazil is “a Christian country,” and he has spent the last four years governing, as he terms it, as the “Trump of the Tropics.” His key support is among Brazilian evangelicals. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s new prime minister campaigned with the slogan “Italy and Italians first!” Her party, Brothers of Italy, is the successor of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), and followed closely the 1926 fascist doctrine to protect the “State, family, morality and the economy.” Meloni, a Christian nationalist, has praised Mussolini and promised to “defend God, country, and family.” She has proposed a naval blockade against migrants. In a speech in a meeting with the Spanish far-right party, she laid out the principles of her neo-fascist ideology: “yes to the natural family … yes to the universality of the Cross … no to mass immigration.” This rise of the Christian right wing can be linked to both a right-wing Islamist and Hindu drive to power. In India Narendra Modi has pursued Hindu-nationalist policies against religious minorities and in Turkey Tayyip Erdoğan has imposed Islamic nationalism and ethnic cleansing against Kurds.[2] The blending of right-wing politics and Christianity as we have it in the United States may be inspiring a world-wide movement, as once liberal democracies are turning right.

The theological problem and solution is not concerned with right or left wing politics, but with the conceding of embodied reality to the dictates of the state. The privatization of religion in liberal democracy, squeezes out the notion of an alternative kingdom or alternative citizenship (an alternative embodiment) in the church. This is the case, as death is the implicit power behind our political order.

The threat of death, in the description of Stanley Hauerwas, justifies political liberalism’s forced political arrangement of citizens with nothing in common but “their fear of death.”[3] Death in war, death at the hands of the state, or protection from a perceived enemy, lends the state something like a sacred responsibility. The secular order can presume to dictate matters of life and death, creating the equivalent of the sacred, with its presumed power over death and life in its policing power, its power to make war and its power of capital punishment. The state controls the body through the body of state, disciplining and punishing and controlling embodied reality. Yet the claim of Christ is that we are saved by becoming part of his body and making him determinative of our reality.

Jesus can only be fully known and encountered in those people who call him Lord and King and who are ordered by his kingdom. Liberal democracy (in the name of secularism), like totalitarianism, fascism, or nationalism functions like religion in its determination of the strictures and loyalties of embodied existence. Add the power of potential nuclear holocaust, and the state takes on its own metaphysical power, an eternal value directly expressed in its power for extermination.[4] Never before has this absolute power, this monopoly on the power of death and destruction, been so literal and blatant. Set aside is any notion of serving a higher good or a law that transcends the state and the absoluteness of its survival (expressed in the power of mutually assured destruction). The law of survival, state self-determination and sovereignty, is written in the power for an assured destruction.

Christian salvation is precisely concerned to defeat the state monopoly on the power of life through its control of death and destruction. The Christian faith makes absolute claims as to the nature of truth and reality, and these claims can in no way be subordinated to the principalities and powers. By conceding that life together, political life, economic life, or sexual life, is ultimately under the control of state power, the church concedes that Christian truth serves the state. This is the lie Christ confronted in his life and in his trial and death. With the resurrection, the state monopoly on the power of death is defeated. There is no truth more determinative of reality than Jesus crucified and raised and this truth is necessarily attached to the holistic shape of his kingdom.[5]

His work is in history, yet he demonstrates God’s rule over time and history. His truth is specifically attached to his personhood, his entry into history as a Jewish carpenter, and his particular story. His truth cannot be relegated to the ahistorical, the abstract or the transcendental. It cannot be privatized or made to serve another story – i.e., the story of the nation state, the story of the rise of liberal democracy, the story of Rome or America. This is the lie not only of the secular state, capitalism, and individualism but is the lie that he confronted in both Rome and Israel. Both would obliterate, kill and control him, so that Rome could be great, or to prove the absoluteness of Israel. It is truth and reality that are in contention in his life and death.

Where his life is deployed to make America great again, or to legitimize the worst forms of oppression, there is a theological failure to recognize Christ constitutes a kingdom. Only in the living community shaped by the politics, culture and tradition of Jesus, do we encounter the fully embodied Christ. The incarnation continues through the church, but the church is only the church where his people are fully formed as part of his body. That is, the body of state, the body of liberal democracy, or the body of death, has no part in the embodiment of Christ.

[1] Elizabeth Dias, “The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them Emboldened’

Political candidates on the fringe mix religious fervor with conspiracy theories, even calling for the end of the separation of church and state.” The New York Times (July 8, 2022)

[2] Camila Vergara, “Opinion/ How Christian Nationalism Is Taking Root Across the World:

The electoral success of the far right in Italy and Brazil is a warning for the United States. Politico (October 27, 2022).

[3] Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997) 169. The quotations from Hauerwas and Williams are from the dissertation by David Wade Horstkoetter, “Gary Dorrien, Stanley Hauerwas, Rowan Williams, and the Theological Transformation of Sovereignties” (2016). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 632. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/632

[4] See Rowan Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 165-166.

[5] Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity,: (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011) 173.

The Lost World of Origen’s Gospel Metaphysics

The fact that the premiere genius among the church fathers, the one most responsible for a fully articulated theological world, the one who explains what must be the case if the Gospel is true, the fact that he is condemned by the church, indicates what was mostly lost for the next two millennia. The problems which plague the church up to the present time, such as the duality between body and soul, between heaven and earth, the dualities introduced into the Trinity, the doctrines of Calvinist predestination, limited atonement, and penal substitution, but most basically the warped conceptions of God which now predominate, can be summed up as the metaphysical problems of God and creation directly addressed by Origen. In short the resulting metaphysical incoherence can be traced to a rejection of the coherence that might otherwise have prevailed if Origen’s thought had been preserved rather than being condemned.[1] As P. Tzamalikos writes in praise of Origen’s accomplishment, “Christianity, against a background of other sects, cults, beliefs and various religions of its time and place, was successful in organizing its tenets into a coherent system. To a considerable extent, this was a feat of Origen.”[2] Neglect of the coherence provided by Origen resulted in metaphysical confusion.

Origen, continuing in the spirit of Irenaeus and Ignatius, expounds and expands upon the rule of faith, inclusive of the basic principles or extrapolations which must be the case, given the truth of the Gospel. Like Aristotle he understands that there must be first principles, or the basis upon which one builds so as to gain wisdom (otherwise there is an infinite regress). While acknowledging the Greek notion of first principles, Origen’s understanding that the Gospel is the first principle departs from a Greek understanding. His opening sentence in On First Principles sets the foundation of his work on Christ: “All who believe and are assured that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, and who know Christ to be the truth, according to his saying, I am the truth, derive the knowledge which leads human beings to live a good and blessed life from no other source than from the very words and teaching of Christ” (On First Principles, hereafter Princ. Preface, 1). Origen notes specifically, that his principle is a departure from a Greek understanding and is a turn to Christ as first principle: “For just as, although many Greeks and barbarians promise the truth, we gave up seeking it from all who claimed it for false opinions after we had come to believe that Christ was the Son of God” (Princ. Preface, 2).

The field of his examination is not that of the Greek sense experience and knowledge. His field of examination is Jesus Christ: “In the first place, we must know that in Christ the nature of his divinity, as he is the only-begotten Son of God, is one thing, and another is the human nature, which in the last times he took on account of the economy” (Princ. 1.2.1.1). The Gospel as first principle requires that he begin by examining the titles of Christ, and the relation of the Son to the Father. He concludes: “As no one can be a father without having a son, nor a master without possessing a servant, so even God cannot be called omnipotent unless there exist those over whom He may exercise His power; and therefore, that God may be shown to be almighty, it is necessary that all things should exist” (Princ. 1.2.10). It is through the Son that the Father is almighty, and this position of the Father is extended through the Son into all of creation. “For through Wisdom, which is Christ, God has power over all things, not only by the authority of a ruler, but also by the voluntary obedience of subjects” (Princ. 1.2.10). Again he explains:

And He exercises His power over them by means of His Word, because at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, both of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth. And if every knee is bent to Jesus, then, without doubt, it is Jesus to whom all things are subject, and He it is who exercises power over all things, and through whom all things are subject to the Father; for through wisdom, i.e., by word and reason, not by force and necessity, are all things subject.” (Princ. 1.2.10)

This is his working principle, namely that God’s almighty rule and his work of creation is grounded in the eternal relation between the Father and Son, which is the means of understanding God’s relation to creation.

Origen is clearly working within a Christological frame. He is setting forth an alternative world-view, a Christ centered logic, or a Christian metaphysic. The problem is that very few may have been up to the task of following the subtlety of his argument. His translators, his readers, his enemies, and ultimately the church will misunderstand Origen. There are a variety of reasons for this misunderstanding, including the treatment and mistreatment of his writings which were being changed even in his lifetime. The simplistic understanding that many presume, is that Origen is a Platonist and is simply deploying Plato or Neoplatonism to explain Christianity. Thus, the charge is that he Hellenized Christianity or that his Christianity is simply a form of Greek thought. In the 15 anathemas leveled at Origen at the 5^th ecumenical council, such as holding that he taught the preexistence of souls, the existence of disembodied souls, and that he denigrated material bodies, what is demonstrated is an incapacity to apprehend his argument. He is describing the world that must be the case given the truth of the Gospel, and to the degree he was correct the church subjected itself to error.

John Behr is, as with his work on the Gospel of John, arguing against the mainstream of scholarship. Behr is relying, at least in part, on the work of P. Tzamalikos, who maintains that not only is Origen not a Platonist but that he is an anti-Platonist: “Since 1986, I argue for the unpopular thesis that Origen is an anti-Platonist in many respects. This was received with suspicion and distrust within a mindset where branding him a ‘Christian Platonist’ was (and still is) a matter of course.”[3] This is particularly important, in that the anathemas and misunderstanding leveled at Origen attempt to fit his argument within a Greek or pagan frame, where it simply does not fit. Tzamalikos repeats his counter-claim and builds upon it throughout his work:

Actually, the claim of Platonism in Origen appears so baffling, that argument would be needed to establish not its incoherence, but its coherence. For it thrives on half-truths confronting his own statements and cardinal ideas, with ‘Platonism’ being mostly a flight of fancy in heads of unlearned authors (many bishops) of old times, whose views were upheld by modern theologians no less uninformed about what Plato really wrote.[4]

He makes the case that Origen is an anti-Platonist and setting forth a Christian alternative to the Greek worldview.

What is almost always forgotten, however, is that it is Origen himself who singles out Platonic views, for the purpose of juxtaposing them with his own conceptions. Had he upheld a notion redolent of a Platonic outlook, would it be too difficult for him to say a few words about it? Cels (Origen’s work, Against Celsus) promptly concedes certain of his viewpoints appearing to be similar to Platonic views. Those points are pointed out, and considered with portions of Plato’s works quoted whenever necessary. . . . On the issue of history and eschatology, Origen knows that his views have nothing to do with those of any pagan philosopher. It is no accident that this section of Cels is one of the shortest of the entire work. He quotes the challenge by Celsus, yet he does not regard him worthy of a full reply on a question which requires the listener to be of an entirely different background. [5]

One of the specific points at which Tzamalikos finds Origen rejecting Platonism is in regard to the body:

The truth is though that Origen espoused a notion held in derision by many Platonists, which nevertheless was originated in the Hebraic tradition: survival as resurrection of the body. According to Platonists, material things make up only the lower half of the wholeness of reality, indeed the far less dignified half of it. For them the body is the source of passion, of meanness and decay, the most outright representation of degeneration of materiality; this ought to dissolve irrevocably. Rejecting the notion of the soul surviving without a body, Origen virtually denied the idea of resurrected bodies living in a disincarnate form: he defended resurrection in a body; although this is understood to be a body of a different quality, still this is a definitely material body. The salient point though is that, pace Paul, he made resurrection the central theme of his thought, indeed of all Christian doctrine: if there is no resurrection, there is no Christian faith and all Biblical history is void of any meaning at all. No one after Paul made so strenuously the Cross and Resurrection the pivotal point designating all history from start to finish.[6]

Tzamalikos lays out the overall difference in terms of the Greek focus on stasis and the unchanging order and the Christian focus on time and history:

The Presocratic religious question had been treated mainly in terms of pursuing stability behind the physis soliciting the essence behind the phenomena. With Christianity the problem of the world in time becomes of main priority. To be sure, some pagan schools of thought did quest for a purpose of history. Plato did reflect on the ultimate goal of the earthly life. Aristotle did research on the teleological causal sequence according to which civic life was formed. The Stoics, as well as Cicero, did visualize a world-state based on reason as a goal which (sic) human race ought to full. What was entirely new though was the question of an overall meaning of human history—a purpose originated in the dispensation of God manifested within the world since its creation.[7]

His starting proposition and conclusion is “that the Alexandrian formed a distinctly Christian Philosophy of History, faithfully following Paul in making the Cross the midpoint of all history. He also formed an Eschatology, which (although obscure in the Latin of De Principiis) is crystal-clear, no matter how putative orthodoxy might receive this.”[8]

The project of John Behr, who is building upon the work of Tzamalikos, is to demonstrate that Origen is spelling out a unique Christian logic, neither Greek nor Gnostic. Among the key issues undergirding Origen’s work and that which is most misunderstood and maligned, is Origen’s concept of God’s eternity as it relates to time. As demonstrated above, Origen’s first principle is the Gospel, and he also focuses on the relation between the Father and Son to explicate the relation of time and eternity. His examination of the divine titles of Christ treats that relation as understood and expressed in the incarnation. In other words, Origen is not explaining a pre-incarnate relationship (sneaking in a Greek metaphysic), but sees the relation between the Father and Son in the incarnation as the divine reality.

As Rowan Williams puts it, “the existence of Jesus is not an episode in the biography of the Word.” As Williams explains, “God has no story but that of Jesus of Nazareth and the covenant of which he is the seal.”[9] Or as Herbert McCabe has expressed the same concept: “to speak of the pre-existent Christ is to imply that God has a life-story, a divine story, other than the story of the incarnation. It is to suppose that in some sense there was a Son of God existing from the eternal ages who at some point in his eternal career assumed a human nature and was made man.”[10] This is the problem, along with all that it entails (the capture of modern theology by metaphysics) that Origen’s first principles resolves before it occurred .

[1] And of course, with a genius of Origen’s caliber there really is no getting rid of him, as even those such as Augustine who will reject key parts of his thought can be said to still have been formed in an Origenist understanding. The Cappadocians will most directly build upon Origen, but they too must be muted and as will become most completely clear by the time of Maximus, those who embrace Origen in both the east and west risk condemnation.

[2] P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History and Eschatology, Supplements to VC, 85 (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 2.

[3] Ibid. xii.

[4] Ibid. 17.

[5] Ibid. 24.

[6] Ibid. 18

[7] Ibid. 1.

[8] Ibid. xiii

[9] Rowan Williams, Arius: History and Tradition, 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, 2001) 244.

[10] Herbert McCabe, “The Involvement of God,” New Blackfriars, (November, 1985) 474.

The God of Empire Versus the God of Passion

There is something of an endless debate about God within the major branches of the Christian faith – What role for Greek conceptions of God? Does the Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Father and the Son? How is the Father involved in the work of the Son and how do we conceive their difference, etc. etc.? East, West, Protestant, Lutheran, Calvinist, are largely defined by the perceived differences (real and imagined) in regard to fundamental issues about how and what we know about God. These divisions though, may be shaped by more subtle sociological concerns. Sarah Coakley, following Ernst Troeltsch, divides the sociological contexts between church, sect, and mysticism and sees the sociological as throwing additional light on theological emphasis. She sees certain forms of trinitarianism as cohering with particular types of ecclesiastical organization. For example, focus on pneumatology is unlikely to accompany strong patriarchal social and political contexts – given the individualistic, mystical, and “feminine” role of the Spirit. [1] Throughout the history of the church, the more settled the institution (the church type), the more unmoved, settled, and distant, the conception and perceived experience of God. The focus on the Spirit and the experientialism of mysticism have tended to be segregated from the theology of the church type. The adaptation of the Aristotelian concept of God (the Unmoved Mover), came with adaptation to empire, hierarchy, and institutions meant to endure by dint of their alignment with worldly power.

Giorgio Agamben describes the rise of two orders of church, each consisting of its own conceptual and experiential reality. In the biblical mandate, the church is to dwell on the earth as an exile or sojourner captured in the Greek verb paroikein, as in the description of I Peter 1:17 – “the time of sojourning.” In this imagery truth is discovered along the way – or truth is the way (viatorum). The sojourner church stands in contrast to the settled church, which takes on the look of a city, state, kingdom, or empire – captured in the Greek verb katoikein. The katoikia church is built to last, and as opposed to the paroikein church, is not geared to the parousia or the coming of Christ, as it has put down roots in the world. The parousia, in Agamben’s conception, is not in the future or deferred but speaks of the immediate experience of time (fundamental human experience). In the true church (Agamben counts the institution as we have it an imposter), every moment bears the possibility of the inbreaking of the Messiah, made impossible by the katoikia church.[2]

Agamben locates the point of departure from the biblical church within early debates about the Trinity. The distinction between the immanent (ad intra – or God’s self-relation) and economic (God’s relation to creation) Trinity accounts for the development of western politics and economics. However, according to Agamben, this secularizes theology even before there is a secular order: “from the beginning theology conceives divine life and the history of humanity as an oikonomia (economy), that is, that theology is itself ‘economic’ and did not simply become so at a later time through secularization.” Where the political order can lay claim to a first order power relation, Christian’s (through this theological maneuvering) only have to do with an economy (a second order of experience).[3] While one may not agree with the sweep of Agamben’s critique, his depiction parallels Coakley’s sociological contextualization of theology.

In the 20^th century there have been a variety of attempts to correct this theological failure precisely where it had the greatest impact. Where the church (at least the church type, with its institutions) failed in Germany with National Socialism, this gave rise to striking theological innovation. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer turn from the characteristic church type dogmatic speculation to a Christocentric point of departure.

Bonhoeffer in his lectures on Christology locates the Logos, not in the realm of the transcendent. He claims “this will inevitably constitute that Logos as an object for human logos, locating it within the territory of things about which we can ask ‘how is it possible?’ or ‘how does it work?'” As Bonhoeffer puts it, “the question is no longer ‘how?’ but ‘who?’ Who is it that I confront when I look at Jesus? But also, and equally importantly, ‘Who am I?'”[4]

Bonhoeffer depicts the question of the person of Christ as challenging his self-understanding: “When a human being confronts Jesus, the human being must either die or kill Jesus.”[5] The reality of Jesus creates its own context and terms of engagement. Jesus is not Socrates, reminding us of what we already know, but he creates the conditions for knowing him as these conditions do not otherwise exist. He is what he teaches.

Picturing the Logos as on the order of the Aristotelian difference (the apathetic God) is simply to accommodate divine revelation to the human word. “The divine revealed as overwhelming power or unconstrained agency as we understand those things will not recreate us, re-beget us; it will not require the death of our logos.” This sort of God simply accommodates our instincts about the absolute Other, the humanly conceived difference of divinity. If we do not accept the death of the human logos, we will deploy it in defeat of the divine Logos.[6]

Of course Christ allows for his death. He is not a rival to my will or my word. It is precisely his kenotic humility – “taking the form of a slave” (not just being incarnate) that challenges the foundation (foundationalism) of my selfhood. Though it is not as if there is any actually existing foundation – this is simply the “poisonous fiction” that must die or the pride that must fail.[7]

One of the sharpest German attempts at a revisionist understanding came from Jurgen Moltmann, who begins his book on the Trinity by recounting how Greek notions of God effectively corrupted the Christian faith. He suggests that where Greek philosophy has been deployed in conceiving of God, “then we have to exclude difference, diversity, movement and suffering from the divine nature.” He names the resultant heresy of nominalism (God cannot be known in his essence) as giving us a God that is so far from us (impassible and immovable in his remoteness), such that apathetic portrayal of God has trumped the importance of the person and work of Christ. He concludes that, “down to the present-day Christian theology has failed to develop a consistent Christian concept of God? And that instead . . . it has rather adopted the metaphysical tradition of Greek philosophy, which it understood as ‘natural theology’ and saw as its own foundation.” By allowing the “apathetic axiom” to prevail over the person and work of Christ, God became “the cold, silent and unloved heavenly power.”[8]

Moltmann poses the following choice: either the apathetic God prevails and the passion of Christ is seen as “the suffering of the good man from Nazareth,” or the passion of Christ prevails and divine apatheia is no longer determinative. Within this second alternative, Moltmann points out that his depiction of suffering entails a two-fold rejection: the Greek depiction of the divine incapacity for suffering, and suffering defined as incapacity or deficiency. “But there is a third form of suffering: active suffering – the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love.”

Without passion God would be incapable of love. Moltmann develops the two-fold meaning of passion – inclusive of passionate desire and the suffering passion of Christ. If God were incapable of suffering in every respect, then he would also be incapable of any form of passion or love. As Aristotle puts it, he would at most be capable of loving himself, but not of loving another as himself. But if he is capable of loving something else, then he lays himself open to the suffering which love for another brings; yet, by virtue of his love, he remains master of the pain that love causes him to suffer. “God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is ‘apathetic’. But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is ‘pathetic’.” [9] God is love and his is not a cold love (as if there is such a thing), but the passionate love revealed in Christ.

Sarah Coakley cites Moltmann as an influence in her turn to desire, sex and gender in conceptualization of the Trinity.[10] However, what Coakley avoids and Moltmann spells out, is the historical and theological challenge to notions of divine apathy entailed in discussions of passion. Moltmann finds in Jewish theology and Origen precedent for his depiction of the suffering of the Father as a necessary part of the love of God.

Origen describes the suffering of God in his exposition of Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.” “In his mercy God suffers with us, for he is not heartless.” In his explanation, Origen equates the love of God with the necessity of suffering:

He (the Redeemer) descended to earth out of sympathy for the human race. He took our sufferings upon Himself before He endured the cross – indeed before He even deigned to take our flesh upon Himself; for if He had not felt these sufferings [beforehand] He would not have come to partake of our human life. First of all He suffered, then He descended and became visible to us. What is this passion which He suffered for us? It is the passion of love {Caritas est passio). And the Father Himself, the God of the universe, ‘slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy’ (Ps. 103.8), does He not also suffer in a certain way? Or know you not that He, when He condescends to men, suffers human suffering? For the Lord thy God has taken thy ways upon Him ‘as a man doth bear his son’ (Deut. 1.31). So God suffers our ways as the Son of God bears our sufferings. Even the Father is not incapable of suffering {Ipse pater non est itnpassibilis). When we call upon him, He is merciful and feels our pain with us. He suffers a suffering of love, becoming something which because of the greatness of his nature He cannot be, and endures human suffering for our sakes.[11]

As Moltmann explains, Origen’s talk of God’s suffering means the suffering of love; the compassion of mercy and pity. The merciful person taking pity on another participates in the suffering of the one he pities, “he takes the other’s sufferings on himself, he suffers for others.” For Origen this is the suffering of God, “the suffering of the Father who in giving up his ‘own Son’ (Rom. 8.32) suffers the pain of redemption.” The Father is not removed from the suffering of the Son, anymore than he can be said to be removed from the passion or desire of God. Origen depicts the divine passion of Christ as inclusive of the divine passion between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. “The suffering of love does not only affect the redeeming acts of God outwards; it also affects the trinitarian fellowship in God himself.”[12]

Origen predates the distinction and Moltmann and Coakley, in varying forms, would equate the economic and immanent Trinity. Moltmann notices in Origen what Coakley notices in Romans 8, that it is precisely in conjunction with suffering that the Trinitarian nature of God is most clearly delineated. Like Coakley and Paul, Moltmann also locates the apprehension and participation in the suffering of God in prayer.

Moltmann though, references a Jewish mystical tradition in which praying the Shema is the uniting of God: “To acknowledge God’s unity – the Jew calls it uniting God. For this unity is, in that it becomes; it is a Becoming Unity. And this Becoming is laid on the soul of man and in his hands.”

Franz Rosenzweig takes up this notion to describe an Old Testament and Jewish conception of the suffering of God:

Mysticism builds its bridge between ‘the God of our fathers’ and ‘the remnant of Israel’ with the help of the doctrine of the Shekinah. The Shekinah, the descent of God to man and his dwelling among them, is thought of as a divorce which takes place in God himself. God himself cuts himself off from himself, he gives himself away to his people, he suffers with their sufferings, he goes with them into the misery of the foreign land, he wanders with their wanderings . . . God himself, by ‘selling himself to Israel – and what should be more natural for ‘the God of our Fathers’! – and by suffering her fate with her, makes himself in need of redemption. In this way, in this suffering, the relationship between God and the remnant points beyond itself.”[13]

Just as in Romans 8, so too in the Jewish conception, prayer inserts the one praying within the communion of God. The Jewish depiction is an estrangement or suffering into which God enters, and the estrangement is overcome through those reflecting the Shekinah to God through prayer. Moltmann explains, estrangement is also overcome “through the acts of the good, which are directed towards the overcoming of evil and the establishment of the future harmony of the one world. That is the meaning of the Hebrew word tikkun (world repair).”[14]

Theology proper (talk of God) cannot begin in the abstract, which inevitably depends upon the human logos, but in the fact that God has opened himself to human experience and human suffering, becoming human that humans might participate in the divine. But it is the primacy of God’s love and not human suffering that determines the course of God’s suffering love. The passion of Christ as point of departure suspends talk of an economic and immanent Trinity, with the first order (the ontological reality) of God removed from the contingencies of the second order (the economic). The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, though as Coakley notes, this does not mean that God is reduced to what is revealed, as “there must be that which God is which eternally ‘precedes’ God’s manifestation to us.”[15] However, speculation about what “precedes” Christ cannot be given precedent over the revealed truth given in Christ.

[1] Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (p. 156-157). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. by Leland de la Durantaye (Seagull Books, 2012).

[3] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (p. 3). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford]. Green and Michael P. Dejonge, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018), 185.

[5] Reader, 268.

[6] Williams, 187-188.

[7] Williams, 190-191.

[8] Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (First Fortress Press edition, 1993) 21-22.

[9] Moltmann, 22-23.

[10] Sarah Coakley, “The Trinity and gender reconsidered,” in God’s Life in Trinity (ed. Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

[11] Homilia VI in Ezechielem (MPG XIII, 714 f). Cited in Moltmann, 24.

[12] Moltmann, 24.

[13] F. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, III, 3rd ed., Heidelberg 1954, pp. 192ff. Cited in Moltmann, 29.

[14] Moltmann, 29.

[15] Coakley