Speaking of the Folly of "Progressive" Christianity

It would seem that Ross Douthat, of the New York Times has been reading my criticism of progressive Christianity's attempt to distance itself from theology and collapse religion into social ethics because he has chosen to illustrate my theological point with some statistical data. His article specifically reviews the declining attendance in Episcopal churches and correlates it to the conscious decision on the part of the denomination to become deliberately progressive.

As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

And why not? After all, what do Episcopalians have now to appeal to a young, socially liberal demographic? You're telling them, "Look, we believe what you believe," but then you also want them to believe in the existence of an omnipotent deity which their college professors have told them is intellectual barbarism, ask them to give up an hour or two out of their precious weekends to do liturgical calisthenics (sit, kneel, stand, kneel, sit), and encourage them to give money so that the church can continue to feed the hungry, care for the sick, and marry the homosexuals (like Jesus did) out of the comfort of their altar-filled, stained-glass cathedrals. That's a PR manager's dream.

So while progressive Christians and secular liberals continue to laud the Episcopal Church (US) as a model for Christianity, regular old Christians are investing less and less of their time in the Episcopal and like churches. Douthat rightly observes that the problem is not a renewed emphasis on the social ramifications of the Gospel but on the emptiness that comes when you strip Christianity of everything not compatible with political liberalism, not unlike Burklo trying to taking everything "unbelievable" out of the New Testament. The truth is, and somewhere some Episcopalian must know it, that a Christianity without a full-bodied, soul-saving, pre-existing, sanctifying, dead-buried-resurrected-returning Christ is no Christianity at all. It certainly has nothing that is going to put butts in the pews and bills in the offering plate. If progressive Christianity is going to continue to have a voice in the greater faith community, it needs to realize that it has fallaciously and dogmatically married social liberalism and theological liberalism. Maybe that's the aberrant marriage they really should be worried about.

Customized Christianity: Ethics à la Carte

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.
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I have made a number of arguments against Jim Burklo’s vision of a believable Christianity over the past week. I criticized his willingness to assume an oppositional relationship between faith and practice, his inability to distinguish between marginal and central biblical stories and truths, his dangerous Christology, and his selective hermeneutic. All of these, however, are part of a broader flawed attempt to collapse religion into ethics. It is only by elevating ethics to the status of comprehensive and exclusive truth that he can effectively disregard the doctrine, dogma, and fantastic stories that he believes hinder people from finding genuine Christianity. Unfortunately for Burklo, Scripture gives us every indication that ethics are rooted in theology, conditioned by soteriology, and aimed toward eschatology (just to name a few of those evil, confusing categories that label trivial matters).

Burklo, as mentioned repeatedly, believes that the central message of the Gospel is the Sermon on the Mount. Far be it from me to ever stand in the way of someone trying to refocus Christians on the Sermon on the Mount, but the majority of Protestant Christianity is going to have a bone to pick with Burklo. And rightly so, as there seems to be a general consensus that, if a single passage encapsulates the gospel, the real text of central importance is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Look at that. We have a theological statement about the nature of God flowing into a soteriological statement about the mechanism of salvation flowing into an eschatological statement about the eternal destiny of humanity. Do you notice what’s missing? Any mention of ethics. This has been the animating sentiment of so much of Protestantism, precisely because of its antinomian character, from Luther’s sole fide to the now widespread evangelical idea (specifically derided by Burklo) of a personal relationship with Jesus.

Certainly, I am part of a generation that wants to correct the stress on faith without ethical strictures, but there is much to commend Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus (one of those passages where Jesus is speaking but Burklo apparently isn’t listening, as there is nothing about social justice) as a good synopsis of the purpose of the Incarnation. The biblical text is not the narrative of the struggle for a moral principle to take root among moral actors but of a perfect God trying to reconcile to Himself a willfully imperfect creation. This reconciliation, the New Testament makes very clear, takes place not with Jesus preaching on the mountain top but with him dying on the cross, being buried in the tomb, and conquering death in the resurrection. Christianity is not an ethical system which we can be convinced to believe but a comprehensive experience of a personal God that radically shapes more than just our ethics.

Otherwise, the poor are left to hope in the moral regeneration of the world for their deliverance. The sick are left to hope in the dedicated work of altruistic physicians for their healing. The oppressed are left to hope for a people powerful enough to enact their liberation but righteous enough not to use that power to oppress. It’s a false hope, an empty hope, very much like faith in an unresurrected Christ is an empty faith. Faith in Christ and hope for an inbreaking kingdom are realities which transcend how we treat one another. They have to do with the totality of existence, and all of reality falls inside the scope of Christian faith.

Genesis, historical or not, teaches us about the nature of the physical world and God’s relationship to it. The Psalms reveal the human character, both as it is and how it can be when it allows itself to be transformed, more than just morally, by the redeeming power of God. Job guides us through the problem of evil and, centuries before the greatest philosophers the world has known would reach the same conclusion, declares that it is irresolvable (but nevertheless God). The prophets instruct us on the interrelatedness of piety and social justice, a lesson Burklo could stand to revisit. Micah introduces us to a vision of the culmination of reality which will define not only Judeo-Christian eschatology but the whole of Western civilization’s utopian vision: peace, fertility, leisure, uncoerced global unity, and the eternal pursuit of knowledge.

Most, if not all, of these themes are taken up explicitly or alluded to by Jesus in his ministry and, if we are going to accept the validity of the biblical account, they must be engaged by Christians as well. We cannot simply call them trivialities, hindrances in the way of creating a heaven on earth (something which Burklo doesn’t seem to believe that Scripture explicitly states is beyond the scope of human possibility). God’s transformative work is not limited to human behavior. Being in Christ is a total transformation, and that includes those pesky truths that Burklo encourages us to ignore. We may never understand them perfectly and we may dispute about them until the second coming, but pursing those truths is part of the great pursuit of perfection, of conformity to the image of Christ.

And, of course, an unwillingness to engage these doctrines and stories, the marginalization of everything that isn’t explicitly command in the social ethics of Jesus, has profound and tragic implications for ethics. Burklo relishes the fact that “Jesus said nothing about [homosexuality and abortion] whatsoever in the New Testament. There’s no hint in the Bible that these topics mattered to him at all.” While the factual accuracy of much of this may be disputed, the real issue is with Burklo’s logic. By the same reasoning, Jesus never mentioned eugenics and therefore there is no reason to assume that the actions of Nazi Germany bothered him. He certainly didn’t talk about atomic weaponry and therefore the atrocities in Nagasaki and Hiroshima probably wouldn’t have mattered to him. After all, harkening back to the points about the divine sparks, Truman probably reasoned that the bomb was how many Americans thought they could express love for the Pearl Harbor widows.

In truth, Jesus presented a radically different view of reality, and more than presenting it, he inaugurated it. The mission of Christ was not primarily one of persuasion. It was one of redemption, and it is impossible to crack the pages of Scripture and think otherwise. The greatest change achieved when he ascended into heaven was not that he had presented a wonderful new ethos for people to construct their own heaven but that he had made of himself the conduit through which humanity might find themselves reconciled to God—which, it turned out, is “heaven.” Trying to take Christianity and customize it, sanitize it, by saying, “I like the ethics but not the other teachings” (i.e. doctrine, dogma, and stories) is a little like saying, “I’m a Muslim but only because I feel compelled to make a trip to Mecca once in my life.” Religions are not like buffets: “none of that ‘I’d rather gouge out my eye than go to hell’ nonsense but I’ll have a double helping of the meek shall inherit the earth.” They stand or fall on the strength of their interrelated features. Frankly, without a benevolent, personal deity who became incarnate as an expression of love to recreate the world and me with it if only I choose to allow myself to be transformed, the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t make sense. If I’m imagining my most pleasurable world, my “heaven on earth,” I’m ashamed to admit that liberating the oppressed is a lower priority than legalizing marijuana and prostitution. Certainly turning the other cheek doesn’t sound heavenly at all.

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 4)

After spending days parsing my thoughts on Jenson, Hart, and Hart on Jenson, all that remains is to share with you the memorable wisdom David Bentley Hart imparted:

Well, theology is a particularly savage business (at least when it is done right), and one that it is never too early to discourage one's children from entering.

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 3)

As is inevitably the case when the conversation turns to classical descriptors for God (e.g. impassible, immutable, eternal), the question of whether or not true faith was corrupted by the evil of Hellenistic philosophy arises. It is a the common calumny of almost every contemporary Protestant theologian that at some point during its development, Christian doctrine sold its soul to "Hellenism." During the course of his discussion of this belief, in which he gladly embraces the early Christian conversation with Platonism as "the special work of the Holy Spirit," Hart uses an illuminating term to characterize this Protestant understanding of God: "Teutonism." There seems to be a common delusion among Protestant scholars--and I encountered this most recently in Paul Hinlicky's Divine Complexity--that if they can only reject the corrupting influences of Hellenism, they will automatically return to an authentic Biblical (sometimes termed "Semetic") worldview. What Hart deftly points out with this term is that this new brand of thinking is not some genuinely detached return to unblemished biblical thought (which incidentally arose in a Hellenistic context); it is deeply dependent on another extrabiblical philosophical paradigm, German Idealism. It was German historical and systematic theologians who reconstructed an early Christian narrative in which a simple faith gradually gave way to a philosophical one, who declared that this acquiescence was fundamentally unsound, and who devised a philosophically "independent" theology of God in response. (It is strange that this had never occurred to me before, especially given how much time I spend thinking about the Restorationist delusion that they were reconstruction authentic biblical Christianity rather than formulating a new Baconian Christianity.)

Without declaring either "Hellenism" or "Teutonism" superior (though it ought to be obvious from my previous posts where I fall), it seems that Hart's disposition toward philosophical "intrusion" into one's worldview is the only honest one. We must be aware of, admit, and embrace our philosophical heritage rather than laboring under the pretense that we attempt theology in a void.

Thanksgiving Family Forum

I track American politics in part because I think they are the most entertaining form of reality television and in part because, as someone who happens to live on American soil, they have a certain pragmatic relevance for me. Naturally, I have been watching the bevy of Republican debates and can honestly say that the Thanksgiving Family Forum, held in a church by a Christian organization, was by far the most painful to watch. For me, at least, the worst part isn't even difficult to isolate. It wasn't Rick Perry talking about the values "this country was based upon in Judeo-Christian founding fathers" (you remember, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Rabbi Goldberg). It wasn't even the extremely unsettling attempt by Rick Santorum to convert his infant daughter's struggle with almost certainly terminal Edwards Syndrome into politcal currency. It was this theologically disasterous thought by Michelle Bachmann:

I have a biblical worldview. And I think, going back to the Declaration of Independence, the fact that it’s God who created us—if He created us, He created government.

Let's forget for a moment that she claims a "biblical worldview" and immediately directs us to the Declaration of Independence and not the Bible and focus on what it means for theology to suggest that if God created us then He necessarily created human government. There are certainly theological systems (dreary, Calvinistic systems) which insist that it is appropriate to speak of God as the creator of everything we create because He created us. I wonder if Bachmann would be ready to endorse the implications of that theology (as so many of its more honest adherents are), that this makes God not only the author of civil government but also the author of various other sins like abortion, rape, nuclear war, and any other human malevolance imaginable. That logic paints a very scary picture, which is why so many of the rest of us are willing to accept a moral disconnect between what God has created and what we create as His creations.

The one bright moment in the whole affair is when Ron Paul contrasted the decentralized post-Exodus Israel and the centralized Israel of the kings, with the shift to the latter being (consistent with explicit biblical statements) perhaps the most destructive turn in Israelite history. His point, of course, was that human governments are nasty things that should be limited or avoided altogether when possible. The whole hermeneutical exercise had profound Lipscomb overtones--as Lipscomb would make a similar point in his works with the story of Samuel and Saul about the folly of civil government--though the two men arrive at very different ultimate conclusions. Delightfully, though Paul also endorsed the Augustinian view of just war (citing the saint by name), he admitted that just war theory is in tension with the experience of the early church and Christ's own emphasis on peace. For his own betterment (though perhaps not that of the American political landscape), I cannot help but hope that Paul will take that final ideological step and realize that government is so nasty that, as a Christian, he ought to just wash his hands of the whole endeavor.

Of course, then what would everyone be left with? Newt Gingrich and his profound answer to the worldwide Occupy Movement: "Go get a job, right after you take a bath."

Re-Reading Revelation: Throne Room (Chs. 4-5)

At the close of Chapter 4, with nearly one fifth of the book now completed, John has spent strikingly little time doing anything like predicting events of the near or distant future. Chapter 4 itself, quite the opposite, is dedicated to John's first direct experience of God. He finds himself standing before the divine throne in a surreal and awe-inspiring landscape. Heralded into the throne room by a trumpet like voice, he beholds the divine person seated on a throne, ruddier than the most fiery gemstones, and crowned with a emerald rainbow. The great throne, from which issues pleas of thunder and flashes of lightening, is surrounded by dozens of lesser thrones, seven burning flames, and a sea of crystal. Just to punctuate the scene, the four most gruesome creatures ever devised in Old Testament apocalyptic--all eyes and wings and bestial visages--surround the throne.

What should immediately strike the reader, and it is hard to imagine that this was not John's intention, is that these creatures--infinitely more terrible and wonderful and awesome than John himself--devote themselves constantly to worship. "They never cease to say, 'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!'" These creatures are the kind of divinities etched on hundreds of ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian reliefs; they are the type of figures you would expect to find Canaanite idols of scattered throughout the Levant. They represent the epitome of human imagination and our conception of the supreme otherness of the demons and deities which populated the ancient world, and yet they have no other purpose in the throne room of God but to declare His holiness for all eternity. What's more, as often as they offer their praise to God--which is ironic, since John has always told us that this is a continuous act--the two dozen regal figures on the lesser thrones prostrate themselves before the throne of God and cry out "Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power..." In other words, John bursts into the throne room of God, and no sooner does he describe the splendor of its royal figures and mythic creatures than the whole scene erupts into a celestial liturgy in which all the most magnificent inhabitants of heaven take turns bowing and praising God eternally. The reader can even infer, by turning back to the narrative in Ezekiel 1 which John is clearly invoking, that John himself responded much as he had when confronted with the presence of the Lord in chapter 1 and joined the divine company in worship.

It is perhaps enough to take from this scene that the God whom we serve and who the persecuted readers served is greater than all other powers, familiar and fantastic. Certainly this is true and would have come to John's readers as a continued reassurance that the forces which oppressed them, both civil and celestial, were immediately reduced to nothing in the presence of God. There is, however, an additional message which can be derived from experiencing this scene with John. A professor of mine as an undergraduate once told our New Testament class that the greatest lesson that no one takes away from Revelation is that it teaches us who we worship and how we should worship Him. It is telling that the worship of God begins first with who He is and moves into what He has done. Beginning with a tripartite recognition of that supreme divine quality of holiness, the four creatures announce that God is praised as the one who was and is and is to come. Merely that God exists and that He exists as He is seems enough to warrant never ending praise from the four creatures. The elders, in turn, offer an antiphon announcing that God deserves all glory, honor, and power because He "created all things and by your will they existed and were created." If it were not enough that God is God, then the fact that He deigned to create obliges all of creation to glorify Him for their existence. Quite contrary to a modern attitude which praises God most fervently when some blessing is bestowed or some calamity averted, the lesson in worship given by John is that before you ever encounter God on a personal level or entreat Him for any specific blessing He is worthy of your unreserved, unqualified, unceasing praise. The moment He spoke everything which is into existence--and before even that by virtue of who He is--He deserved everything. That He settles for less is a testimony to His mercy; that we expect Him to, a testimony to our hubris.

Much the same formula continues passing into chapter five. After having been introduced to "him who sits on the throne," the reader is then confronted with the equally dramatic image of the Lamb: seated at the right hand of the throne of God with the appearance of a seven-horned, seven-eyed slain lamb. The response of the living creatures and the elders is no less immediate and no less unqualified than it was for the Father. They instantly begin a new song dedicated to the lamb which declares his worthiness for praise in terms equal with that of the one of the throne. The message becomes clear in the closing lines of the whole throne scene which summarize all of creation's appropriate response to God: "And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, 'To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!' And the four living creatures said, "Amen!" and the elders fell down and worshiped." There is no other appropriate response to the presence of our blessed, honorable, glorious, mighty God but immediate, unconditional, and unqualified worship.

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

Language and the Corruption of Meaning

It is interesting (which is, in this particular context, a euphemistic way of saying “tragic”) the way the dynamic and cultural nature of language can completely transform the meaning of words. Specifically it is “interesting” how Christians have been able to constantly reinterpret the Bible and the rich theology therein—at times under the conscious aegis of contemporary contextualization but more often entirely unconsciously and thus uncritically—with a ceaselessly shifting cultural lexicon. Words which have a very specific meaning have crossed time and language, arriving at the present only semantically equal to the original with the meaning totally lost. The form persists while the function is obscured. There would be little cause for alarm if, as many seem to think, the problem could be solved merely by opening a dictionary of ancient words. In truth, the dictionary only compounds the problem: explaining ancient words with modern glosses or, at best, drawing tenuous parallels to modern concepts.

That is perhaps all too vague to be much of a complaint. An example: Vladimir Lossky has suggested to some acclaim that the formula “one substance in three persons” has been corrupted by the modern understanding of personality. Speaking of the Father, Son, and Spirit as “persons” was filtered (and thus altered) immediately into Latin where the term carried with it a connotation of “mask” that is entirely absent in the Greek. The concept was further altered in the West as culture embraced a radical form of humanism in the Renaissance and, even more dramatically, in the Enlightenment. Western culture (and this embraces the Eastern Church) now understands the person in terms of radical individualism, the thing which makes the “me” actually “me” and not “you.” Contemporary culture lacks not only the appropriate language to speak about the hypostases of God but lacks the appropriate concepts to grasp the personhood in theology. The solution for generally embraced in theological discourse is to abandon the corrupted terms (something that the preceding sentence demonstrates that I am guilty of as well). Instead of the three “persons,” English theology reverts to a transliterated form of the Greek: “hypostasis.” This by no means solves the problem. Simply changing the word to more nearly resemble the original does not automatically attach to it the original concepts. Even as theologians strain to unravel the mystery of the original terminology, how the ancients conceived of hypostases is continually colored by how moderns conceive of personhood. In its extreme form, this tendency produces literature like The Shack where God is depicted as three people with different voices, different senses of humor, different tasks, and different interests, in short, different personalities. This, for Lossky and later for David Bentley Hart, represents a fundamental reversal of the way conceptual transformation ought to work. Christians are constantly allowing the changes in the concepts conveyed by language to alter the original concepts: modern personhood explains theological personhood. Hart suggests that rather than altering the language (i.e. using “hypostasis” instead of “person”), people ought to be rethinking the concept of modern personhood. A true understanding of theological personhood ought to have radical effects on how Christians conceptualize human personhood. In the most basic terms possible, instead of thinking that God is persons in the way humans are persons, people ought to understand how they are persons by thinking about how God is persons.

The problem is not restricted to the esoteric fields of theology proper and anthropology, nor is that my primary concern in arguing this point. In fact, the specific problem which is the catalyst for this thought was actually inspired in part (heaven help me) by the pope and in part by the Jars of Clay song, “Love Song for a Savior.” The pope, several weeks ago, warned a group of children that the “love” which was being peddled on the Internet and in popular culture was not really love at all. I agree, but, while the pope may recognize (at least in speeches) that “love” as expressed in the contemporary idiom is not love in the true sense, in the Christian sense, the secular definition of love has crept into our religious thought and corrupted our understanding of love as God intends it or as the biblical authors mean it. Case and point is the aforementioned Jars of Clay song, the first verse of which describes a girl in a rosy haze thanking Jesus for flowers, running into his arms, and singing over and over: “I want to fall in love with you.” This picture of “true love” is contrasted to those people who sit in church and ignore the sermon. Someday, they too will sing the young girl’s chorus: “I want to fall in love with you…my heart beats for you.”

It could not be more evident (to me at least) that this is a clear permeation of the secular idea of love into what ought to be a truer, more theologically sound conception of love. Jars of Clay is by no means the lone, or even the most egregious, offender. This idea of Christians “loving” Jesus and God “loving” us has seeped into our hymnography, into Christian pop music, into sermons, and into the popular consciousness. The idea is pervasive that the way God loves mirrors in some way the sentimentality of the contemporary understanding of love and that we should, therefore, reciprocate that “love” in kind. The statement “I love Jesus” is more likely to denote nothing more than a positive affection for the Savior than it is to suggest any concrete reality that aligns itself with biblical or historical theological perspectives on love. The affirmation that God loves us is likewise diluted beyond the point of substantial meaning such that God might just as easily be caricatured as our Heavenly Father who carries pictures of all His children in his wallet.

It may be alarmist of me, but I would suggest that the contemporary contextualization (which is, in this particular context, a euphemistic way of saying “rape”) of the meaning of “love” is the root of a number of significant theological problems. I wonder, for example, if the “faith alone” mentality which understands faith as the mere desire of Jesus to “come into my heart” is possible with a more concrete, less romantic view of what it is to love God and be loved by Him. More certainly, this false idea of love stands behind the overwhelming majority of objections to Christianity which begin, “How can a loving God” and end with a description of behavior which we would never permit from our spouses or relatives or friends—as if that were some kind of objective measure of love. Still more troubling are the manifold “loveless” marriages that people are stuck in. Love, rightly considered, is not something that is fallen into our fallen out of so much as it is something which the lover consciously chooses to express to the beloved through certain behaviors and dispositions. If God could fall out of love with humanity, then we would all be quite doomed. For just this reason, I object to the language of Jars of Clay about wanting to “fall in love” with Jesus, not—as with Dr. John Stackhouse—because it gives me the “homoerotic creeps” but because loving Jesus is not something which I fall into anymore than love (properly so-called) is something which I fall into with my wife.

The problem is not, as I said, so much with the words. We have preserved the right language. God should be spoken of as three persons and our basic stance toward Him ought to be described as love. The problem is the direction of meaning transformation for our words. Rather than allowing love rightly understood through divine guidance to determine how we ought to love both God and neighbor, we allow how we love apart from divine guidance to influence what we think is expected of us in the greatest commands. Human personhood ought to be defined relative to divine personhood, and human love ought to be define relative to divine love. In reversing these, our “contemporary contextualization” of meaning has led us into an unbelievably “interesting” modern problem.

Marriage: A Tabernacle of Truth

In reading (and inevitably rereading) David Bentley Hart, I have grown very fond of his explanation of a concept he typically refers to as "difference" within the Trinity, but which might be more familiar to the typical Christian as a theology of relationality or community. (I realize that in making this connection, as with others that will follow, I am being painfully imprecise in a way that would likely infuriate Hart. Nevertheless, because the concept of community is so prevalent in theology at the moment and because I believe that the emphasis on community arises from the same spirit as Hart's stress on the priority of difference I think some profit may be derived from equating the two, if only provisionally for the sake of simplicity.) In contrast to the "perverse and sinful fiction" that is contemporary understanding of personality, the Trinity as dogma demonstrates the absolute priority of difference (and again, I know that the imprecision of my language will not do justice to Hart's theology) against the illusion that a person exists as, in any sense, a self-contained autonomous self. Trinity affirms that relationality is not fundamentally the interaction of independent beings but actually the foundational makeup of Being itself, the essential substance of truth.

To highlight this, Hart makes reference to the analogies used by the early church to comprehend the Trinity. Particularly instructive are the social analogies of the Cappadocian fathers and the psychological analogies of Augustine. Rather than one being more fitting than the other, it is important to realize that both balance each other to create an ineffably distant analogy to the Trinitarian life. The relationality of the Trinity manifests both as an interior reality within the unity God (as in the psychological analogy) and as actual difference manifest in distinct persons (as in the social analogy) - though these persons are always understood in terms of the constant interplay of giving and receiving and giving again.

Thus Hart writes:

As the Son is the true image of the Father, faithfully reflecting him in infinite distance, and as the Spirit forever "prismates" the radiance of God's image into all the beautiful measures of that distance, one may speak of God as a God who is, in himself, always somehow analogous; the coincidence in God of mediacy and immediacy, image and difference, is the "proportion" that makes every finite interval a possible disclosure - a tabernacle - of God's truth.

In general, the very nature of humanity can be understood as one of these tabernacles of God's truth, a window into the infinite Trinitarian reality subsisting in perpetual unity in difference. As with the aforementioned analogies for Trinity, relationality makes up the essential character of all humanities being. There is no need to demonstrate the social nature of the human experience of difference, but Hart argues that even within ourselves there is interior difference. Humans experience themselves within themselves as an "exterior" object. Even in saying "I am..." we necessarily remove ourselves as the speaker, speaking about ourselves as we would an object that could be externally observed. Hart words it better:

...do we really possess identity apart from relation: is not even our "purest" interiority reflexive, knowing and loving itself as expression and recognition, engaged with the world of others through memoria and desire, inward discourse and outward intention (hence the genius of Augustine's "interior" analogies)?

Or consider:

...knowledge and love of neighbor fulfill the soul's velleity toward the world, and so grant each of us that internally constituted "self" that exists only through an engagement with a world of others; but that engagement is only possible only in that the structure of interiority is already "othered" and "othering," in distinct moments of consciousness' inherence in itself.

It was after reading and synthesizing this understanding of the Trinity (infinitely superior to other "community" themed explanations of the Trinity which I have lately been made to read) and its significance for anthropology that I saw an immediate and fantastic application to marriage as understood through the creation accounts. It struck me that marriage is also one such tabernacle of Trinitarian truth in which humans could "at infinite analogical remove" (to borrow from Hart) participate and understand the incomprehensible divine dynamic of difference. The dance - an Orthodox analogy - of experiencing the self as other and incorporating the other into the self without negating its otherness fits neatly into the language of the garden and the creation of woman. Eve is she who was taken from Adam (his rib) and formed into the other but who Adam immediately takes back into himself (as bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh) without ever negating her complimentary nature. The unity in marriage, the ideal unity perhaps inaccessible in this life of sin, is not a unity of purpose or will, not an exterior contract willingly accepted by two autonomous parties but the embracing of the other into the self so that, without negating the difference, there is separation of will or purpose. It is replaced by a unity of giving up self and embracing the other into self.

If this is true, then some of Hart's most beautiful language about the Trinity applies, however equivocally, to the marital relationship as an analogy of the divine life. Marriage is that relationship "of self-oblation according to which each 'I'...is also 'not I' but rather Thou." It is a symphony of mutual joy - the joy of knowing and of loving - which consists of a perpetual self-giving to the different other who is nevertheless self. It is the "fullness of shared love," a perpetual expression of the "dynamism of distinction and unity."

That, I think, is a beautiful image of marriage based analogically on a beautiful image of the Trinity. After all, as Hart reminds, we can always affirm that "God is beautiful: not only that God is beauty or the essence and archetype of beauty, nor even only that God is the highest beauty, but that, as Gregory the Theologian says, God is beauty and also beautiful, whose radiance shines upon and is reflected in his creatures."

Personal vs. Person

In general, in reading Stanley Grenz's Theology for the Community of God I have very often been unimpressed and only rarely disappointed. I did find one rather predictable occasion of unnerving theology, however, in his explanation of the personhood of the Holy Spirit. Grenz is part of that venerable tradition of Western theologians whose reductionist pneumatology equates the Holy Spirit to the bond of love between the Father and the Son. This is, so far as I'm concerned, an essentially binitarian view of God where the two person of Father and Son constitute God with the Spirit as an unintended consequence of their relationship. David Bentley Hart is more generous when dealing with the tradition in general. He writes:

There is a long, predominantly Western tradition of speaking of the Spirit as the vinculum caritatis between Father and Son, which - if taken to mean that in the divine life the indiscerptibility of love and knowledge is such that God's generation and procession enfold one another, the Spirit acting as the bond of love between Father and Son, the Son as the bond of knowledge between the Father and Spirit, the Father being the source of both - is a good and even necessary term. But it can also be misleading, in various ways: as Orthodox theologians occasionally worry, it can give the appearance that the Spirit is not irreducibly "personal" as Father and Son.

Correctly understood, however, it does none of this; and it depicts the Spirit as not simply the love of Father and Son, but also everlastingly the differentiation of that love, the third term, the outward, "straying," prodigal second intonation of that love.

Whatever the merit may be of Hart's evaluation of the tradition in general (and stricken as I am by intellectual hero worship, I doubt I could ever flatly disagree with him), Grenz's pneumatology seems to fall far short of Hart's "correctly understood" application of the tradition. Instead, Grenz sums his position up thus:

The personhood of the Spirit arises from the personal character of God as well. The love that binds the Father and the Son is the essence of the one God, for "God is love." God is also personal. Therefore his essential nature - love - is likewise personal. This essence is also the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who as the "concretization" of that essential divine character must be person.

I would like here to point out merely the most obvious flaw with this line of reasoning: simply because something is person does not mean that it is a person. The adjective "personal" in general usage - and, it would appear to me, in the above usage - means that object of the adjective involves persons. The love of the Father and the Son is personal because it involves the hypostases Father and Son. The love in my marriage is arguably personal on the same grounds, that it involves two (and hopefully only two) persons. By Grenz's logic, this makes the love in my marriage a person in its own right. Grenz argues, and I certainly agree, that God is personal, but it is because he is "constituted" of persons. I likewise agree that his love is personal, but again it is personal because it is "shared" among persons. None of this demands that the love is itself a person distinct from the persons who share the personal love.

In short, simply calling something personal does not logically demonstrate that it is a person. PC owners everywhere can sleep easy tonight.

Knowing God...in the Biblical Sense

More than any of my very outspoken and radical stances, my belief about the suprarational nature of God (or the "illogicalness" of God if you prefer) has caused the most controversy. As an ardent proponent of non-resistant pacifism and "Christian anarchy," and an equally outspoken opponent of therapeutic and eugenic abortion, I find it somewhat odd that the simple and somewhat esoteric assertion that God could make A equal not A should engender the most antagonism toward me. (For previous posts, see my response to Ron Highfield and Barton W. Stone.) I would like to think that somehow people sense the inherent threat to their worldview that comes from admitting that God is not constrained by logic. On the one hand, atheists have objected, I feel, because they know that a God which cannot be logically assaulted cannot be assaulted. On the other hands, Christians have objected because their theology and, more critically in some ways, their biblical hermeneutic is based on the supremacy of logic. (Interestingly, through the influence of John Behr I can no longer understand why our biblical hermeneutic is not founded primarily on the supremacy of Christ.) There is something frightening about the possibility that we might not be able to put God in any box at all, not even the box of logic. There is an understandable anxiety about the fact that the Creator may not be able to be circumscribed and thereby made impotent by the creation.

Nevertheless, I firmly believe this to be the case. I would gladly argue the point for the rest of my life using nothing but rhetoric, existential appeals, and unaccompanied quotes from church fathers, theologians, and even, strangely, rationalist philosophers. Yet, I feel compelled to address the question biblically, in part because I know that I can never convince anyone in my own movement without making direct appeal to the Bible, and then only through the preferred hermeneutic of Baconian induction. Conveniently, regardless of how I feel about the ultimate validity of the strict application of logic as a hermeneutical tool, even when all the instances of divine revelation are lined up neatly for the reader, the God of illogic is revealed and vindicated. That is, in part and crudely, what I propose to do here.

The Bible is replete with stories of God's self-revelation to humanity. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that the Bible is the story of the history of humanity coming to know God. If I had the time and inclination, I could make an exhaustive list of all theophanic activity in Scripture, and I am confident that my conclusion would be the same. I would gladly demonstrate that no one in Scripture arrived at God rationally. Each was called by God apart from the powers of his or her own intellect. Moreover, it would be a pleasure to show that these callings and the regular inbreaking of God into reality was more often explicitly contrary to logic rather than in line with it. I do not, however, have the time or inclination.

So let it suffice to examine the text more generally with special attention paid to a representative example: Moses and the burning bush. With the arguable exceptions of Adam and Eve and the disciples at Mount Tabor, no one experienced a more direct revelation of God than did Moses. He heard God's voice directly and frequently. More importantly, he would even "see" God at one point in his life. For all the spiritual intimacy typified in David or the faith typified in Abraham, no one compares to Moses in terms of direct personal contact.

The burning bush, moreover, as the beginning of the long and close connection of God with Moses represents a particularly potent example to demonstrate the irrationality of God and His self-revelation. It is not merely that Moses did not discover God after contemplating the logical inevitability of a supreme being. It is not enough that Moses encountered God rather than deducing His presence. Moses experienced God in a way that was supremely irrational: a bush which while on fire was not consumed. The experience of God was not merely overwhelming within the bounds of reason but violated the principle of reasons which govern existence. Modern science only serves to elucidate this story by highlighting its blatant idiocy. Fire, we know, is no independent thing, merely the visible byproduct of the process of rapid oxidation. In other words, there is no fire without consumption since fire is itself only the tangible product of consumption. A fire that does not burn anything is an impossible contradiction, a square-circle right in the Bible.

Hallelujah to the impossible contradiction. This is the God of Israel, the violator of reality and the defier of the "laws" of reason, the precepts of logic. This is the God we see manifest throughout the Bible. The God who parts the waters, who turns water into blood, who turns water into wine, who turns water bitter, who makes water come from a rock, who walks on water, who destroys the world with water, and redeems the world with water. Sometimes the sun stops. Sometimes the earth swallows people up. Sometimes storms quiet. Sometimes food multiplies. Sometimes people raise up from the dead.

That last one is my favorite, if for no other reason than I believe I will get to experience it myself.

We do not grasp God logically in the same way that I do not understand my love for my wife logically. Even if we concede that science can exhaustively explain my love for my wife in neuro-chemical terms (and I think this would be unnecessarily generous), I do not understand my love for her as biological. My love for her is experienced irrationally. In the same way, even though some may delude themselves into believing that they may approach God through unadulterated logic, humanity does not understand God rationally but existentially, and even then as an irrational experience. We do not believe that seventy-two mathematicians went into seventy-two different rooms and emerged seventy-two days later all holding identical translations of Euclid's Elements into Koine. We do not believe that 318 logicians made the trek to Nicaea in order to confirm as orthodoxy that A =/= ¬ A. If we believe the tradition (and I see no reason not to), then we believe that seventy-two Jews, contrary to all reasonable expectations, produced identical translations of the highly irrational stories just outlined and that 318 bishops assembled at Nicaea to confirm the radically illogical orthodoxy that A = ¬ A.

John Locke was confused to speak of the reasonableness of Christianity and his confusion is like an epidemic in the Christian consciousness. We worship the reasonableness of Christianity and the logic of its rational God like an idol. With all the trouble caused by the biblical anthropomorphisms of a God who speaks and walks, with hands and eyes and a mouth, there is no more perilous anthropomorphism than the rash assumption that God is logical and reveals Himself logically. By insisting that God must conceive of reality as humanity does, must interact with creation as humanity does, and must operate within the same binding strictures that humanity does we come closer to making God over in our image than if we were to insist He had hands. In fact, I am ready now to confess that it is easier for me to suggest that God may have hands than to insist that He must be logical. The former speaks only of the possibilities open to an unfettered deity while the other is the supreme fetter which ties Him down and make Him little more than an unspeakably powerful wizard in a children's story.

The God of the Bible does not behave logically and people do not arrive at Him rationally. It is, therefore, quite inappropriate as far as I'm concerned to suggest either that God is the solution at the end of a metaphysical equation or that God is bound in any sense by the mathematics that produce such equations. If God is real, and He is, He necessarily transcends logic, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than His activity in the world as recorded in Scripture.

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.

The God of the Square-Circle

Can God make a square-circle? The standard response is “Of course not,” since that would be a logical contradiction. Here is Ron Highfield’s response in his Restoration Quarterly Article “The Problem with the ‘Problem of Evil’”:

When we say “God cannot do a logical contradiction,” we are not placing limits on God; we are removing them…One can illustrate this principle by analyzing the statement “God cannot create a square-circle.” This statement does not limit God because the term “square-circle” refers to nothing at all, a “non-entity.” The term “square-circle” might as well be gibberish.

That seems logical, right? Yes it does, and that, I suggest, is precisely why it is wrong. Highfield’s argument is logical and a “square-circle” is in fact a logical contradiction, an idea we cannot even truly imagine with any concreteness. This proves, very definitively that beings which are bound by logic cannot create or even conceive of something quite so absurd as a square-circle. But in the formulation of that assertion lies the flaw in extrapolating it to God.

Highfield very bravely asserts that “logical contradictions do not limit God” without analyzing his presupposition that God must be logical, a presupposition which might be just as easily rephrased as “God is bound by logic.” In spite of openly rejecting anthropocentric conceptions of reality, Highfield falls prey to his own critique when he argues that God must be bound by logic since, to humanity, “square-circle might as well be gibberish.”

I can anticipate Highfield’s response to such a criticism by his connection of logic with the “nature of God.” If that is the case, then my protest is essentially vain. If God is in fact necessarily logical in His nature, then Highfield has the high ground. The real question then becomes now whether or not God can create a square-circle but whether or not God is logical by nature. I submit that He is not.

On a speculative level, the question of what logic is can serve to demonstrate this. Logic from a human standpoint is merely a descriptive practice of how the world as we experience it works. Words like “circle” and “square” are terms which we have created to describe observable phenomena, to conceptualize and categorize creation. From a religious standpoint, it may be argued that logic is our innate, God-given ability to interact with a creation which He has ordered to be understood by His creatures, but this falls dramatically short of asserting that God is by nature logical. It is sufficient to point out that God is benevolent to explain logic, because the definition of a creation without logic is one in which all rational beings are in a constant state of crippling confusion. Logic is a gift which permits functional interaction with reality. That God could not have created an illogical world is most properly explained by His Goodness and not because He is, in any sense, Logic.

But speculative arguments are, at the most, speculative. A look at the nature of God which is commonly embraced by Christians will be an even more potent proof that God is not logical by nature. Consider the paradoxical nature of almost all theology proper. For example, is the existence of an entity which is indivisibly one and equally three any less of a logical contradiction than a square-circle? Anyone who has endeavored to create a material analogy for the Trinity can testify that all which we experience, even in our minds, is unquestionably inadequate. The Trinity is no more an egg than it is three phases of water, and each of these analogies, pressed to its logical conclusion leads inevitably to the grossest heresy. Take as another obvious (or at least it should have been) example the Incarnation which presents logical contradictions on a number of levels. The most obvious is the mathematical absurdity of a savior who is 100% God and 100% man without mixture and without becoming thus 200% existent. Consider a God whose definition includes very absolutely the contention that He is uncircumscribable and is nevertheless totally circumscribed in a human, the infinite becomes finite, the immortal mortal, the eternal temporal, etc. The Incarnation is a tour de force of logical contradictions.

In the words of Vladimir Lossky: “These are not the rational notions which we formulate, the concepts with which our intellect constructs a positive science of the divine nature; they are rather images or ideas intended to guide us and to fit our faculties for the contemplation of that which transcends all understanding.” Continuing to take my cue from Lossky, the very truth of God’s suprarational character is the reason for the constant expression of dogma in the form of antinomy.

To make God logical by His nature does perhaps more than merely limit Him; it may limit Him in the most profound way possible. The suggestion that God conforms to logic, a human mode of conception, is to essentially assert that He is fully knowable. If God is logical, then He is comprehensible, and if He is comprehensible then He is circumscribable by the human mind. Even if this is accepted only in theory and never in pre-eschatological practice (as in many minds during the height of Scholasticism in the West), God has been debased in perhaps the grossest way possible. He has been made in some sense less than His creation, by suggesting that He can in any way be contained within it. If we do not fully know God it is a matter of circumstance and not of possibility. God is essentially containable, and therefore necessarily not infinite. Quite the opposite of what Highfield claims, the suggestion that God cannot make a “square-circle” actually has imbedded in it the most profound limitation on God that humanity can imagine: God is limited to our imagination of him, our ability to comprehend Him. (And if I may deliberately be alarmist, the distance is not so great between the assertion that God cannot exceed our imagination of Him and the belief that He is in fact the product of our imagination.)

In Highfield’s defense, I think the flaw in this case is more a product of the analogy chosen than the actual point He is arguing. He parallels the suggestion that God might make a square-circle to the suggestion that He might “lie, die, or be deceived.” Ignoring for a moment the most fundamental Christian belief that God did die, Highfield’s point seems to be that God cannot do that which limits. In other words, omnipotence precludes impotence. The more appropriate example that Highfield could have chosen is the old standard, “Can God make a rock so big that even He can’t move it.” Anselm answered this kind of question centuries ago (in one of the rare instance where I find myself closely aligned to Western Scholasticism). God making a rock so large he could not move it is not an act of power but of impotence. The suggestion that omnipotence requires that He can self-limit confuses omnipotence with the ability to do anything. They are certainly not the same, and on these grounds Anselm also rejects such impotent behaviors as lying or being deceived.

Those the two analogies (the square-circle and the rock) seem very similar, the questions they address are vastly different. The latter only address whether or not omnipotence, properly understood, precludes impotence. Certainly it does. The former, quite unrelated, treats whether or not God is bound by logic. There is no reason to assert that He is, and that assertion, in fact, may be the most profound limit which the human mind could conceive for God. In the final analysis, I must agree with Lossky that “the only rational notion which we can have of God will still be that of His incomprehensibility. Consequently, theology must be not so much a quest of positive notions about the divine being as an experience which surpasses all understanding.”

Immutability: You're Doing it Wrong

I recently read a pair of articles for work that concerned prayer and the immutability of God. Each undertook to answer the question: “If God is immutable, in what sense does he answer our prayers?” Reed Lessing (“Pastor, Does God Really Respond to My Prayers?”) opposes the doctrines of classical theism to open theism on the question of God’s immutability and inclines in favor of open theism. In his opinion, a dynamic God, a God who can be changed by our prayers, is greater than the static God of classical theism. Without abandoning completely classical conceptions of God, Lessing (citing Bruce Ware) proposes that we posit a relational mutability in God which will allow Him to be responsive to our prayers. “Constancy is, therefore, a better description for God as opposed to unbending immutability,” in his opinion.

William D. Barrick (“The Openness of God: Does Prayer Change God?”) takes the opposite approach, concluding that prayer actually changes the petitioner, not God. Anything which God appears to have done in response to human petition is merely something that He had predetermined to do all along. God’s supremacy positively forbids any suggestion that He might be mutable and thus susceptible to persuasion by our prayers. Barrick concludes, “Indeed, if man is capable of changing the mind of God, then it might be argued that man knows more about governing this world than God.”

So which author is correct? Neither. They are both wrong and not simply in the conclusions they draw (since both opinions appear to be solidly rooted in the biblical evidence that each marshaled to his defense). More importantly, they haven’t even asked the right question, so it should be expected that they cannot come to a conclusive answer. In those much beloved (at least by me) words of Hans van Campenhausen: “It is the wrong question to ask, and therefore, as one might expect, has no right answer.”

These men, and countless others before them, have artificially integrated the question of whether or not God answers prayers with the theological concept of immutability. In fact, God’s immutability can be accepted or (if one is so inclined) rejected completely apart from what one decides about God’s response to our prayers. In fact, I am of the opinion that God is both immutable and receptive to our prayers, a position which both men would undoubtedly consider self-refuting. But why?

God is immutable in that He does not change, and, defined that way, it is understandable that people should then extrapolate that God is immutable in that He does not change what He has predetermined to do. Unfortunately that confuses a change in what God will do with a change in who God is. God does not grow, does not learn, is never added to, or subtracted from, and in this sense He is unchanging. The immutability of God found critical use in the fourth century trinitarian controversies as a defense against the Arian belief that there was when the Son was not. If there was a time when there was no Son, then there was a time when God was not Father. He was lacking in that key attribute of his nature. Since God can never be said to have been lacking in anything, the Son must always have been with the Father.

Regardless of whether or not you accept that logic for the Son’s co-eternality, it assumes an understanding of immutability that is ultimately concerned with protecting God from any accusation of deficiency, or capability of acquiring deficiency. If God is said to grow, then there was a time when God was not yet fully formed. If God is said to learn, there was a time when God was in some respect ignorant. If God is said to be added to or subtracted from, then there was a time when God was deficient. Suggestions such as these were intolerable to early Christians (and to me for that matter), and thus immutability becomes an inviolable part of God’s character.

It would be an abuse of the above doctrine, it should be fairly obvious, to suggest that to give to humanity when He is asked is to somehow violate the immutability of God and require that He is changing. Just the opposite, the changes which are often seen in Scripture as a result of human petition are an affirmation of what we believe to be the consistent nature of God. In Amos 7, for example, each time God promises calamity for His people and relents of that decision at Amos’ pleading, those changes (and they are real changes in God’s activity) are not changes in who God is. They reveal who God is, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. No less, when He refuses to relent, that shows forth His just character in no way betraying His former “repentance.” That God is responsive to the human condition is an essential aspect of God’s character, one that thankfully cannot change. It is indispensable to the personal character of God (and we do believe that God is God-in-three-persons).

For my part, I see the position of “classical” theism (gross as that misnomer is) that rejects God’s receptiveness to human petition as a perverse form of deism. Instead of the world being a watch that the Watchmaker has set in motion and left to run, God is Himself a watch that He has set and allowed to run, totally unreceptive, totally unresponsive. God becomes no better than an impersonal object which we futilely hope will respond to our needs, like insane people trying to have a conversation with a rock.

The solution is not, however, to throw immutability out with the bathwater. The question of immutability simply has nothing to do with whether or not God answers our prayers. Tying the two together does little more than betray the manifest stupidity of the modern theologian, or at least the historical ignorance. As a concluding analogy – and certainly a flawed one, as all analogies drawn between God and the imagers of God are – let me pose this question: if I am driving home with my wife, and she asks me if we can stop at the grocery story instead of going straight home, do I cease to be me by changing our course? I submit that who I am includes receptivity to my wife’s needs, not just as an accident of my human mutability but as an essential expression of my character. Only when I am no longer in any way receptive to the desires of my wife have I truly and irrevocably changed.

Apologia Apatheia

My thoughts here are largely in response to this post, though I hope that they have value on their own as well.

It has been suggested that the classical doctrine of impassibility is an assertion of the emotionlessness of God. I reject this, both as a depiction of the history of dogma and as a theological assertion. While it may be said that the post-scholastic, Western conception of impassibility necessitates a God without emotion, the historical doctrine of impassibility, even the basis of that Western doctrine, is not directly related to the ability of God to feel.

The doctrine of God's impassibility (formulated, as was almost all early doctrine, in Greek) regarded His apatheia (impassibility or dispassion), that is His lack of pathos (passion). As with most theological discussion, the language here took on a specialized meaning so that passion cannot simply be equated with emotion (which was never the meaning of "pathos" to begin with). Therefore, to truly understood what is meant in an authentically classical definition of impassibility, one must first determine the classical defition of that which impassibilty says God is without: pathos.

Kallistos Ware, in his introduction to John of Sinai's Ladder of Divine Ascent, writes that passions are "regarded as the contranatural expression of fallen sinfulness." Pathos represents the human perversion their emotions, their natural impulses. Pathos are the sinful impulses of a fallen creation. If a direct relationship to emotion is necessary, then passion can be said to be our subjugation to our corrupted emotions rather than our domination and purification of them. Anger, for example, is pathos not because it is an emotion but because it has been perverted to ungodly ends. Desire is a pathos not because it is an emotion but because it has been coopted by humanity for the purpose of indulgence. Pathos is by its very definition sin.

Impassibility then becomes an ethical imperative, rooted in the nature of God, which is intended for humans. God governs His pure emotion rather than being governed by them, so humanity must transfigure and govern their emotions. The impassibility of God is a goal for man to achieve; in Ware's words "...it is a reaffirmation of the pure and natural impulses of our soul and body. It connotes not repression but reorientation, not inhibition but freedom; having overcome the passions, we are free to be our true selves, free to love others, free to love God. Dispassion, then, is no mere mortification of the passions but their replacement by a new and better energy."

Clearly passion refers to something other than the emotive aspect of the human soul, as the fathers vigorously affirm the God given virtue of emotionality:

"Hatred against the demons contributes greatly to our salvation and helps our growth in holiness." Evagrius Ponticus, "On Discrimination," 9.

Evagrius also writes that one should experience, while fasting, the emotions of joy "at the blessings that await the righteous" and fear of resurrection and "that fearful and awesome judgment-seat," because "in this way you will have the means for helping others and for mortifying the passions of your body" ("On Asceticism and Stillness")

"We should be afraid of God in the way we fear wild beasts. I have seen men go out to plunder, having no fear of God but being brought up short somewhere at the sound of dogs, an effect that fear of God could not achieve in them." John Climacus, "Ladder of Divine Ascent"

The dichotomy between emotion and passion is evident in Diadochos' contrast of real joy (an emotion) and counterfeit joy (a diabolical passion): "When we experience things in this manner, we can be sure that it is the energy of the Holy Spirit within us. For when the soul is completely permeated with that ineffable sweetness, at that moment it can think of nothing else, since it rejoices with uninterrupted joy. But if at that moment the intellect conceives any doubt or unclean thought, and if this continues in spite of the fact that the intellect calls on the holy name...then it should realize that the sweetness it experiences is an illusion of grace, coming from the deceiver with a counterfeit joy. Through this joy, amorphous and disordered, the devil tries to lead the soul into an adulterous union with himself."

Passion then is not simply equated to emotion but is the corruption of and domination by emotion. This, at least, is the testimony of the Church Fathers.

(This, I might add, is a view of passion and impassibility consistent with the Bible, if not the exclusive biblical view. While apatheia is never used in the New Testament, the three instances of pathos and its forms are all negative leading one to conclude that the absence of passion is a virtue. The three occurrences of pathos, moreover, never tie pathos to emotion strictly but always in some sense to control by passion as opposed to self-control: 1 Thess 4:3-5: "It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God;" Rom 1:26: "For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions;" Col 3:5: "Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil lust, and greed, which amounts to idolatry." Notably God is never described as being "passible" since pathos is a sinful state.)

Therefore, in its original formulation, impassibility is not a feature of the divine distinct from humanity. Instead, it is the shared possession of God and His creature in its natural state. Impassibility is a mandate for humanity in an attempt to once again recapture our created purity, our image of God. "Blessed dispassion raises the poor mind from earth to heaven, raises the beggar from the dunghill of passion." (John Climacus) It requires that people not be subject to their pathos (sinful impulses) but that purified emotion should be subject to them in order that they may be subject to a dispassionate God. Quotes from a few fathers should suffice to demonstrate that this is the case.

"When the intellect rescues the soul's senses from the desires of the flesh and imbues them with dispassion [apatheia], the passions shamelessly attack the soul, trying to hold its senses fast in sin; but if the intellect then continually calls upon God in secret, He, seeing all this, will send His help and destroy all the passions at once." Isaiah the Solitary, "On Guarding the Intellect," 14.

John of Carpathia parallels sin and passion: "Once certain brethren, who were always ill and could not practice fasting, said to me: 'How is it possible for us without fasting to rid ourselves of the devil and the passions?' To such people we would say: you can destroy and banish what is evil, and the demons that suggest this evil to you, not only by abstaining from food, but by calling with all your heart on God." ("Texts for the Monks of India," 68)

More telling still is the exposition of impassibility/dispassion (both apatheia) by Ilias the Presbyter in his "Gnomic Anthology," I.71-74, where he intimately connects passion to sin and impassibility to sinlessness: "Pasionateness is the evil matter of the body...the self-indulgent man is close to the impassioned man; and the man of impassioned craving to the self-indulgent man. Far from all three is the dispassionate man. The impassioned man is strongly prone to sin in thought, even though for a time he does not sin outwardly...the man of impassioned craving is given over freely or, rather, servilely, to the various modes of sinning. The dispassionate man is not dominated by any of these degrees of passion...Dispassion is established through remembrance of God."

Gregory Palamas notes that the goal of ascetic practice is the attainment of impassibility, that is to no longer be "dominated by passionate emotions:" "In every case, those who practice true mental prayer must liberate themselves from the passions, and reject any contact with objects which obstruct it, for in this way they are able to acquire undisrupted and pure prayer...for the body's capacity to sin must be mortified" ("The Hesychast Method of Prayer," II.ii.6).

In addition to an ethical goal for humanity restored to its pure created state, there is another function of the impassibility of God in the Fathers. The insistence on impassibility is a tacit affirmation of the incomprehensibility of God, part of a theology of negation which says that God is no confined to our categories of emotionality. Therefore, the kataphatic assertion that God loves/hates/rejoices/burns with anger is both accepted and countered with the apophatic assertion that God is impassible, and this in turn should be accepted and then met with the even more apophatic assertion that God is beyond impassibility. Nikitas Stithatos expresses the paradox in "On Spiritual Knoweldge, Love, and the Perfection of Living," 1: "God is dispassionate Intellect, beyond every intellect and beyond every form of dispassion." [And as a way of cheating to further prove my previous point about the ethical implications of this, he immediately continues:] "If on account of your purity these qualities have been bestowed on you and are richly present in you, then that within you which accords with the image of God has been safely preserved and you are now a son of God guided by the Holy Spirit; for all who are guided by the Spirit of God are sons of God."

Thus, when Anselm formulates what becomes the "classical" doctrine of impassibility for the West, he is not truly reiterating what has always been held by the church universal. Instead, he is expressing and justifying what he believes has been taught in proto-scholastic terms that will take hold in the West. His sentiment is rooted neither in the sinlessness nor the incomprehensibility of God expressed by the fathers who preceded him:

But how are You at once both merciful and impassible? For if You are impassible You do not have any compassion*; and if You have no compassion Your heart is not sorrowful from compassion with the sorrowful, which is what being merciful is. But if you are not merciful whence comes so much consolation for the sorrowful?

How then are you merciful and not merciful, O Lord, unless it be that You are merciful in relation to us and not in relation to Yourself? In fact, You are [merciful] according to our way of looking at things and not according to Your way. For when You look upon us in our misery it is we who feel the effect of Your mercy, but You do not experience the feeling. Therefore You are both merciful because you save the sorrowful and pardon sinners against You; and You are not merciful because You do not experience any feeling of compassion for misery. (Proslogion, 8)

In fact, just the opposite, this view of God's impassibility is motivated by our ability categorize God, the opposite intention of the original proponents of impassibility. Rejecting these scholastic trends that were creeping into Eastern theology, Gregory Palamas writes:

By examining the nature of sensible things, these people have arrived at a certain concept of God, but not at a conception truly worthy of Him and appropriate to His blessed nature...wrapped up in this mindless and foolish wisdom and unenlightened education, they have calumniated both God and nature. (Triads, I.1.18)

A good formal theology will always be fundamentally apophatic, and thus affirms that God transcends all human categorization including form and emotion, but the motivation is something quite different than a scholastic understanding of impassibility. The beautiful paradox of God is that we can at one time affirm that He transcends all emotional categorization and at the same time truly declare that we experience His love: not feigned love or effects which are analogous to the effects of love but love that is true and pure, the perfect expression of how He created His creatures to experience love. When true impassibility is applied to God it is first and foremost a defense of God's sinlessness, since pathos is a patristic term which refers to our contranatural impulses (which all ought to agree are absent in God). From there, impassibilty may be employed as an apophatic category which rejects the finitude of God, even from being restricted truly into the category of impassibility. What impassibility can never be is an assertion that we have an unfeeling God, indifferent to the plight of His creation and incapable of interacting with it in any genuinely personal way. Neither Scripture nor the Fathers who formulated the doctrine of impassibility necessitate this, and all good sense seems to prevail against it. Most importantly, the testimony of the Incarnation positively precludes it, or else the sorrow of Jesus in the garden and the anger in the temple are instances of the divine succombing to the human rather than the human conforming to the divine, something which is particularly untenable.

See also: Appendix to the Apology

*As almost a curiosity, it is worth noting that Anselm's problem here is undoubtedly partly linguistic. In Latin compassion and passion clearly have the same root, the Latin pati for "to suffer." A Greek would never have seen dispassion as opposed to compassion, since in Greek pathos forms no part of the etymology of either mercy (eleos) or compassion (oiktirmos).

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?

If I may be deliberately oversimple for a moment...

Erring on the side of simplicity is not exactly my trademark, but if I may deliberately oversimplify for a moment: Christianity is, at its core, the faithful affirmation of the paradoxical. This is clearest in Christianity's two most critical dogmas. The Christian must affirm that:

• God is one, and God is three.

• Jesus was fully human, and Jesus was fully divine.

Those dogmas not only do not make sense, they seem to be deliberately contradictory. And why not? The closer one looks at Christianity, the more it becomes obvious that the faith revels in contradiction, takes supernal delight in constant paradox.

God makes exceedingly great demands on His followers. After all, "small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." Not everyone who says "Lord, Lord" makes the cut. For some people, God demands truly supernatural feats, like passing large even-toed ungulates through pinholes. He tells me that if I am struck, I am not allowed to strike back. He tells me that if my spouse mistreats me, neglects me, and rejects me that I am not allowed to break the bonds of marriage and seek another spouse. He tells me that I cannot indulge the sexual urges He has embedded in me. He tells me that I no longer have any claim to things that I "own," but all are at His disposal. I have to love my enemies, give what I have worked for to those who have not earned it, repress my thirst for pleasure of various kinds, and (perhaps worst of all) give up one day a week to warm a pew.

While affirming the truth of the above, it is impossible to not equally affirm that God makes absolutely no demands of His followers. After all, adoption into God's family is "not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast." God demands absolutely nothing from you. Otherwise it would not be a "gift of God" freely given. The same Lord who says "small is the gate" says "my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

It's a paradox, and it is by no means unique. I am called to love my enemies, but also to hope in the coming vindication of a just God. I am called to deny this world in favor of the one to come, but also to work actively in the world. I believe that God is immortal and that he died. I believe that He works in all things and that He preserves the freedom of man's will. I believe that He is self-sufficient and that He yearns for my love in a way similar to the way I yearn for His love.

And if I may go even further down this path of oversimplification, I think many of the controversies that have embroiled the church could be solved if only we would remember the devout faith of the early church in the paradoxical nature of ultimate truth. In the course of my recent readings, I have seen every manner of human contrivance conspiring to rip apart the church. Only in abandoning the strictures of human reason can we adequately express the truth of a God Who we must universally affirm transcends human categorization. The best way to express this ineffable divine mystery is in silence. Since, however, there no virtue more lacking in theologians than silence it is best to embrace our Christian heritage and express the great Truth in sets of paradoxical truths.

"The divine nature exceeds each finite good..."

I admit before I start that I am grasping to understand what I read even as I read it and still as I write this, so I beg your pardon for however half formed are the ideas that I am about to present. They are my reflections upon reading an essay by David Bentley Hart, “The Mirror of the Infinite” (which I will quote at length).

Solid comprehension of how the Trinity functions both as a unity and a triunity has plagued Christian thought since the beginning of systematics. We have attacked it with analogy and discourse, but all to often the result is ultimately frustration. Any sense of satisfaction we gain, as with so many of our answers to the most pressing questions (I think particularly at the moment of Anselm’s satisfaction at having finally “proved” God), is always turned to despair upon deeper consideration of the problem. My aim is certainly not to solve once and for all the understanding of how God exists as both three and as one. Instead, I want to address a possible explanation for why we do not and perhaps cannot every fully wrap our minds around how God exists in community and personal unity.

This quote from Dr. Hart originally caught my interest, initially for its complex beauty but immediately after for its provocative content:

“Our being is synthetic and bounded; just as (again to borrow a later theological vocabulary) the dynamic inseparability but incommensurability in us of essence and existence is an ineffably distant analogy of the dynamic identity of essence and existence in God, the constant pendulation between inner and outer that constitutes our identities is an ineffably distant analogy of that boundless bright diaphaneity of coinherence, in which the exteriority of relations and interiority of identity in God are one, each Person wholly reflecting and containing and indwelling each of the others.”

Now certainly it is not a new thought that the nature of God should be reflected in the nature of man. After all, it was the Cappadocians who famously drew analogies between the community of man and the community of God. Such a social understand of God’s nature its relation to the human desire for community is actually quite fashionable now. Less recognized, but no less novel, is the realization that this analogy is “ineffably distant” from the nature of God. When one tries to understand the triunity of God as somehow analogous to three coessential humans, the theological fallout is mind boggling. This tends toward the conclusion that the community of God is so distant from ourselves that not only can we not use humanity as an analogy for understanding God, but we also cannot use our understanding of God’s community as normative for the “ineffably distant” reality of human community.

And, yet, I think both of those conclusions may be overturned when we understand precisely why it is that we are so ineffably distant in our reality from God. Dr. Hart describes the community of God:

“Surely this progression – from the divine nature’s infinite source, through God’s gnosis of himself, to the “conversion” of that recognition into delighted love, into agape – is a description of how the one God, even in his infinite simplicity, eternally conceives his equally infinite image, knowing himself perfectly in his Logos, and so eternally “wills” himself an equally infinite love, so completing his Trinitarian life in the movement of the Spirit.”

Knowledge and love, logos and agape if you will, are the communal acts of God. Through self-knowledge and self-love (in the words of Gregory of Nyssa about whom the article is written “He desires what he possesses, and possesses what he desires”) each Person not only knows Itself and loves Itself but knows the Others, without qualification, and loves the Others, without qualification. In so doing, every movement, every aspect of His being, every inclination of His nature is a total unity which is utterly indivisible. For where there is no distinction of will or knowledge, and where the “aporia that theology much inevitably confront” is solved by seeing God “in terms of the order of relations that distinguish the Persons from one another ‘causally’”, we are left with a totally satisfying, though no less incomprehensible, picture of God.

While still beyond human conception, while still necessitating that we stop before God in silent recognition of our ignorance and insufficiency, this revelation is not totally without merit. For not only can we use humanity’s psychology and society as analogies for God’s unity and community, but we can also reap the psycho-social benefits of understanding what separates our nature from closer analogy to God: namely imperfect knowledge of self and others, and imperfect love of self and others. Human psychology is strewn with the victims of inadequate self-knowledge and self-esteem (or love), and certainly every mental health professional would encourage people to develop both a healthy love of self and a healthy knowledge of one’s own person. Yet, do we ever think that in doing so, we better embody the image of God and more closely mimic what it is to people transformed into his Incarnate Image? The same applies for society. How often do we hear it preached how far a little understanding of one’s neighbor can go towards a peaceful, harmonious, and productive society? Nowhere do I hear, however, about how making the effort to know one another is actually pursuit of divinity, which itself is the perfect exemplar of what it means for Persons to be in fully disclosed harmony with one another.

So while the sinfulness of humanity and the limitations of our nature will always prevent any dramatic ascent towards the divine nature, the perfectness of that nature understood through the ineffably distant analogy of what we know of our own nature (created as it is in His image) can serve as a motivator for the personal and interpersonal transformation of God’s people into God’s likeness. I will leave you with a final quote from Dr. Hart, who clearly expresses his thoughts better than I do:

“We waver between these two analogical orders at an infinite distance from their supereminent truth; and obviously the orders are not separate: knowledge and love of neighbour fulfill the soul’s velleity towards the world, and so grant each of us that internally constituted ‘self’ that exists only through an engagement with a world of others…”