Tag: the interdependence of time and eternity

The Unity of Creator and Creation in Christ-Consciousness: A Meditation on Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose

The incarnation means there is no gap between the finite and infinite, such that the ordinary is on a continuum with the eternal. Feeding the hungry, providing a drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, involves eternity: “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me” (Matt. 25:40).  This is not hyperbole. God is not a discreet object, an intrusion, or something beyond. God is in history, in the finite, in the “mundane.” Due to our distinctions between “the natural and the supernatural” we may think ordinary life, outside those special religious moments in prayer or church, are not adequate for the spiritual. Salvation, after all, is often conceived as departure rather than an embrace of the immediate reality, such as sharing a cup of water. We are prone to miss the spiritual in the ordinary and pass over reality in imagining it lies beyond, but there is no creature closed off from its Creator or one moment closed off from the eternal as the one depends upon the other, just as the Son relates to the Father. Reality is not discreet stuff contained in consecutive space and time but is a relational interdependence, in which the part is dependent upon the whole and the whole is in and through the parts, and in which Christ is holding all things together. Like Christ his disciples are to hold things together as mediators of order, bringing unity out of chaos, peace out of violence, care out of indifference, quenching thirst, hunger, and loneliness.

The problem which bad reflection and bad theology pose is to introduce conceptual distinctions into reality, such that the ultimate or absolute is beyond and the finite is only itself in distinction from the infinite. As Rowan Williams argues: “there is no ‘alterity’ – no sense of ‘one and then another alongside’ – between Creator and creation, between Word and humanity in Jesus; just as there is no ‘one and then another’ in the relation between Father and Son. In neither context can we talk about items that could be added together.”[1] Life is often a striving beyond itself (definitive of death) while eternal life is immediate. There is a harmonious whole in the relation between Father and Son poured out upon all things through the Spirit. The priority of deity over humanity does not mean they are discreet, anymore than the Father and Spirit are discreet. 

Creation is most fully itself, just as the Son is most fully himself, in relation and dependence: “the fully responsive and radically liberating dependence that is the filial relation in the divine life is the ground of all created dependence on the Creator, and so the logic of creation includes a natural trajectory towards this kind of life-giving responsiveness.”[2] The goal and ground of creation, as realized in the Son, is participation in Trinitarian life, but this participation is not beyond the finite, as if finitude were an incapacity. God is knowable in the Son, within finite capacities, as God has poured himself out in the Son by the Spirit, so he is present in human ways by human means, offering a drink, offering food, offering himself, to be known and loved in human ways.

Christ, the heart of creation, is not beyond creation but its center, so uncreated love, uncreated understanding, uncreated knowledge, as exercised in the Word, are opened to creatures made for eternity. However, unity with God is attained in a particular finite context. Just as Jesus comes in a particular context, so he finds us in history and time. It is not by escaping or transcending the context of createdness, but by coming to the fullness of the historical, the physical, the humanness that eternity is mediated.

The obstruction of sin, cuts off eternity in time and Christ reconciles us to this confluence. There is an opening to creation, as Christ restores or heals the broken relation, not only with God, but with reality. Createdness is an opening to the infinite as the discreetness, the alienation, the separation, the loneliness, are overcome in relatedness. The unity of the subatomic with the organic and the organic with the social and the social with the spiritual are part of a field, a form of consciousness. There is no gap to be bridged but the removal of the false obstacle is the coherence of Christ.

The convergence of visible and invisible is in and through the unifying head: “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible . . . He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything” (Col. 1:16–18). This headship is inclusive of consciousness, of shared experience, of life in the Spirit, which participation in the body under the head entails, but it is realization of the infinite (consciousness) through immanence. The infinite does not transcend the finite in the sense that the finite annuls the infinite, or the infinite annuls the finite; they are interpenetrating.

God, taken as a discreet object, reduces to a mysterious transcendence in which ignorance passes for knowing the infinite as absence. As Gillian Rose notes in her meditation on Hegel, “If the infinite is unknowable, we are powerless. For our concept of the infinite is our concept of ourselves and our possibilities.”[3] God brings coherence out of chaos and this coherence is itself knowing God. Ironically, the insistence on absolute distinction between the finite and infinite, between God and the world, between the knowable and unknowable, is posited by consciousness. A consciousness which would only relate to an unknowable infinite, or which depends upon the unknown, grounds knowing in the negative.[4] In this manner Kant saved his rational foundation. The Kantian or modern notion of the infinite would separate it from the finite and sensuous, making the infinite utterly different and exterior. As Rose points out, “it is deprived of all characterization, and hence turned into an empty abstraction, an idol, made of mere timber.”[5]

In this hollowing out of the infinite is a “hallowing of a finitude that remains as it is” and the relations of domination, violence, exploitation, are legitimized.[6] To bring together the finite and the infinite, the domination of human reason must give way. God, the infinite, participates and enjoys creation as a fit dwelling, and the ethical infinite expressed in Christ is made an actually existing ethical finite. In other words, the Sermon on the Mount takes precedent over the particular laws of any place. There is an infinite ethical imperative that disrupts commitment to the infinitizing of human ethics and will.

We can only fall silent about God apart from Christ, but this knowing in Christ is not apart from creation, or apart from ethics, or apart from the normal. We can see the Father in Christ (John 14:9) and more. By partaking of the divine nature in discipleship, enacting Trinitarian life, taking up the cross, it is not as if God appears alongside the self or the world. God does not disrupt creation or personhood, but orders and opens it as the place of his indwelling. There is a unity of consciousness in which opposition between thought and its objects, the finite and infinite are dissolved, as consciousness takes on the unifying wholeness of the Head.  

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (p. 218). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.  

[2] Ibid.

[3] Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, (New York: Verso, 2009) 48.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 104.

[6] Ibid, 105.

Maximus on the Lord’s Prayer: The Specific Instance of the Word Actualized Always and In All Things

Prayer, the most instinctive and common of religious practices, is also the most paradoxical. How can God be both personal and interactive and yet be eternal? Does the unchangeable God hear and respond to our requests? Does he change his mind, at our prodding?[1] In a classical theistic understanding, God is prior to all things. He is impassable, unchangeable, immovable, and all knowing. If he already knows, then doesn’t his foreknowledge require that all things are already determined? In some Calvinist interpretations, for example, all events are direct determinations of his will. The only explanation for prayer, for a classical theist, a Calvinist, or for any who hold that eternity is prior to creation, is that prayer is about aligning human will with the eternal (the unchanging purposes of God). Even in my anti-Calvinist fundamentalist Bible college this was the explanation that was given. While aligning our will with God’s must play a role in prayer, this also seems to fall short of the basic human need in the midst of pain, sickness, suffering and evil. It also does away with authentic personal interaction with God. Is prayer just a matter of learning to accept bad things, and relinquishing any hope of a different outcome? This is not very satisfying and does not accord with the Bible’s picture of God “repenting” or changing his mind, as he did in response to both Abraham and Moses, the most prominent examples of many, in which God interactively changes course. Open Theology, in attempting to answer this problem, concluded God is subject to time and does not know all future events, and so, as in Process Theology, God is discovering the future along with the rest of us. This may be more emotionally satisfying, but it also seems to diminish God and his power in the face of evil and suffering (the very things that evoke much prayer).

Maximus the Confessor provides an alternative cosmological setting and understanding of prayer, in which eternity and God do not simply precede creation, but the identity of God is in incarnation and creation. Time is not subsequent, or outside of God’s eternal purposes, but as is clear in the incarnation, creation is part of and participates in who God is. In his explanation of The Lord’s Prayer, Maximus concludes that this model prayer, which touches upon the needs and requests of every prayer, is answered by Christ in the incarnation. “For the words of the prayer make request for whatever the Word of God himself wrought through the flesh in his self-abasement.”[2] Creation’s purpose and completion, realized in incarnation, sets prayer and the Lord’s prayer, directly within God’s eternal purpose. It is not that God’s eternal purposes precede or are outside of time, or that human free will conflicts or obstructs eternity, but God, in his eternity, responds to human freedom. Afterall, God “became man without any change” in who he is as God.[3] Thus the model prayer “teaches us to strive for those goods of which only God the Father through the natural mediation of the Son in the Holy Spirit is in all truth the bestower, since according to the divine Apostle the Lord Jesus is ‘mediator between God and men” (1 Tim 2:5; cf. Heb 8:6). Jesus teaches us to petition God for that which he would accomplish, but even here the petition is part of the fulfillment. 

God’s purpose, that his Word would be “actualized always and in all things,”[4] or the purpose of creation as participation in God (deification), means that divine and human purpose (the mutual purpose of incarnation) is to be in full communion/communication. Prayer is central to this purpose: “If then the realization of the divine counsel is the deification of our nature, and if the aim of divine thoughts is the accomplishment of what we ask for in our life, then it is profitable to recognize the full import of the Lord’s prayer, to put it into practice and to write about it properly.”[5] Maximus equates “divine thoughts” with “the accomplishment of what we ask for in our life.” That is, human need, human action, human desire, in this reversal of the way we may often think, shape divine thoughts. Time shapes eternity, as creation and incarnation are eternal facts about God. We know this, as God’s eternal purposes are realized in the incarnation.

Seen in this light, Maximus concludes the prayer contains the meaning of 7 key things: “theology, adoption in grace, equality of honor with the angels, participation in eternal life, the restoration of nature inclining toward a tranquil state, the abolition of the law of sin, and the overthrowing of the tyranny of evil which has dominated us by trickery.”[6] In summary, Christ teaches us the true name and nature of God, and adoption is enacted through the Son, rendering men equal to the angels in heaven by bringing together heaven and earth, and providing a new birth fully integrating human free will in the promotion of “Thy Will”, and by providing a new heavenly food (the bread of immortal life). God in Christ restores nature from the bondage to decay by defeating death and purifying nature of the violence of hostility, and by providing a spiritual birth not subject to the law of sin and death, thus effecting the destruction of the tyranny of evil.[7] In each phase of his argument, Maximus demonstrates how the salvation wrought in Christ answers the prayer.

In regard to theology, the prayer speaks of the Father’s name, but the one name given by God is that of Jesus Christ: “for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). According to Maximus, “Father” is not an added designation nor is the kingdom an added dignity: ”The Father indeed has no acquired name and we should not think of the kingdom as a dignity considered after him. For he did not begin to be, as if he had a beginning as Father and King, but he always is, and is always both Father and King, not having in any way begun to exist or to be Father or King.”[8] God did not take on a different identity, but the identity revealed through Christ and because of Christ is who he is from eternity. In the incarnation, the Word “teaches us the mystical knowledge of God, because he shows us in himself the Father and the Holy Spirit. For the full Father and the full Holy Spirit are essentially and completely in the full Son, even the incarnate Son, without being themselves incarnate.”[9] The prayer, in the name of the Father, for the kingdom to come, is inclusive of all of who God is: “For the name of God the Father who subsists essentially is the only-begotten Son, and the kingdom of God the Father who subsists essentially is the Holy Spirit.”[10]

By praying “Our Father,” and bidding others to so pray, Jesus sets forth and shares the grace of his relation to the Father. The adoption by the Father is enacted by the Son: “He gives adoption by giving through the Spirit a supernatural birth from on high in grace, of which divine birth the guardian and preserver is the free will of those who are thus born.”[11] No one asks to be born the first time, but in the true birth and beginning, human will and freedom are preserved by God. “Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate through those who are saved. He causes the soul which begets him to be a virgin-mother who . . . does not bear the marks of nature subject to corruption and generation in the relationship of male and female.”[12] The first birth is something of a false beginning, displaced by the second, in which each, like the Virgin Mary, consents to bearing the incarnate one. “For in Christ there is neither male nor female, thus clearly indicating the characteristics and the passions of a nature subject to corruption and generation. Instead, there is only a deiform principle created by divine knowledge and one single movement of free will which chooses only virtue.”[13] The defeat of evil, the overcoming of temptation, the arrival at virtue, are implicit in the very possibility of the prayer enacted in Christ. The prayer, like the one who modeled it, is a new order of relation with the Father, in the Kingdom through the Spirit.

Throughout, Maximus is picturing the prayer as a process of deification, and so the daily bread is best described as “Our bread” as that “which you prepared in the beginning for the immortality of nature, ‘give us this day,’ to us who belong to the mortal condition of the present life, so that nourishment by the bread of life and knowledge triumph over the death of sin.”[14] Adam missed partaking of the bread of life due to transgression, but Christ restores this possibility. “For the Bread of Life, out of his love for men, gives himself to all who ask him . . . according to the spiritual dignity enabling him to receive it.”[15] Elsewhere Jesus warns not to worry about life, about food or drink, or what you will wear, but seek first the kingdom of God (Matt. 6:25). Maximus suspects some may not agree with his interpretation, but even in the literal understanding (which disagrees with Jesus command) the prayer is for one day’s supply, thus even taken literally the prayer is a preparation for death. “On the contrary, let us without anxiety ask in prayer for one day’s bread and let us show that in the Christian way of life we make life a preparation for death, by letting our free will overtake nature, and before death comes, by cutting the soul off from the concerns for bodily things. In this way it will not be nailed down to corruptible things, nor pass on to matter the use of the natural desire, nor learn the greediness which deprives one of the abundance of divine gifts.”[16] It is due to possessively seeking after earthly life after all, that death reigns, and this prayer for God’s provision is aimed at the institution of a heavenly economy.

The prayer asks those in heaven and on earth to be of a single will, and Maximus also turns this imitation into a two-way interpersonal realization, as the prayer calls upon God to imitate man in offering forgiveness. “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” is a “summons to God to be to him as he is to his neighbors.”[17] As the one praying takes on God’s likeness, he takes on the divine detachment from remembering offenses, and like God, he freely forgives, enacting reconciliation between God and nature: “For since free will has been thus united to the principle of nature, the reconciliation of God with nature comes about naturally, for otherwise it is not possible for nature in rebellion against itself by free will to receive the inexpressible divine condescension.”[18] It is not simply that earth is drawn heavenward, but the heavenly kingdom is brought to earth, in and through the prayer. Not only God, but his children become dispensers of grace in forgiveness.

Maximus ties together the logic of the prayer for bread and the forgiving of debtors, as both are a surpassing of nature. Asking for spiritual bread can be likened to forgiving debtors as the one praying knows he is mortal by nature, and any day natural life may end, but this is the point of the spiritual life, of “outstripping nature” and dying to the world. “For your sake we are put to death the whole day, we are considered as sheep of the slaughterhouse” (Ps. 44:23 and Rom. 8:36). Like Christ, the one praying pours out life as a libation, which is already a deliverance from temptation and evil. This is already deliverance from the law of sin, and from the evil one. “In this way not only shall we acquire forgiveness for our sins but we shall also be victors over the law of sin without being left behind to undergo the experience of it. We shall trample underfoot the evil serpent which gave rise to the law.”[19]

The prayer calls for a radical cosmological shift, in which time participates in and completes eternity, and eternity and the heavenly are enacted in time. The prayer, Maximus insists throughout, calls not only for the completion of creation in incarnation but directs “us to the mystery of deification” as God condescends “through the flesh of the Only Son” to enact His Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.[20]

[1] Jordan Wood raises and answers these issues in a PBI lecture http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/maximus-on-the-explanation-of-prayer-by-jordan-wood/

[2] Maximus the Confessor, “Commentary of the Our Father: A Brief Explanation of the Prayer Our Father To a Certain Friend of Christ By Saint Maximus, Monk and Confessor,” in Maximus Confessor:  Selected Writings, trans. George C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) 102.

[3] Ibid.

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

[5] Commentary on the Our Father, Ibid.

[6] Ibid, 102-103.

[7] Ibid, 103-104. Maximus cycles through these results several times.

[8] Ibid, 106.

[9] Ibid, 103.

[10] Ibid, 106

[11] Ibid,103.

[12] Ibid,109.

[13] Ibid, 110.

[14] Ibid, 113.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 114.

[17] Ibid, 115.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 118.

[20] Ibid, 118.