Customized Chrisitanity: Finding Your Divine Spark

The following is one of a multi-part response to an article by Jim Burklo entitled "How To Live As a Christian Without Having to Believe the Unbelievable." For an introduction to these thoughts, see Burklo's Bible.
-----------------------------------------------------------

As promised, let us turn now to that nasty dogmatic discussion of Arianism, a spectrum of beliefs which, in their many forms, share the common denominator of a belief that Jesus was somehow less than divine. The Trinity, and its necessary belief in the full and equal divinity of Jesus, is among those pesky doctrine that Burklo would have us do away with if we find them at all offensive. What he proposes instead is a benign, new age rendition of the divinity of Christ more palatable to our refined, enlightened sensibilities.

When Jesus asked us to believe in him, he wasn’t asking us to believe a list of ideas about him. He was asking us to believe in that spark of the divine that was inside of him, because he wanted us to believe in the spark of the divine that is in every one of us.

Let's ignore, for the time being, the unfortunate reality that Jesus never actually says what Burklo wants him to. He never references a common divine spark shared between himself and humanity. He doesn't mention a divine spark at all. But this willingness to pick and choose and distort Burklo's own chosen source material to conform to his preset notion of who Jesus ought to be is a problem to deal with tomorrow.

Instead, let's assume, arguendo, that Burklo's argument isn't self-defeating on its face and look to the disastrous implications of his vision of Christianity. What Burklo has offered us is a perverted version of Jesus message read anachronistically through the lens of Enlightenment humanism. It imagines Jesus not as something other than or apart from the human condition but as an exemplar of the ideal human as humanity can and ought to be. If only humanity would see and embrace love ("who is God") which is already available to us, already accessible, then we could construct a heaven on earth.

It is, for all intents and purposes, a functionally atheistic form of Christianity. Except that really isn't fair because what it actually does is deify humanity creating a vulgar, anthropotheistic religion. This devastates theology, particularly the cosmic story of fall and redemption, creation and recreation, that dominates the biblical narrative, replacing it instead with universe which revolves around me. Just the way we like it. This paring away of the annoying doctrines of soteriology, cosmology, and eschatology will be the subject of my final complaint. More crucially here, Burklo's vision of Christianity even undermines his all important ethical consideration. After all, if God is love and I have God (i.e. love) inside me and practicing love is the whole duty of man (not, as the narrator of Ecclesiastes says, fearing God and keeping His commandments) then any behavior which I can reasonably justify as originating from love--whatever that is, however I feel like defining it, since I have the divine spark equal to that of Jesus--is moral.

In fairness, Christians of all stripes do this anyway. I'm loving that homeless man by not giving him a few dollars because he'll probably just use it to buy liquor anyway. I'm loving my spouse by being obstinate because, in the long run, what I know is right will be best for both of us. I'm loving my enemies by invading their country and setting up a democracy because that's how God wants their lives to be governed. It's all ridiculous, but, by making Jesus the messenger of love and divine sparkliness, Burklo actually exacerbates the problem. If Jesus really did come to say, "Hey, I have a divine spark, and I'm living consistent with it. You should look to your divine spark too and live in accordance with its law of love," then he freed every man to be a canon unto himself, the measure of what love is and how it should be applied through the loose framework of "willingness to feed the hungry, liberate the oppressed, heal the sick."

Sure, it makes you always feel good about the kind of loving your doing because it is always consistent with your divine spark, but you're left feeling a little suspicious of the guy down the road whose working just as hard to liberate a different set of oppressed people--maybe the people you thought were oppressing your oppressed people--and in a way that you don't think is all that loving. I guess maybe his divine sparkler just sparkles different from yours.

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 2)

It is so rare that I disagree with David Bentley Hart, and when I feel compelled to do so it is always with the utmost trepidation. Nevertheless--in spite of the fact that, as Stanley Hauerwas put it, "The sheer delight that David Bentley's turns of phrase invite tempts me to agree with anything he writes--almost"--in reading his endorsement of Robert Jenson's Christology, which stresses the inseparability of the Son and Jesus, I wonder if Hart does not go too far.

Jesus is not an avatar of the Logos, a mask the Son assumes in a transient or extrinsic fashion, or a part he plays in some grand cosmic charade. When God becomes man, this is the man he becomes--and there can be no other. That is why it is silly to ask the questions that bad theologians, or casual catechists, or well-meaning Sunday School teachers have sometimes felt moved to ask: whether the Son might have been incarnate as someone else-as a Viking, or a Nigerian, or a woman, or simply another first-century Jew. The Logos, when he divests himself of his divine glory, is this man: between this finite historical individual and the eternal and infinite Son of God, there is no caesura. Jesus is not a manifestation of the Son, but the Son in his only true human form.

I certainly sympathize with Hart's general point, that the person of Jesus was not a triviality in the divine plan. There is no person of Jesus apart from the Incarnate Word (and, as far as both Jenson and Hart are concerned, no Word apart from its incarnation in Jesus). I even agree with the rejection of trivial musings like "could Jesus have been a Viking" or the more common "could he have been a she"--though this is more because I think they are unproductive than fundamentally unsound.

Where I find myself forced to dissent, however, is in tying every particular of Jesus to the eternal Son. Hart seems to insist that the Son could not have come as a different ethnicity or a different gender not for pragmatic reasons but for essential ones. This leads to other trivial (but I imagine damning) questions, like "if Jesus were an inch taller, would he cease to be divine" or "if he were balding" (instead of having a full head of flowing chestnut hair, as we all know he had) "would he no longer be the Son?" There is of course a sense in which it is true that the Son became incarnate as he did, the way he did, because that was the perfect time and the perfect manifestation for the perfect purpose of God. At the same time, to tie those contingent realities to the eternality of the Son seems to contradict Hart's normally strong rejection of any limitation or finitude in God.

Perhaps he wouldn't disagree with this (though there is nothing in the above quote to make me think he wouldn't), but I would think it safer to say that the Son could have come in any way he chose but, being perfectly obedient to the will of the Father, chose freely to come as he did, when he did, for the purpose he did. That does not, I think, mean that I believe Jesus was merely an "avatar of the Logos."

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 1)

Perhaps my favorite thing about David Bentley Hart is that it hardly matters about what he is writing. If he puts ink on paper it is more or less certain to be witty, engaging, and intellectually provocative. I was reminded of this recently when I realized that it had been months since I dusted off the large section of my bookshelf dedicated to Hart and allowed myself to be immersed in his prose. To correct this, I picked an article at random to read: "The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok: On the Theology of Robert Jenson." The essay took the form of a response to criticisms--which Hart considered legitimate--about his hasty treatment of Jenson's work in a recent publication. In response, he made an effort to summarise, praise, and disagree with Jenson in the matter of a few short pages.

Most of Hart's disagreements with Jenson are philosophical and theological in nature, and they are criticisms I certainly found compelling. There was one area in which, in my estimation, Jenson's theology went uncritiqued, perhaps because Hart lacked space or perhaps because he doesn't give the line of argument much currency. There is, however, a degree to which Jenson's anthropology is unconvincing because it is emotionally unsatisfying. This does not, of course, preclude the logical possibility that Jenson is correct, but inasmuch as theology is an encounter with the divine and, in the words of Vladimir Lossky, it is impossible to totally separate "personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church" it is impossible to affirm teachings which are so existentially destructive as to nullify any positive experience of God.

Hart himself recongizes that "summary is usually invidious," and I admit that to make a critique based solely on someone else's summary is even more odious. With that said, however, here is what Hart has to say about Jenson which has so disturbed me:

Who God is, therefore, subsists in the Father's loving concern for the Son and the Son's loving obedience to the Father, and in the freedom of the Spirit who--as unending divine futurity--makes this relation eternal. In Jenson's rather daring formulation, the Spirit "frees" the Father and the Son for the adventure of this love, and for the infinite possibility that is this love's perfection. As for us, our place in this drama is that of the compaions of the Son: we are included in the story of God's freedom because Christ is the man who is for all men, and so for the Father to have Christ as his Son he must ahve us as well; for there is no Son apart from him who said "Father, forgive them."

Hart will object that Jenson's construction removes any Logos asarkos (a Word apart from the incarnation in Jesus) and that Jenson's admirable focus on Christ's uniqueness is meaningless without a classical understanding of transcendence which Jenson rejects. For my part, what struck me is just how trivial I become in this narrative and not just me but you too. All of humanity becomes incidental, the happenstance of this eternal love and becoming. That the Son happened to be man for all men, that he should happen to need or desire or will companions, that he would be predestined to say "Father, forgive them" means that there must be an object for that being, that desire, that phrase. God does not create us out of love or out of an ontological impulse to create or out of a desire to share the beauty of otherness (which, as best I recall, approaches ideas expressed by Hart himself), but merely so that the Son who was always determined to the Son incarnate needed a place and a body and a community into which to incarnate. We are all no more than the industrial by-product of God's mechanism of becoming, and I for one find that thought deeply disatisfying. Perhaps it is theologically naive of me, but I have always been inclined to believe that the Incarnation was for the sake of creation and not creation for the sake of the Incarnation (which Jenson's systems seems to suggest).

In the course of a few short pages, Hart gave me innumerable quotes worth sharing and provoked a wealth of theological thought, but in the interest of not being any more longwinded than I already have, I will save those thoughts for another entry.

Re-Reading Revelation: Encountering Jesus (Ch. 1)

Significantly, the first verse of Revelation begins by rooting the entire text immediately in Christ and his authority. The first three words (five in English) rapidly establish that what follows is not a word from John himself but "the revelation of Jesus Christ." It should not be surprising, therefore, as Jesus takes center stage that what we read in Revelation is not only a revelation belonging to Jesus but a revelation of Jesus himself. John is writing to churches that are hurting in some form or another, a fact which he makes clear in presenting his own credentials. Immediately upon the first mention of John's name, he identifies himself as the one who "bore witness," the Greek for which is quickly becomes a technical term from which we get our English word "martyr." As he starts in the first person, John again immediately identifies himself as "your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus." John knows that his audience is suffering and wants them to know that he suffers alongside them.

It is unsurprising then that for this persecuted author writing to a persecuted audience the first image of the savior for which they suffer is so crucial. After his introduction, John spends most of the first chapter describing his initial encounter with the celestial Jesus. It is immediately apparent that this is not the Jesus on whose breast John lay at the last supper, at least not in appearance. The "son of man" that John encounters is like something out of an apocalyptic prophecy with woolen hair, flaming eyes, bronze feet, and a roaring voice, audible apparently in spite of the double-edged sword protruding from his mouth. It is understandable, if a bit melodramatic, that John should all "at his feet as though dead." Frankly, the encounter would frighten most of us out of our right minds. In a single motion, however, this son of man reveals that he is the same compassionate Son of Man whom John knew. He reaches out, touches the prostrate John, and says "Fear not."

In this paradoxical image of our Lord and Savior--an appropriate title--as both terrible and merciful is the heart of the picture of Christ which will be echo throughout the rest of Revelation. It is an encounter with the divine which spoke to the heart of John, tried to the limits of endurance, and to the churches as they suffered unspecified trials. They served a Lord who was compassionate without being weak, a Savior who was terrible without being malicious. He declares his sovereignty; "I am the first and the last." He reveals his sympathy; "I died, and behold I am alive forevermore." He reiterates his promise; "I have the keys of Death and Hades." He is a suffering king, perfectly suited for a kingdom beset on all sides.

This encounter should continue to resonate with us as often as we strive for our faith, be it against worldly powers or against spiritual ones. We can be reminded by this image of Jesus, bursting dramatically onto the narrative scene of Revelation, that we do not serve an impotent Lord nor an apathetic Savior. Ours is the Christ who reveals himself to John, "who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom." He will come and will make trivial the demons which haunt us because he loves us and because he has in him the power to actualize that love. It is a message of hope not for some distant point in chronology but in a living God who is right now, in this moment, ready to bless those who read the words of his prophecy and who keep to them.

*****

For a full list of "Re-reading Revelation" posts, see Re-reading Revelation: Statement of Purpose.

The Psychology of Unity

B. J. Humble’s article “The Influence of the Civil War” examines the role the Civil War played in precipitating the eventual division of the Stone-Campbell Movement into the Disciples of Christ and the Churches of Christ. Traditional historiography with its hagiographical bent painted the movement’s post-war unity as an anomaly on the American religious landscape. Humble, however, probes beneath the surface in line with more recent revisions in the traditional approach. He examines the rhetoric of the anti-society Disciples before the outbreak of the war and after. Tolbert Fanning is a noteworthy example, as a prominent even the premier voice of the Disciples in the South. Before the war he was opposed to the missionary society but professed spiritual unity with its members nonetheless. What changed after the war for Fanning, and for many of the anti-society Disciples in the South, was not the stance toward American Christian Missionary Society itself but a subtler shift in the way that opposition manifested itself. Fanning wrote later of the pro-society Disciples in the North: “Should we ever meet them in the flesh, can we fraternize with them as brethren?” He shifted from calling the members of the Society “brothers” to referring to them as “monsters in intention, if not in very deed.”

Fanning’s behavior and Humble’s observations have interesting implications for understanding the nature of division. It is notable that an issue which existed before and after the war should be treated so radically differently over time. The doctrinal reasons for opposing missionary societies had not changed, but the issue suddenly became so divisive that it became a lightning rod for splitting a movement that had not even a generation earlier come together for the common purpose of Christianity unity. The relevant change came when an issue of doctrinal opinion took on personal overtones.

Of course that is an oversimplification. It is equally true that the issue of missionary societies had not fully come to a head until after the Civil War. Certainly the actions of the American Christian Missionary Society during the war had confirmed many of the fears of anti-society Christians that were merely theoretical prior to the war. The political endorsement of the union by the Society—which in the South amounted to a wholesale endorsement of war, tyranny, and the slaughter of Christians—could only reinforce and intensify anti-society sentiments wherever they already existed. More importantly still, the issue of missionary societies should not be isolated as the sole cause of division. The factors were multiple and complex.

It is nevertheless telling how radically the Civil War and the personal animosity it engendered altered the way doctrinal heterogeneity was treated. Gregory E. McKinzie, in his article “Barton Stone’s Unorthodox Christology,” recounts the early Christological controversy that threatened the proposed unity of Stone’s and Campbell’s movements. These two great fathers of the movement differed publicly and vocally on so basic and critical an issue as whether or not Jesus was God. Campbell published an article in response to Stone in which he stated “I fraternize with [Stone] as I do with the Calvinist. Neither of their theories are worth one hour…” Stone responded that if Campbell only called brothers those who, in Campbell’s words, “supremely venerate, and unequivocally worship the King my Lord and Master” then Stone was not his brother at all. Yet in spite of this strong rhetoric, the two men were architects of a unity between their two movements on the grounds that Bible-based unity transcended metaphysical uniformity.

Yet the same movement which united in spite of foundational theological difference split in the wake of the Civil War because significantly less dramatic doctrinal differences took on the character of personal loyalties. There a sense in which most Christian division can be reduced to this basic human flaw. I refer here not to functional division but spiritual division, since obviously a body of believers who believe it is a sin to have a kitchen in a church building cannot flourish shackled (at least architecturally) to a body of believers who meet in a building with a kitchen. The watershed, however, between this functional division and a true spiritual rupture comes when people begin to associate their doctrinal beliefs, no matter how strongly held, with their identity. Then, a dispute over personal opinions becomes a dispute between persons. It is the difference between a Tolbert Fanning who can attend a meeting of the American Christian Missionary Society and call its members his brothers and a Tolbert Fanning who calls a sectional meeting in the South and demands repentance from the “monsters” in the North.

It is interesting to note how frequently unity is sought through ever more distilled doctrinal confessions, with mixed results. From the Nicene Creed to the Restorationist “no creed but the Bible” to modern moves like paleo-orthodoxy, Christians hope desperately to achieve some semblance of Christian harmony by codifying from without what it means to be a Christian. Instead, it might be fruitful to consider that perhaps unity begins not at the level of doctrine but at the level of human psychology. The seed is planted when I identify as a Christian and only a Christian in a way that ultimately defies logical formulation because it consists in the mysterious working of Christ in me. Then, I recognize that I am a Christian definitionally and a Restorationist only incidentally. Then, recognizing that truth exists and warrants our faithful and diligent pursuit, you and I may work out our salvation with fear and trembling and tension and dispute and study and prayer and, most importantly of all, a Spirit of unity that vivifies all our collective efforts.

Sunday of Orthodoxy

Scripture:


John 1:1-5,9-14

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Exodus 33:12-19a

Moses said to the LORD, "See, you say to me, 'Bring up this people,' but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, 'I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.' Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people."

And He said, "My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest."

And he said to Him, "If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?"

And the LORD said to Moses, "This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name."

Moses said, "Please show me your glory."

And he said, "I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name 'The LORD.'

History:

John of Damascus, Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Images, I

Of old they who did not know God, worshipped false gods. But now, knowing God, or rather being known by Him, how can we return to bare and naked rudiments? I have looked upon the human form of God, and my soul has been saved. I gaze upon the image of God, as Jacob did, though in a different way. Jacob sounded the note of the future, seeing with immaterial sight, whilst the image of Him who is visible to flesh is burnt into my soul.

Reflection:

The first Sunday of Lent commemorates the "Triumph of Orthodoxy," when Empress Theodora in 842 restored the icons to the Church of the Holy Wisdom and the iconoclastic controversy finally ended. Without delving too deeply into the history of the controversialist theology of the question over iconodulism, it is important to note that the issue was not primarily about "praying to idols" (which is how Protestants, in particular, are apt to view it). It was the last great Christological controversy of the unified church. At stake was the idea that God came in the flesh, a flesh which appeared just like your flesh or my flesh. Christ's body was one which, according to John, "we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands" (1 John 1:1).

This, the Incarnation, is the greatest of the Christian wonders. The idea that God would pass before Moses and that Moses could actually see God (whatever that means) baffles us. The Incarnation was something more, because, unlike Moses, humanity was allowed to see God face-to-face. John not only saw him and heard him, but he touched him. It is with this in view that we must read the prologue of the Gospel of John. The Word through which everything was made, which was with God, which was God, on which John lavishes such lofty theological language is the Word which became flesh, who in the form of a man consented to be perceived with our vulgar senses.

And like John of Damascus, we can testify that we have seen God and that his image is burned on to our souls. We see him through the testimony of those who have come before us. Even if our eyes do not perceive him directly, we stand in an unbroken spiritual chain with John and countless others who did see him thus. More fully we see him still, as I firmly believe that Christ is really and substantially encountered by every Christian in every age. He truly indwells as the image of the Father, enshrined in our souls, making us temples of divinity. Still more glorious is the promise that we will yet see him in eternity. Traditionally, the text for this Sunday is later in John 1, where Jesus promises his disciples "You will see greater things than these…Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man" (vv. 50-51). We know that this promise holds true even for us, and that we can hope for a time when we will see Christ glorified at the right hand of the throne of the Father.

Lent should be a time to encounter Christ, specifically in his suffering on our behalf. Each of us has wandered into our own spiritual wilderness and committed to be tried for forty days. If you seek him, you will find that Jesus is waiting for you in that desert. When the devil tempts you to break fast, you can say "Man does not live by bread alone" and trust that these are the words of the Bread of Life. He will sustain us all.

Prayer:

O our Savior! Of ourselves we cannot love thee, cannot follow thee, cannot cleave to thee;
but thou didst come down
that we might love thee
didst ascend
that we might follow theee,
didst bind us around thee as thy girdle
that we might be held fast unto thee;
Thou who has loved us, make us to love thee,
Thou who has sought us, make us to seek thee,
Thou who, when lost, didst find us,
be thou my thyself the way
that we may find thee
and be found in thee
our only hope, and our everlasting joy.
--Edward Bouverie Pusey

A Day with Ben Witherington: Theosis, Against an Anemic Christology

Theosis is so critical a doctrine in Orthodox theology that it is essentially impossible to escape it in any aspect of Orthodox thought. It relates to soteriology (obviously), epistemology, theology proper, anthropology, and, among countless others, Christology. In this final aspect, I think that once again Witherington would have profited from a fuller, better understanding of theosis. During a very informal Q&A, Witherington made the assertion that the human nature in Christ was identical for all intents and purposes to the unfallen nature of Adam. (I mention the venue in the hopes that it may merely have been that Witherington, without having prepared, misspoke or spoke imprecisely.) This creates a theological quandary: would human nature inexorably but unconfusedly united to divine nature really have not been any different than human nature not so united? In the Orthodox tradition, the divine nature divinized the human nature, not in a way which was supernatural (that is to say, not in a way that exceeded the potentiality of any other human nature) but in a way that made that humanity something functionally other than all other human nature. It is only by being somehow different, not merely by virtue of the volitional activity of the human nature in Christ, that Christ can truly represent the new man, the true humanity.

I think the appropriate language to speak about the difference between Adam's nature and the human nature of Christ, other than merely that one was united to divinity (which is theosis) and the other was not, is the language of potentiality and actuality. Adam always had the potential for increase, for union, for participation in the divine life, but that participation and its inevitable consequences had not occurred. He elected sin instead. Certainly, that participation in and union with divinity would have resulted in a radical change in him. Panagiotes Nellas has said that this potential was never truly possible before the Incarnation and argues that, even if there were no Fall, the Incarnation would have been necessary as a means of opening the path for union between God and man. Regardless of the merit of that argument, it was never beyond Adam's nature to be in union with God. In that sense, the human nature of Christ and Adam were identical in their potential. After all, the human nature of Christ was truly human and no more. The suggestion, however, that they were no different in any respect seems to suggest (as I have accused Witherington of suggesting before) that the encounter with the divine can somehow leave all or part of human nature unaffected. I cannot accept this.

I dare say that a Christology which views the humanity in Christ as unremarkable misses something of the promise which we have in salvation. We are being transformed into something remarkable by our participation in the divine life. Christ, as the living embodiment of that participation, was already something remarkable even in his human nature.

Hall and History (or) History as Propaganda Pt. 2

Reading God & Human Suffering, I found it strange how fervently Douglas John Hall could reject historical optimism (the belief that history is progressing inevitably towards the ultimate good) and at the same time how certain he was in his own superior position in history to judge the barbaric Christians who floundered in the mythical “Dark Ages.” On more than one occasion, Hall spoke of our present “post-Constantinian” Christianity with palpable smugness, embracing the double myth that Constantine somehow radically perverted the church and that we stand somehow purified of that alteration. (Frankly, it is only the thoroughly post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment Christian, confused about the significance of those paradigmatic shifts, that can pretend to be in any sense post-Constantinian.)

Hall falls frequently into the error of nostalgia, picturing an original church that is eerily similar to his own conception of Christianity, and as a result of this error tends to paint the era of Constantinian Christianity as a time when all the ills which plague the Christian mind were born and embedded deeply in the Christian consciousness. As with most in the West, particularly Protestants, he marks the beginning of the rebirth of an authentic Christian worldview with the rise of Scholasticism (particularly the writings of Anselm, in Hall’s case). Setting this presupposition aside – at great personal pain – I would like primarily to address myself to three descriptions which Hall offers of Constantinian Christianity which are as crudely mistaken as they are obviously self-serving.

Ascetics: Perverted Sufferers

Hall first takes aim at forms of monasticism which embrace as part of their rule varying degrees of ascesis. Groups such as these (and monks are by no means the only ones guilty here) have made a religion of suffering. Sufferings have “become interesting in themselves…become ends (or almost ends in themselves.” “…suffering is turned into a law, a principle, a soteriological technique…” Hall rejects this misappropriation of the human suffering intrinsic to nature. Suffering which is good, according to Hall, is that suffering which is productive of life, and “the line must be drawn at the point where suffering ceases to serve life.”

It is strange to see monks brought up in this context, as they would most heartily agree with everything that Hall has said (with the obvious exception of their inclusion among those who are being rebuked). Ascesis is not suffering for the sake of suffering nor is it suffering as a means of salvation. The voluntary sufferings undertaken by monks are not purely for the sake of suffering, a benefit unto itself, and certainly no Christian ascetic would suggest that suffering is productive of salvation. Instead, the ascetics suffer in the service of life. They mortified their flesh in an effort to mortify the sins of the flesh, and they destroyed sin in order to progress in life (that is true, abundant life). The purifying power of suffering is by no means a foreign concept to the “pre-Constantinian” church. It is, after all, a prominent theme in both 1 Peter and James.

Hall’s fails both to understand the nature of the church before Constantine and to truly grasp the change which occurred with the advent of imperial Christianity. Suffering as a way of life is engrained in the early church, something which even Hall stresses, and the life of the Christian was lived in the constant fear of persecution (either current or inevitable). With Constantine this all changed, and the average Christian no longer needed to live in fear. The role of suffering in the identity of the church began to be more or less nominal (not unlike many new Christians). The monks were pursuing precisely what Hall is suggesting is necessary for Christians, participation in the suffering of the world in imitation of Christ in an effort to sponsor life.

Imperial Christianity: Apotheosis of Power

In criticizing the monks of Constantinian Christianity, Hall missed perhaps his clearest opportunity to level a pertinent criticism against the role of Constantine in altering the church. When he does decide to target imperial Christianity directly, his criticism falls well off the mark. For Hall, the pre-Constantinian church conceived of God with love as His central attribute. (Am I the only one impressed by how near that is to the position of Christians in the latter half of the 20th century when Hall’s book was written?) Only with the ascent of the Christian emperor to power and his subsequent corruption of the church did Christianity begin to deliberately stress God in terms of power motifs:

To make the faith amenable to the imperial mentality and at the same time a fitting symbol for and reflection of imperial splendor itself, the church through the ages has permitted its message to be filtered through the sieve of worldly power and glory.

Again, the distorted picture of early Christianity Hall presents cannot survive even the test of the biblical witness much less the whole corpus of ante-Nicene literature. In the Old Testament, the Divine-Warrior motif stresses God’s power in explicitly “worldly” terminology: “For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city will be captured...Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle. And the Lord will be king over all the earth; in that day the Lord will be the only one and His name the only one.” (Zech 14:2a,3,9) This sort of imperial imagery for God is by no means isolated. “Immediately I was in the Spirit; and behold a throne was standing in heaven, and One sitting on the throne. And He who was sitting was like a jasper stone and a sardius in appearance; and there was a rainbow around the throne, like an emerald in appearance. Around the throne were twenty-four thrones; and upon the thrones I saw twenty-four elders sitting, clothed in white garments, and golden crowns on their heads.” (Rev 4:1-4) If the imperial Christians were looking for royal images of God, they had them in abundance.

In fact, it is more Hall’s tradition of imagining Jesus as the one on the cross rather than the exalted king that makes him so opposed to power motifs. It has been noted countless times that if you walk into any given church in the West, regardless of denomination, you are infinitely more likely to be greeted by the image of the cross than the image of Christ pantokrator (as you typically would be in an Eastern church). When we are talking about whether or not God is the suffering savior on the cross or the exalted lord of heaven and earth, the West is hardly at risk of over-emphasizing the latter. We have an almost morbid obsession with the broken Jesus hanging on the cross, so much so that we forget that he is no longer hanging there. In the Western imagination Christ is perpetually crucified for our sins (an image which is lamentably in use at youth rallies across the nation every year), and idea which would be repugnant undoubtedly to the early church, before and after Constantine.

The Trinity: Arbitrary Dogma

The above are almost trivial objections to Hall’s conception of history compared to this final point. In his discussion of the value of the Trinity, Hall treats the dogma as in some respects useful but quaint and at other times as positively cumbersome. Hall imagines that after Constantine the doctrine of the Trinity became “interesting in itself” and was therefore “misconstrued.” Hall does not restrict his accusation of arbitrary speculation to the Trinity alone, but extends it to the Christological discussions of the era of the councils. “It is unfortunate that the doctrine of the incarnation of the divine Logos was so soon and so successfully coopted by non-Hebraic assumptions and priorities. Under the impact of a religious and philophical worldview which distrusted matter and sought redemption in the realm of pure and disembodied spirit, the concept of the indwelling of the “mind and heart of God” (Logos) in historical existence was uprooted from its essentially Hebraic matrix and, in the decisive early centuries of doctrinal evolution, encumbered with the heavy, heavenly language of metaphysics and abstract mysticism.”

Could anything be farther from the truth? The assumption that the Father platonized Christianity has been repeated so often and challenged so rarely that it has entered into the modern mindset with the status of infallible dogma. Yet, any honest reading of the doctrinal controversies surrounding the Trinity or the Incarnation see must necessarily reject an escapist soteriology (like the actually platonic Gnostics) or a theology of the disembodied spirit. Hall, and so many others, seems to have confused the adoption of philosophical terminology with the adoption of philosophical presuppositions. But what language did we expect them to adopt? The theology which the nurtured (because we are talking about growth and not innovation) had to be articulated in the language of the intellectual culture of the time. The fact that the terminology was also being used by Plotinus can, in the words of Lossky, “delude only those unimaginative and pedestrian souls who are incapable of rising above rational concepts: those who ransack the thought of the Fathers for traces of ‘Platonism’ and Aristotelianism.’”

More importantly, the concepts of Trinity and Incarnation never became interesting in themselves, they were never pursued out of intellectual curiosity, that is at least not until the post-Enlightenment West took hold of them. These early church debates - productive as they were of unrest, schism, exile, popular uprising, and no small number of martyrs – were not merely the intellectual disagreements of the speculative elite. They sat at the very heart of Christian spirituality, and almost always related very directly both to the question of how we are saved and how we relate ourselves to the God who saved. The affirmation of Jesus’ divinity which gives us that “mystifying terminology” of homoousios was tied directly with his ability of God to save us. If the Son was not coequal with the Father than how was he empowered to save us, and why do we sing hymns to him as God? The centuries of debate about in what sense the Son took on flesh were not particularly heated PBS debates about the compatibility of divinity and humanity. They were struggles to understand how God could truly redeem humanity by taking on human nature, in what sense a God could die, and in what sense the taking on of flesh saves us. They were questions so central to Christian faith that people were willing to die a hundred times over in pursuit and defense of the truth. How Hall paints it, Maximus the Confessor was merely so belligerent so attached to his philosophically cumbersome conception of a Savior with two wills that he would rather have his hand cut off, tongue cut out, and die in exile than be wrong. And how many times did Athanasius go into exile, merely to escape the embarrassment of admitting that he may have been wrong? What arrogant, unreasonable men these Church Fathers were!

If I have learned something recently from Douglas John Hall and Fr. Paul Christy, it is that history is a dangerous tool in the right hands. On the one hand, we may use it to paint to pretty a picture of reality. We can imagine a world where history at every turn validates the institutions which we believe produced it. Just as self-serving, however, we may use history to construct for ourselves a strawman against which to react. We can focus on the seediest most despicable moments of any traditions past – or merely reinterpret neutral events…or for that matter fabricate events completely – in an effort to validate our rejection of them. History will almost always be able to serve the ends to which it is utilized as a means. That is not to suggest, I will quick to point out, that history is entirely subjective. Only that it is malleable by virtue of our incomplete knowledge of it. The fuller one’s understanding of the past, the more cautiously it will be marshaled to that person’s defense.

A Chalcedonian Revelation

I am presently reading through John Meyendorff's Byzantine theology, and the section on Christology has opened my eyes to a fine christological distinction with radical implications for every field of theological inquiry. Let me see if I can explain it adequately. I have always held to the opinion, though not consciously, that the hypostatic union affirmed by Chalcedon (i.e. Christ has two natures [ousia] united in one person [hypostasis]) was in a unique hypostasis. That is to say that the divine nature united itself to a human nature and formed together a unique person in the individual Jesus, who was thereby the Christ. If I had been forced to choose whether the hypostasis was primarily that of the humanity or the divinity of Jesus, I probably would have chosen the former.

That view, apparently, is contrary to the teaching of the Orthodox Church. The Byzantine theologians understood Chalcedon to affirm that the single hypostasis of the Christ was the same as the hypostasis of the pre-existent Logos. That is to say, when one talks about the Trinity as one essence in three persons, that second person (i.e. the Son) is identical with the person of the Christ with his two essences. Meyendorff says that this emphasis on the divinity of Jesus has drawn criticism from the West. The Orthodox have been accused of being "crypto-Monophysites" because they subordinate the human essence and will under the divine by affirming the divinity of Christ's hypostasis. Reading the criticisms, I admit that I agreed. There is little there to allow us to empathize with Jesus the person, to delve into his human mind, and to speculate about the psychology of his behavior.

But, true to form, Meyendorff set me straight. He defends the Orthodox position on the grounds of Orthodox anthropology, which has (without explicit attribution to the Byzantine tradition) found great acceptance in the world today. The focal point of Orthodox anthropology is that man is only true to his humanity, the creational purpose of the person is only truly fulfilled when he is in submission to God. Who could argue with that? If we accept this premise (and if we do not, there are larger problems to address), then the subordination of the humanity of Jesus to the divinity of Jesus is actually an implicit glorification of his humanity. The humanity of Christ, following always the lead of the divine will, is in fact more human than our own humanity which has subordinated itself to that which it was created to rule (an insight to expand for another time). Rather than the East becoming crypto-Monophysites, the West has tended toward idolatrous worship of humanity. Can there really be any formula of union between man and God where the former is not submissive to the latter? Is man greater than God, equal to him?