The brilliant Russian Theologian, Sergius Bulgakov, captures both the truth in the world’s religions and the possibility that, perhaps for this same reason, the various religions may hold, at a minimum, a pedagogical danger (missing the uniqueness and finality of Christ), and at a maximum may threaten captivity to the demonic (though he constantly and at length qualifies the nature of this danger, and even maintains that to reduce pagan religion to the demonic is blasphemous). David Bentley Hart, largely inspired by Bulgakov, captures the positive moment in world religions and shared humanity, but Hart is not concerned to highlight the uniqueness of Christ in comparison to the religions, and does not warn, as does Bulgakov, of the danger of misapprehension. As a result, Hart’s abstractions float free of the intimate Christocentric and Trinitarian Personalism, which pervade the work of Bulgakov. Nonetheless Hart, (in his book The Experience of God )[1], waxes so eloquent on the divinely inspired element in human religion, thought, and experience, that his work may be irreplaceable. The two thinkers, taken together, offer a balanced, broad, and generous assessment of human thought and religion. Given Bulgakov’s grounding of this understanding in Christ and Scripture, and Hart’s expansion on Bulgakov’s understanding (in my reading), this makes for a profound theology of religion and anthropology.[2]
Their shared starting premise is summed up by Hart: “God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever.”[3] As Bulgakov states it: “There is no place and can be no place of its own or independent ground for the world which would belong to it alone. If there is such a place, it must be established by God, for there is nothing that is outside of or apart from God and that in this sense is not-God.”[4] Human experience, at its foundation and in substance, is living and moving and having being in God. According to Augustine (and cited by Hart), God is not only beyond our highest thoughts but is more inward to me than my inmost thoughts.
Bulgakov ties the substance of human experience, not simply to an abstract concept of God, but directly to Christ, in that all of humanity shares in the experience of the first and second Adam: “The new Adam redeemed the whole old Adam and in this sense replaced him with himself. And no pars pro toto, or series of successive and partial redemptions, could correspond to this task, which is a universal one.” Adam, “necessarily presupposes the existence of an integral all-humanity, which is redeemed by Christ in its entirety and not only in its individual parts or persons.”[5] Bulgakov pictures this as working in two directions, from Christ to each person and from each person to Christ. In the Incarnation, “The Lord took His humanity not from impersonal nature but from each of us personally. He thus became one with His humanity, introducing it into His own hypostatic being. And only on this basis can it be said: ‘Christ lives in me.’”[6]
Bulgakov grounds the most abstract concepts in the Person of Christ (personhood itself), in which Christ’s Personhood is a summing up and ground of each individual person. Christ as the all in all, is what I am most intimately in myself, and he is what I am becoming.
Every person is a point on the surface of this sphere, connected by a radius to the center. The whole and a particular variant, the genus and an individual, exist with one existence, are inwardly one. The historical chain of individual human lives with all its diversity manifests the multiplicity of the genus; far from abolishing the multi-unity, it even presupposes it. Thus, each human individual, being a generic being, is at the same time personal and all-human.[7]
Hart describes this finite experience of the eternal as the guiding substance and quality of thought, experience, and desire: “The vanishing point of the mind’s inner coherence and simplicity is met by the vanishing point of the world’s highest values; the gaze of the apperceptive ‘I’ within is turned toward a transcendental ‘that’ forever beyond; and mental experience, of the self or of the world outside the self, takes shape in the relation between these two ‘supernatural” poles.’” Rational experience continually goes beyond the immediacy of finite experience and objects, comprehending them in “more capacious conceptual categories.” The mind conceives of the world only “because it has always already, in its intentions, exceeded the world. Consciousness contains nature, as a complete and cogent reality, because it has gone beyond nature.” [8] The values providing impetus to thought and judgment cannot be accounted for within the material world, a fact immediately available in experience, which Bulgakov explicitly identifies with the deity and humanity of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Bulgakov, through a careful exegetical process, arrives at the universality of experience with which Hart begins. He poses as his point of inquiry a refutation of the notion that pre-Christian paganism was lacking in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, making the case that paganism consists of a “natural old testament” and that all people, in the words of Romans know of God: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:19–20). To imagine that paganism was totally deprived of the Holy Spirit and even the spirit of God, is contrary, as Bulgakov demonstrates, to both the Old and New Testament.[9] “In conformity with the spiritual maturity, particular gifts, and historical destinies of paganism, the knowledge of God is realized in it in multiple and manifold ways; and this knowledge is possible only because the Holy Spirit ‘bloweth’ also in the unrevealed (and in this sense) ‘natural’ religions.”[10]
We know that God has been preparing and speaking to all peoples, as the Word of Christ translates into every culture and tongue. On the day of Pentecost “every man heard [the apostles] speak in his own language” (Acts 2:6). There is a deep grammar, or a shared Spirit (the Old Testament “spirit of God”), giving rise to every culture and religion. As Hart puts it, there is “a sort of universal grammar of human nature, which makes it possible to overcome any cultural or conceptual misunderstanding; and, without discounting the immense power of culture to shape and color our encounter with the one world that we all together inhabit, I also believe there are certain common forms of experience so fundamental to human rationality that, without them, we could not think or speak at all.”[11]
According to Bulgakov, not only Judaism, but the religions and cultures of the nations have prepared for Christ “by a special mode of knowledge, by their own gift, by a language proper to this natural Pentecost.” The historical religions and cultures of the world have also been “touched” by the Spirit of God, and for this reason it should not surprise us that they have something to teach, and that “we directly experience this breath of the Spirit of God” through them. “[W]e should not shy away from this experience because of an unjustified fear that the uniqueness and truthfulness of our Revelation will be shaken. On the contrary, one should rejoice in the gifts of the Spirit of God bestowed upon these ‘prophets’ as well, who came ‘from the river’ like Balaam, or upon the ‘wise men from the east,’ who came to worship Christ.”[12]
Bulgakov compares world religions and experience to Judaism, referencing the “pagan church” found in the ancient liturgy. This “pagan church” or “natural old testament,” reached a fullness or maturity, that enabled acceptance of Christ, proving “the gifts of the spirit can be present in paganism too, gifts that are diverse and ascend from measure to measure.”[13] As he argues, the gospel is founded upon the notion of its universal reception and receptivity, meaning all have been prepared by God. “What does this calling of the Gentiles, of paganism, signify? Is it merely an act of divine arbitrariness and coercion, as it were; or does it have sufficient inner justification, in virtue of which the Gentiles turned out to be receptive to the preaching of Christianity, and even more so than the Jews, except for the chosen? And how should one understand this receptivity if one believes that paganism is a realm of demonic possession?” He maintains this does not fit with biblical testimony, and “it contradicts the fact of the conversion of the Gentiles, their reception of the Spirit, the openness of their hearts to Christ.”[14]
In making his case for this universal preparation of the nations, through the Spirit, Bulgakov turns to the books of Acts and Romans. “This marvelous testimony of the apostle Paul about the common seeking of God on the part of all the brothers by blood of the one human race places before us not only the fact of the divine election of the chosen nation but also the fact of a universal divine vocation: ‘we are also his offspring’ (Acts 17:28).”[15] It is not that paganism is equal to Israel, as she is His special “vineyard,” but she too, like the pagan nations has obscured the truth with sin and “pagan contaminations”: “when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful” (Ro. 1:21). Israel may have received a purer revelation but as Paul notes in Acts, God is working with all peoples and nations: “[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him; and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:26–28). Bulgakov notes the contributions of the Gentiles to philosophy, art, science, and providing the “wise men,” which means “this is not foreign to the spirit of God.” “There should be no doubt about this, just as it should not be doubted that the founders of the great religions and their books were, to some extent, divinely chosen and even divinely inspired.”[16]
While the Jews may have been “chosen,” Bulgakov points out that theirs is still part of a universal experience in Paul’s description. “Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil; of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile.… For there is no respect of persons with God.… For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of law written in their hearts” (Rom. 2:9, 11, 14–15). As Bulgakov sums up, “Without in the least diminishing the election of the Jews, the Apostle equates here in a certain sense the Jews and the Gentiles as equally needing salvation and equally called to salvation.”[17]
The gospel, in Bulgakov’s estimate, is premised on this fact of a universal “accessibleness” to God and the Holy Spirit, and at the same time the “abolition of Judaism” indicates that both Judaism and paganism are limited. “It is noteworthy that the Acts of the Apostles, which tell about the establishment of the New Testament church by the action of the Holy Spirit, end and are inwardly summed up, as it were, by the definitive abolition of Judaism, which stopped being the Old Testament church.”[18] In turn, he notes that with the inception of Christianity, paganism also, poses a peculiar danger. “It became an anti-Christianity.” That is, like a Judaism which would refuse its synthesis and completion in Christianity, paganism also posed as a competitor (where its inadequacies were not acknowledged). Thus, much like Judaism in Bulgakov’s estimate, “Paganism is justified only as the past of a religion which does not yet know Christianity but which is preparing to know it.” Just as there may be a necessary separation from Judaism (as an end in itself), so too the early church and Christian apologists felt the need for a complete break from pagan religion: “The fate of the pagan old testament is the same as that of the Jewish Old Testament. Just as Judaism, not recognizing its proper fulfillment in the person of the Messiah, was transformed from a divinely revealed religion into a fierce anti-Christianity, so the natural religions too become anti-Christian in proportion to their conscious rejection of and opposition to Christianity.”[19]
Unlike Hart, Bulgakov combines deep appreciation for world religions with the sense that they pose a danger, not so much because they are demonic or untrue, but because they contain a powerful truth which should rightly find its end in Christ.
(Register now for the class in World Religions and Cultures: Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings to register.)
[1] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, (Yale University Press. Kindle Edition, 2013).
[2] At least that is my presumption in the upcoming class being offered through Ploughshares Bible Institute, which will incorporate both Hart and Bulgakov’s reading. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings to register. Hart does not seem to share Bulgakov’s sense of the danger of pagan religion. On the other hand, philosophical atheism is his primary target (in The Experience of God).
[3] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God (p. 10). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
[4] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (p. 6). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
[5] Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 111.
[6] Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 109.
[7] Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 110.
[8] Hart, 244.
[9] Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter ( 233-234). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition. He does a great deal of work with Melchizedek, and sights the case of the pagan prophet, Balaam.
[10] The Comforter, 239.
[11] Hart, 15.
[12] The Comforter, 239.
[13] The Comforter, 242.
[14] The Comforter, 235-236.
[15] The Comforter, 233-234.
[16] The Comforter, 239-240.
[17] The Comforter, 234.
[18] The Comforter, 235.
[19] The Comforter, 241.