The Feast of the Transfiguration

The Transfiguration is one of the most critical, glorious, enigmatic texts in the Gospel story, not to mention one of the most neglected. I sat in an Episcopal church yesterday morning, and no mention was made of the upcoming feast at all. (Labor Day, on the other hand, is going to be a big to-do.) The Catholics didn't even decide to uniformly celebrate it until the fifteenth century. Only the Orthodox seem to have afforded the story and its commemoration the appropriate place of importance in their corporate life.

Perhaps it's not as sexy as the various smaller, less central passages about sexual ethics or gender economics. It's certainly not as gory as the Passion. But, in spite of its gross inability to satisfy our western lust for sex and violence, the Transfiguration represents a crucial moment in the Christian narrative when God manifests Himself to the world, glorifies His Son, and declares our hope and our promise in Christ. Jesus is revealed for who he truly is, and we glimpse what we will be through conforming ourselves to his likeness.

So, to commemorate the Transfiguration--in addition to eating grapes--consider the following quotes from two great theological masters for whom the Transfiguration was central.

Maximus the Confessor, First Century on Theology, 13-14:

If a man seeks spiritual knowledge, let him plant the foundation of his soul immovably before the Lord, in accordance with God's words to Moses: "Stand here by me." But it should be realized that there are differences among those who stand before the Lord, as is clear from the text, "There are some standing here who will not taste death till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power"...To those who follow him as he climbs the high mountain of his transfiguration he appears in the form of God, the form in which he existed before the world came to be...

When the Logos of God becomes manifest and radiant in us, and his face shines like the sun, then his clothes will also look white. That is to say, the words of the Gospels will then be clear and distinct, with nothing concealed. And Moses and Elijah--the more spiritual principles of the Law and the prophets--will also be present with him.

Gregory Palamas, Triads, I.3.5:

So, when the saints contemplate this divine light within themselves, seeing it by the divinizing communion of the Spirit, through the mysterious visitation of perfecting illuminations--then they behold the garment of their deification, their mind being glorified and filled by the grace of the Word, beautiful beyond measure in his splendor; just as the divinity of the Word on the mountain glorified with divine light the body conjoined to it. For "the glory which the Father gave him," he himself has given to those obedient to him, as the Gospels says, and "He willed that they should be with him and contemplate His glory."

..It is necessarily carried out in a spiritual fashion, for the mind becomes supercelestial, and as it were the companion of him who passed beyond the heavens for our sake, since it is manifestly yet mysteriously united to God, and contemplates supernatural and ineffable visions being filled with all the immaterial knowledge of a higher light. Then it is no longer the sacred symbols accessible to the senses that it contemplates, nor yet the variety of Sacred Scripture that it knows; it is made beautiful by the creative and primordial Beauty, and illumined by the radiance of God.

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

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

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

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

A Day with Ben Witherington: Theosis, Multiform Salvation

The series of lectures that Witherington presented were on ethics, and so it is unsurprising that his focus was on moral aspects of the New Testament. In fact, I would have been annoyed had it been otherwise. After all, I did not come to hear a lecture on the role of the intellect in salvation or on the eschatological hope for life. Unfortunately, Witherington did not merely ignore other aspects of soteriology but actively subordinated them to his moral agenda. After his rejection of theosis as a proper interpretation of 2 Peter 1, Witherington insisted that our participation in the divine nature was a moral participation: a grace-empowered imitation of the divine moral attributes. He spoke of knowledge as a means of understanding those characteristics but not as an area in which we partook of divinity. He explicitly rejected the idea that we should partake of any characteristic of divine being. It is precisely in these areas that I think theosis improves on the deficient Western means of understanding salvation.

Witherington provided me with the pedagogical tool to lay out my opposition to his "moral only" view of participation in God, his ethics-driven view of salvation. He noted that in Scripture there are three predicates for God: God is love, God is life, and God is light. Witherington insisted that the first of these was most critical as it represented the moral character of God. I would suggest that there is a corollary between the way in which salvation grants increase and participation in the characteristics of God and these three predicates.

God is love, and I certainly do not mind Witherington pointing out the critical importance of this affirmation. Salvation does include moral perfection, as it should. Ours is a holy God, a God for Whom love is the highest expressed good. Our experience of the divine is one of love: love in the very act of creation, love in the governance of that creation, and love in the plan of redeeming creation. To encounter the divine is necessarily to be changed into the image of love, to love God and to love neighbor. The entire ethos of the New Testament is constructed on this axis and, if we trust the testimony of Christ, so is the Old Testament. To participate in God requires a holiness which manifests as love and a love which drives holiness. In the process of salvation, God cures us of the disease of sin, cooperates with us in keeping us morally healthy, and finally eliminates the potential for the disease altogether. That is an appropriate, even crucial, understanding of salvation. It is not, however, exhaustive.

God is also life, and life is not a moral characteristic of God. Yet, the most common images for salvation are those of the "new life" and of "eternal life." Unless we view this life as the mere absence of physical death and as a consequence of moral health--which I find to be a shockingly shallow understanding of the "life abundant" that we are promised--we must understand our being given life as being given a divine characteristic which is not moral. Life is a characteristic of being, and in that sense we may speak about it as an "ontological" quality of God (thought I realize how much qualification that would require). Salvation includes not merely a moral perfection and the elimination of evil, but also the elimination of sin's handmaiden, death, and a kind of perfection of our being. Salvation is not merely a process of God helping us to do good and forgiving us when we do evil, it is a an initiation into being good, not in the ethical sense of having good virtues which motivate good actions but in the metaphysical sense of having being which is being perfected by its contact with Being. Unless we view being as a static category which includes both Creator and creature, than we admit that a communion with a transcendent "being" can affect our very being.

Finally, God is light. In this we see that God is Truth and the revealer of truth. The fourteenth century hesychasts spoke of divine light as an object which was seen and the means by which that object was seen and the seeing subject by virtue of the transformative power of the light. This, I believe, is a fuller view of knowledge than Witherington suggests when he speaks of knowledge a means of revealing the moral character of God. Again, Witherington seems to limit knowledge merely to a possible bank of knowable facts. In Scripture, however, what the light exposes is not facts but Truth (a distinction which is both rhetorical and substantial, however trite it may seem). Knowledge is a means of encountering God, of unlocking or decoding the facts which are rationally perceived, and of combating ignorance which is a sinister force in the order of sin and death. Certainly as a part of this, we better understand both the moral and ontological character of God and of our own salvation, but knowledge has merit which transcends the auxiliary function Witherington wants to assign to it. To know is something in itself, provided that we understand knowing in a way that ignores the limitations that science is attempting to artificially impose on knowledge.

However artificial that schema may be, I think it appropriately conveys the point: salvation is comprehensive. When we encounter God, which is itself the means of salvation, the result is not merely moral perfection. It is not "merely" anything. The come into contact with the divine is transformative experience whose ramifications are total. It is perhaps even inappropriate to speak in even so broad of categories of moral, ontological, and epistemological aspects of salvation. In truly apophatic style, it may be best to keep silent as to the true scope of salvation. Certainly, however, a view of salvation which involves only the erasure of sin and the perfection of moral virtue leaves much of the human person unaffected by the intervention of the divine, something that contact with divinity would seem to preclude by its very nature.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Theosis, Vanquishing a Strawman

On the list of doctrines that Witherington took ever so subtle jabs at (so subtle, in fact, that the person sitting next to me in the lecture did not even remember it) was "theosis." I put that in quotes because the doctrine that Witherington opposed was nothing like the doctrine of theosis espoused by the Orthodox Church. Reading 2 Peter 1, Witherington scoffed at those who held to a view of "theosis," people who thought that we would become omniscient, omnipresent, and so on.

Frankly, I can understand why that concept of theosis would be unnerving for Witherington. After all, the Orthodox Church for centuries has worked deliberately to resist any understanding of theosis which would equate divinization with becoming God in any absolute sense. Witherington inexcusably confused taking on divine characteristics as becoming divine absolutes. The Orthodox doctrine of theosis does not allow for people to appropriate the absolute characteristics of God. In fact, it positively precludes it.

The doctrine of theosis is one of perpetual ascent, the expansion of finite beings into an infinite plenitude of God. It doesn't matter to what degree a finite reality grows, it can never fill infinity. The point at which a being reaches omniscience, for example, is the moment at which knowledge ceases to be finite and becomes infinite. Unless you view God's omniscience as merely His comprehensive knowledge (in some way analogous if not identical to our own mode of knowing) of things extant rather than as His infinite capacity to contain everything as cause, there is no reason to assume that without a dramatic ontological shift that the finite human should ever expand to a point where he has reached complete knowledge. Complete knowledge is not something absent in humanity merely from some lack of information. Absolute knowledge requires an absolute being who transcends knowledge and knowing as cause.

Theosis never allows for humanity to make that transcendent leap from finitude to infinitude. In fact, the idea of perpetual ascent absolutely excludes the possibility that we should ever arrive at an absolute. To be saved as creatures, we must remain creatures even as we are united with divinity. Notice the language is of "union" and not of "absorption." Perhaps Witherington had in view the doctrines of the Latter Day Saints, in which people themselves become deities, or of certain forms of Buddhism, in which people are absorbed into a universal Nothingness. That is not, however, "theosis" properly speaking. Theosis has its type in the Incarnate Word: a union of two natures without confusion, in which both retain their essential characteristics. (This Christological aspect of theosis is a problem to be dealt with later.)

Witherington in his brief and subtle critiques of theosis only managed to display and undo his own misconception of the doctrine. Theosis has always rejected the confusion of deity with humanity. It has nothing to fear from accusations that it will lead to omniscience, omnipresence, or really omni-anything in the way that God possesses those qualities.

Salvation: Embracing a Means Without an End

In the course of an unrelated Internet search, I stumbled upon an interesting entry in another blog. The poster argues, with notable acuity, that positing a creative consciousness does not solve the problem of human purpose. In fact, he asserts, it leads inevitably to purposelessness. I agree with much of his reasoning, but there is one flaw which seems to undermine his ultimate conclusion. It is here:

If the extension of the question of purpose continues on in an infinite chain of reasons that all depend one each other, then there is no motivation for everything as that would imply an end to the chain of reasons.

I do not object, necessarily, to the suggestion that an infinite chain of dependent reasoning is flawed. I certainly doubt anyone would argue along the lines of his example that the creative consciousness created us like a nail to attach to boards and that the creative consciousness needed to nail the boards together to build a cosmic treehouse and that...ad infinitum. There is, however, an underlying problem with the reasoning, particularly the way the poster views concepts like "purpose."

The warrant for the entire argument seems to be that purpose can only exist if there is an end and that end is not fulfilled in creation. I would argue that the idea of an infinite being (which, for the sake of argument, we will assume the creative consciousness is lest we need to posit a further creative consciousness above each temporary one) precludes any ultimately finite ends. The purposes of creation would need to be infinite to correspond to the one purposing them. More importantly still, the suggestion that an endless purpose lacks motivational force seems to be radically disconnected from the more basic elements of the human condition. Our thirst for purpose is infinite, and purposelessness runs contrary to our most deep-seated desires. Even if you want to argue that humanity has fabricated deity in order to construct a more transcendent purpose, that still reveals ultimately that we have an eternal desire for purpose that corresponds quite neatly to the prospect of an infinite purpose.

I realize that I am about to drift away from a critique of nihilism and into a sermon, but the application is necessary to demonstrate the viability of the Christian religion on this point. Properly understood, soteriology is the appropriation and actualization of an infinite purpose. In the Eastern tradition, salvation is spoken of as an infinite ascent into deifying light. It is a purpose which inexhaustibly renews itself, and thus indescribably fulfills the infinite human thirst for purpose.

In short, my objection to the aforementioned reasoning is that not only would an infinite being necessarily create with an endless purpose but the endlessness of that purpose corresponds well to humanity's desire for purpose such that there is no need to fear a lack of motivation.

Nicholas Cabasilas on True Joy

The following is something of a long selection from Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, on why true joy has God alone as its object:

God has emplanted the desire into our souls by which every need should lead to the attainment of that which is good, every thought to the attainment of truth. For these we long in their purity: good rather than evil, truth rather than error; for no one enjoys being deceived or is pleased by going astray and meeting with evil instead of good. Yet no one by desiring them has ever attained them in their purity. What is good and true in our eyes does not correspond to the name, but rather the contrary. Thus it is also clear that neither the power of our love nor the greatness of our joy apparent when the things which we must love and which we enjoy are absent, nor is the compulsion of desire or the ardour of its fire known when the object of desire is absent.

For those who have tasted of the Savior, the Object of desire is present. From the beginning human desire was made to be gauged and measured by the desire for Him, and is a treasury so great, so ample, that it is able to encompass even God. Thus there is no satisfaction, nothing stills the desire, even if men attain to all the excellent things in life, for we still thirst as though we had none of the things for which we long. The thirst of human souls needs, as it were, an infinite water; how then could this limited world suffice?

He, then, is its repose because He alone is goodness and truth and anything else it desires. Those, therefore, who attain to Him are hindered by nothing from loving to the extent that love was implanted into our souls from the beginning, or from rejoicing as much as human nature is able to rejoice, or from anything that virtue and the water of regeneration added to these faculties. Since the good things of ordinary life are not true to their name it is impossible for either desire or joy to be fully effective in them, for even if something seems to be beautiful it is but a paltry spectre of true beauty. But in this case, since , since there is nothing which will stand in the way, love is clearly shown to be wonderous and ineffable and joy to be beyond description. Above all this is so because God has ordained each of these passions with Himself as its object, so that we should love Him and find our joy in Him alone. It follows, I think, that the passion should be in proportion to that infinite goodness and thus, so to speak, be in keeping with it.

In reading that, two thoughts immediately to mind. The first is how much thoughts like this make me prefer soteriology which focuses on participation in God rather than remission of sins. The idea that our souls are made to delight eternally in the infinite goodness of God seems so much richer to me than more aneseptic visions that are preoccupied merely with the expiation of sin.

My second thought returns to the perennial issue of apatheia as an ethical imperative for humanity. The argument here is the reverse from how I typically make it-namely that God is impassible and we ought to be impassible in the way that He is impassible-but it seems nonetheless compelling to me. God has created us with divinely ordained passions which we are to actualize in the ways He has ordained for them ("God has ordained each of these passions with Himself as its object"). Not only are we passionate by design, but our passions are intended to be infinite, coressponding to the object of the passion ("passion should be in proportion to that infinite goodness"). Given that the reality of passions does not remove the necessity of impassibility (apatheia) as an ethical imperative, why would be reject the idea that God can be both passionate (i.e. loving, angry, pleased) and impassible?