Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Father Thomas darwin and christianity part VI
Father Thomas continues his series on Darwin and Christianity
http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/darwin_and_christianity_-_part_6
Friday, July 27, 2012
Father Thomas on Darwin and Christianity Part V
Father Thomas continues his illumined series regardind what god are we refering to when we speak of God. Is it the god of deism, the god of unitarianism or the God of Jesus Christ. Any discuss with science and Christianity has to start with the right concept of who God is and that Christ was God. Without this truth, Christianity and its discussions with science will always be skewed.
http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/darwin_and_christianity_-_part_5
Father Thomas on Darwin and Christianity part IV
A well thought out perspective on Charles Darwin, Spencer and Huxley and the times that they lived. Taking into condsideration the state of the Church as separated from Roman Catholicism which was separted from Othordoxy in 1054. What we have is an interesting view on what is real Christianity. Is Christianity liberal and embedded with the reason and scholasticism of man with no belief in miracles or is it pharisitical and a return to legalism and the strictness of the letter and not the spirit? Or is something else? Christianity is not another religion at all but a fullfilement of philosophy and all religions into the one who spoke and the galaxies lept into existence. The One who is Christ.
http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/darwin_and_christianity_-_part_4
Father Thomas Hopko Christianity in the time of Darwin part 3
One again a very illumined understanding on the times of Charles Darwin.
http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/christianity_in_the_time_of_darwin
Father Thomas Hopko on the life and works of Charels Darwon part II
Good Job Father Thomas on this very illumined series. Christ bless your work.
http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/reflectons_on_the_life_and_work_of_charles_darwin
http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/reflectons_on_the_life_and_work_of_charles_darwin
Darwin and Christianity by Father Thomas Hopko part 1
Posted these because they are profoundly good:
http://ancientfaith.com/announcements/darwin_and_christianity_-_part_1
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Matthew 21:23-27 NKJV
Jesus’ Authority Questioned
23 Now when He came into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people confronted Him as He was teaching, and said, “By what authority are You doing these things? And who gave You this authority?”24 But Jesus answered and said to them, “I also will ask you one thing, which if you tell Me, I likewise will tell you by what authority I do these things: 25 The baptism of John—where was it from? From heaven or from men?”
And they reasoned among themselves, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ He will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ 26 But if we say, ‘From men,’ we fear the multitude, for all count John as a prophet.” 27 So they answered Jesus and said, “We do not know.”
And He said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2021:23-27&version=NKJV
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Orthodoxy on Faith and Science/Archpriest Gregory Hallam
2011 by Archpriest Gregory Hallam on the subject of Science, Creation, and the Seeking of Truth in Orthodox Christian Theology.
It has become a truism for many in the West that faith and science belong to two conflicting world views. An atheist will say that science is rational, based on empirical observation and self-correcting as new theories eventually modify or replace old out-dated ones. Faith, on the other hand, is held to be irrational, defined by static religious texts and immoveable religious authorities, which can be neither challenged nor revised. There is another view that regards this conflict as a needless clash of two Titans of similar breed: fundamentalism in religion and triumphalism in science. Rather than a genuine standoff between two antagonists we have instead a phoney war based on a cartoon version of both disciplines and, therefore, a misunderstanding of the true purpose of each. These two approaches to Reality—science and religion—are actually complementary, this other view holds, and not at all mutually exclusive. Orthodox Christianity shares a common platform with these more positive voices, but with its own distinctive approach. A perspective from history will help.
There is a historical background to this clash between faith and science in the west, a legacy in which Orthodox Christianity has no part. In Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages the scholastic movement sought to develop the idea that reason alone could establish certain basic fundamentals of Christianity. This approach has sometimes been referred to as natural theology or natural law. However, natural theology had its own built-in self-limitation in that reason alone could not impart the fullness of faith, because faith came with grace and revelation. This distinction between reason and faith became hardened into a division, sometimes even a mutual antagonism. The Galileo affair showed just how difficult it was for the Catholic Church to accommodate the findings of natural philosophy, or as we now call it, science. Not until 1992 did Pope John Paul II finally and fully exonerate Galileo. This is deeply ironic, even tragic, bearing in mind the intellectual space that Catholicism had itself created in natural law precisely for the application of reason and the importance of empirical observation.
Protestantism showed itself to be more amenable to the rise of science in its own host cultures, but only because, under the influence of Calvinism, it had further hardened the division between faith and reason to the point of completely isolating a grace-only theology from the natural world and human faculties. This widening gap hit a crisis point in the 18th century during the full flowering of the Enlightenment when many Protestant theologians abandoned any semblance of orthodox (lower case) Christianity and embraced deism. The deist god was only in the most minimal sense a Creator in the sense that at creation he had “lit the blue touch paper,” and retired to a ‘safe distance’ allowing creation to develop in accordance with the laws with which he had imbued it. Deism retained the kernel of monotheism’s insistence that creation was not itself God, but rather a rationally accessible and predictable expression of his creative mind and will. However, it made providence, divine intervention, miracles and intercessory prayer extremely problematic notions, for these were now considered to be “supernatural” - by definition contrary to the natural order and, therefore, extremely improbable. At about this time pietism grew stronger in some Protestant traditions by way of reaction and this movement tended to scorn reason and emphasise religious experience as an exclusion zone of grace, inaccessible by definition to scientific enquiry. Eventually even this bastion of pseudo-orthodoxy fell with the rise of neuroscience which showed itself quite competent in analysing altered states of consciousness in the religious mind, not exactly explaining them away but at least demystifying them. Soon the intellectual establishment embraced Positivism—the Great Idea that the sciences themselves were a sufficient and exclusively reliable description of the totality of human experience. This scientism, as many have called it since, has been popularised in our own time by such notable atheist propagandist popularisers as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Their relentless and theologically illiterate evangelism has been the source of much functional atheism amongst lazy thinkers and uninformed media pundits ever since. Sadly, too many people have taken their word as the true gospel for a life freed from the shackles of religion and superstition. God has finally been dethroned; or has He?
The trouble with this alienation between faith and science is that it is so deeply embedded in Western culture that it seems blind to its own myopic view of reality and the spiritual and intellectual origins of its unquestioned assumptions. In propaganda terms, atheist popularisers have a vested interest in attacking a caricature of religion as normatively fundamentalist. In the general population the level of religious literacy is so low that many simply buy the half-baked notions that seem to be continually recycled in the latest paperbacks of authors who have made a very decent living out of the whole sorry enterprise. Since many people unquestioningly assume that all Christians are the same and believe the same things, it has become almost impossible for Orthodox Christians to contribute to the debate without being written off as self-serving or idiosyncratic. I do not think, however, that we shall be able to improve on this situation until we can put some clear blue water between the caricature and the reality.
Creation Explains God
Firstly we need to establish some basics of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, later adopted by Islam. This monotheist infrastructure is often not well understood. Significant differences exist within the religious traditions, but there is enough common ground to establish a shared platform concerning the relationship between God and the world. So, let us start with creation and the monotheist position. Is it possible to believe in God the Creator without being a creationist?
‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth.’ (Genesis 1:1) So begins Jewish and Christian Holy Scripture. The Jews were exceptional amongst all peoples of antiquity in their insistence that God and the natural order were neither to be confused nor fused. The creation owed its being and purpose to God. God himself was singular and unique. There was only one God and God was one. The surrounding cultures had very different ideas in their creation stories. Many supposed a pantheon of deities only some of which had any role in creation. Others commonly believed that the creation was itself part of God, an emanation of His being. However, the Jews under the divine revelation of their covenant knew that God could not be divided without impugning His sovereignty and power; He could not be confused with creation for then He would be subject to change, violating His self-sufficiency and perfection. Such sovereign sufficiency required the belief that God created the Cosmos out of His own love, freely, so as to nurture something “not-Himself” into a dynamic and evolving relationship of communion with Himself. This applied in the first place to the physical process of creation itself, which was not instantaneous but rather an unfolding fecundity of God from the Earth itself (Genesis 1: “let the earth bring forth ...”).
Although man was a special case in that only he, both male and female of course, was made in the image and likeness of God, there is no reason to suppose that humans, animated by the breath of God, were exempt from these natural processes of life development. This then is our first conclusion: the supposed conflict between faith in a Creator and evolutionary processes is both unnecessary and harmful to the pursuit of truth. For this not to be case, humans would have to be a special instance in the development of life such that our biological genesis could not be connected to precursor species. However, the Scriptures of the monotheist religions make no comment on such matters; they do not even consider them. How could it be otherwise? The prevailing knowledge of the development of life lay in a pre-scientific age. Revealed truth concerning the dignity of humankind is built neither on the inclusion or exclusion of the theory of evolution; and so it goes for every other discovery of science. There can, therefore, never be a conflict between religion and science if each remains true to its principles and methods. As an example, we can push the logic of this position back to the dawn of creation itself, the Big Bang, and whatever may lie beyond or before that. The “how” of creation (i.e. science) has absolutely no bearing on the “why” of creation (i.e. religion) and vice versa. In so far as religion addresses the different and exclusive question of why there is something rather than nothing and why we are here, the language and processes employed are not those of the scientific method but of relationship tested in human experience—the relationship that is between God and the Cosmos. Any attempt to construe the reality of God from principles of design in the Cosmos, intelligent or otherwise, although superficially plausible, falls into the error of thinking that religion exists to explain this order in Creation. This is the fatal God-of-the-gaps defence of God-the-Explainer, forever retreating behind the advancing frontline of science, always a feeble competitor, never a strong associate. From a true monotheistic perspective, God does not explain Creation, Creation explains God. Knowledge of God comes not through science but by a direct personal encounter. This was first tested in the covenant relationship between God and his people, the Hebrews.
Something from Nothing
The Jews did not know God because they philosophised about Him, but rather because they had entered into a relationship with the One who had made a friend with Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. His ways had been made known in salvation and judgement; and this required from them faithfulness and love, repentance and hope. The expression of this relationship was a personal and existential knowledge of the Creator, utterly transcendent to anything created—literally the Uncreated One. This transcendent Being they came to know as above and beyond infinity, space, time, created reality itself, was so sacred that even his Name could not be spoken. Later in Israel’s history, and particularly after the emergence of the Wisdom writings in the post-Exilic environment of Hellenism, the people of God began to reflect more thoroughly on the presuppositions and implications of their faith in an utterly transcendent Creator. There is then a marked progression and refinement in understanding for example between Genesis, which only considers creation from the starting point of pre-formed matter (1:2), and 2 Maccabees 7:28, which follows the received faith to its logical conclusion, namely that the Cosmos was made out of nothing (ex nihilo) or rather, more properly, out of that which had no being.
The implications of the ex nihilo doctrine are radical when contrasted with the confusion of nature and God which is often characteristic of pagan and polytheist faiths. For example, the world does not exist eternally but, as St Augustine emphasised, both space and time were created with matter and energy, making the terms “before creation” and “after creation” meaningless. So, there is creation “before” time (a singular Big Bang or multiple primordial creations) and creation in time as the one Cosmos or the Multiverse evolves. Before-time creation is possible in so far as God in His essence utterly transcends anything He creates. In-time creation is possible because God embeds Himself in the Cosmos from the outset by His energies. (I shall explain further this classic Orthodox distinction between the essence and energies of God in the next theological section: “God is both Creator and Trinity” but for now let us return to consider ex nihilo from the non-theistic perspective).
The atheistic scientific approach denies a priori the existence of anything other than the Cosmos, (or in the “Many Worlds” hypothesis, the Multiverse), in this case, God. Under this view, creation makes itself, there being no extrinsic or for that matter intrinsic divine agent to bring it into being. However, such spontaneous creation is never actually explained in such theories without some sort of precursor. Two favoured current theories either involve a quantum irregularity in the substrate vacuum which super-inflated like a bubble in a boiling pan of milk or the collision of two higher dimensional sheets or branes which triggered the Big Bang in the energy of their collision. None of this solves the puzzle as to why there should be a bubbling quantum foam or a system of colliding branes in the first place. The precursor may be necessary and true, but whatever “it” is, it is not nothing or non-being. The search for a First Cause or an Origin only ceases if a beginning is considered unnecessary, and then one is stuck with the brute fact of an eternal, infinitely regressive universe.
Whether or not the Universe is eternal still ignores the favourite old elephant in the corner. This is his question: - “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Science is not equipped to answer “why” questions such as this, whereas such unfathomable existential issues are “food and drink” to the philosopher and the theologian. The hubris of an all-inclusive positivism for atheist scientists enables them to claim scientifically that no such theological answers can exist in principle. That is to step beyond the boundary of empirical science itself into belief, in this case the belief we call “unbelief.” It must be recognised that there are questions and answers in life that do not submit to the scientific method because they deal with references that are by definition not measurable. Measuring my heartbeat alone will not reveal whether or not I am in love.
The great 19th Century theologian, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, described the conundrum of existence from a religious point of view. He describes either the terror or beauty of our existence very succinctly. The choice is stark and uncompromising: the void or God? “All creatures are balanced upon the creative Word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them, that of their own nothingness.”
So far we have examined the truth claims and methods of science and religion from the shared perspective of the great Abrahamic monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We shall now look to the specific insights of Orthodox Christianity—a very different territory of enquiry with surprising discoveries in store.
God is both Creator and Trinity
As we have observed, it is the transcendent majesty and glory of God, his singular unexcelled and excellent being that concerns all truly monotheistic faiths. Any conceptualisation, image or formulation concerning God in his essence or being is idolatrous and to be rejected. There can be absolutely no ontological overlap between God the Creator and Uncreated One and creation. However, to say that God is utterly distinct from creation at the level of his essence is to contribute nothing to an understanding of how he can be known by humankind through his covenanted grace, his theophanies or self-manifestations and supremely by his Incarnation in the Word made flesh (John 1:14). The Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church teach that God manifests himself in creation without being absorbed by it or fused with it, which of course would be pantheism. By way of contrast, the Orthodox teaching that incorporates the reality of the Divine Presence is called panentheism and this received its classic formulation in the distinction made between the essence and energies of God in the works of St Gregory Palamas. The energies of God are sometimes referred to as his immanence in creation. God is not to be thought of, therefore, as only acting “from beyond.” He also (by His energies) acts from within.
When the Jews reflected upon this immanence in the context of their own covenant experience, their sacred writings made a distinction between the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Later the Wisdom of God was added. The Word of God could be described as his powerful creative and prophetic utterance. Noteworthy in this regard is this verse from the prophecy of Isaiah:- So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void but it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:11) If the Word of God is that in God which brings something to fruition in a declaratory manner, the Spirit of God is that in God which imparts his life to that which his Word has brought into being. The Wisdom of God is that which may be known from both his Word and Spirit; it is in effect a term of revelation and dependent upon the other two for its operation.
When the Word became flesh in the Incarnation of Christ and later when the Holy Spirit was given to the Church at Pentecost, the Apostles learned through their own experience that this Word and the Spirit have their own distinct hypostatic or personal identities, but always in relation with each other and not as separate individualities. That which had been hinted at in the Old Covenant was fully revealed in the New Covenant; and Church Tradition was later to make sense of this in monotheistic terms by the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. St Irenaeus referred to the Word and the Spirit as the two hands of the Father (Against the Heresies, 5.6), but it was not until the Cappadocian Fathers clarified the terminology in the 4th century that the Church’s experience of the Trinity was thoroughly articulated. The only change that the doctrine of the Trinity made to traditional monotheism concerned the hypostatic distinction of both the Word and the Spirit, both between themselves and with the Father. However this distinction was not applied to the essence or being of God which remained as it always had been - a simple, undifferentiated, identical consubstantiality. In this Orthodox sense the hypostases always remained co-equal and undivided.
Against Supernaturalism
The value of the Trinity thus described is wholly compatible with a scientific account of the world in which the lineaments and workings of natural processes in space and in time are accounted for without recourse to God as a direct causal agent. If, for example, we believed that hurricanes happened because God sneezed, then what would be the point and practical advantage of meteorology? We must say rather that the lineaments and processes of the natural order are in and of themselves signatures of the divine. These signatures cannot be shaped by a calligraphy of intelligent design without invoking the capricious intervention of a episodically active god in an otherwise chaotic and frequently fragile and dangerous evolutionary process. Such extrinsic and invasive actions of a god from beyond the Cosmos—the classic form of supernaturalism—neuter both science and theology. The divine signatures are rather to be found in the beauty, elegance and fittingness of the natural operations themselves which are both emergent in their complexity and convergent in their function. Consciousness, for example, is a fluid and dynamic artefact of emergent complexity; physiological commonality a functional convergence of evolution. Neither is a deterministic process, but each nonetheless has its own teleology (that to which it tends), notwithstanding the chaotic and random factors involved. God, then, only acts “from beyond” when, ex nihilo, He creates space and time itself.
This characterisation, however, presupposes a scheme of primary and secondary causes with God in the backseat and Nature in the front. How then is this different from deism where the God who is aboriginally involved in creation is subsequently absent or Neo-Thomism where divine intervention is a more subtly conceived additional layer of supernatural causation? The only way such a model of divine action can be different, at least in Christianity, is by building it on a radically different foundation than that which has been commonplace in the west since the Middle Ages. This foundation is neo-Patristic in that it learns from the Fathers in their engagement with Hellenistic philosophy whilst at the same time striking out with a similar method and some of their insights into the arena of this century and its concerns.
There are three theological references that we need to consider in order to make progress in constructing an old but new model of divine activity that compromises neither science nor Orthodox Christianity. These three theological references are basic and biblical—the Word of God, the Spirit of God and the Wisdom of God. The Word of God, (that is, the Logos in Greek) and the Holy Spirit are two hypostases of the Trinity, the Father’s active agents in Creation. The Wisdom of God has often struggled to find a place in this scheme for she (in reference, feminine) certainly is not an additional hypostasis, nor the essence or energy of God but something else. Rehabilitated from ancient Christian Tradition by the sophiological school of Russian Orthodox Christian thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, Divine Sophia, Holy Wisdom is, I submit, a shared divine attribute which we can apply to ALL three hypostases or persons of the Holy Trinity in the summation of their activity in the Cosmos as one God. I shall refer, therefore, to Wisdom in relation to each and all of the hypostases in the following account. The Father is in relation to the Son or Word and the Spirit as the timeless Source of the Trinity. He is never without them, nor they without Him. In the course of this proposal, therefore, I shall proceed in my argument from the Logos in Wisdom (from the Father alone but in the Spirit) to the Spirit in Wisdom (from the Father alone but in the Son). The Father of course timelessly imparts Wisdom both to the Son and the Spirit in their coordinated actions as One God in Creation. (I am indebted in much of what follows to Dr. Christopher Knight whose reasoning and conclusions I largely follow. The sophiological speculations are my own).
The Logos Christology
St John the Theologian in the prologue to his gospel taught that it was the Logos (the Word of God) that was active in both the creation of the Cosmos and in the Incarnation. St. John deftly achieved two goals in his use of this Logos Christology. Firstly, he showed the universality of the Incarnation by using a term which was familiar to Jews and pre-Christian Greeks, the Logos. The Jewish diaspora in Alexandria (Philo) had already united the Hebraic concept of the Word of God (dabar) with the Hellenistic Logos, the divine seed inherent in all things. Secondly, by using a single term, the Logos, St John ensured that Christ would be received, as is His due, as the Lord of all creation. Christians such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen continued to develop this synthesis and used it as a bridgehead for the communication of the gospel in Greek culture. Pre-Christian Greek philosophy, at this stage heavily influenced by Plato, contributed something of great value to Christianity—the means to express the inclusion of both nature and revelation as the sphere of God’s action. The Church reimagined Platonism from a dualistic philosophy in which created forms were merely shadows of more substantial heavenly ideals into the Judaeo-Christian confession of the goodness of creation itself.
Important progress in the development of these ideas took place in the cosmological teaching of the seventh century Byzantine theologian, honoured in both the East and the West, St Maximus the Confessor (580-662). St Maximus explored further this idea of the logoi in all things created as manifestations of the creative Word, the Logos imparting both the inner essence and the ultimate fulfilment to one and all. In this account the Incarnation was characterised not as an abrupt intrusion or invasion of the Logos into the created order from which it was originally absent but rather the personal and particular development and refinement of an existing and universal creative presence of the Word, now united to human flesh and nature in the person of Christ. Although the Incarnation happened so that death might be destroyed and humanity with creation restored to the path of dynamic transformation, the East generally held that the Word would have been made flesh in the context of this process even if humanity had not fallen. It is after all the nature of Divine Love to make itself known through self-giving.
St Maximus, together with all the Greek fathers and their successors, had a panentheistic conception of God’s immanence which harmonised ideas in both pagan and Hebraic religion without sacrificing God’s transcendence. Later generations of theologians, notably St Gregory Palamas articulated this in the distinction they made between the nature or essence of God, forever transcending anything created, and his energies, also God and Uncreated, but manifest in every spacetime coordinate and in every physical and immaterial creation. After the Great Schism in 1054 when the West began to lose touch with Greek Christian culture, this vital insight was gradually lost. Later Western theologians assumed as axiomatic the principle that God had to “move” as it were from heaven to earth when he needed to act, his presence otherwise being rather nebulous and erratic. This was the source of supernaturalism, the notion that grace had to be added to nature. This view prevailed for centuries until the Enlightenment finally dispensed with supernature leaving the west in the grip of deism or the worship of the goddess Reason. Secularisation rapidly followed as the sea of faith made its melancholic withdrawal from the public consciousness. The Christian East however continued with what we might call its theistic naturalism in which the Lord pervaded the whole of the Cosmos without the need to suspend natural laws at whim in order to achieve his purpose. Creation has complete freedom to be itself and yet at the same time there is a natural and grace-full growth in the logoi or Logos towards an end or telos in God. In the Christian West science only flourished once the Catholic Church’s inflexible intellectual control had been broken. There never seems to have been such a problem in the Christian East and for good reason. The phoney war between science and religion never broke out beyond Rome’s dominion, nor could it, the theology being radically different.
The Life Giving Spirit
The unique theological perspective of the Christian East, which the Orthodox believe to be the simple witness of Scripture and Tradition, is expressed in its understanding of the person and work of the Holy Spirit as well as the Logos. The Holy Spirit is the Life Giver, the power of creation, of revelation, of guidance, of cleansing, of renewal, of holiness, of justice and of peace. The action of the Holy Spirit in human life and the Cosmos itself is simply to bring the fullness of life to all that is latent within the logoi of created things. This, however, is not a vitalism that constitutes or replaces the energies of creation but rather that which restores and enhances these according to their divine purpose. Consider the healing of the sick. This is achieved through the skill of doctors, nurses, surgeons and drug researchers in addition to the care for the whole person manifested through pastoral support and prayer. The Holy Spirit works in and through the logoi of each means of healing, once more revealing the Wisdom of God in action, bringing everything to its proper fulfilment in Christ.
The Holy Spirit also continues to work in Creation so that in the Wisdom of God the Cosmos is transfigured and, in the case of humans who are in the divine image and likeness, deified. Again St Maximus the Confessor reveals this cosmic regeneration as possible by reaffirming a pre-Christian notion of Greek philosophy, namely that humankind is a microcosm of the Cosmos. If humanity is restored and set free by the Holy Spirit so shall the Cosmos (Romans 8:18-23). This glorious vision is not of course what we see in the world today. We have inherited the legacy of a quite different view of the earth in which divine transformation is very far from the mind of those who are its unwitting stewards. The impact of this legacy is plain for all to see. The recovery of Earth’s ecosystems will only occur when humans exercise once again an ascesis of self-restraint and live out anew their connectedness to the Cosmos. This will require a spirituality that does not see the natural world as a mere stage for unbridled human activity but rather a gift to be respected and cherished. How can this be achieved without honouring the divine logoi that inhere within all things?
I have contended that there is no conflict between Science and Religion, when each discipline is properly understood. More specifically, it should be recognized that Orthodox Christianity has developed important insights into that fine structure of the Cosmos which allows for divine action without compromising or controlling creation’s freedom to move toward its goal in God. It should now be clear that both creationism and scientific atheism are dead doctrines based on a weak understanding of both science and religion. In contrast, Orthodox Christianity offers the freedom to humanity to explore the inner workings of the Cosmos, its glory and its beauty.
Source transcript:
http://ancientfaith.com/specials/episode/god_and_science
It has become a truism for many in the West that faith and science belong to two conflicting world views. An atheist will say that science is rational, based on empirical observation and self-correcting as new theories eventually modify or replace old out-dated ones. Faith, on the other hand, is held to be irrational, defined by static religious texts and immoveable religious authorities, which can be neither challenged nor revised. There is another view that regards this conflict as a needless clash of two Titans of similar breed: fundamentalism in religion and triumphalism in science. Rather than a genuine standoff between two antagonists we have instead a phoney war based on a cartoon version of both disciplines and, therefore, a misunderstanding of the true purpose of each. These two approaches to Reality—science and religion—are actually complementary, this other view holds, and not at all mutually exclusive. Orthodox Christianity shares a common platform with these more positive voices, but with its own distinctive approach. A perspective from history will help.
There is a historical background to this clash between faith and science in the west, a legacy in which Orthodox Christianity has no part. In Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages the scholastic movement sought to develop the idea that reason alone could establish certain basic fundamentals of Christianity. This approach has sometimes been referred to as natural theology or natural law. However, natural theology had its own built-in self-limitation in that reason alone could not impart the fullness of faith, because faith came with grace and revelation. This distinction between reason and faith became hardened into a division, sometimes even a mutual antagonism. The Galileo affair showed just how difficult it was for the Catholic Church to accommodate the findings of natural philosophy, or as we now call it, science. Not until 1992 did Pope John Paul II finally and fully exonerate Galileo. This is deeply ironic, even tragic, bearing in mind the intellectual space that Catholicism had itself created in natural law precisely for the application of reason and the importance of empirical observation.
Protestantism showed itself to be more amenable to the rise of science in its own host cultures, but only because, under the influence of Calvinism, it had further hardened the division between faith and reason to the point of completely isolating a grace-only theology from the natural world and human faculties. This widening gap hit a crisis point in the 18th century during the full flowering of the Enlightenment when many Protestant theologians abandoned any semblance of orthodox (lower case) Christianity and embraced deism. The deist god was only in the most minimal sense a Creator in the sense that at creation he had “lit the blue touch paper,” and retired to a ‘safe distance’ allowing creation to develop in accordance with the laws with which he had imbued it. Deism retained the kernel of monotheism’s insistence that creation was not itself God, but rather a rationally accessible and predictable expression of his creative mind and will. However, it made providence, divine intervention, miracles and intercessory prayer extremely problematic notions, for these were now considered to be “supernatural” - by definition contrary to the natural order and, therefore, extremely improbable. At about this time pietism grew stronger in some Protestant traditions by way of reaction and this movement tended to scorn reason and emphasise religious experience as an exclusion zone of grace, inaccessible by definition to scientific enquiry. Eventually even this bastion of pseudo-orthodoxy fell with the rise of neuroscience which showed itself quite competent in analysing altered states of consciousness in the religious mind, not exactly explaining them away but at least demystifying them. Soon the intellectual establishment embraced Positivism—the Great Idea that the sciences themselves were a sufficient and exclusively reliable description of the totality of human experience. This scientism, as many have called it since, has been popularised in our own time by such notable atheist propagandist popularisers as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Their relentless and theologically illiterate evangelism has been the source of much functional atheism amongst lazy thinkers and uninformed media pundits ever since. Sadly, too many people have taken their word as the true gospel for a life freed from the shackles of religion and superstition. God has finally been dethroned; or has He?
The trouble with this alienation between faith and science is that it is so deeply embedded in Western culture that it seems blind to its own myopic view of reality and the spiritual and intellectual origins of its unquestioned assumptions. In propaganda terms, atheist popularisers have a vested interest in attacking a caricature of religion as normatively fundamentalist. In the general population the level of religious literacy is so low that many simply buy the half-baked notions that seem to be continually recycled in the latest paperbacks of authors who have made a very decent living out of the whole sorry enterprise. Since many people unquestioningly assume that all Christians are the same and believe the same things, it has become almost impossible for Orthodox Christians to contribute to the debate without being written off as self-serving or idiosyncratic. I do not think, however, that we shall be able to improve on this situation until we can put some clear blue water between the caricature and the reality.
Creation Explains God
Firstly we need to establish some basics of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, later adopted by Islam. This monotheist infrastructure is often not well understood. Significant differences exist within the religious traditions, but there is enough common ground to establish a shared platform concerning the relationship between God and the world. So, let us start with creation and the monotheist position. Is it possible to believe in God the Creator without being a creationist?
‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth.’ (Genesis 1:1) So begins Jewish and Christian Holy Scripture. The Jews were exceptional amongst all peoples of antiquity in their insistence that God and the natural order were neither to be confused nor fused. The creation owed its being and purpose to God. God himself was singular and unique. There was only one God and God was one. The surrounding cultures had very different ideas in their creation stories. Many supposed a pantheon of deities only some of which had any role in creation. Others commonly believed that the creation was itself part of God, an emanation of His being. However, the Jews under the divine revelation of their covenant knew that God could not be divided without impugning His sovereignty and power; He could not be confused with creation for then He would be subject to change, violating His self-sufficiency and perfection. Such sovereign sufficiency required the belief that God created the Cosmos out of His own love, freely, so as to nurture something “not-Himself” into a dynamic and evolving relationship of communion with Himself. This applied in the first place to the physical process of creation itself, which was not instantaneous but rather an unfolding fecundity of God from the Earth itself (Genesis 1: “let the earth bring forth ...”).
Although man was a special case in that only he, both male and female of course, was made in the image and likeness of God, there is no reason to suppose that humans, animated by the breath of God, were exempt from these natural processes of life development. This then is our first conclusion: the supposed conflict between faith in a Creator and evolutionary processes is both unnecessary and harmful to the pursuit of truth. For this not to be case, humans would have to be a special instance in the development of life such that our biological genesis could not be connected to precursor species. However, the Scriptures of the monotheist religions make no comment on such matters; they do not even consider them. How could it be otherwise? The prevailing knowledge of the development of life lay in a pre-scientific age. Revealed truth concerning the dignity of humankind is built neither on the inclusion or exclusion of the theory of evolution; and so it goes for every other discovery of science. There can, therefore, never be a conflict between religion and science if each remains true to its principles and methods. As an example, we can push the logic of this position back to the dawn of creation itself, the Big Bang, and whatever may lie beyond or before that. The “how” of creation (i.e. science) has absolutely no bearing on the “why” of creation (i.e. religion) and vice versa. In so far as religion addresses the different and exclusive question of why there is something rather than nothing and why we are here, the language and processes employed are not those of the scientific method but of relationship tested in human experience—the relationship that is between God and the Cosmos. Any attempt to construe the reality of God from principles of design in the Cosmos, intelligent or otherwise, although superficially plausible, falls into the error of thinking that religion exists to explain this order in Creation. This is the fatal God-of-the-gaps defence of God-the-Explainer, forever retreating behind the advancing frontline of science, always a feeble competitor, never a strong associate. From a true monotheistic perspective, God does not explain Creation, Creation explains God. Knowledge of God comes not through science but by a direct personal encounter. This was first tested in the covenant relationship between God and his people, the Hebrews.
Something from Nothing
The Jews did not know God because they philosophised about Him, but rather because they had entered into a relationship with the One who had made a friend with Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. His ways had been made known in salvation and judgement; and this required from them faithfulness and love, repentance and hope. The expression of this relationship was a personal and existential knowledge of the Creator, utterly transcendent to anything created—literally the Uncreated One. This transcendent Being they came to know as above and beyond infinity, space, time, created reality itself, was so sacred that even his Name could not be spoken. Later in Israel’s history, and particularly after the emergence of the Wisdom writings in the post-Exilic environment of Hellenism, the people of God began to reflect more thoroughly on the presuppositions and implications of their faith in an utterly transcendent Creator. There is then a marked progression and refinement in understanding for example between Genesis, which only considers creation from the starting point of pre-formed matter (1:2), and 2 Maccabees 7:28, which follows the received faith to its logical conclusion, namely that the Cosmos was made out of nothing (ex nihilo) or rather, more properly, out of that which had no being.
The implications of the ex nihilo doctrine are radical when contrasted with the confusion of nature and God which is often characteristic of pagan and polytheist faiths. For example, the world does not exist eternally but, as St Augustine emphasised, both space and time were created with matter and energy, making the terms “before creation” and “after creation” meaningless. So, there is creation “before” time (a singular Big Bang or multiple primordial creations) and creation in time as the one Cosmos or the Multiverse evolves. Before-time creation is possible in so far as God in His essence utterly transcends anything He creates. In-time creation is possible because God embeds Himself in the Cosmos from the outset by His energies. (I shall explain further this classic Orthodox distinction between the essence and energies of God in the next theological section: “God is both Creator and Trinity” but for now let us return to consider ex nihilo from the non-theistic perspective).
The atheistic scientific approach denies a priori the existence of anything other than the Cosmos, (or in the “Many Worlds” hypothesis, the Multiverse), in this case, God. Under this view, creation makes itself, there being no extrinsic or for that matter intrinsic divine agent to bring it into being. However, such spontaneous creation is never actually explained in such theories without some sort of precursor. Two favoured current theories either involve a quantum irregularity in the substrate vacuum which super-inflated like a bubble in a boiling pan of milk or the collision of two higher dimensional sheets or branes which triggered the Big Bang in the energy of their collision. None of this solves the puzzle as to why there should be a bubbling quantum foam or a system of colliding branes in the first place. The precursor may be necessary and true, but whatever “it” is, it is not nothing or non-being. The search for a First Cause or an Origin only ceases if a beginning is considered unnecessary, and then one is stuck with the brute fact of an eternal, infinitely regressive universe.
Whether or not the Universe is eternal still ignores the favourite old elephant in the corner. This is his question: - “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Science is not equipped to answer “why” questions such as this, whereas such unfathomable existential issues are “food and drink” to the philosopher and the theologian. The hubris of an all-inclusive positivism for atheist scientists enables them to claim scientifically that no such theological answers can exist in principle. That is to step beyond the boundary of empirical science itself into belief, in this case the belief we call “unbelief.” It must be recognised that there are questions and answers in life that do not submit to the scientific method because they deal with references that are by definition not measurable. Measuring my heartbeat alone will not reveal whether or not I am in love.
The great 19th Century theologian, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, described the conundrum of existence from a religious point of view. He describes either the terror or beauty of our existence very succinctly. The choice is stark and uncompromising: the void or God? “All creatures are balanced upon the creative Word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them, that of their own nothingness.”
So far we have examined the truth claims and methods of science and religion from the shared perspective of the great Abrahamic monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We shall now look to the specific insights of Orthodox Christianity—a very different territory of enquiry with surprising discoveries in store.
God is both Creator and Trinity
As we have observed, it is the transcendent majesty and glory of God, his singular unexcelled and excellent being that concerns all truly monotheistic faiths. Any conceptualisation, image or formulation concerning God in his essence or being is idolatrous and to be rejected. There can be absolutely no ontological overlap between God the Creator and Uncreated One and creation. However, to say that God is utterly distinct from creation at the level of his essence is to contribute nothing to an understanding of how he can be known by humankind through his covenanted grace, his theophanies or self-manifestations and supremely by his Incarnation in the Word made flesh (John 1:14). The Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church teach that God manifests himself in creation without being absorbed by it or fused with it, which of course would be pantheism. By way of contrast, the Orthodox teaching that incorporates the reality of the Divine Presence is called panentheism and this received its classic formulation in the distinction made between the essence and energies of God in the works of St Gregory Palamas. The energies of God are sometimes referred to as his immanence in creation. God is not to be thought of, therefore, as only acting “from beyond.” He also (by His energies) acts from within.
When the Jews reflected upon this immanence in the context of their own covenant experience, their sacred writings made a distinction between the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Later the Wisdom of God was added. The Word of God could be described as his powerful creative and prophetic utterance. Noteworthy in this regard is this verse from the prophecy of Isaiah:- So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void but it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:11) If the Word of God is that in God which brings something to fruition in a declaratory manner, the Spirit of God is that in God which imparts his life to that which his Word has brought into being. The Wisdom of God is that which may be known from both his Word and Spirit; it is in effect a term of revelation and dependent upon the other two for its operation.
When the Word became flesh in the Incarnation of Christ and later when the Holy Spirit was given to the Church at Pentecost, the Apostles learned through their own experience that this Word and the Spirit have their own distinct hypostatic or personal identities, but always in relation with each other and not as separate individualities. That which had been hinted at in the Old Covenant was fully revealed in the New Covenant; and Church Tradition was later to make sense of this in monotheistic terms by the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. St Irenaeus referred to the Word and the Spirit as the two hands of the Father (Against the Heresies, 5.6), but it was not until the Cappadocian Fathers clarified the terminology in the 4th century that the Church’s experience of the Trinity was thoroughly articulated. The only change that the doctrine of the Trinity made to traditional monotheism concerned the hypostatic distinction of both the Word and the Spirit, both between themselves and with the Father. However this distinction was not applied to the essence or being of God which remained as it always had been - a simple, undifferentiated, identical consubstantiality. In this Orthodox sense the hypostases always remained co-equal and undivided.
Against Supernaturalism
The value of the Trinity thus described is wholly compatible with a scientific account of the world in which the lineaments and workings of natural processes in space and in time are accounted for without recourse to God as a direct causal agent. If, for example, we believed that hurricanes happened because God sneezed, then what would be the point and practical advantage of meteorology? We must say rather that the lineaments and processes of the natural order are in and of themselves signatures of the divine. These signatures cannot be shaped by a calligraphy of intelligent design without invoking the capricious intervention of a episodically active god in an otherwise chaotic and frequently fragile and dangerous evolutionary process. Such extrinsic and invasive actions of a god from beyond the Cosmos—the classic form of supernaturalism—neuter both science and theology. The divine signatures are rather to be found in the beauty, elegance and fittingness of the natural operations themselves which are both emergent in their complexity and convergent in their function. Consciousness, for example, is a fluid and dynamic artefact of emergent complexity; physiological commonality a functional convergence of evolution. Neither is a deterministic process, but each nonetheless has its own teleology (that to which it tends), notwithstanding the chaotic and random factors involved. God, then, only acts “from beyond” when, ex nihilo, He creates space and time itself.
This characterisation, however, presupposes a scheme of primary and secondary causes with God in the backseat and Nature in the front. How then is this different from deism where the God who is aboriginally involved in creation is subsequently absent or Neo-Thomism where divine intervention is a more subtly conceived additional layer of supernatural causation? The only way such a model of divine action can be different, at least in Christianity, is by building it on a radically different foundation than that which has been commonplace in the west since the Middle Ages. This foundation is neo-Patristic in that it learns from the Fathers in their engagement with Hellenistic philosophy whilst at the same time striking out with a similar method and some of their insights into the arena of this century and its concerns.
There are three theological references that we need to consider in order to make progress in constructing an old but new model of divine activity that compromises neither science nor Orthodox Christianity. These three theological references are basic and biblical—the Word of God, the Spirit of God and the Wisdom of God. The Word of God, (that is, the Logos in Greek) and the Holy Spirit are two hypostases of the Trinity, the Father’s active agents in Creation. The Wisdom of God has often struggled to find a place in this scheme for she (in reference, feminine) certainly is not an additional hypostasis, nor the essence or energy of God but something else. Rehabilitated from ancient Christian Tradition by the sophiological school of Russian Orthodox Christian thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, Divine Sophia, Holy Wisdom is, I submit, a shared divine attribute which we can apply to ALL three hypostases or persons of the Holy Trinity in the summation of their activity in the Cosmos as one God. I shall refer, therefore, to Wisdom in relation to each and all of the hypostases in the following account. The Father is in relation to the Son or Word and the Spirit as the timeless Source of the Trinity. He is never without them, nor they without Him. In the course of this proposal, therefore, I shall proceed in my argument from the Logos in Wisdom (from the Father alone but in the Spirit) to the Spirit in Wisdom (from the Father alone but in the Son). The Father of course timelessly imparts Wisdom both to the Son and the Spirit in their coordinated actions as One God in Creation. (I am indebted in much of what follows to Dr. Christopher Knight whose reasoning and conclusions I largely follow. The sophiological speculations are my own).
The Logos Christology
St John the Theologian in the prologue to his gospel taught that it was the Logos (the Word of God) that was active in both the creation of the Cosmos and in the Incarnation. St. John deftly achieved two goals in his use of this Logos Christology. Firstly, he showed the universality of the Incarnation by using a term which was familiar to Jews and pre-Christian Greeks, the Logos. The Jewish diaspora in Alexandria (Philo) had already united the Hebraic concept of the Word of God (dabar) with the Hellenistic Logos, the divine seed inherent in all things. Secondly, by using a single term, the Logos, St John ensured that Christ would be received, as is His due, as the Lord of all creation. Christians such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen continued to develop this synthesis and used it as a bridgehead for the communication of the gospel in Greek culture. Pre-Christian Greek philosophy, at this stage heavily influenced by Plato, contributed something of great value to Christianity—the means to express the inclusion of both nature and revelation as the sphere of God’s action. The Church reimagined Platonism from a dualistic philosophy in which created forms were merely shadows of more substantial heavenly ideals into the Judaeo-Christian confession of the goodness of creation itself.
Important progress in the development of these ideas took place in the cosmological teaching of the seventh century Byzantine theologian, honoured in both the East and the West, St Maximus the Confessor (580-662). St Maximus explored further this idea of the logoi in all things created as manifestations of the creative Word, the Logos imparting both the inner essence and the ultimate fulfilment to one and all. In this account the Incarnation was characterised not as an abrupt intrusion or invasion of the Logos into the created order from which it was originally absent but rather the personal and particular development and refinement of an existing and universal creative presence of the Word, now united to human flesh and nature in the person of Christ. Although the Incarnation happened so that death might be destroyed and humanity with creation restored to the path of dynamic transformation, the East generally held that the Word would have been made flesh in the context of this process even if humanity had not fallen. It is after all the nature of Divine Love to make itself known through self-giving.
St Maximus, together with all the Greek fathers and their successors, had a panentheistic conception of God’s immanence which harmonised ideas in both pagan and Hebraic religion without sacrificing God’s transcendence. Later generations of theologians, notably St Gregory Palamas articulated this in the distinction they made between the nature or essence of God, forever transcending anything created, and his energies, also God and Uncreated, but manifest in every spacetime coordinate and in every physical and immaterial creation. After the Great Schism in 1054 when the West began to lose touch with Greek Christian culture, this vital insight was gradually lost. Later Western theologians assumed as axiomatic the principle that God had to “move” as it were from heaven to earth when he needed to act, his presence otherwise being rather nebulous and erratic. This was the source of supernaturalism, the notion that grace had to be added to nature. This view prevailed for centuries until the Enlightenment finally dispensed with supernature leaving the west in the grip of deism or the worship of the goddess Reason. Secularisation rapidly followed as the sea of faith made its melancholic withdrawal from the public consciousness. The Christian East however continued with what we might call its theistic naturalism in which the Lord pervaded the whole of the Cosmos without the need to suspend natural laws at whim in order to achieve his purpose. Creation has complete freedom to be itself and yet at the same time there is a natural and grace-full growth in the logoi or Logos towards an end or telos in God. In the Christian West science only flourished once the Catholic Church’s inflexible intellectual control had been broken. There never seems to have been such a problem in the Christian East and for good reason. The phoney war between science and religion never broke out beyond Rome’s dominion, nor could it, the theology being radically different.
The Life Giving Spirit
The unique theological perspective of the Christian East, which the Orthodox believe to be the simple witness of Scripture and Tradition, is expressed in its understanding of the person and work of the Holy Spirit as well as the Logos. The Holy Spirit is the Life Giver, the power of creation, of revelation, of guidance, of cleansing, of renewal, of holiness, of justice and of peace. The action of the Holy Spirit in human life and the Cosmos itself is simply to bring the fullness of life to all that is latent within the logoi of created things. This, however, is not a vitalism that constitutes or replaces the energies of creation but rather that which restores and enhances these according to their divine purpose. Consider the healing of the sick. This is achieved through the skill of doctors, nurses, surgeons and drug researchers in addition to the care for the whole person manifested through pastoral support and prayer. The Holy Spirit works in and through the logoi of each means of healing, once more revealing the Wisdom of God in action, bringing everything to its proper fulfilment in Christ.
The Holy Spirit also continues to work in Creation so that in the Wisdom of God the Cosmos is transfigured and, in the case of humans who are in the divine image and likeness, deified. Again St Maximus the Confessor reveals this cosmic regeneration as possible by reaffirming a pre-Christian notion of Greek philosophy, namely that humankind is a microcosm of the Cosmos. If humanity is restored and set free by the Holy Spirit so shall the Cosmos (Romans 8:18-23). This glorious vision is not of course what we see in the world today. We have inherited the legacy of a quite different view of the earth in which divine transformation is very far from the mind of those who are its unwitting stewards. The impact of this legacy is plain for all to see. The recovery of Earth’s ecosystems will only occur when humans exercise once again an ascesis of self-restraint and live out anew their connectedness to the Cosmos. This will require a spirituality that does not see the natural world as a mere stage for unbridled human activity but rather a gift to be respected and cherished. How can this be achieved without honouring the divine logoi that inhere within all things?
I have contended that there is no conflict between Science and Religion, when each discipline is properly understood. More specifically, it should be recognized that Orthodox Christianity has developed important insights into that fine structure of the Cosmos which allows for divine action without compromising or controlling creation’s freedom to move toward its goal in God. It should now be clear that both creationism and scientific atheism are dead doctrines based on a weak understanding of both science and religion. In contrast, Orthodox Christianity offers the freedom to humanity to explore the inner workings of the Cosmos, its glory and its beauty.
Source transcript:
http://ancientfaith.com/specials/episode/god_and_science
Friday, July 20, 2012
a layman's thoughts - Unitarian Universalist can its creed stand?
If this is the creed of the Unitarian Universalist Church, it shows
that it can’t stand by its own creedal legs
What
do Unitarian Universalists believe?
Beliefs, Creeds and Doctrines
Come return to your place in the pews,
And hear our heretical views:
You were not born in sin
So lift up your chin,
You have only your dogmas to lose.
Leonard Mason, UU Minister
And hear our heretical views: (heretical views have been dangerous to spiritual living)You were not born in sin (dangerous teaching)
1. Every individual should be
encouraged to develop a personal philosophy of life.
- 2. Everyone is capable of
reasoning.
intuitive or above reasoning faculty that has been proved by saints and mystics. This has been
talked about since Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, Heraclitus and many others.... Like all things,
the experience of this is first and foremost and secondly is hearing about it from others. And
now to the heart or nous moreover ...
C.S. Lewis touches on the heart here somewhat... but I think Clark Carlton nails it...
“We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'.20 The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,21 of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”
~ C.S. Lewis.
I must stress at this point that in biblical anthropology the “heart” is not the seat of the emotions. Those are located in the “bowels”. The “heart”, rather, is the psychosomatic center of man. When moderns talk about heart and head, they usually mean the emotions and the intellect. But when the Fathers talk about the separation of the heart from the mind, they mean that the nous has somehow become stuck in the discursive reason, i.e., the brain.
This is why the Fathers talk about the nous descending into the heart. They do not mean that we need to get in touch with our emotions. They mean that our attention needs to be drawn back inward to the core of our being where Christ dwells through the Holy Spirit.
3. We do not need any other
person, official or organization to tell us what to believe.
If we read something and do not understand it, it always helps to have elders or Saints
to go to for instruction. Deep prayer, meditation, study and consulting the living faith
through its traditions (The Church) is very important. We have seen throughout history when
we use our own philosophies to understand spiritual things, often, the case is hardship and
sorrow.
4 . We should be able to present
religious opinions openly, without fear of censure or
reprisal.
5. All people should be tolerant
of the religious ideas of others.
And tolerance must go both ways. Also tolerance need not be
accompanied with apathy. Some beliefs must never be tolerated.
-
“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled
by evil men”
6. Truth is not absolute; it changes over time.
Logically speaking, this is a surprising statement
and cannot be true. If there is no absolute truth, then everything is relative.
Your personal view is just as valid as anybody else’s. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot,
Mao and others thrived on exactly this type of thinking. If there is no absolute
truth, then these men have no judge because there is no basis to judge them. “Truth
is not absolute; it changes over time:” If this statement excludes itself or
includes itself, it is a self- decimated proposition to borrow from Ravi
Zacharias. If this statement excludes itself, then it is positing an absolute
that contradicts absolutes. If it includes itself, then it has just defeated
itself because even the statement “Truth is not absolute; it changes over time”
means that even this statement will change over time. So this statement is
decimated; it cannot be true. To say that people have “life, liberty and
justice” or “freedom” would not be true either because it too is impermanent
and will change over time.
7. Everyone should continue to
search for the truth.
Truth is good but again “what is truth” as
Pontius Pilate once exclaimed? If it is the statement above, that "truth changes"then we know we
have to look elsewhere. How can we search for truth if it is not absolute and
changes over time? That is like trying to hit a target that moves each time you shoot.
8. Everyone has an equal claim to
life, liberty and justice.
-
9. People should govern themselves
by democratic processes.
Agreed with the democratic process. However, even this has its problems for it is from democracy that tyranny can arise... and furthermore man as the ever present danger of group-think or ad populum. Democracy is not infallible as it is based on the foundation of fallen human nature.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of
their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”
― Plato
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of
their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”
― Plato
10. Ideas should be open to
criticism.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and with the prayers of Saint Peter, the intercession prayers of St. Demetrios and blessed Elder Paisios of the Mount Athos. May we all be changed by the divine love of Jesus Christ to a good account before the awesome judgement seat of Christ unto life everlasting. Glory to God.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Is liberal Christianity signing its own death warrant?
Courtesy: Diocese of South Carolina
Rt. Rev. Mark Joseph Lawrence, the Episcopal bishop of South Carolina, believes his denomination is moving too far left.
One week after the U.S. Episcopal Church overwhelmingly voted to approve a provisional rite for blessing gay unions and the ordination of transgender people, Bishop Lawrence said in an interview with NBC News that his denomination is moving too far out of the mainstream.
"Do I think that these two decisions will cause further decline? I believe they will," Bishop Lawrence said. "I think we've entered into a time of sexual and gender anarchy."
Lawrence's comments come amid a growing debate over the future of so-called mainline Christian churches: Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, some Lutherans and more. These denominations, which are generally more liberal than their evangelical counterparts, have been in decline for decades, a trend some observers attribute to their supposed leftward drift.
In a recent New York Times editorial, columnist and author Ross Douthat tackled the "looming extinction" of liberal Christianity, adding that: "Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance."
Since 2000, the Episcopal Church has lost more than 16 percent of its membership. This decrease reflects a wider trend across most other Protestant denominations. In 2008, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reported that "the proportion of the population that is Protestant has declined markedly in recent decades."
As the Episcopal Church weighed gay-union rites last week, most of the Diocese of South Carolina’s delegation left the General Convention to show their concern.
"I had an issue of conscience in which I believed that a line had been crossed in the church’s teachings, that I could no longer pretend that nothing significant had happened," Bishop Lawrence said, adding that he has no intention of leaving the church, despite the walkout.
“It’s not merely a matter of adapting the Church’s teachings about Jesus Christ, about salvation, about right and wrong to the culture," he said. "The culture is adrift in sexual confusion and obsession.”
But Jenna Guy, an Episcopalian from Iowa, said when the gay-rites vote was taken that the issue is important to the younger generation of Episcopalians and that the resolution would bring more people into the church.
"It’s always with great pride that I tell [people] of the inclusive nature of this church,” Guy said.
The Episcopal Church's approval of the rites makes it one of the more liberal churches on that issue.
- In May, the United Methodist Church, the largest mainline denomination in the United States with about 7.8 million members, voted against changing its definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.
- Earlier this month, the U.S. Presbyterian Church narrowly rejected a proposal for a constitutional change that would redefine marriage as a union between "two people" rather than between a woman and a man. The church, with around 2 million members, currently allows ministers to bless gay unions but prohibits them from solemnizing gay civil marriages.
- The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America defines marriage as "a lifelong covenant of faithfulness between a man and a woman" and has no official rite for same-gender unions.
- Standing out among the rest, the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination with about 1 million members, voted in 2005 to support full civil and religious marriage equality for same-sex couples.
"I think churches that are fairly clear in their stance and are not either fundamentalist or way out there on the fringe are doing pretty well," Hein added.
Steady decline in membership, however, is a problem across the board for mainline Protestant churches.
According to the National Council of Churches' 2011 report, membership in the UCC declined 2.8 percent to 1.1 million members over the previous year; the Presbyterian Church was down 2.6 percent to 2.7 million; the Episcopal Church was down 2.5 percent to two million members and the Evangelical Lutheran Church was down 2.0 percent to 4.5 million members.
The United Methodist Church's membership has declined every year since it was formed in 1968, according to a 2010 report commissioned by the denomination.
In the case of the Episcopal Church, Hein believes it "might not have been hemorrhaging so quickly " had it been more accommodating of its traditionalists.
“I think it’s a mistake that the Episcopal Church is not more welcoming of the mainstream attitude,” he said, adding that "these accommodations should really have been made five, seven years ago, because really about all that’s left of the Episcopal Church is the left wing of the Episcopal Church.”
In 2003, the election of the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church caused a deep rift between liberals and conservatives within the global Anglican Communion, with many churches leaving the U.S. and affiliating instead with the global Anglicans. The Episcopal Church is an independent church affiliated with the worldwide Anglican Communion.
"I still believe there is a broad and silent middle [within the Episcopal Church], I just don't know what it would take for them to stand up with moral courage and say, 'We don't believe this,'" Bishop Lawrence said.
Bucking the national trend, the Diocese of South Carolina experienced growth in 2011 in its average Sunday attendance, which rose 10.8 percent, from 11,086 to 12,286, according to the diocese.
“If ever there was a time for the church to be clear, hopeful, and to offer a moral compass to the struggling, and grace, and forgiveness, and healing to the broken, it’s now,” Bishop Lawrence said.
Source:
Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: July 14, 2012 328 Comments
IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Ross Douthat
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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.
This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital.
Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.
But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.
Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)
Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.
But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.
What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”
Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.
Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 17, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of an interview an Episcopal Church bishop did with The Times. It was in 2006, not 2005.
Correction: July 17, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of an interview an Episcopal Church bishop did with The Times. It was in 2006, not 2005.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Quote by Francis Bacon
"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
~Francis Bacon
1561 –1626
St. Gregory of Nyssa Apocatastasis and Later Church Theologians.
The Fate of the Unworthy and the Unbaptized.
This ascent is not possible for those who are unworthy. They
are spiritually blind and will be left outside of true life and bliss forever.
They are driven off to the outer darkness and they carry with them the stench of
their flesh which they nourished by their constant surrender to sensual
passions. This is the result only of sins which have not been effaced by
repentance, but confession is potent only on earth, and in hell it is
ineffectual. Gregory devotes particular attention to unbaptized souls which have
not been sealed and which "do not bear any mark of the Lord." "It is only
natural that such a soul will wander and circle aimlessly in the air. No one
will look for it since it does not bear the mark of the Lord. It will long for
rest and refuge but it will never find them. It will grieve in vain and its
repentance will be fruitless."
In Gregory's conception, the sinner's torment consists
primarily in the nakedness and hunger which result form the deprivation of the
hope of bliss. The sinner is also consumed by an inexhaustible fire, the
"furnace of hell" and the "untiring worm." This is the "outer darkness." These
images are all symbolic but they also express a certain spiritual reality, for
they indicate the continuation of man's earthly path and his process of
purification. Gregory considers the fire of hell as a fire of baptism and
renewal. "There is a purifying power in both fire and water," and whoever fails
to purify himself through the water of the sacrament "will necessarily be purged
by fire."
The Possibility of the Eventual Salvation of the Impure and
Unrepentant.
Salvation can be attained even in the afterlife and the path of
impure and unrepentant souls can lead to their eventual healing and purification
from evil. All traces of past life are burned away in the fire. This process is
not accomplished by means of external force because even in the purifying
torments of hell man remains free. Repentance is awakened by the fire, and the
soul, which had been held captive by material things, suddenly sees and realizes
the vanity of everything it had wanted for itself, and it mourns and repents.
The soul, Gregory writes, "clearly recognizes the distinction between virtue and
vice through its inability to participate in the Divinity." Movement toward God
is natural for the soul and when the soul turns away from evil it sees God, Who
"calls to Himself everything which comes into being through His grace."
In other words, after the soul crosses the threshold of death,
the deceitful nature of sin is revealed to it. The soul is shaken by this
discovery and "with absolute necessity" it turns in a new direction. The will to
evil, which had previously been strong in it, becomes weak and is soon
exhausted. Gregory does not believe that the created will's movement toward sin
can be eternal. He considers it highly unlikely that the will can maintain this
insanity, especially when it is freed, even if only partially, from the fetters
of the flesh. It seems to him that this is contradictory to the very nature of
man, who has been created in the image of God. "The passionate desire for that
which is foreign to it cannot remain in our nature forever. Everything which is
not proper to us, which was not part of our natures at the beginning, will
surfeit everyone and become a burden. Only that which is related to us and
natural for us will always be desired and beloved."
"Evil is not so powerful," Gregory writes, "that it can
overcome good. The foolishness of our nature is not higher or more en during
than the Divine Wisdom. Furthermore, it is impossible for that which is
inconstant and changing to be better and more resistant than that which is
immutable and has always been firmly established in good."
This explains why the free movement of the will with which this
process begins is "necessary." The turn of the will away from evil makes
purification possible. The fire can burn out sin, "impurities," "material
tumors," and "the remainder of fleshly contamination. Gregory compares this
purification to the excision of a wart or callus, but even this image is
insufficient. Purification is a separation which is ordered by God. God in His
love irresistibly draws to Himself everything which has been created in His
image. Movement toward God is natural and easy only for the pure. Impure souls
must be forced to this movement, which is agonizing for them. The soul which has
been ensnared by its passion for the material things of this earth "suffers
constantly and undergoes violent tension. God draws the soul to Himself because
it is His own property. Whatever is foreign to the soul, or whatever has grown
into its substance, has to be scraped away by force and this causes the soul
unendurable agony."
The duration and intensity of this torment is determined by the
"quantity of healing" needed for purification to be achieved. "The agony will be
measured by the amount of evil in each individual." From this it follows that
the torment ultimately comes to an end because the "amount of evil" or the
"amount of unpurged matter" in the soul of a sinner cannot be infinite, since
infiniteness is not a property of evil. Sooner or later the fire will destroy
every impurity and vice. This process of healing "by fire and bitter medicines"
may seem protracted and "commensurate with eternity" but nevertheless its
duration is limited to time.
Gregory maintains a clear distinction between the terms αιωνιος from αιων and αιδιος from αει. He never applies
the second term to the torments and he never applies the first term to bliss or
the Divinity. Αει designates that which is superior to time or outside of
time. It cannot be measured by the ages and it does not move within time." This
is the sphere of the Divinity. Creation, however, abides within time and "can be
measured by the passing of the centuries.” Αιων
designates temporality, that which occurs within time. This distinction in
terminology is the explanation for an apparent contradiction in Gregory's
thought. He demonstrates that the torment of fire is only temporary by citing
passages from Scripture which describe it as "eternal." This refers to the
eternity of time and the totality of the temporal state. However, this is not
the same as the state which is superior to time. There is no foundation for
considering that Gregory believed that the "eternal" torment foretold in
Scripture is limited to unrepentant sinners only. Gregory would not accept even
this restricted conception of damnation because for him the finiteness of the
process of purification is a basic truth. It must end, no matter who is forced
to undergo it. Other commentaries on this problem have not been conclusive.
Gregory's basic premise is that everything which has been
created is finite. Time, which is the sphere of death (because dying is a
process of change and can take place only in time), is also the sphere of
purification, the purification of man for eternity through death. The body is
purged through dissolution into its original elements and the soul is also
purified and grows to maturity in the mysterious ways and dwelling places. When
time is fulfilled it will end, the Lord will come, and the resurrection and
judgment will be at hand. This will be the first restoration.
The End of Time and the Universal Resurrection.
Time will end when the internal measure of the universe has
reached its limit. Further origination will be impossible and the passage of
time will be unnecessary. "When our race has completed in an orderly fashion the
full cycle of time," Gregory writes, "this current streaming onward as
generation, succession will cease." The significance of the forward motion of
time is in the succession of human generations, in which the "fullness of
humanity," which has been predetermined by God, is realized. "It is necessary
for reason to foresee an end to the multiplication of souls because otherwise
there will be an endless stream of births into nature which will have no end."
Measure and limitation are part of the perfection of nature. "When the birth of
men has ended, then time will end, and in this way the renewal of the universe
will be accomplished." This is not merely exhaustion or the natural end to that
which had a natural beginning. This is fulfillment, the realization of
completeness, and the reunification of this fullness.
The seven days of temporal creation will end and the eighth day
will come, "the great day of the future age." A new life will begin, "continuous
and indestructible, and it will never be altered by birth or death." Christ will
come again and the universal resurrection will be accomplished. The Lord comes
for the sake of this resurrection and "to restore the dead to incorruptibility."
He comes in glory, born by hosts of angels who bow to Him as their King. "All
the higher order of creation will worship Him" and "all the angels will rejoice
that men have again been summoned to their original state of grace." This
summons is the universal resurrection, the renewal and gathering together of the
whole of creation. "All creation, both the higher and the lower orders, will
join together in their rejoicing."
This universal gathering will begin with the resurrection of
the dead. It is our bodies which will rise up, for the soul never dies even
though the body disintegrates. The soul will not arise, but it will return. "The
soul will again return from its invisible state of dispersion to a state which
is visible and has a focus." This is the restoration of the entire man, the
"return of that which had been separated to an indivisible union." The bodies of
all men will be restored to their original beauty and there will be no physical
difference between the virtuous and the wicked. This does not mean that there
will be no distinction between the purified and the unpurified, but this
difference will exist only in their internal natures and fates. That which
awaits men in the afterlife is purification, the renewal and restoration of the
body, and the resurrection of all. But for some souls the path to purification
will have to continue even beyond this.
Gregory's Doctrine of Apocatastasis.
There is a certain inconsistency in Gregory's doctrine, which
is apparently the result of his acceptance of certain features of Origenism and
his rejection of others. In Gregory's conception the universal resurrection is a
restoration, the "restoration of the image of God to its original condition."
Through this men are again led into paradise. However, even at this restoration
impurity is still in existence. It is only the mortality born of sin that has
been brought to an end. Not every soul has been fully healed and purified, and
yet it is the soul which contains the image of God. In Gregory's system true
apocatastasis, universal restoration, is separated from the universal
resurrection and delayed until some future time. This is both unexpected and
contradictory, since according to this very system time has already ended and
there can be no further succession or development. The whole of humanity has not
yet been led into paradise. The just have been admitted into heaven but the
impure souls cannot yet enter because paradise is achieved only through absolute
purity. If the universal restoration is expected to take place at the end of
time, this restoration cannot logically be separated into parts or stages, for
this division would abrogate the integrity and completeness we would expect in a
mode of existence that is outside of time.
In Origen's system this does not involve a contradiction be
cause for him the "resurrection of the dead" is not the final restoration or the
ultimate fate of the universe. It is only a point of transition in the
continuing flow of the ages. For Origen the fate of the body is not resolved at
the universal resurrection because the resurrection is followed by further
stages of existence in future ages. Origen does not separate the fate of the
soul from the fate of the body.
Gregory accepts certain features of Origen's doctrine, although
the basic significance of their eschatologies is different. Ac cording to
Gregory's system time has ended and the last things have been accomplished but
suddenly it turns out that not everything has been brought to completion. The
ultimate fate of all men should be realized simultaneously, but for Gregory this
is not the case. In Gregory's conception the bodies of all men are purged and
become radiant in unison. How can such a body remain incorruptible if it is
reunited with a soul which has not yet been purified but which is still moribund
and decaying? The strength of Divine life cannot be active in such a soul but
the body without a soul will remain dead. Origen's system, on the other hand,
maintains a distinction between the bodies of the righteous and the bodies of
sinners, which is in accordance with his conception of the gradual overcoming of
corporeal nature.
There are two possibilities. If the last resurrection is truly
the restoration of the universe or, in the words of Gregory, a "catholic
resurrection," then time and development have absolutely ended. Any souls which
may remain unpurified are condemned to torment for eternity, the true eternity,
which is superior to the limitations of human time. This idea was later
developed by Maximus the Confessor. The other possibility, which is set forth by
Origen, is that the general resurrection is not the ultimate restoration. The
features of Origen's system which Gregory adapts are logically incompatible with
his own premises. Furthermore, Origen's conception is contradictory and cannot
be defended. Gregory's attempt to achieve a synthesis between Origen's system
and the eschatology of Methodius of Olympus, from whom he borrows his doctrine
of the resurrection, is unsuccessful.
At the resurrection the body grows forth from the earth as if
it were a new plant. Gregory compares this resurrection with the germination of
seeds, the blossoming of trees, and the development of the human embryo. All of
these analogies had long been a part of Christian tradition. "In the words of
the Apostle," Gregory writes, "the mystery of the resurrection can be understood
as the same type of wonderful development that we observe in seeds." "Seeds" and
"ears of grain" are among Gregory's favorite images. He distinguishes two stages
in their growth. Their development originates in a state that is indeterminate
because "at first the seed is without form but once it is established by the
ineffable artistry of God, ii takes on form and develops and becomes dense." For
this reason there is nothing exceptional about the growth of the seed of the
dead body or its restoration to its previous form and "entire material state."
Since every germination is achieved through dissolution and death, all growth is
a resurrection and a victory over death.
Resurrection is made possible by the connection of the soul and
the body in an individual organic unity but it is actually achieved only through
the power of God. It is He Who authorizes the birth, renewal, and life of all
nature. Resurrection is a miracle worked by the omnipotence of the Divinity but
it is a miracle which is in accord with the basic laws of nature. It is one more
manifestation of the general mystery of life. Resurrection is the fulfillment
and ultimate realization of nature. The bodies which are resurrected are the
very bodies which have died. Otherwise this would not be resurrection but a new
creation. The resurrected bodies are composed of their former elements which
have been gathered from everywhere by virtue of the life-giving power of the
soul. "In this way the different elements are gathered by the power of the soul,
which weaves them together to form the chain of the body."
Resurrection is not merely a return to our former life or our
previous mode of existence. This would be a great misfortune and the soul would
lose all hope of true resurrection. Resurrection is the restoration of the
entire man. It is a renewal and a trans formation to something better and more
complete. However, it is one and the same body which makes this transition. Not
only the unity of the subject, but also the identity of the substratum are
maintained. This does not contradict the truth of the renewal and
transformation. "The veil of the body, after it has been destroyed by death,
will be recomposed and rewoven from the very same material elements, not into
its previous coarse and imperfect state, but in such a way that the fibers of
its being will be light and airy. It will be restored into the superior state of
the great beauty which it had desired." That which returns to life is that which
was interred in the grave, but it will be different. All earthly life is a
continuing process of change and renewal. "Human nature is like a constantly
flowing stream," Gregory writes, and yet this does not turn individual men into
an indefinite "crowd of people."
When man is resurrected he will not be any particular age nor
will he be every age all at once. The concept of age will become invalid at the
resurrection because it was not part of our original nature. "In our original
life there was probably no old age, or child hood, or suffering from various
diseases, or any other deformity or imperfection of the body because it is not
proper to God to create anything like that. All of these violated us when we
were invaded by sin." These things will not be a part of our resurrection but
neither will they prevent it. It is only our true nature that will be
resurrected and not the vices and passions which have infected it. We will be
renewed and liberated from this heritage and all the traces of our former lives
of evil and sin. At the resurrection we will be transformed into a state of
incorruptibility and immortality because resurrection is victory over death. The
ears of grain will ripen to their maturity and be fruitful, and they will reach
out to the heights of heaven.
Nothing that is connected with disease, the infirmity of old
age, or ugliness will survive at the resurrection, neither wrinkles, nor
deformity, nor immaturity. Resurrected bodies will not preserve their former
organs and members which were made necessary by the demands of sinful life on
earth. Death will purify our bodies of everything that is "superfluous or
unnecessary for our enjoyment of our future life." This is especially true of
the organs which we need to nourish ourselves and to perform the other functions
of animal life or which are connected with the cycles of all material growth.
Humanity will no longer be distinguished by sex. All the unrefined matter of our
bodies will be overcome and the heaviness of the flesh will disappear. The body
will become light and will naturally move upward. All of the attributes of the
body: its color, form, features, and everything else "will be transformed into
something Divine." Our bodies will lose their impermeability and their
accidental distinctions will be effaced.
This is what Gregory is referring to when he says that we will
all assume a single appearance at the resurrection. He writes: "We will all
become the single body of Christ and we will all take on a single form and
aspect because the radiance of the image of the Divinity will shine equally in
all." This means that our appearance will be defined from within. "It is not the
elements which will distinguish the appearance of each but the particularities
of sin and virtue." Thus, the appearance of everyone will not be the same. The
resurrection is the reinstitution of our original condition. It is not only the
return to but also the gathering together of everything that was part of our
previous life. It is not only apocatastasis, a restoration, but also
recapitulatio, a summing up.
Gregory's conception of the final restoration is not the same
as Origen's because Gregory did not believe in the pre-existence of the soul.
For him the restoration is not a return to the past but the realization of
something which had never existed and the accomplishment of that which had not
been fulfilled. It is completion, not oblivion. This is especially true for the
body. In Gregory's conception the body is not replaced but it is transformed and
in this way it truly fulfills its function as the mirror of the soul.
The resurrection is followed by the Last Judgment of the entire
universe. The Son of God will come again because He is the Judge and the Father
judges through Him. "Everything the Only-Begotten decrees at the Last Judgment
is also the work of the Father" but it is the Son Who sits in judgment because
through His own experience He can truly measure the circumstances and
difficulties of human life. He will judge everyone, "whether they had great
experience of the good and evil of human life or whether they had hardly begun
to know it and had died in immaturity."
This is more a judgment of Divine love than of Divine justice.
All of its sentences are properly merited, however, and are equal to that which
each man deserves. Christ is the "Justice of God and He revealed this Justice to
men." In a certain sense each man will be the judge of himself. Each man will
awaken at the resurrection and will remember his past life and give it a true
evaluation, so that everyone who appears to be judged will be fully aware of his
good deeds and his faults. The judgment is a mirror in which all men will be
reflected.
The full glory of the Son, which is equal to the glory of the
Father, will be revealed at the Last Judgment. This judgment will be universal
and "the whole human race, from the first creature to the full completeness of
all who were ever brought into being," will gather together and stand before the
royal throne of the Son. The devil and his angels will also be brought to Him
for judgment. "Then," writes Gregory, "the instigator of the rebellion, who
dreamed of usurping the dignity of the Lord, will appear before the eyes of all
as a beaten slave, and he will be dragged to punishment by the angels. All of
his servants and the accomplices of his malice will be subjected to the
punishment which is fitting for them." The ultimate deceit will be revealed and
the true and only King will appear and both those who are victorious and those
who are conquered will recognize Him and sing Him songs of praise.
Gregory devotes relatively little attention to the Last
Judgment. The few depictions he has left of this terrible day are striking but
they are intended more for edification than for serious consideration as dogma.
The focal point of Gregory's eschatology is not the judgment because for him the
judgment is not the final resolution of the fate of the universe. It is only a
preliminary summation of history and a mirror of the past. The judgment is
simply the beginning of the eighth day, which will continue beyond this process.
Only the resurrection and the appearance of Christ in His glory are ultimate.
The Son's judgment is more the revelation of the activity of humanity than its
resolution and it accomplishes little that is new. The bliss of just souls has
already been determined by the resurrection and the torment of sinners has begun
even before the resurrection and will continue beyond the judgment. The greatest
significance of the Last Judgment lies in man's expectation of it because this
conception motivates us in our efforts on earth to achieve religious and moral
perfection. "The coming Judgment is a threat for us in our weak ness. This
magnification of our sorrows makes us fear punishment and teaches us to avoid
evil." "We make our description of this severe court as convincing as possible
only in order to teach the necessity of leading a good and charitable life."
Gregory has borrowed much of his doctrine of the Last Judgment from Origen.
Gregory sets forth a doctrine of a "universal restoration."
"Participation in bliss awaits everyone," he writes. Some men achieve this
through their actions in life on earth, whereas others must pass through the
fire of purification. In the end, however, "after many ages evil will disappear
and nothing will remain except good. This will be the completion of the return
of all intellectual creatures to the original state in which they were first
created, when there was as yet no evil." Eventually "evil will disappear from
existence and it will again become nonexistence." Not a trace of evil will
remain, and then "the beauty of our similarity to God, in which we were formed
at the beginning, will again shine forth."
"There was a time," Gregory writes, "when all intellectual
natures formed a single union and, by fulfilling the commandments of God, they
brought themselves into agreement with the harmony which the Source had
established through His activity. But after sin had intruded among the first
men, who until then, together with the angelic forces, had made up a single
assembly, the Divine harmony of this union was destroyed. Something had made men
susceptible to deceit and this caused them to fall. Man was deprived of
communion with the angels, so that through the fall their intellectual harmony
was abrogated. After this it became necessary for the fallen one to labor and
sweat in order to fight to liberate himself from the power which had gained
dominion over him at the fall. Man must rise again and he receives as a reward
for his victory over the enemy the right to participate in the Divine assembly."
In this assembly human and angelic natures will again be united and form a
"Divine host."
This will be a great and universal feast and nothing will
interrupt the unity of intellectual creation. Both the lower and the higher
orders will rejoice in universal gladness and all will worship and praise the
Father through the Son in unanimity. All veils will be raised and a common joy
and glory will shine forth in all. This final restoration will include everyone:
all people, the entire race of men, and the whole of human nature. Moreover, it
will encompass even evil spirits and the "inventor of evil" himself will finally
be joined to the triumphant gathering. He also will be saved because during the
three days of his death the Lord healed all three vessels of evil: demonic
natures, the female sex, and the male sex. Evil will finally be driven out "even
from the race of the snake, in which the nature of evil first found a source for
itself."
Gregory's doctrine of the universal restoration of everything
to its original state is based on the teaching of Origen. Their common point of
departure is that Good is omnipotent because it alone has true existence and is
the only foundation and goal of everything that exists. "There is always an
immutable Divine harmony in everything," Gregory writes. "Your indignation and
the dissatisfaction with which you observe the necessary chain of the sequence
of things are in vain, since you do not know the goal to which each individual
thing in the ordering of the universe is directed. It is necessary for
everything to follow a certain order and succession, in accordance with the true
Wisdom of the One Who directs all, as it comes into harmony with Divine
nature."
Gregory understands the opposition of good and evil as the
opposition between being and will, between that which is necessary and that
which is accidental. There is no evil. It does not exist but only occurs or
happens occasionally. It is necessary for that which occurs to have an end, for
"that which has not always been will not always be." That which originates can
subsist eternally only if there is an eternal will for it to do so and only
through that which itself exists eternally. It can exist only by participating
in the One Who truly is and by communion in the eternal Good. Creation can be
maintained in this way but this is not possible for evil because evil is not
from God. It is the "absence of good" or nongood, and this is the same as
non-existence. In Gregory's reasoning: "Since it is not proper for evil to exist
without being willed, and since the eternal will is from God, evil will
eventually be completely destroyed because there will be no place for it to
exist." Gregory follows Origen in his reference to the Gospels: "God will be all
in all." "By this Scripture teaches us that evil will be completely destroyed
because if God is in all being, it is evident that He is not in evil being or
sin." God is in everyone and for this reason no one can be excluded from the
whole. "God is in everything" means that all are in God and partake in the
Good.
Gregory manages to avoid one of the difficulties of Origen's
system. In Gregory's conception time is not merely the falling out of eternity
or the environment for sinful and fallen men. Nor does Gregory concede that
creation had pre-existence or is eternal. On the contrary, creation is realized
for the first time only within the process of history. This gives a completely
new significance to the conception of apocatastasis, the restoration, and
establishes a positive value for the course of human history. This principle is
undermined, however, by Gregory's insistence that nothing created has any
essential value and that God is the only worthy goal of our contemplation and
striving. This premise leads Gregory to conclude that we will ultimately achieve
a state of oblivion. "The memory of that which existed after our original state
of prosperity and of that which caused man to sink into evil will be effaced by
that which will be effected when time runs out. Our memory of this condition
will come to an end when it is completed. Our final restoration in Jesus Christ
will efface our memory of evil." However, without the memory of evil there will
be no remembrance of our struggle against it and our victory over it.
Gregory openly or by implication proposes that creation will
find its ultimate completeness only in God. Creatures will be oblivious of
themselves and of everything which is not similar to God. All that men will see
in one another will be God, and a single image of God will be in everyone. This
doctrine contains elements of historical docetism and is connected with
Gregory's underestimation of the human will. This is why Gregory denies the
permanent existence of evil. Man's will cannot fail to yield when ultimate Good
is revealed to it because even in opposition the will is weak. Furthermore, in
Gregory's conception the will is determined by reason, which can be mistaken
only when it is deceived and cannot persist once its error is revealed.
According to Gregory, a clear vision of the truth will necessarily turn the will
towards that truth.
Gregory's doctrine of the necessary movement of the free will
is an attempt to unite the concepts of human freedom and necessity. This is the
basic concern of his eschatology. The will is subordinate to the law of the
basic goodness of all nature and the eschatological process is defined as the
gradual elimination of the consequences of evil. This is the significance of the
fire of purification. Gregory's doctrine shows the influence of the traditions
of the school of Alexandria, and it is very different from the teaching of Basil
the Great. It should be noted that certain features of Origenism are also
present in the system of Gregory the Theologian, who accepts the idea of baptism
through the purifying fire but does not support the doctrine of the general
restoration.
Gregory's Doctrine of Apocatastasis and Later Church
Theologians.
The contemporaries of Gregory of Nyssa did not respond to his
eschatology. It was first evaluated by Barsanuphius, who died about 550. He
considered that Gregory was an uncritical disciple of Origen. Gregory's theology
was later examined by Maximus the Confessor, who interpreted his doctrine of the
universal restoration as the turn of every soul to the contemplation of God,
which is the realization of the "totality of the faculties of the soul." "It is
fitting that just as all nature will, at the appointed time, be made
incorruptible through the resurrection of the flesh, so also will the damaged
faculties of the soul efface the flawed images contained within it in the course
of the ages. The soul will reach the boundary of the ages without having found
peace, and it will finally come to God, Who is without limit. Thus it will
recognize the Good but not yet participate in it. It will return to itself all
of its faculties and it will be restored to its original state. It will then
become clear that the Creator is not the author of sin." Maximus distinguished
between επιγνωσις, the knowledge of Divine truth,
and μεθεξις, participation in the Divinity, which requires a definite
movement of the will. Gregory's conception differs from this because Gregory
makes no distinction between the consciousness of Good and the inclination of
the will towards it.
Maximus' interpretation did not satisfy his contemporaries.
Several decades later Patriarch Herman suggested that the elements of Origenism
in Gregory's theology were interpolations. Although his theory is unacceptable
because of the organic integrity of Gregory's system, his views were seconded by
Patriarch Photius and are representative of the way Gregory was understood in
the eighth and ninth centuries. The reticence of Justinian in his epistle on
Gregory to Mennas, Patriarch of Constantinople, as well as the silence of the
fathers of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, can be explained by the circumstances
in which they were writing. They were primarily concerned with refuting those
Origenist doctrines which stemmed from Origen's premises of the pre-existence of
souls and the originally pure spiritual nature of all creatures, which were
rejected by Gregory. It is with this in mind that the fathers of the council
pronounced their anathema on "those who accept the pre-existence of the soul and
the apocatastasis that is connected with it." Because of Gregory's
generally accepted authority and sanctity, the sixth century opponents of
Origenism were disposed to remain silent about those of his views which were, if
not coincident with, at least reminiscent of the "impious, impure, and criminal
teachings of Origen." However, Gregory's Origenism was not entirely with out
effect on his authority, and he was read and cited less frequently than the
other "chosen fathers."
Source:
http://www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/fathers_florovsky_1.htm#_Toc3723877
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