Theology as Doxology and Dialogue: The Essential Writings of Nikos Nissiotis 1978703422, 9781978703421

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Theology as Doxology and Dialogue

PRAISE FOR THEOLOGY AS DOXOLOGY AND DIALOGUE: THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS OF NIKOS NISSIOTIS “Three decades after his untimely death, the theological and ecumenical legacy of Nikos Nissiotis remains unprecedented and undiscovered. At a time when global society and Christianity face unforeseen challenges in society and politics, science and technology, as well as the rise of religious nationalism and radicalism, Nissiotis’ theological voice, founded on the spirit of dialogue, offers a vibrant interpretation of Church teaching as well as a timely reflection on ecumenical relations. Nissiotis served for many years as director of the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey and was the Orthodox voice in the World Council of Churches in Geneva. In ecumenical conferences throughout the world, he was capable of communicating the Orthodox response to questions of common interest in a clear, coherent, and comprehensible manner. We miss this extraordinary Greek theologian in the global dialogue of Christianity, and we will never forget his theology of ‘paschal joy.’” —Jürgen Moltmann, professor emeritus, University of Tübingen “Nikos Nissiotis was a landmark for modern Greek theology, representing a ‘different’ kind of theologian, scholar, and professor, while relating the language of theology with the immediacy of experience. For Nissiotis, theology preserved and integrated the exciting realism of existential value without any trace of intellectualism. His teaching sustained the freshness of vibrant reflection, transcending the delusion of narrow-minded introspection. He refused to divorce theology from philosophy, perceiving theology as a source and inspiration of vitality and delight.” —Christos Yannaras, professor emeritus, Panteios University of Political Science “Nikos Nissiotis was among the first to open the eyes and ears of Christians from other traditions to the theological and spiritual treasures of the Orthodox Church. As Director of the Ecumenical Institute Bossey and as Moderator of the Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches, he has left a profound mark on the ecumenical movement.” —Konrad Raiser, former general secretary, World Council of Churches

Theology as Doxology and Dialogue The Essential Writings of Nikos Nissiotis Edited by Nikolaos Asproulis and John Chryssavgis Foreword by John Zizioulas

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-9787-0342-1 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-9787-0343-8 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword vii John Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 John Chryssavgis and Nikolaos Asproulis PART 1:  PRELUDE TO THEOLOGY  1 Theology as Science and Doxology

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 2 Reflections on the Renewal of Systematic Theology

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PART 2:  SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION  3 The Unity of Scripture and Tradition

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 4 Corporate Worship and Individual Prayer

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PART 3:  TRINITY AND CREATION  5 The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity in Church Life and Theology

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 6 Pneumatological Christology as a Presupposition of Ecclesiology

133

 7 Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person

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 8 Pneumatological Christology: Nature, Ecology, and Integral Humanity

215

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Contents

PART 4:  CHURCH AND SOCIETY  9 Our History: Limitation or Creative Power?

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10 The Unity of Grace

239

PART 5:  ECUMENISM AND MISSION 11 The Ecclesiological Foundation of Mission

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12 The Witness and the Service of Orthodoxy to the Undivided Church

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PART 6:  THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION 13 Toward an Ecumenical Theological Education

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14 Toward an Orthodox Theological Education

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Bibliography 325 Index of Names

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Index of Terms

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About the Editors

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Foreword

Nikos Nissiotis was undoutbedly one of the most exceptional and diverse thinkers, while at the same time one of the most prolific and influential personalities of the second half of the twentieth century. After completing his studies at the Theological School of the University of Athens, Nikos Nissiotis was privileged to pursue graduate work abroad for many years in the heart of the most important theological and philosophical ferments. In Basel and Zurich, he would come to know Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, representatives of two competitive trends of European theology in the post-war period. He would also become familiar with “dialectic theology,” which reoriented Protestant theology to its roots, freed from the shackles of liberalism. Subsequently, he moved to Louvain where he studied the philosophy of existentialism and Roman Catholic neo-Thomism. His solid grasp of Western thought further complements his understanding of the depth psychology of Carl Jung. As a result, Nissiotis became the orthodox theologian most deeply and broadly informed in the entire range of Western thought. His influential role was sealed by his important service to the Ecumenical Movement. The Bossey Institute of Ecumenical Studies in Switzerland thereafter became the center of his theological initiatives. It is there that he first realized the major differences that divide Orthodox theology from Western thought and set out to express Orthodox thought in categories and ways easily perceived by Western Christians. Nissiotis would play a leading role in the World Council of Churches (WCC), while also taking part in the Second Vatican Council as an official observer. His theological efforts were primarily focused on the theological dimension of the WCC, namely its Faith and the Order Commission, where he was elected as the first Orthodox president. vii

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After the theological contribution of the Russian émigré theologians who settled in Paris, perhaps no other theologian worked so much as Nissiotis to render Orthodoxy ecumenically visible and viable. This is because Nissiotis was deeply conscious and respectful of the differences that divide Orthodoxy from other Christian communions in terms of doctrine but especially with regard to ethos. Having studied Western theology in depth, he pointed out that the latter deeply underestimated the doctrine of the Holy Trinity by focusing on Christology. This was a trend that he labeled “christomonism.” By way of offering a corrective to this tendency in Western theology, Nissiotis underlined the essential role of the Holy Spirit in theology overall and in ecclesiology in particular, insisting on Pneumatology as a unique and distinct feature of Orthodox theology and tradition. Nikos Nissiotis cared deeply about Orthodoxy and believed sincerely in its ecumenical mission among the diverse Christian traditions. In deliberation and debate with his Protestant and Roman Catholic colleagues, his thought was at once critical and creative. In this regard, in order to contribute toward the reconciliation of divided Christendom, Nissiotis proposed several practical and pastoral steps toward unity. In particular, he stressed that the unity of the Church must first be established on the local level, suggesting concrete, albeit revolutionary steps for coexistence and cooperation among the various divided Christian communities. Needless to say, such ideas could not be realized on the local level inasmuch as Eucharistic communion still remained unresolved. Nevertheless, Nissiotis was correct to point out that unity cannot remain on the level of theological debate but must also be grounded in the life of local Church. Despite his far-reaching presence and influence in ecumenical circles of his time, Nissiotis unfortunately remains unknown to many students of Christian theology and thought today, largely because his numerous publications appeared in various languages, mostly European (French and German), and in journals not readily accessible in the English language. This is why we owe a great debt to Nikolaos Asproulis and John Chryssavgis for selecting, introducing, and exposing some of the most fundamental and formative addresses and articles of this extraordinary thinker and theologian, who in many ways was at the vanguard of systematic theology and ecumenical reflection. John [Zizioulas] Metropolitan of Pergamon

Acknowledgments

1.  “Theology as Science and Doxology” appears here for the first time in English translation from the French original: “La theologie en tant que science et en tant que doxologie,” Irenikon 33, no. 3 (1960): 291–310. Reproduced here by permission. 2.  “Reflections on the Renewal of Systematic Theology” appears here for the first time in English translation from the French original: “Remarques sur le renouveau de la theologie systematique,” La pensée orthodoxe 12 (1966): 125–134. Reproduced here by permission. 3.  “The Unity of Scripture and Tradition,” first appeared in the Greek Orthodox Theological Review 11, no. 2 (1965/66): 183–208. Reproduced here by permission. 4.  “Corporate Worship and Individual Prayer,” first appeared as “The Relationship between Corporate Worship and Individual Prayer in the Orthodox Tradition,” in Tantur Yearbook 1978–79 (Jerusalem, 1981): 129–146. Reproduced here by permission. 5.  “The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity in Church Life and Theology,” first appeared in A. J. Philippou, ed., The Orthodox Ethos, vol. 1 (Oxford: Holywell Press, 1964), 32–69. Reproduced here by permission. 6.  “Pneumatological Christology as a Presupposition of Ecclesiology,” first appeared in Oecumenia, edited by F. W. Kantzenbach and V. Vajta (Neuchâtel: Delachaux/Nestlé, 1967), 235–252. All attempts were made to secure permission before publication. We apologize for those cases where permission might not have been sought and, if notified, will formally seek permission at the earliest opportunity. 7.  “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person” first appeared in Theologia 53 (1982): 947–989; (1983): 90–122. Reproduced here by permission. ix

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8.  “Pneumatological Christology: Nature, Ecology, and Integral Humanity” appears here for the first time in English translation by N. Asproulis, from the French original “La Christologie pneumatologique de la nature et ses consequences pour l’ ecologie et l’ humanism integrale,” in Unterwegs zur Einheit (Festschrift fur H. Stirnimann), edited by J. Brantschen and P. Selvatico, Freiburg i. U/i. Br. (Universitatsverlag/Herder, 1980), 435–444. All attempts were made to secure permission before publication. We apologize for those cases where permission might not have been sought and, if notified, will formally seek permission at the earliest opportunity. 9.  “Our History: Limitation or Creative Power?” first appeared in Student World 1 (1965): 33–43. Reproduced here by permission. 10.  “The Unity of Grace” first appeared in The Sufficiency of God (Hon. Volume to W. A. V. Hooft) (London: SCMP, 1963), 88–110. © SCM Press. Reproduced by permission of Hymns Ancient & Modern LtD. 11.  “The Ecclesiological Foundation of Mission” first appeared in the Greek Orthodox Theological Review 7 (1961/62): 22–52. Reproduced here by permission. 12.  “The Witness and the Service of Orthodoxy to the Undivided Church” first appeared in the Ecumenical Review 14, no. 2 (1962): 192–202. Copyright World Council of Churches, reproduced by permission. 13.  “Toward an Ecumenical Theological Education” reprinted with permission from Orthodox Handbook for Ecumenism: Recourses for Theological Education, edited by P. Kalaitzidis, Cyril Hovorun, et al. (Volos: Volos Academy Publications in cooperation with WCC Publications and Regnum Books International, 2014), 935–940. 14.  “Toward an Orthodox Theological Education” first appeared in English as “Orthodox Theological Education: Reality and Perspectives,” Scientific Annals of the School of Theology of the University of Athens 23 (1976): 507–530. Reproduced here by permission.

Introduction John Chryssavgis and Nikolaos Asproulis

NIKOS NISSIOTIS’S PERSONAL AND ECUMENICAL LEGACY JOHN CHRYSSAVGIS There are two anecdotal details that come to mind when I recall with profound admiration and affection Nikos Nissiotis (1924–1986): First, when I was studying theology in the late 1970s, there were few professors like Nissiotis at the University of Athens that came as prepared for class: there was a method to his teaching and an objective to his course. To me, that reflected a profound respect for the subject (philosophy and psychology of religion) as well as for the student (upper-level undergraduates). Second, I also recall his emphasis on the conviction of hope.1 The relevant passage in the New Testament from the First Letter of Peter was one of his favorites: “Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence” (3.15). This “account for the hope in us” (λόγος περί τῆς ἐν ἡμῖν ἐλπίδος) was what inspired and invigorated Nissiotis to be “always prepared to advocate” (ἔτοιμος ἀεί πρός ἀπολογίαν) and advance the cause of theology in the public square. This was a man whose classroom was a window to the world and for whom the world was the material of education. I doubt that there was any other theologian in the twentieth century that had the breadth and depth of Nikos Nissiotis in his understanding of Western thought and interpretation of Orthodox theology to the Western world. The title and breadth of participants alone in one of the earliest commemorative volumes, which was dedicated to the work and writing of Nissiotis, demonstrates the circles within which 1

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Introduction

this prophetic figure moved throughout his life: Nikos A. Nissiotis: Religion, Philosophy and Sport in Dialogue.2 Here is a select list of the contributors: Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann, Oscar Cullmann and Thomas F. Torrance, Dumitru Stǎniloae and Nikolaos Matsoukas, Hans Küng and John Cobb Jr., Archbishop Iakovos of America and Archbishop Demetrios of America, John Meyendorff and Christos Yannaras, and (from the World Council of Churches) Lukas Vischer and Emilio Castro. In a special tribute to Nissiotis in the same book, Archbishop Iakovos of America perceptively encapsulated the heart and mind of this remarkable theologian and exceptional teacher: “The space in which he moved—and he moved in many directions, making his presence and contributions well known—was in certainty the whole world.”3 From Monologue to Dialogue4 For Nissiotis, theology was fundamentally about encounter and exchange; it was dialogue with others and with the world. In Zürich and Basel, Switzerland, he studied “dialectic theology” under such Reformed pioneers as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, while also embracing the philosophy and psychology of existentialism under trailblazing thinkers like Karl Jaspers and Carl Jung. Hearing stories from him about these formative teachers was a striking aspect of his classes. Nissiotis came from a religious family and background. His father, papaAngelos, was a well-known and well-educated clergyman in Athens, with roots in Asia Minor and involved in reforming religious education in Greece. Young Nikos watched as his father led a lay movement that advanced a renewal of church life in Greece. However, his first acquaintance with other communities and confessions came from the world Christian student movement. In his early twenties, after the Second World War, he had been the general secretary of the Student Christian Movement in Greece. It was in this context—and particularly in the process of establishing in 1953 the world fellowship of Orthodox youth, Syndesmos, whose name was conceived by Nissiotis—that he also became closely acquainted with leading theologians of the Russian emigration, such as Fr. John Meyendorff, Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Paul Evdokimov, as well as luminary theologians such as Georges Khodr (later Metropolitan of Mt. Lebanon in the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch) and Anastasios Yannoulatos (later missionary in Africa and currently Archbishop of Albania).5 His later involvement in ecumenical circles, both academic and religious, articulated and demonstrated his interest in dialogue. His teaching at the Ecu-



Introduction 3

menical Institute of Bossey, the international center of encounter and education of the World Council of Churches, offered him the opportunity to shape his own perception of how theology can inform society while at the same time providing formative guidance to a generation of scholars and clergy. Nissiotis served as deputy director to Hans-Heinrich Wolf from 1958 to 1962 and the third director of the institute from 1966 to 1974. Beyond coaching its staff soccer team for competition against the students, Nissiotis developed its graduate school and guided students to the frontier between the church and the world. One of his greatest contributions to Bossey and to East-West relations was a series of conferences that he organized on liturgy and spirituality, on the role of the church in the world, and on reconciliation and international justice. Undoubtedly, his influence was as tangible in inter-cultural as in inter-confessional encounter, in the philosophy of religion as in scripture and doctrine. He also played a pivotal role in the World Council of Churches, being the first Orthodox theologian to address one of its general assemblies,6 serving as associate general secretary (1968–72) and moderator of its Faith and Order Commission (1975–83)7 while also contributing substantially to its “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” (1982)8 document as well as its “Common Account of Hope.” The confidence of the World Council of Churches—especially through its founding secretary general Willem Visser’t Hooft—was evident in his appointment as official representative of the organization to both the second session of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church (Rome, 1963) as well as the earliest preparatory consultations for the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church (Rhodes, 1961). In his report on the De Ecumenismo document of Vatican II, submitted to Visser’t Hooft in November 1963, Nissiotis remarked that, just as the council should be understood as a momentous council of one church, rather than as an ecumenical council, “Unitatis Redintegratio” may be perceived as a consequential statement that is more than merely a monologue about dialogue, but rather the result of dialogue with the wider ecumenical movement. Of course, Nissiotis was also deeply committed to bilateral dialogue—for instance, between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, the Reformed Protestant Churches, and especially the Oriental (or non-Chalcedonian) Orthodox Churches. His close friendship with the distinguished theologian and ecumenist Paul Verghese also brought him into contact with the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church in India.9 The World Council of Churches also appointed him as its official observer to the four annual autumn sessions of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65).10 Later, Nissiotis would remark to those who participated in Bossey, Switzerland, conferences in 1964 and 1965 that often the Eastern Orthodox observers would contribute a comment in discussion, or make a recommendation

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informally to a Roman Catholic bishop, and the next day it would appear in a draft document of the council. Ever the mentor and teacher, Nissiotis maintained close relations with prominent hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, including Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, and would in turn hand pick Orthodox students from Greece and Russia, as well as Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with Anglican and Roman Catholic students from all over the world, to participate in the graduate school sessions at Bossey chateau. One of the Orthodox during this time was a deacon named Bartholomew—then a young student of theology, later an influential figure in the ecumenical movement, and today the Ecumenical Patriarch with global stature. His teaching was diverse and broad in scope, as stimulating and inspiring in content; it was filled with spiritual insight and ecumenical enthusiasm. Nissiotis loved passionate debate and honest conversation; he conveyed Orthodoxy through friendship and fellowship. His classes covered such topics as theology, philosophy and psychology; his theological approach highlighted the importance of pneumatology and ecclesiology; and his educational methodology included practical aspects of liturgy and spirituality. His house was always open to students for further stimulation and growth through intellectual exchange and cultural exposure. For a period of four decades, Nissiotis was one of the most prominent theologians and prolific speakers of the ecumenical movement in the post-war era. He sought to unwrap the mystery and decipher the antiquity of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, speaking a language that resonated to a Western audience. Dr. John Cobb, the director of the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, observed: “As Western . . . Christians, we are suspicious of our tradition, trying to correct and change it. Nissiotis, on the other hand, was at home in his tradition, arguing from it, affirming and reaffirming.”11 Nissiotis was deeply rooted in and informed by the theology of the Orthodox Church. However, he was also deeply committed to building bridges between the Eastern and Western traditions.12 This “enabl[ed] him in a distinctively critical and creative way to cut through formalized patterns of academic text-book theology.”13 It was in this spirit that, in April 1959, he initiated Bossey’s first conference of serious study among theologians of the Eastern Orthodox and the Western church traditions. For Nissiotis, “interpreting Orthodoxy” signified “engaging with the West.” For Orthodox Christians, it implied moving beyond traditional slogans and catchphrases; for non-Orthodox Christians, it involved understanding the reason behind Orthodox doctrine, spirituality and liturgy. “This means in practice that Orthodoxy must give up defensive,



Introduction 5

confessional-apologetic attitudes and . . . become a river of life, filling the gaps, complementing opposites, overcoming enmities and driving forward towards reunion.”14 For Nissiotis, the term “Orthodoxy” coincided with “oneness,” “catholicity” and “apostolicity.” It was not a narrow label or parochial qualification descriptive of one or even all of the Orthodox Churches. It was much broader than any institutional or confessional boundaries. The Orthodox witness to unity should reflect self-sacrifice, placing all separations at the service of the one undivided Church—overcoming divisions, reconciling differences and complementing divergences. Indeed, the unique reminder of Orthodoxy to the discussion of church unity lies in its reminder that the unbroken continuity of the historical church has a far greater authority than any confessional or jurisdictional statement of a local church, especially in that church’s compulsive efforts to justify its distinctiveness and separateness. Nissiotis embodied a new kind of theology: one that was dynamic and creative. He inspired and invited a theology that broke free from the shackles of a stifling past that resulted in anachronism and instead modeled a way out of the impasse of a parochial present that refrained from marginalization. Theology as Doxology From a young age, Nissiotis learned that dialogue was a vital dimension of theology. Or, to put it otherwise, dialogue is the very essence of theology; dialogue is theology in life, or theology alive. It is a way of offering glory and thanks to a God, whose essence is dialogical and whose action is merciful. So Nissiotis’s scholarly articles consider the entire breadth of life: philosophy and psychology, academia and scholarship, education and healing, science and religion, ecology and technology, religion and peace, medicine and sport, social and contextual theology.15 Throughout his academic career and ecumenical service, he contributed as an editorial member of such ecumenical journals as The Ecumenical Review, Concilium, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, and Ökumenische Rundschau. His ecumenical conviction stemmed from a broader vision of “reconciliation and sharing among all those regarded as brothers and sisters in the one family of God . . . a constant challenge in the search for appropriate relationships in social, economic and political life.” For Nissiotis, “the eucharist shows us that our behavior is inconsistent in face of the reconciling presence of God in human history: we are placed under continual judgment by the persistence of unjust relationships of all kinds in our society, the manifold divisions on account of human pride, material interest and power politics and,

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above all, the obstinacy of unjustifiable confessional oppositions within the body of Christ.”16 Fellowship and dialogue were critical tools for unity and communion. In his opening address as Moderator of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches in Bangalore (1978), Nissiotis remarked: “The operation of the Spirit fills the gaps, unites the oppositions, bridges the distances, links the different gifts of grace.”17 Inter-Orthodox relations—within and among both the Eastern and Oriental Churches—were foremost among his interests and concerns. One of his earliest articles addressed the Pan-Orthodox Conference of Rhodes in 1960. For Nissiotis, communication and consensus were paramount in the preconciliar preparatory process for the proposed Pan-Orthodox Council. “Nissiotis hoped the Pan-Orthodox council would include preliminary consultation with nonOrthodox, who would have voting rights and episcopal representation—especially the Oriental Orthodox.”18 “Speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4.15) was his guiding principle. Indeed, “to do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice. Haughty eyes and a proud heart . . . are sinful” (Prov. 21.3–4). Nissiotis recognized that identifying heterodoxy with heresy was a rigid and inflexible attitude of certain modern and narrow Orthodox circles, which is nevertheless scarcely reflective of the more compassionate and charitable experience of Orthodox history and tradition. This is why, while “he loved the church, he despised churchiness. His Greek eyes would flash in anger at hypocrisy, at excuses for unjustified stand-stills or church aloofness and smug isolation.”19 Ecumenical dialogue is ultimately about rapprochement and reconciliation. Not, however, in the sense of tolerating or forgetting the past, but rather in the radical and authentic sense of forgiveness as “making space” for one another historically, culturally, and theologically. Nissiotis was capable of rising above dissension and division, choosing instead to contemplate the ultimate fulfillment of the Church. Such an eschatological vision “leaves room” or “makes space” for other individuals, other communities and other confessions—which is the etymological meaning of the Greek word for “forgiveness” (συγ-χώρησις), namely “sharing the same space” or “making accommodation” for another. After all, the space is always more restricted when we refuse to share; by “making room” for others, there is more space for us to breathe as well. For Nissiotis, ecumenical openness implies dialogue and witness, not censure or judgment. Christian witness was about the journey from “I” to “Thou”; it was the movement from mere existence to coexistence.20 And this invariably called for breaking out of every form of parochialism, sectarianism



Introduction 7

and exclusivism—a vocation and vision for Orthodox Christians within the ecumenical movement but also for Orthodox Christians themselves. In this framework, even sport was related to truth and dialogue. It was undeniably more than purely physical or athletic in nature; it was in essence both spiritual and ecumenical. For him, competition was engagement as encounter; and challenge was development through trial. He believed that “the Olympic ideal is what qualifies sport exercise in general as a means for educating the whole of man as a conscious citizen of the world.”21 He was of course well known as a sportsman in his own right. He loved swimming and tennis, but excelled in basketball, even coaching the Greek national team during the 1950s. Moreover, he represented Greece at the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne. He delighted recounting an early visit to Romania during the Communist period when he was coach of the Greek national basketball team. At the end of the athletic tour, the Romanian minister of sport asked Nikos if he and the team had any special request that he might fulfill for them. To the amazement of all, Nissiotis asked if he could pay his respects to the patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, which he was in fact permitted to do. Nikos Nissiotis was elected vice president of the founding Olympic Committee of Greece in 1974 and president of the International Olympic Academy (IOA) in 1977 in ancient Olympia, which he developed into a cultural center with athletic and academic speakers from all over the world. In 1978, he was elected to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). His dream was to return to the idea proposed by Pierre de Coubertin (founder of the International Olympic Committee in 1894) and the ideal promulgated in the first ancient games dedicated to the gods in Olympia. His ideology was centered on the pursuit of beauty and truth. Without this focus, “the more the Olympic Games become absolutized as an end in itself deprived of its deeper sense, function and scope which is to be simply a reminder of a much higher human value than the mere competition of power.”22 In Bearing Light: Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement, John MacAloon writes: “Had his life not been cut tragically short, Nissiotis . . . would have gone on to formulate a new Olympism for the global, intercultural world of today . . . of ecumenical discourse, the real object of the Olympic movement for which Olympic sports is intended to serve as only a means. After his death, the IOA [International Olympic Academy] never regained its status as a place for serious intercultural encounter and debate, and today it is largely a marginalized venue for the Olympic sport industry.”23 Today, more than two decades after his untimely death by car accident— he was even passionate as a driver!—the personal and ecumenical legacy of

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Nikos Nissiotis remains unparalleled and unsurpassed. It also remains definitive and formative for younger generations of theologians in their aspiration and application to transform the monologue of Orthodox Christianity into a dialogue with the rest of the world and to render their theology an offering of doxology for the life of the world. NIKOS NISSIOTIS’S PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL LEGACY NIKOLAOS ASPROULIS It would not be exaggerating to argue that Nissiotis touched on almost all the fields of academic theology, ecclesiastical affairs and public debates. From hermeneutics, Trinitarian theology, Christology, Pneumatology and Ecclesiology to Ecumenical Dialogue, philosophy and psychology of religion as well as modern science and even sports, his writings cover a wide range of topics that transcend traditional theological discourse. Without being systematic in character, his work was nonetheless deeply systematic in scope,24 thereby providing a bold contribution to systematic theology that is still searching for its proper place in contemporary Orthodox theology. His hesitancy to theologize systematically, along with the fact that his writings appeared in journals or collective volumes somewhat inaccessible to this day, account for the reason that his legacy has hitherto remained largely unknown, even marginalized. The Greek and Ecumenical Context Nissiotis belongs to a generation, the “theology of the 60s,”25 destined to cause tectonic changes in twentieth-century Greek theology. For centuries under the yoke of the so-called “Babylonian captivity,”26 and subsequently following the ways of the Russian émigré theologians, especially in Paris,27 Greek theology now experienced an unforeseen revival by seeking to recover the patristic ethos of doing theology. In its attempt to be liberated of Western influences, Orthodox theology in general, and Greek theology in particular, turned to the study of the patristic tradition as a necessary condition for selfawareness and as the normative criterion for interpreting the world. This flourishing new historical phase at times assumed the form of a crude critical anti-Western attitude,28 while at other times the form of a fruitful encounter and mutual exchange.



Introduction 9

This promising period of contemporary Greek theology did not appear out of the blue. Similar developments took place during the first decades of the twentieth century in Western theology, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, both of which struggled with the conservative reactions of church officials before the achievements of modernity and the conditions created by the atrocities of the two world wars. Within this context, the Nouvelle Théologie movement29 emerged within Catholic theology as a call for theological renewal to address the timely and urgent existential needs. This turn of the French Ressourcement30 toward history and humanity—away from the predominant scholastic and metaphysical theological reflection—also found its counterpart in Protestant dialectical theology, primarily represented by Karl Barth, Oscar Cullmann and others. At the same time, the turn from the external objective world to the inner subjective self would become the main characteristic of contemporary continental philosophy, manifested principally by existentialism, which in the aftermath of the two world wars and the rise of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe would dominate philosophical and anthropological discussions, while also deeply influencing Christian theology. It was in the midst of this critical and formative period that Nissiotis, who sought substantive dialogue with the prevailing theological and philosophical agenda, would play a pioneer role in the renewal of Greek theology. If one considers that Nissiotis was in a deep and constant dialogue with all the European pioneering intellectual movements of the postwar era, including dialectical theology (K. Barth, E. Brunner), neo-Thomism, psychoanalysis (C. Jung) and existentialism (K. Jaspers),31 movements that led in one way or another to the “anthropological turn” of philosophical reflection,32 one will acquire an appreciation for his long commitment to ecumenical dialogue and existential concern. At the same time, however, philosophy was not the only interlocutor for Nissiotis. The key ecumenical context within which Nissiotis would develop his worldview may be found in the “Copernican shift” taking place from the early twentieth century in the fields of natural sciences, psychology, philosophy and political theory: the theories of A. Einstein, N. Bohr, W. Heisenberg, the depth psychology of S. Freud, the analytic psychology of C. Jung, the individual psychology of A. Adler, the dominant role of existentialism with its pioneering interpretation of the subject,33 the spread “of totalitarian ideologies and the sovereignty of the massive forms of life.”34 Moreover, it is found in the progressive emergence and consolidation, during the second half of the same century, of Western liberal democracy as the most appropriate form for the organization of social life. In short, the era of modernity—what today we might call late or post-modernity—was the playing ground of Nikos Nissiotis.

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The Doctrine of the Trinity Describing the Trinitarian theology of Nikos Nissiotis, Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance argued that “the primacy of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity . . . was central to [his] theological outlook.”35 Having studied at Basel under the pioneer of dialectic theology, Karl Barth, Nissiotis was directed back “to the heart of the Athanasian and Cappadocian theology,” which facilitated the expression and structure of his faith and thought.36 For Nissiotis, the doctrine of the Trinity is the “crux of the biblical revelation.”37 However, it is not grounded in some well-formulated theological reasoning, as in the case of classic Western scholastic theology, but instead arises from a faithful biblical contemplation and the experience of the Church. In this respect, the concept of “mystery” will become a keyword in describing this fundamental dogma of Christian faith, especially with regard to the incomprehensibility of God.38 Nissiotis will attribute priority to divine sovereignty in terms of God’s self-revelation, despite any human capacity to know God: “Man cannot know God unless God has known him.”39 Based firmly on the Bible as an “echo” of divine life and the starting point of theological discourse, Nissiotis contends that “mystery, as a category of theological thinking, should lead neither to mysticism nor to existentialism,” but is best understood as the “response of man to the divine act in history.”40 Although the Fathers adopted philosophical terminology, they nevertheless intended to comment rather than speculate on revelation.41 Thus, any seeming priority of apophaticism, which might limit theologizing on the part of man, is overcome to the extent that divine self-revelation justifies a cataphatic approach to the “mystery.”42 In an effort to articulate the Eastern Orthodox position on this doctrine, Nissiotis describes contemporary deviations that seriously affect the Christian faith and life. In this regard, he alludes to various monistic tendencies—such as “unitarian Patromonism,” “Christomonism,” and “pneumatomonism,” as well as the current state of “filioquism” and “Modalism”—all of which either wholly or partially present a fragmented understanding of God’s self-revelation and a distortion of the apostolic kerygma. These deviations represent more or less a sequel of ancient heresies (like Arianism and Sabellianism) officially condemned by the early Church but persistently attracting intellectual efforts to construe the “mystery” of God rationally and empirically.43 Nissiotis would also closely correlate Creation to Revelation in order to bring to the fore their profound “secret” operated by the Holy Spirit: “Life springs out of the communion which exists in God and leads to communion between God and men and among men.”44 Partly reminiscent of the existentialist emphasis on relation as constitutive of being, but primarily reflective



Introduction 11

of the biblical role of the Spirit as personal communion within the Trinity, a movement also replicated in its movement within creation, Nissiotis focuses on “relationship . . . as the backbone of divine creation and revelation.” In this light, he contends that the “Christian God is personal,”45 meaning that the divine being is constituted as communion, an assertion that became a core aspect of contemporary social Trinitarianism in both East and West. Nissiotis insists on the basic palamite distinction between the essence (ousia) and the energies (or operations) in God; the former is incomprehensible and the ground of unity within the Trinity (“oneness”), while the latter is communicated to creation and human beings.46 At the same time, he points to the concrete role of the concept of hypostasis, which is used by the Fathers to “show the flowing together of substance within the Trinity.”47 Hypostasis is further used to clarify the mode of intra-Trinitarian unity, since “each of the Persons [without one of them having any kind of priority] retains His unique characteristics in a union without confusion.” This “hypostatic” union results from divine consubstantiality. The priority given to substance language is evident in Nissiotis, despite his preference for the term “perichoresis” to avoid any imbalanced relationship between the essence of God and the Trinitarian persons. He would further caution that, in order for theology to remain biblical in its roots and Christian in its character, “person” and “hypostasis” should not be regarded as “ends in themselves . . . as constitutive of a new philosophical system.”48 Reminiscent here of Lossky’s critical attitude toward the use of philosophical categories in theology, like the Heideggerian “ekstasis,” Nissiotis appears reluctant to adopt the dominant personalistic language of his time as key concept in his interpretation of the doctrine of God. However, this would not prevent later theologians from undertaking the risk to ground the latent personalistic vocabulary of Eastern Orthodox theology in the tradition of the mainly Greek Fathers of the Church.49 This “mystery” of union of the divine persons in the Trinity is revealed as “communion” of the Holy Trinity with humanity toward redemption. It is a God who is principally Love (“Holy Trinity means Love”),50 who comes out of his self into salvific communion with the ex nihilo creation. As Nissiotis aptly put it: “This unity . . . is revealed to us by the particular action of the Three in accomplishing the salvation and regeneration of man, of history and the whole world.” It is only in relation to the world that the use of personalistic language appears justified, to the degree that “person is the key word in the relationship between God and man in the Bible.”51 Based on the biblical revelation and not on any a priori philosophical assumption or speculation about the divine life, Nissiotis likes to assert that only by his self-revelation in the divine economy can we “imagine what the pre-existing unity in the

12

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Trinity is.”52 His Trinitarian theology is inconceivable outside the context of its soteriological implications, both in reference to anthropology and ecclesiology. This is due to his bold emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit, through which the “reality of [the] personal Being [of God] is revealed in the world.”53 By giving due focus to the Spirit of God, Nissiotis strives to provide a more balanced Trinitarian theology by overcoming the alleged one-sidedness of Western theology, which gives absolute priority to Christ, as in the work of Karl Barth. Pneumatological Christology Nissiotis’s emphasis on the role of the Spirit of God both in the intra-Trinitarian life and in divine economy would help him overcome certain deviations in Western theology. While acknowledging the relevance of the christocentric approach for theology and ecclesiology, an approach followed by contemporary Christian theology influenced by dialectic theology and Vatican II, Nissiotis is quick to underline the possible dangers of an imbalanced Trinitarian theology.54 Based again on a firm biblical account of divine revelation, he seeks to overcome the tendency of christomonism, which inevitably affects the relationship of Christ to the Church and Christ to the world. To this end, Nissiotis stresses the following necessary parameters: a) “Christ can never be separated from the Spirit of God; b) it is only in the Spirit and by the Spirit that Christ is present in His Church; Christ had to leave the world so that the Spirit might come into it in a new way.”55 Reminiscent of Irenaeus’s “two hands,” Nissiotis insists on a close cooperation between Christ and the Spirit as the two “means” by which God reveals himself in Creation and communes with human beings in history. Insofar as the main problem in theology of his era was how to relate God and history, Nissiotis emphasizes the role of the Spirit in an effort to highlight not only the “vertical” relationship between God and the world in Christ but also the “horizontal line” or permanent character of this relationship in the Spirit, which since Pentecost provides a “new personal revelation of the whole Trinitarian God in history”56 and dwells permanently in creation in its entirety and not only in the Church.57 Thus, the focal point of the Spirit’s work in creation is to create “communion,” wherever it blows, both in the Church and the entire creation. As Nissiotis puts it, “it is the Spirit who, in a personal way, creates the ‘link’ between God and man.”58 The Spirit of God realizes and fulfills the very self-revelation of God. Indirectly following Basil the Great,59 Nissiotis often refers to the ontological, dynamic and not merely functional role60 of the Creator Spiritus in creation



Introduction 13

as well as in the sanctification of creation itself, the inspiration of the Old Testament prophets and the realization of the Incarnation and the work of Christ. In his view, the “Spirit communicates, personifies and actualizes in time the personal revelation of God.”61 It is the role of the Spirit in creation that obliges the Christian theologian to adopt the Pauline understanding of the Trinitarian creative act as “ktisis” (creation) and not merely as “physis” (nature). While physis alludes to a Platonist-like Demiurge, closely associated with and limited by the one unified cosmos, this is not the case with ktisis, which highlights the deeply renewing, restorative and salvific act of creation in the Spirit of God. Furthermore, this Pauline perception stresses the importance of material creation in its entirety, as the place where divine self-revelation in Christ and the Spirit takes place.62 The emphasis attributed to the role of the Spirit of God in divine economy and history is further extended to the Church, which should not be regarded as an anthropocentric institution or sociological organization, which is often the case in our secular age. The Church is neither “a sacred institution nor an association of believers only . . . but the presence of Christ in the Spirit among men here and now.”63 Its heart is not an anthropocentric understanding of its essence, but the very “energy of the Spirit” in both Word and Sacrament, both of which are considered as the pillars of the Church as a result of the creative act of the Spirit. There is here no polarization between Word and Sacrament64 (or between Amst and Geist), but both become the visible manifestation of the Spirit, which purifies and sanctifies the sinful members of the Church.65 Due to its pneumatological constitution, then, the Church is realized more as an event in history,66 rather than as a hierarchical or juridical institution. Instead of the medieval scholastic perception, the Church is considered “an event in the Spirit . . . a permanent event, present, structures and ordered by the . . . Spirit through human means in this world.”67 Nissiotis does not give priority to any particular biblical image of the Church, like the “body of Christ” or the “people of God,” inasmuch as these images merely reflect this “new” revelation of God after Pentecost, the pledge (arrabon) of the Spirit (Eph. 1.14) given in history through the Church as a guarantee that “God has established a visible, real community structured by His grace, in order to communicate with all men in this world.”68 Anthropology: Faith and the Secular World The imperative to investigate the identity and value of the human being over time has long been the central issue of human thought, moving from the unrestrained idealism and transcendentalism to the newest trend of understanding

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Introduction

the human being in the perspective and spirit of utilitarian social activism or as an undervalued number in current neo-liberal economy. However, Nissiotis attempts to reflect on the “mystery” of the human being beyond any ideological or unilateral preconceptions. For Nissiotis, anthropology would become the contact point between his philosophical-theological reflection and secular thought. He was not interested in developing an anthropological doctrine “disconnected” from the existential reflection on life, focused solely on a scholastic or abstract and confessional or apologetic reflection on the Christian faith and church tradition. On the contrary, he is interested in meeting the “challenges” posed by the contemporary world in order to “form a more authentic Christian anthropology that takes into account the signs of our times.”69 In this regard, Nissiotis unconsciously adopts the “correlation method” formulated by Paul Tillich70 to bring the Gospel into soteriological dialogue with the existential needs of the modern world. What is clear is that Nissiotis never theologizes in absentia of the philosophical reflection of his time. In this perspective, without making a philosophical understanding of personhood a focal point of his anthropology, Nissiotis creates a very balanced personalistic view within the context of his existential thought, which derives from a critical reading of contemporary philosophy, especially N. Berdyaev, as a hermeneutical tool of the actual human condition. By understanding the human being as an identity that “begins with a self-affirmation and is fulfilled in relation to others and the ego-world,” Nissiotis highlights the importance of self-awareness and self-knowledge for the identity of the subject, particularly in light of intra-subjectivity. The latter is possible only in the perspective of encounter, coexistence or communion with other people, the world, and finally the divine “Other.” This aspect of communion plays an important role in Nissiotis’s account as the result of the work of the Spirit in creation, by which God brings to the fore the “secret” that lies within creation. He insists that, in its attempt toward self-understanding, the subject must accept its reliance on trans-subjectivity to the extent that the way toward identity can only move through the other or the Other.71 Therefore, for Nissiotis, in order for the subject to be understood as a person, two fundamental conditions should be met: relationship and difference.72 “The relationship with the other is the necessary starting point of existence itself in search of self-affirmation and complementarity. The difference . . . is the challenge to being to understand itself more deeply and realize it as a particular subject and this particular I . . . that is always in via.”73 Although he does not say so explicitly, Nissiotis believes that a human being is, or rather becomes, a person (“person in becoming”) to the extent that one opens one’s



Introduction 15

self, to the degree that the catholic is constituted as coexistence in communion, freedom and dialogue with every “other” in the “now” of history, in the perspective of a dialogical reciprocity with neighbor, world and God. By always understanding personhood as a dynamic reality,74 Nissiotis avoids the weaknesses of existentialistic philosophy, which often leans toward unhistorical or individualistic conceptions of human existence by trapping it in a sterile immanent self-referentiality. Moreover, through his personalistic approach, Nissiotis overcomes the extreme tendencies of existentialism, which tend to alientate the human being from its inner world, thereby rupturing the psycho-physical totality (“man as a whole”).75 In fact, Nissiotis focuses on the inner world of man by exploring the subconscious experiences that contribute to or hinder the psychological formation and personal identity of man.76 In this perspective, the fundamental principles of Nissiotis’ theological anthropology are as follows: The Incarnation of the Logos as Starting Point In order to better understand Nissiotis’s anthropological approach, it is necessary to begin with an often neglected truth that “anthropology is central for all Christian theologies, especially for the Eastern Orthodox tradition, because of the Logos theology, i.e. of the Incarnate Word of God, in Jesus, in a historical person.”77 Nissiotis will welcome this view, which may be attributed to Paul Evdokimov,78 by giving similar priority to anthropology as the starting point for all theological discourse. This is due not so much to any influence from the anthropo-theology of Ludwig Feuerbach, but primarily to a reliance on the “pivotal event”79 of the Incarnation of the Logos and the act of the Spirit of God in history, which renders the human being a “king of creation” (Gregory the Theologian) and a “microcosm” (Maximus the Confessor), ultimately the center of the world. Committed to the patristic tradition of the Church, Nissiotis conceives of anthropology as the direct consequence of the Incarnation, as the search for divine roots in human existence. Thus, for Nissiotis, the Incarnation justifies the anthropological axis of the Gospel, since “the uniqueness of man is grounded in the fact of God ‘humanizing’ in history, here and now in the form of a man.”80 The Organic Union between Human Beings, Nature, Creation and History Nissiotis would be one of the few among Orthodox theologians to criticize apparent deviations in secular thought (whether anthropomonistic and ahistorical tendencies, or aspects of existential nihilism) but also in theological

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Introduction

interpretations of the Christian faith (whether dualistic separation of soul and body or hubristic supremacy of humanity over creation leading to what he called “egocentric anthropomonism”).81 For Nissiotis, it was this anthropomonism by virtue of the rapid technological development that inevitably led the world to the exploitation of its natural resources and to the present ecological crisis.82 With a Christological and Pneumatological account of nature and creation, Nissiotis highlights the need for a balanced relationship between anthropology and cosmology in a Christian perspective. Bearing in mind the adoption of the Pauline understanding of the world as creation (ktisis) rather than as nature (physis), Nissiotis formulates a holistic understanding of creation by God, perceived within the catholic salvific work of the Trinity and including a harmonious relationship between nature, human beings and the entire creation. Thus, by virtue of the biblical understanding of creation, Nissiotis once again brings to the fore the unbroken continuity between anthropology and cosmology: “On this biblical basis, anthropology cannot be conceived apart and in isolation from Christology and cosmology.”83 The Human Being as a Whole Based on this pneumatological Christology of nature and bearing in mind on the one hand the dualistic or monistic exaggerations of idealist anthropological views and on the other the materialist view of human beings, Nissiotis points out the profoundly balanced biblical-Christian view. In this perspective, the human being is the mediator between nature and world, constituting the final transcendence of any dualistic or monistic tendency to separate spirit and matter, emphasizing instead their “mutual interrelation” in the human being, who is thereby also regarded as a microcosm. For Nissiotis, only Christian theology secures the “undivided union between body and soul.” Drawing again on St. Paul and his “anthropocentric view of Creation,”84 Nissiotis notes that, despite the frequent abuse of the body in theological and secular thought, for the Christian it continues to constitute the “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6.19) and the foundation of resurrection in the age to come. As a result of the Incarnation, the body constitutes a central and inviolable feature of Christian faith. In this perspective, the human being does not possess but rather comprises a body and soul, which are considered less as adjuncts and primarily as components of its being.85 Image and Likeness of God; the Fall A further fundamental feature of Nissiotis’s theological anthropology is the concept of the image of God (imago Dei). Nissiotis is careful to avoid certain



Introduction 17

views that require a direct relation between God and human beings remoto Christo (without Christ). Beginning with the “infinite difference between ‘creating’ and ‘being created,’” Nissiotis stresses that “we are not allowed to speak directly of man as the Image of God . . . [since] it is the act of Creation qualifying man as image of God and not man in himself directly.”86 Nissiotis thus seeks to avoid any self-referent understanding of the image of God by adopting relationality as its fundamental feature, since the human being can only be understood as an image of the image (who is Christ) (2 Cor. 4.4). Due to his bold emphasis on the Incarnation, the imago Dei should be primarily seen in Christological terms. In this respect, his anthropological view is theocentric by being christocentric, regarded as an inviolable condition for the formulation of an anthropological proposal in dialogue with (post-) modernity. Committed to the biblical narrative, Nissiotis views the image of God in close relation to the Fall and the likeness of God (similitude Dei). While the image of God constitutes a fundamental aspect of human nature, it is also considered a “gift,” as a call toward a creative and free fulfillment of the likeness of God as communion with God. Nissiotis understands the human being as a mixture (mixis) of nature and grace, to adopt one of his favorite terms. Although seriously perverted by the Fall, the image was never fully lost, since without it, the human being “cannot be constituted as a person.”87 Therefore the image of God constitutes an inviolable ontological element of the human being’s constitution and by no means as a superadditum; at the same time the likeness of God is seen as the free journey toward the fulfillment of the image in terms of communion with God, which is precisely the “existential side of the Image.”88 Nissiotis does not intend to underestimate the reality of the Fall. His perspective of the Fall implies that: i) the human being deviates from its central focus, namely communion with God; ii) the fallen state represents a latent desire toward self-definition; and iii) the Fall expresses the gift of freedom as narcissistic autonomy or alienation from God.89 Taking seriously into account the fallen condition of the human being, Nissiotis underlines repentance (metanoia) as a basic existential dimension of the human being, an aspect often diminished in contemporary expressions of Orthodox personalistic thought. To the degree that the inner self with all its passions and neuroses— as described by contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis—is taken into account, repentance constitutes a fundamental dimension of healing and wholeness. Repentance does not so much reflect the original state of human existence, but rather constitutes “a new direction within the state of fallen man.” This, he says, is why “in the East we insist on the recovery of the Image through repentance in the communion of God.”90 Nissiotis will find in Alfred Adler the appropriate terminology to describe the human being as a

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Introduction

“repentant sinner,”91 a phrase that takes into account both the fallen condition of humanity as well as the reality of repentance. The Concept of Theosis Faithful to the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Nissiotis is also fond of highlighting the concept of deification (theosis). This is the method whereby he seeks to overcome certain problematic interpretations that point to a “cryptic, ecstatic, mystical and visionary attitude of Orthodoxy in connection with the reality of human person.”92 By virtue of the Incarnation and especially the hypostatic union of the two natures in the person of Christ, Nissiotis will emphasize the concept of “mixis” as relevant for the proper understanding of theosis. The “mixis” between the humanity and God does not imply any confusion but rather a “reciprocal movement” (perichoresis) and communion (koinonia) between humanity and divinity without the personal identity or nature of either being altered.93 For Nissiotis, “theosis means the possibility for human beings to emerge to the state of the real humanum, in the existence of the imago and similitudo Dei, as it has been originally created by the Trinitarian God.”94 Theosis is the work of the Spirit of God, which through the sacramental life that “represents the full ontological presence of God,”95 renders possible the participation of the human being in the human nature of Christ, namely the deified human nature. This means that on the one hand theosis does not alter the ontological status of human being,96 while on the other hand it is understood as transformation and constitutes an event that takes place from “now” in history. In other words, it is a process that leads to the emergence of the genuine humanum as already presupposed in the ontological roots of the Trinitarian creative energy and the Incarnation of the Logos, which reveals “not only the Verus Deus but also . . . the Verus Homo.”97 *** The philosophical and theological vision of Nikos Nissiotis is clearly characterized by a deep sensitivity to the various challenges posed by the surrounding world and the need of the Church to witness the good news in a soteriologically effective way. His dialogical and critical ethos—both in relation to the ecclesial and theological tradition as well as the diverse aspects of the secular world (such as philosophy, science and technology)—presents him as the theologian of dialogue. The biblical ground of his theology, the systematic scope of his philosophy, the dialogical character of his outlook and the deeply informed and comprehensive nature of his vision, provide us with all the necessary resources to facilitate and advance not only inter-Christian or inter-religious dialogue, but primarily a dialogue of Orthodoxy and Christianity with the rapidly changing world of moder-



Introduction 19

nity, particularly in an era of great turmoil, religious fundamentalism and totalitarian ideology that seek to dominate the public space by limiting the human creativity and freedom. NOTES   1.  See Nikos Nissiotis, “The Apology of Hope,” Theologia 46 (1975): 273–291, 482–510 [in Greek].  2. Nikos A. Nissiotis: Religion, Philosophy and Sport in Dialogue (No publisher: Athens, 1994), 415 pages.   3.  Archibishop Iakovos of North and South America, “Be truthful in love,” in Nikos A. Nissiotis: Religion, Philosophy and Sport in Dialogue (No publisher: Athens, 1994), 353. Fr. John Meyendorff described Nissiotis as a “theologian, philosopher, ecumenist and human being, capable of so much openness to the world, to all aspects of human life, including sports,” in Nikos A. Nissiotis: Religion, Philosophy and Sport in Dialogue, 375.   4.  The subhead is drawn from several references to Nissiotis by Marios Begzos, who summarized the philosophy of his counselor and colleague in the phrase “I am in dialogue; therefore, I am.” See his contribution “N. Nissiotis and the Modern Greek Philosophy of Religion,” in Nikos Nissiotis: Religion, Philosophy and Sport in Dialogue, 264–277 [here at 274]. See also his Logos as Dialogos: A Portrait of Nikos Nissiotis (Thessaloniki: Pournaras Publications, 1991) [in Greek].   5.  This resulted in a number of early articles on youth, the laity and diakonia.   6.  Nissiotis delivered a keynote address at the Third General Assembly in New Delhi in 1961, where his bold and groundbreaking arguments on “The Witness and Service of the Eastern Orthodox Church to the One Undivided Church” (Ecumenical Review 14 [1962]: 192–200) drew criticism from conservative Orthodox circles, both ecclesiastical and academic.   7.  He is the author of numerous articles on “faith and order” from 1978 onward.   8.  In addition to articles on the life, Nissiotis provided the preface for the book edited by Max Thurian, Ecumenical Perspectives on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1983), vii–xiii.   9.  Known as Paulos Mar Gregorios upon ordination, Verghese was the author of such formative works as The Human Presence: An Orthodox View of Nature (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1978); and Cosmic Man: The Divine Presence in the Theology of St. Gregory of Nyssa (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1988). 10.  This resulted in a number of articles on ecclesiological and ecumenical perspectives of the council over the next decade. 11.  See J. B. Cobb Jr. and D. R. Griffin, “N. Nissiotis and Process Theology,” in Nikos Nissiotis: Religion, Philosophy and Sport in Dialogue, 357. 12.  See Joseph Kallarangatt, “The Ecumenical Theology of Nikos A. Nissiotis,” Christian Orient 11 (December 1990): 174. Also see Hans Schwarz, Theology in a Global Context: The Last Two Hundred Years (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 460.

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13.  Thomas F. Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 103. 14. Emilio Castro, “Vital Contributions of Nikos Nissiotis to the Ecumenical Movement,” in Nikos Nissiotis: Religion, Philosophy and Sport in Dialogue, 120. 15. Beyond the present volume, readers are also directed to an earlier German anthology published while Nissiotis was still living: Nikos A. Nissiotis, Die Theologie der Ostkirche im ökumenischen Dialog: Kirche und Welt in orthodoxer Sicht [The Theology of the Eastern Church in Ecumenical Dialogue: Church and World in an Orthodox Perspective] (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1968) (245 pages). 16.  From paragraph 20 of the document on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Faith and Order Paper no. 111) adopted by the World Council of Churches in Lima Peru in 1982. Few in the ecumenical movement know that it was Nikos Nissiotis who drafted this paragraph. See E. Castro, in Nikos Nissiotis, 126. 17.  Nikos Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Faith and Order Commission for Restoring Ecclesial Fellowship,” in Sharing in One Hope (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1978), 13. 18. Radu Bordeianu, “The 2016 Pan-Orthodox Council and Ecumenical Relations,” Public Orthodoxy, accessed February 23, 2017, https://publicorthodoxy.org /2015/10/30/the-2016-pan-orthodox-council-and-ecumenical-relations. Sadly, the dialogue with the Oriental Orthodox did not remain on the agenda of the Pan-Orthodox Council. 19.  Thomas Stransky, former rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute of Jerusalem, in “Nikos Nissiotis: Three Sketches,” Ecumenical Review 48, no. 4 (1996): 466–475. 20.  From Existence to Coexistence is the fitting title of a Greek anthology of his articles published posthumously by Maistros Books in Athens in 2004. 21.  Nikos Nissiotis, “Olympism and Today’s Reality,” in International Olympic Academy Proceedings (Athens: International Olympic Academy, 1984), 64. 22.  See Nikos Nissiotis, “Philosophy of Olympism,” in Report of the Eighteenth Session of the International Olympic Academy at Olympia, ed. Hellenic Olympic Committee (Athens, 1979), 170–178 [here at 170]. I recall his visit on that occasion to the Peloponnesian city of Olympia, leaving after class by a helicopter provided by Konstantinos Karamanlis (1907–1998), president of Greece, in order to argue for a permanent Olympic Village in ancient Olympia instead of the quadrennial spending of vast funds for a new city-host for the Olympic Games. 23.  John J. MacAloon, ed., Bearing Light: Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 32–33. 24.  For the conventional models of systematic theology, see for instance Colin Gunton, Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark International, 2009). 25.  By “theology of the 60s” we refer to a generation of theologians, intellectuals and spiritual thinkers who mainly under the influence of Russian émigré thought sought the renewal of Greek Orthodox theology on the basis of the patristic tradition. For an overall critical overview, see Pantelis Kalaitzidis, Thanassis Papathanasiou,



Introduction 21

and Theofilos Abatzidis, eds., Turmoil in Post-War Theology: The “Theology of the 60s” (Athens: Indiktos, 2009) [in Greek], and the special issue of the French Orthodox theological journal Contacts no. 259–260 (2017). 26.  This term, Lutheran in origin, has been used by Georges Florovsky to denote the state of seventeenth- to nineteenth-centry Russian academic theology under the various influences of the West: Ways of Russian Theology, Collected Works part I, vol. 5; part II, vol. 6 (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979, 1987). 27.  For a critical overview, see Paul Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 28. See, for instance, George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013). 29. See, for instance, J. Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2010). 30.  Cf. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray, eds., with Patricia Kelly, Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 31.  Μarios Begzos, “Nikos Nissiotis’ Portrait (1924–1986),” in Ν. Νissiotis, From Existence to Coexistence: Society, Technology, Religion (Athens: Maistros, 2004), 243–249 [in Greek]. 32.  Νikos Nissiotis, Existentialism and Christian Faith According to Sören Kierkegaard and the Modern Existential Philosophers Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre (Athens, 1956, 21965), 5–6 [in Greek]. 33.  Μarios Begzos, Logos as Dialogos: A Portrait of Nikos Nissiotis (Thessaloniki: Pournaras, 1991) [in Greek]. 34. Nissiotis, Existentialism and Christian Faith, 5. 35. Thomas F. Torrance, “The Trinitarian Theology of Nikolas Nissiotis,” in Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 104. 36.  Torrance, “The Trinitarian Theology of Nikolas Nissiotis,” 104. 37.  Nikos Nissiotis, “Interpreting Orthodoxy: The Communication of Some Eastern Orthodox Theological Categories to Students of Western Church Traditions,” The Ecumenical Review 14, no. 1 (1961): 4–28, here at 7. 38.  Nissiotis, “Interpreting Orthodoxy,” 5. Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity for Church Life and Theology,” in The Orthodox Ethos: Essays in Honour of the Centenary of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, ed. A. J. Philippou (Oxford: Holywell Press, 1964), 32. 39.  Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 34. 40.  Nissiotis, “Interpreting Orthodoxy,” 6. 41.  Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 40. 42.  Torrance, “The Trinitarian Theology of Nikolas Nissiotis,” 107. In a similar vein, Georges Florovsky would criticize V. Lossky’s (and, by implication, contemporary Orthodox theology’s) excessive overemphasis on apophaticism. See his “Review of V. Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church,” The Journal of Religion 38, no. 3 (July 1958): 208.

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43.  Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 34–40. 44.  Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 40–41. 45. Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 41. Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology as a Presupposition of Ecclesiology,” Oecumenica (1967): 238: “God is One and Personal. He is what He is, but He is ‘in relationship’ . . . He acts in time through a relationship (Christology) and establishes out of it a communion (pneumatology).” 46.  Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 42. 47.  Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 43. 48.  Nissiotis, “Interpreting Orthodoxy,” 7. 49.  In this regard one should consult Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007), and John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985). 50.  Nissiotis, “Interpreting Orthodoxy,” 7. 51.  Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 56. 52.  Nissiotis, “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 43. 53.  Torrance, “The Trinitarian Theology of Nikolas Nissiotis,” 105. 54. Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology as a Presupposition of Ecclesiology,” 235. 55.  Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 236. 56.  Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 242. 57. Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 237. Compare with Florovsky’s similar view for a permanent presence of the Spirit of God in history. See his “The Church: Her Nature and Task,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Collected Works, vol. 1 (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972), 165. See also Torrance, “The Trinitarian Theology of Nikolas Nissiotis,” 106. 58.  Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 240. 59.  See, for instance, Thomas F. Torrance, “Spiritus Creator: A Consideration of the Teaching of St. Athanasius and St. Basil,” in Theology in Reconstruction (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996), 209–228. 60. Torrance, “The Trinitarian Theology of Nikolas Nissiotis,” 106. Cf. Nikos Nissiotis, “La Christologie pneumatologique de la nature et ses consequences pour l’ écologie et l’ humanisme integral,” in Unterwegs zur Einheit. Festschrift für Heintich Stirnimann, ed. J. Brantschen und P. Selvatico (Freiburg-Wien: Universitatsverlag Freiburg Schweiz, Verlag Herder, 1980), 440. 61.  Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 241. 62.  Nissiotis, “La Christologie pneumatologique,” 440–441. 63.  Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 244. 64.  Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 251. See also “Interpreting Orthodoxy,” 13: “In the discussion of whether one should speak in terms of ‘Law and Gospel’ or ‘Gospel and Law’ . . . it would perhaps be better to say ‘Law in the Gospel.’” 65.  Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 245. 66.  In a similar vein, Zizioulas refers to the Church as a “mode of existence.” See his Being as Communion, 15.



Introduction 23

67.  Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 250. 68.  Nissiotis, “Pneumatological Christology,” 250–251. 69.  Νikos Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person,” Theologia 53, no. 4 (1982): 947–989, here at 947. 70.  Cf. David Kelsey, “Paul Tillich,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. D. Ford (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 62–75, and B. Loomer, “Tillich’s Theology of Correlation,” Journal of Religion 36, no. 3 (1956): 150–156. 71.  Nikos Nissiotis, “From the Consciousness—through Conscious Alienation— to Identity,” Synaxis 59 (1987): 19 [in Greek]. 72.  One discerns here an echo of the personalistic vocabulary of “communion and otherness” boldly employed by eminent Greek intellectuals of his era, such as Christos Yannaras and John Zizioulas. 73.  Nissiotis, “From the Consciousness—through Conscious Alienation—to Identity,” 23. 74. This dynamic understanding of personhood may be compared to his “dynamic” ecclesiology in the sense that the Church cannot be understood as a closed but open reality in relation to other Christian confessions and culture in general. This personalistic vision both informs and is conditioned by the ecclesiological perspective developed within the context of Nissiotis’s rich experience in the ecumenical movement. For the ecclesiology of Nissiotis, see Stelios Tsombanidis, “The Dynamic Ecclesiology of Nikos Nissiotis,” in Theological Portraits II: Nikos Nissiotis, the Ecumenical Theologian of Orthodoxy, ed. Nikolaos Asproulis and Giorgos Vlantis (Volos: Volos Academy Publications, forthcoming) [in Greek]. 75.  Nikos Nissiotis, Psychology of Religion (Athens: Maistros, 2006), 252–258 [in Greek]. 76.  For his recognition of the importance of the psychological world, see his Psychology of Religion, which was posthumously published and includes his lectures on the topic. 77.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images,” 949. 78. Paul Evdokimov, L’ Orthodoxie (Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1959), 57, quoted in Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images,” 949. 79.  Nissiotis, “La Christologie pneumatologique,” 430 [author’s translation]. 80.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images,” 950. 81.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images,” 950. 82.  One can here recall the article by Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–1207, which accuses Christianity as one of the causes of the ecological crisis. 83.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images,” 953. 84.  Nissiotis, “La Christologie pneumatologique,” 440. 85.  Nikos Nissiotis, Prolegomena to Theological Gnoseology. The incomprehensibility of God and the possibility of his knowledge (Athens, 1965), 74 [in Greek]. 86.  Nikos Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person,” Theologia, 54, no. 4 (1982): 93. 87.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person,” 96.

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88.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person,” 96. 89.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person,” 97. 90.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person,” 98. 91.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person,” 99, and “La Christologie peumatologique,” 443. 92.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person,” 114. 93.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person,” 115, where Nissiotis refers to Gregory of Nanzianzus, PG. 36.140; 93.165–168. See also Nissiotis, “A Comment on Gregory Nazianzus’ Theological Gnoseology,” in Orthodoxy, Tradition and Renewal (Athens: Eythini, 2001), 43–77, here at 57ff [in Greek]. 94.  Nissiotis, “A Comment on Gregory Nazianzus’ Theological Gnoseology,” 62. 95.  Nissiotis, “A Comment on Gregory Nazianzus’ Theological Gnoseology,” 63. 96.  Nissiotis, “La Christologie pneumatologique,” 443, and “Secular and Christian Images,” 116. 97.  Nissiotis, “Secular and Christian Images,” 117.

Part 1

PRELUDE TO THEOLOGY

Chapter One

Theology as Science and Doxology

The progress and development of science, the transformation of the universal community by the introduction of new research methods and new categories of thought, constantly raise the question of the nature of theology as a science. This question is of particular importance to systematic theology, that is to say, to the principles, method and purpose of the exposition of theological truths according to a well-defined system of thought and terminology, of objective scientific value. At first glance, systematic theology, especially in modern times, has been always developed in relation to the theories of philosophy and psychology on the one hand, and also in relation to historical or exegetical research of the biblical text on the other. On these grounds, it has often tried either to demonstrate Christian truth or to seek the point of contact to apologetically prove, as a science, the need for systematic theological thought. Mentality, morality, or intuition, play an initial but not the main role in the explanation to the unbelievers, of the reasons that one has to believe, while they offer to the scientific context a point of contact between theory and reality. This meritorious effort, accomplished by the theology of the Middle Ages and Thomism, by the German theology of the past two centuries, and by American liberal theology taking into account the results of the psychology of personality, has given systematic theology a particular brilliancy among the other branches of theology. It must be confessed at the same time, however, that this brilliance does not go without exerting another dangerous influence and risks derailing theology by diverting it from its main purpose and reducing it to a mere moral and psychological system, intended to justify the reason of being a scientist of theological thought. Theology risks losing its patristic splendor, and at the same time the simplicity, depth and beauty of a reflection faithfully and 27

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strictly reflecting the light revealed by God in the glory of his incarnation, his sacrifice and his resurrection. Systematic theology, the culmination of theological thought, should not worry about not being considered a science, because it is not intended to defend the prestige of human thought, of science and gnoseological categories. It develops in the Holy Spirit, in the holiness of life and for the glory of God. This is why it must be admitted frankly that in its main, final, and last phase, theology is not a science. It does not have a function to demonstrate the soundness of its foundations and does not verify its propositions by objective reality. It does not prove experimentally—in the psychological or rational sense—the relation between the thinking subject and the object of its thought, which is God himself. Because, as we will see later, this subject reflects, driven by presuppositions which have nothing to do with scientific proposals. The object, God, cannot become for human thought a pure object, in the scientific sense. On the other hand, contemporary philosophical thought is influenced on one side by the positivist spirit of our time and on the other by the passion of man for his works; it no longer offers the possibility of creating great metaphysical systems, at the end of which the personal God could be placed beyond revelation in Christ. Neo-positivism, by freeing the mind from the problem of the Absolute Spirit and from the thing in itself, and existentialism, with its phenomenological basis which will replace subject-object relation by the conception of Nothingness in our anxious consciousness beyond this relation, have sufficiently demonstrated the need for strictly realistic limits to philosophical research. God cannot be known through objective reality or through metaphysical theories, because he no longer hides himself as the immediate foundation of all being, existing behind the things, the forms, and the laws of life, waiting to be revealed by human reason. There is no direct line, or continuity, between the experience of reality and the spiritual world. We must always make a leap to reach another kind of thought and arrive at theological metaphysics. There is certainly today, as always, a strong metaphysical tendency in all science, but this metaphysics is realistic, that is, it is a judgment on the relation between the thinking subject and the special object of thought after the characterization, evaluation and exploitation of the second by the first, and this judgment has a practical value for everyday life. Fortunately, God is not the last chapter of this metaphysics! We have the right, I think, to support the view that classical Greek philosophy and especially Aristotelianism do not provide more than modern philosophy the possibility of teaching a theological metaphysics in the Christian sense. This applies also to philosophy. To attempt such an effort is to add a heterogeneous end to Greek thought; this is what the Arab thinkers of the



Theology as Science and Doxology 29

Middle Ages did. The Greek Fathers were very cautious at this point. They have never been identified with Greek thought and they have never developed systematic metaphysics from a particular philosophical system. But they knew this philosophy very well. The latter served them as discipline of thought, a preparatory stage, or a terminology to clarify their dogmatic thought, and especially a sort of introduction to the Christian wisdom. Thus, philosophy is for them both good and bad, inspired by God and full of lies and fantasy. It can teach the methods of thought; it is an exercise of the mind, especially the Platonic dialectic. But, it is dangerous if it, as a system, influences Christian thought. It is quite wrong to describe the theology of the Greek Fathers as Platonist, because of a kind of typological eclecticism and formal admiration for this philosophy found in some Fathers. There are in the Fathers too many elements not only foreign to this thought but frankly contrary, as we are going to see it, because of the doxological element, founded on the one hand on the relationship with Christ through the Church, and on the other on the holiness of the Christian theologian which negates the possibility of a direct mixture with pagan thought. The doxological element dismisses any continuity of this thought by avoiding the transformation of the system into a kind of Christian apologetics, as if one were undressing a classical statue of Christian priestly clothing. For the Greek Fathers, theology, although it is thought in the deepest sense, requiring a thorough philosophical preparation (something profoundly necessary and inevitable for all human thought), is not a philosophical or scientific concern but a prayerful thought, a presentation of a reality, already experienced in the Church, of the relationship between God and man. It is a doxological and Eucharistic thought of human beings already engaged by the power of the Holy Spirit in the path of holiness. In keeping with these first remarks, and faithful to this patristic tradition, we can say that theology has a lower scientific aspect and a higher doxological aspect. Nobody can deny that certain branches of theology require research work; they are based on texts which require a critical study with regard to the language and the historical context. Theology must discover effective methods to expose the central ideas of these texts and to systematically formulate the fundamental principles, in order to be able to define precisely the limits of the truth, against the false interpretation of this base on the literary level. But true theology, in the Greek patristic sense, shows us that its beginning is prior to this scientism, although it is regarded as a necessary starting point. True theology in this realm of the living personal faith does not have, in the scientific sense, an objective criterion valid for all, and its theories cannot be proved afterward as conforming to the requirements of human reason and the immediate and sensible reality. This sort of theology lacks the proposition and the demonstration, the beginning and the end, because it

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belongs exclusively to the relation of the theologian with God. Certainly, all creatures manifest the glory of God. But this glory is not the central theme in the theology of the Fathers, because this glory is static and aesthetic, while human reason, as far as it is transformed into thought and conceived in the image of the incarnate Divine Logos, is called by God to be the place of theology par excellence. In this purely transcendental and contemplative theology, criticism has often made the mistake of discovering an idealistic mixture between ancient philosophy (especially Platonism) and patristic thought. But this superficial criticism reaches only the preparatory domain of this thought and seeks to prolong non-existent analogies to the higher stage of Byzantine theology. It completely ignores, however, the doxological element, which is the real difference, although not the opposition. Indeed, in its consequent theological agnosticism, Platonism seeks the truth that cannot be revealed, according to its definition as ἀ-λήθεια. The theology of the Fathers does not only describe the revelation in Christ as the culmination of the Platonic expectation of a revelation of the final truth, by means of substance and Platonic ideas; it rather expresses in its last stage the continuation of this revelation in the existence of the theologian, being transfigured by the glory of God. Philosophy is for Platonism, and especially for Neoplatonism, research regarded as an expectation of the revelation of being, as the essence of all things or as the higher sphere of creation. For the Greek Orthodoxy, Christian theology does not reject this element of expectation from the human point of view, because it bears positive qualities as regards the preparation of the mind for the reception of the logical necessity of a divine revelation. But this theology then becomes profound reasoning about the glory of God, the Logos of the δόξα τοῦ Θεοῦ, because God reveals Himself as glory in the flesh and is continually revealed in the Logos of all flesh, which is also in unity with the Spirit of God. The glory of God constitutes the foundation, the criterion and the fundamental and final category of metaphysical theology. I do not want to support the idea that doxa is the immediate, almost identical expression of faith, which could lead us to an irrational fideism despising the value of human thought capable of reasoning ontologically about the act of God; but I will say that from the theological point of view, the glory of God is placed between faith and knowledge. It creates the distance in favor of the revealed God, who thus keeps his absolute Lordship on human thought, and at the same time it operates, it “acts” the relation between the two. Thereby, faith and knowledge do not oppose each other, but they progress mutually in a relationship where the latter remains always dependent on the former. We believe in Christ so that, in the Holy Spirit—that is, through the transfiguration of the existence of



Theology as Science and Doxology 31

the thinking believer and in the light of the revelation of God in His glory— we may be called to know better, that is to say, to be born with the Logos to a thought illuminated by this glory. In this sense, one places oneself, insofar as it is a doxological theology, above an irrational fideism, a philosophical agnosticism or a theological rationalism constructed from purely epistemological categories. Therefore, the more the theologian’s faith expresses itself as a personal transfiguration, the more the divine knowledge and theology become worthy of their name. If, then, we wish to approach the theme of glory as a category of theological thought, we must begin with the person of the theologian. Instead of talking of a first, immediate relation between knowledge and theology, it would be preferable, as an indispensable introduction, to start with the relation between theologian and theology. For any theology conceived on this meta-scientific basis, without claiming to have requirements of general acceptance by human reason, and without being individualistic, is strictly personal. Theology, in its last stage, becomes the prerogative of a small number of people who have been able to rise through revelation in the grace of divine glory and offer their thought as a reasonable glorification of the work of God, such as a hymn to the knowledge of God. Doxological theology is found at the top of human thought which wants to follow the Divine Logos and tries to identify itself with its revealed glory in Christ and manifests itself as a real presence in the life of the theologian. Theology is a thought of life and a thinking life. There is no more abstract wisdom, but a logos incarnated in the living form of the existential transformation of the theologian. Incarnation means revelation of the glorious coexistence of God and man. Theology is thus the expression of the divine energy as glory, glorified in the person of Jesus, completed and accepted by faith, and interpreted by thought on the ontological level. In the theologian, it is the transformating force that operates existentially. This twofold meaning of glory is expressed by the Greek Fathers according to the words of St. John by the verb θεᾶσθαι: to see, to contemplate Christ in his essence as the son of God, as glory (1.14). The Word has an active and passive voice at the same time, showing the objective manifestation of glory, but also seen and contemplated only by the pure eyes of those who have become, through Jesus Christ, the sons of God. It is obvious that a consistent theology, in addition to a penetrating thought that probes the darkness of incomprehensibility of the essence of God, requires that this thought really participate in the energy of the Holy and the Sacred. It is because of this that one never succeeds in understanding the orthodox mysticism and consequently the doxological aspect of its theology if one does not immediately emphasize the core significance of the incomprehensibility of God, a common basis respected by all, although apparently

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negative, for doxological theology. It is from it that the features of a new theological knowledge arise in the divine revelation. The doxological element in theology constitutes a double admiration: first of all that of human thought humbled before the hidden mystery, even after the revelation in Christ, of the essence of the divine being; secondly, that of the possibility of its knowledge through communion with the holy gifts of God which result from a personal transfiguration in the image of the revealed holiness. The theology of the Greek Fathers has been always, and has remained, faithfully consistent with the incomprehensibility of God, which is the most fundamental dogma, and which has not led to agnosticism but to the action of the Holy Spirit, who animates in us the knowledge through participation in these gifts. The true God is active in history in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, remaining, however, unknown in its essence. A great spiritual strength is necessary while at the same time one has to be already caught up in the sanctifying realm of the Spirit in order to remain totally consistent to this doctrine. The theology of definitions and categories of thought is always tempted to fall into Eunomianism, which, in its gnoseological optimism, has denied the essence and the starting point of true Christian theology. In doxological theology, the weak mind of man is transfigured by the divine energy, and thanks to this participation, it becomes a force of thinking the mystery of God with a full awareness of the communion with God through his incarnation. God is incomprehensible, but it is only as such that it is communicable; it then becomes knowable for man as objectively real glory and, subjectively, as the transforming power of human existence and mind. As a result, for a true theology to know God, one must first be known by him (Gal. 4.9). Then, man must change his life and his thought according to the free act of God, by which he manifests his lordship and his objective glory. God does not operate according to our categories, but according to his will, his grace, and his love which allows humans to glorify him by knowing him, as existing in him. The Logos does not offer himself to those who already know him, neither by wisdom nor by divine law. It is an ἐφ’ ἅπαξ act, a unique, new revelation that changes everything and transforms the man to whom it is first offered. He came into the world with his family. We knew him, but we did not receive him. Everything depends on his reception by humans, that is, on the new birth of humans as son of God. It is then he, the Logos, who fills by his life and his word the vacuum, the void, of the incomprehensibility. It is only in Him that there is life, but this life must later become the light of men (John 1.4). The Greek Fathers, following this exchange between the divine Logos and the life of man, connect the inseparable and real life in Christ, his progress, with the true theological thought. This unity, which reflects the perfect consequence of the union between God



Theology as Science and Doxology 33

and man, sheds light on the darkness of God. By this light, the Fathers define theological thought as a doxological response to the work of God, living and experienced by themselves. This light shines only in those who receive it in repentance, in a transformed life, in those who have been purified from an egoistic desire for knowledge of God, which prevented them from seeing his incarnation in his Logos, which is all: ultimate reality–presence, transfigurative strength and fulfillment of creation. It is he who becomes the only paidagogos of human thought toward the unknown God. It is then that knowledge, as a theological category, that becomes the abstract of the act of knowledge—that is, of the act of transforming the Logos into the life of the spirit. Theological knowledge is not a purely cognitive operation of mind, like any other knowledge; it is also the result of the spiritual re-creation of human existence. The verb γιγνώσκω presupposes the communion between God and man and not a speculative relation of reason; it is a somatic/bodily relationship of flesh and blood, of love and life, for the birth of a new life; it is similar to the incarnation of the Word, through the communion God-man, which is a reciprocal knowledge. Luke uses the verb γιγνώσκω at the most important moment, when he faces the incomprehensible energy of God. For when the Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin that she will become pregnant and give birth to a son, she expresses her astonishment. “I am a virgin. How, then, can this be?” (Luke 1.34). Here γιγνώσκω is chosen instead of κοινωνῶ (to be in communion) in flesh and blood fully by the Spirit of God. The birth of the divine Logos is the result of the intimate union with the Holy Spirit. The result is and will always be the creation of a new theandric existence. In this vein, theology expresses this continual fact by the life in the Spirit and human thought. Knowledge in this sense is no longer the Platonic anamnesis or methexis—the simple participation of thought in divine and unchangeable ideas—but the metousia by the energies of the Holy Spirit in us.1 Theological thought, therefore, is never autonomous; it is not subject to rational categories but to a more fundamental category which encompasses the fullness of existence. It is the knowledge that results from communion with the gifts of God. Faced with this knowledge, any other category remains partial, limited in the senses by the immediate object. The Logos of God becomes a theology of humans. A conception of God that does not imply first of all that one is known by him, suppresses his incomprehensible essence, makes God disappear as a transforming power of man, leading to a dead knowledge, that is, to an end without the result: the birth of the new creature. God, as an object of knowledge, must always remain the subject who first knows man, and this is possible only in the mystical communion offered and realized by Him. Every thought outside of this Logos in communion with the flesh leads to a God defined as one object among others; an object of human

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thought equals human lordship. In that case the object receives its value from the human being. In the case of God-object, the Creator becomes a creature of his creature. All theological gnoseology must presuppose as lived and living experience the knowledge of man by God, which means the spiritual re-creation of the theologian. Theology is the expression of this reality, of the passage from death to life; in its true nature, it is therefore charismatic, Eucharistic and ethical; it is the conception in the thought of the new hypostasis which occurs through the mystical communion of the Holy Spirit. There is no category here to describe this “idea”—it is simply the life of thought as a light that completely possesses us. To contemplate this light, one must be enlightened by it and hold it as life, reality, incarnation of the word in the works of holiness. Let us stop here for a moment to clarify this mystical unity as a presupposition of theological thought and especially in its relation with the doxological element. From the patristic point of view as a whole and according to most of its principal representatives and using a modern terminology always in relation to theological doxology (which will be developed later), I would say that this mystical union should not be identified with absolute mysticism—that is, with the full union of God with an individual isolated from the community of the Church. We must distinguish between the psychological mysticism that is subjective, ecstatic, visionary, and ontological mysticism that has an objective basis offered in common to all, in the Church. The latter, which is the Greek mysticism, is neither that of an idealistic philosophy which would conceive of it as an identity of the Absolute Spirit with the human mind—nor of a psychological, which renders the relations of the mystic with the world inexistent in the total passivity of ecstasy and the followed visions. The mysticism of Orthodoxy is sober and is always in the face of the real historical event of the soteriological work in Christ, continued and completed in us by the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. The replacement of philosophical metaphysics by theological soteriology is made possible in the light of the perfect union between the two natures, and this union is repeated in man by the participation in the gifts of the Holy Spirit who operates this union. To better understand this mysticism, we must return to the doxological element in theology. The category of doxa, as it is found in the biblical texts and as it is taken up by the Greek Fathers, will help us to better understand on the one hand the reality of this ontological mysticism and on the other hand the doxological theology which will be its authentic expression. Since the glory of God is the point of contact, this glory is what can be “seen” from the divine essence, in the sense that we have spoken above. It is therefore in the glory of God that this unity is manifested, and it is from this glory that man manages to seize it mystically.



Theology as Science and Doxology 35

Modern theology as a whole is very little concerned with the theological meaning of doxa, which is one of the most fundamental biblical expressions in relation to the revealed divine essence. This theology deals much more, sometimes almost exclusively, with the love of God. We must make here a very delicate distinction between the love and the glory of God, which will help us to better understand the ontological mysticism in relation to any other deviation. In fact, love is the essence of God par excellence; it is love that realizes the plan of the creation of the world and the salvation of man from the point of view of the divine substance, and as such, it is incomprehensible; the essence of God is love, and it must be conceived as another aspect of the incomprehensibility of God. It is, therefore, very dangerous to theologically treat this love of God as a starting point, taking as point of contact the love of man. Any analogy here would endanger theology, and often does so. The result would be an absolute or psychological mysticism, romantic theology, sentimental moralism. For, by working with the love of God as a category of theological thought, one is too eager to operate an identity between the human essence and the divine essence. On the other hand, to avoid this pitfall, we modify the love of God by interpreting it exclusively in relation to the divine justice or the wrath of God, manifested on the cross of Christ, from which a Kierkegaardian dialectic of relations between God and man stems. In both cases, God is valued according to the analogies of human love. It is thus possible to arrive at the negation of the incomprehensibility of God that one deprives of his lordship; the worst thing would be that these two extremes— mysticism and dialectic—meet in absolute subjectivism. So the God-love can be determined by anthropological criteria, whether it is considered as savior of humanity for the sake of love, or because it offers the additional grace on the cross. But we forget in all these cases that the love of God is not sentimental; it is a sovereign love; it is the love of the Lord. It is the greatest and deepest mystery of the unknown essence of God. This incomprehensible mystery is revealed by glory and in the glory of God, driven to reveal itself by its unknown essence which is love. The divine glory is placed between the divine love and the human, the creature and object of this love, to realize in the Son the plosive union between the two and to carry out the gifts of this union in the human by the Holy Spirit. In other words, we can say that the glory of God, being the final stage of his revelation, is expressed in the contact of God with the sinful human after the Fall, through the union in Christ by the Holy Mind. This glory is the unknown love of God, his essence acting in revelation. It is his revelation. The glory is the manifestation of the incomprehensible essence of God that becomes accessible to humanity. It is the point of contact between the work of God and the possibility for humans to participate.

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The glory is not primarily the majesty of God as Creator and should not lead to an aesthetic admiration of God’s creation. On the contrary it is the glory of the Son seated with the Father before the creation of the world (John 8.18). The glory is the strength of God who makes his love active and communicable in Christ; it is the manifestation of this same glory in the Son. The mystery of salvation is not only a revelation but an energy of the glory of God (John 13.31), incarnated in Christ and bestowed upon us by the Holy Spirit, being Trinitarian, as a perfect communion of the three hypostases. But this does not mean that human being remains the passive spectator of this glory. The true theological mysticism begins from the moment that this glory of God through the Son becomes the glory of his disciples and of all believers. St. Paul, in speaking to the Thessalonians of the sanctification of the Spirit, adds, “God called you to this through the Good News we preached to you; he called you to possess your share of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 2.14). The glory of God in Christ becomes the glory of humanity. To contemplate the glory means to participate in it, to be re-created. There is no spectator of the glory of God. Nobody can describe it without participating in it. When we contemplate this glory, we reflect it under the action of the Holy Spirit. “All of us, then, reflect the glory of the Lord with uncovered faces; and that same glory, coming from the Lord, who is the Spirit, transforms us into his likeness in an ever greater degree of glory” (2 Cor. 3.18). Father is glorified not only by the Son but also by the works of the disciples (John 15.8). This glory by sanctification is the co-glorification of humans in Christ and becomes the light of knowledge in communion with the revealed mystery. Thus, the gnoseological basis of mystical theology finds its complete expression in the doxological element. The doxa of God is the only ontological category of any truly theological thought that wishes to remain faithful to the principle of the incomprehensibility of God. The theme of mystical light does not concern the knowledge of the essence of God through a fusion of human nature with it, but the knowledge of its glory through participation in the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Nothing better expresses the essence of God than his glory. And this glory is pre-creational, manifested in the creation, in the incarnation of the Logos, in the salvation of man, in the last judgment, and in the eschatological pleroma. The whole Bible speaks about the manifestation of the glory of God. Human being is called to glorification by the knowledge of glory as light in him/her—that is to say, by the fact that he/she abandons him/herself totally to it, which transfigures him/her. In this situation of life in the salvation of God, human thought does not have rational categories. It does not think to define the reasons for its structure, but to penetrate the mystery that can be known from categories of life



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that already operate in humans. The abstraction concerning the relation between subject and object and the categories of scientific thought thus become superfluous in the face of the relation between life and action. It is a new relationship, a revelation of the superior powers that makes the consciousness of man the center of a new knowledge having objective characters, at the moment when it becomes a subjective act. It has an objective reality, but that exists only when it begins to operate in the being of the subject by its dynamic qualities, remaining objectively incomprehensible. Divine glory for thought is this transformation of the unknowable incomprehensible, experienced by humans. It is a glory, because it always exceeds our cognitive possibilities, but it possesses the characters able to make known to the subject, which thinks in itself the living object, hitherto unknown. In this sense the human understands the act of God as glory and thinks through it because glory is, as doxa, an opinion that comes from the energy of a real and objective fact, expressed by a thought that is animated and completely possessed by the soteriological nature of this objective fact. The incomprehensibility of God is revealed in his glory, at the moment when he knows humans, humbling himself as Lord and taking in his Logos, by the unity of the flesh, all the qualities of the human known to him; and the human, by knowing him/herself thanks to the unknown God, thinks in the light of this knowledge. This thought will have, as a fundamental category, the fact of being known, and the thought which results from this fact will be the reflection of this imitation realized by the knowing object. God as knowing can become known only in his glory, manifested in his act of knowing us—that is to say, in our total change according to his act which makes us commune with his glory (“and that same glory, coming from the Lord, who is the Spirit” [2 Cor. 3.18]). So, theological thought does not proceed according to a fusion of essence with God, it is not the product of an experience, it is not the result of a psychological shock felt by the human spirit in an extraordinary moment of negation of oneself. Theology reflects the glory of God, which is realized objectively and becomes comprehensible as wisdom, when it becomes life and force of transfiguration. But in thought, this act is the light of God in us. It is precisely the light of divine glory that is the point of contact in our hearts. It is then that the true theology begins. It is God who lights us, through our existential change toward the path of holiness, the light of his glory to make us to know his mystery which is infinite (“The God who said ‘Out of the darkness the light shall shine!’ is the same God who made his light shine in our hearts, to bring us the knowledge of God’s glory shining in the face of Christ” [2 Cor. 4.6]). Doxological theology is the eternal movement of the Spirit of God that reveals to us the majesty, the lordship, and the love of divine essence in our

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lives. This movement does not stop, neither from the psychological mysticism leading to ecstatic satisfaction, nor from the dialectical passion which does not provide a moment of rest between the momentary “yes” of God and the permanent “no” of the rebellious human, while it is not possible to express a stable and certain thought of this divine glory. The movement of doxology is an arduous effort from thought to the top. It does not let us fall backward, for it is always attracted not by our thought, but by the Spirit of the glory of God, who is the only Lord, above all opposition in the world. The mysterious element in this theology is precisely that the end of this doxological movement is caused by the fact that it is our thought that is finite, but at the same time called to stand in the infinite glory of God. Indeed, the thinking subject is no longer the sinful thinker but the object of this thought: God the Holy and Savior. On the human level, there is a limit to the expression of the Logos of this doxa, because the means available to humans fail to fully express the real mystery that depends on a life beyond human possibilities, always relying on the hands of God. So doxological theology, at the end, becomes poetry, hymnology, iconography. If there is no limit on the divine plane, there is in us, on the other hand, aporiae, defilements which veil the sun of the divine glory. Sin exposes the theologian to sudden eclipses of this light. But they are falls and rebirths; we fall to rise and to purify ourselves by the fire of the Spirit. It is a death with a view to life and continual rebirth. The doxology is ascending, despite the falls. This dialectic of death and life is the harsh battle of the theologian. It is his decisive part in the act of his re-creation by God, his only contribution, but it is indispensable. The ascension toward the light is thus accomplished by repentance—which leads to a change of life—and by a new orientation toward the divine contemplation. That is why all true doxological theology deals inevitably with the misery of humans, which is all the more dark as it is illuminated by the glory of God. Every doxological hymnology is interrupted by the “Kyrie eleison” of the glorified people. In the icons, the splendor and purity of the eyes of the saints—who are wearing the clothes of the heavenly liturgy—hide the weak and miserable bodies. But in the active, existential repentance, all these miseries and all these falls are only interruptions, possessed by the light that never extinguishes, in living faith—that is, in mystical unity with the Logos. Everything is attracted from above, where the divine glory, being objectively real, is placed. Although personal sin accomplishes in us its furious dance, the doxological element situates theology within the uncreated light. This light appears once and for all in history, through the incarnation of the Logos, its crucifixion and especially its resurrection. The Lord and His Lordship manifested in this



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way cannot be diminished by the condition of humans. Otherwise it would be possible to lower God in our miseries and to give priority to anthropology rather than to theology. Through repentance, everything becomes positive and allows humans to stand in the glory of God. Repentance reminds us of our tragic situation; it is the painful experience of our weakness in the face of God. Therefore, in a true theology which preserves the Lord’s Lordship, repentance becomes for humans the only possibility to pursue the path to divine glory. The last and ultimate stage of a true meta-scientific theology is based on repentance, albeit attracted, directed and accomplished by the victorious end of the Lord in his glory. In this sense, doxological theology is mysterious because the beginning and the end of its categories are hidden in the revealed light of the incomprehensible essence of God. It is mysterious but not sacramental. A subtle distinction must be made here to better understand Eastern theology. There is also in theology another act which may diminish the Lordship of God. I would like to speak here of a kind of theology that I would call “theological legalism,” which deals mainly with the quality and quantity of salvation obtained by the sacrifice of the Cross of Christ. This sort of theology studies the what, the how much and the how of the justification of humans, following legal human analogies, and tending to evaluate and measure the glorious work of God. Legalism thus supplants the mystery of God. It proclaims salvation in the name of God, making an effort to define glory by purely human concepts. It is an anthropomorphic conception of the soteriological sacrifice, which has no relation with the repentance of humans, nor with the pleroma in the resurrection. It is the proclamation of the innocent human in the presence of God, without his/her participation in this mystery of salvation. In order to respect the essence of divine glory, doxological theology has departed from all discussion of this mystery, which is absolutely in the hands of God and is simply manifested as glory in the world. The Greek Fathers seem poor in this respect, in comparison with Western theology. The cause of this poverty lies in their restraint in the face of the legalist scientism of human thought. The most superficial theological theory in the eyes of an Orthodox would be the system that would like to prove, measure, the surplus of grace. Doxology is reasoning about the mystery of God. The sacramentum, in the legal sense, is a disfiguration of this glory, while the mystery totally depends on the act of sanctification of God which continues with our transfiguration by the Holy Spirit. Legalism justified once and for all gives security, legalizes what goes beyond human understanding, remaining Christomonistic. It is likely to inspire humans with total passivity. This sacramental legalism is an

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erroneous stop, halfway to salvation, creating the religion of a new law. All non-doxological theology is threatened by the danger of imprisoning itself in categories of human thought. The doxological element opens the horizon toward God. It is a thought always directed toward the mysterious revelation of God, nourished by this revelation which knows its culminating point in the resurrection, sublime victory of God in this world. On the other hand, the idea of the mystery is not identified with the sense of the abstract reflection in theology. Mystery does not mean infinite space in which human reason can fly without any foundation and without end. The mystery must be understood always from the objective and real fact of the revelation of the glory of God. Mystical theology is ontological insofar as it is based on the realization of this union between the glory of God and the glory of human, between the Spirit of God and the flesh of human, between the saint and the sinner, between grace and repentance in the Church. This means that the mystery is revealed and given, not to the individual, but to everyone in the communion of all. Theological thought is therefore based on a reality which is common to us and which is conceived as the Eucharistic offering of all. Theology in its supreme realization can only be community in the Church. Admittedly, this theology is the prerogative of qualified spirits who are distinguished in the Christian community by this particular charisma, but it must not be subjectivism. This theology is both strictly personal and representative of the community. The glory of God does not reveal itself to the mystic in the psychological situation of ecstasy and loneliness, which destroys all relations with other humans, but it is revealed to all children united perfectly with one another by participation in this mystery. Doxological theology, as a Eucharistic offering of the ecclesial community, cannot be limited to a dialogue between God and the theologian in a relationship with me. Although it is the offering of a person, it is at the same time the reasonable worship of the whole Church, which recognizes in this theology the supreme expression of divine glory. The voice of personal theology thus becomes the Eucharistic voice of all members of this mystical body. This is the foundation of the dynamic tradition of Orthodoxy. This tradition is not a law to which one must submit as an obligation. Its dogmas express the necessary definition to rule out heresy. The dogmas of a doxological theology are the expression of the glory of God, manifested by the imitation of the Church. They are today, as they always were and as they will forever be, our voice, our prayer, our faith, our life. On the path of this theology, all theologians are invited to think as members of the Church, representing the common glory accomplished by God in all. Theology as prayerful thought in the communion of Saints and as Eucharist is the supreme crowning of human thought. It saves us from the pettiness



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of research that has its purpose in itself, frees us from division and leads us to the unity of life and thought in the Church. We must not be deluded. It is not easy to write a true theology as a doxology of the Church. Only those who are transfigured by sanctification and continual repentance and who live in communion with the glory of God can contemplate the mystery of God. It is the work of the last and supreme science, of sacred science, the work of both humble and powerful thinkers, rooted in the communion of all the members of Christ and offering in their name their theology as a diakonia to the glory of God. NOTE 1.  Gregory of Nyssa, De Infantibus, PG 46, 176B.

Chapter Two

Reflections on the Renewal of Systematic Theology

The need for a systematic exposition of the content of faith was imposed on Christian theology in the East and in the West from the earliest centuries of Christendom. The Church was obliged to present its doctrine in a clear and concise manner for catechetical and missionary purposes, and subsequently to guard against heretical deviation from the central truths of its doctrine. This systematic exposition was, from the outset, the expression of truth found in seed in the Bible experienced by all members of the Church throughout the world. At all times and places, the Bible and the life of the Church form an inseparable whole, experienced by the totality of the People of God and attested by their consciousness—namely, a sort of qualitative catholicity—on the basis of the efforts of the Church Fathers, the Ecumenical Councils, and other theologians toward a systematization and more detailed exposition of the living truth. It may be observed that systematic theology only expresses what is already present and certain in the Church, so as to serve its inner needs and provide an answer to those who question its truth from outside, a truth already given by the Holy Spirit and dwelling in the Church as an event and institution inseparably linked to the consciousness of the People of God, which is animated by this Spirit and its gifts. It must therefore be affirmed without reservation that any systematization of the biblical and experienced doctrine of the Church is relative and secondary in relation to this profound truth that animates the Body of Christ. This primordial truth, dependent only on the grace of God, exists in an eminent, immediate and existential way without any development of systematic theology and long before its multiple or diverse expositions, which add nothing to the truth, as lived and immediately communicated by categories of life. 43

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These preliminary remarks are fundamental and mandatory because, while for the Orthodox theologians of the Eastern tradition they may be quite apparent, we nonetheless sometimes find ourselves—especially in our present-day context of neo-orthodoxy—before serious instances, where systematic theology, formulations and dogmatic definitions are confused with the received truth, leaving no room for the mystery of the life of the Church and drawing no distinction between the content of faith and its relative expression by various definitions. This “orthodoxy” ultimately identifies faith and dogmatic theology, which constitutes the first “fallacy” of all theology, especially of the authentic Orthodox theology of the East. Faced with this problem, the Orthodox must once again endeavor to reconsider their theological foundations by avoiding being victims of pseudo-scientific methodologies, whose systems might otherwise claim precision and scientific clarity. It is well known that there is no absolute analogy between scientific dogmas, or even scholarly propositions, and Christian dogmas. The former of these derive from a concrete, immanent and positive experience of the object, even if the latter is not material; the latter operate on the basis of revelation, experienced only by faith. Theological scientism adds nothing to theology as science; on the contrary, it deprives it of its original foundation and degrades it by applying thought to the supreme mystery of community life, which in itself is always free in the Spirit to encompass all of human reality in its cosmic and universal dimensions. The fundamental scientific condition, according to which every proposition must be universally accepted on the basis of pure logic and immediate evidence, is not valid for theology or its dogmatic formulations and adds nothing to them. On this scientific premise, the sciences as positive logic are limited voluntarily and properly to the examination of the immediate, whereas true theological thought has the supreme duty of making its “propositions” valid for all people by means of free choice, beyond anything immediate and concrete, where the life of the Spirit calls for continuous transcendence of all limitation. In criticizing systematic theology whenever it contends that it is an end in itself, self-sufficient, or the last word of truth, while basing this absolutism on the authority of the ecumenical councils, the magisterium, or some divine right, we do not intend to demonstrate that all systematic theology is superfluous. This criticism is not intended to deny the value of systematic theology but seems absolutely necessary in the face of certain exaggerations. Instead, it aims to renew the evangelizing effort of the Church in the contemporary world. This criticism is based on the affirmation of faith lived by the Church, which must provide each generation with a unique missionary force, seeking to fight against theological absolutism and establish a new point of contact with other religions and non-believers.



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Thus, we can claim that systematic theology must be continually renewed, struggling against any static and immutable system. This is only possible if we refrain from establishing an identity between the experienced truth of the Church and all theological formulations, as well as if we are concerned with safeguarding the flexibility of theological thought in relation to the content of truth. For this truth is not itself static or ontological in the old scholastic understanding, but rather dynamic and existential since for the Orthodox it results from the divine Trinitarian energy. Authentic Orthodoxy holds that there is a kind of ontology of divine grace, which does not permit any static and definitive formulas but only grants true Orthodox believers an infinite space to reflect and penetrate the mystery of the Holy Spirit. It is this Spirit that transmits to us by its operation the freedom of the Wisdom of the incarnate Word. This Spirit liberates us from all false intellectual limitation, which would result from any constrictions of the immediate, thereby calling us to the freedom of the true pneuma (Spirit) of the Son of God. This is not possible otherwise than through a concrete center: namely, the life of the Church and its consciousness as the People of God—a concrete historical community. It is the firm conviction of all of us that truth dwells through the Holy Spirit in the historical Church in a unique and absolute way, which can never find in any theology an absolutely adequate or definite expression. In reality, of course, there is a dualism by which authentic and dynamic Orthodoxy is animated and continues the path that it has traced out in history. On the one hand, we are convinced that truth, as a continuous historical event, dwells through the energy of the Paraclete (Comforter) in the historical Church, which must not be confused with the hierarchy alone or with any glorious historical period, or even with a system of thought or any single theology, but which is found in the consciousness of the pleroma (plenitude) of its people, as the redeemed, sanctified and regenerated People of God. On the other hand, we recognize that this reality of the Truth is expressed only in a relative and approximate way by means of a theological system and any attendant dogmatic formulations. This position allows all generations to rethink and reformulate the truth, inasmuch as the Paraclete always returns it to us through the historical community of every age; indeed, the Paraclete obliges us to fulfill this task in order to preserve the message of true orthodoxy, ever dynamic and evangelical in the contemporary world, as well as in order to enable the Church to regain its prophetic role and presence as a spiritual and creative force in the culture and social life of our time. As a consequence of assuming this position, we may perhaps be accused of relativism with regard to the value or validity of doctrine in the Orthodox tradition, since Orthodoxy has traditionally adopted an attitude of absolute respect for the dogmas promulgated by the seven Ecumenical Councils, while

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accepting doctrine as the adequate and immutable definition of truth. We may also be accused of failing to distinguish between dogma and theologoumena—that is to say, between definitive formulas of dogmatic truth, which every believer must accept, and theological questions, on which opinions can freely be exchanged since each individual is entitled to hold a personal opinion, at least to a certain degree. So we need to clarify our position to avoid any misunderstanding. In the first place, it is necessary to make it clear that this lies at the heart of the renewal of systematic theology, but not of dogmas. As a basic science, the field of “dogmatics” definitely belongs to systematic theology, but the time has come for the neo-Orthodox to draw a sharp line of demarcation between the fundamental dogmas of Trinitarian theology—that include Christology and Pneumatology—as well as divine economy more broadly and the dogmatics taught in textbooks, whose system sometimes unfortunately becomes as important and absolute as the dogmas themselves. Although such systems are often merely an enlargement or enhancement of the core dogmas, not only do we not profess them on the same level as the dogmas themselves, but moreover we do not attribute them an absolute value. By the same token, especially in the face of sectarian confessionalism, the Orthodox must rethink the nature of these dogmas and any kind of horos dogmatikos (dogmatic definition) today, while at the same time avoiding any defensive apologetics or any confessional polemics that render the unity of the Church into a game among small groups that become emancipated from the authentic Church on the basis of some “new” and “clear” definition of faith. As already mentioned above, Orthodoxy differs from any sectarian theology by safeguarding the distinction between the truth of the living Church by its Pleroma as a trans-historical and perpetual event as well as by constituting the expression of this truth on the basis of particular internal and external factors in the life of the Church. Even the most fundamental dogmas are not exempt from classification in the latter of these categories in the life of the Church. All dogmas (and their dogmatic content) are never understood as the truth itself, but only as an adequate expression of truth. Anything else would be considered inconceivable. Moreover, as systematic theologians, we must be conscious of operating on the basis of an antinomy between effective grace, which directly animates the Church, and our expression of this event by means of logical systems or rational structures. Even if dogmatic formulations sometimes allude to this antinomy and respect the primacy of divine energy, it is always necessary to acknowledge that the antinomy persists and constantly to transcend the “conflict” between the event and its expression. Indeed, this effort is precisely the supreme duty of systematic theology, which must move beyond any antinomy



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without nevertheless denying its reality. Thus systematic theology will no longer operate within an internal contradiction between the revelation of God and the universality of immutable dogmas treated as things in themselves. We frequently encounter a simplistic and superficial solution, which consists in separating into two categories the components of this antinomy— namely, the mystery of revelation and its manifest expression. Those who hold to such a separation do so unconsciously because they primarily care about the duty of systematic and clear expression, while seemingly forgetting that the nature, origin and energy of the divine mystery do not constitute an immediate given and clear reality, similar to other data in nature and history. By assigning mystery to a separate category, logical-rational theology ultimately leads to an abandonment of mystery, offering theologians the illusion that any antinomy between Revelation and contingency may be overcome by some clear and definitive statement. This statement then guarantees the universal truth of the faith of the Church as a human institution, albeit while being separated from mystery as event. The dualism of “mystery-event” on the one hand, and “logical-rational theology” on the other, ultimately results in the ecclesiological separation between event and institution. Furthermore, just as the institution must always be safeguarded, whether by constructing an ecclesiology centered around the institution de jure divino or else by regarding the institution as a historical reality, or as the phenomenon of the event itself, or whether again by accepting the institution as a necessary evil, that is subject to the caprice of theologians, sometimes even despising it as the cause of all evil in the Church. This separation between event and institution in ecclesiology is deeply rooted in the separation between immediate and communicable revelation as a mystery of divine energy and the theological expression of this mystery by means of a systematic, static and supposedly clear theology. In this context, it is believed that the antinomy between divine mystery and systematic thought is overcome, whereas in reality it is not; it is merely rationalized and ignored. The patristic theology of the Eastern Church was for the most part aware of this antinomy very early. Throughout its literature, it generally appears that the incomprehensibility of God was firmly established as a principle for all theological thinking, thereby giving priority to divine grace and energy. In this understanding, God is “incomprehensible” but not “unknowable” (in the sense of classical Greek philosophy). Divine knowledge is a perpetual event, a revelation. Divine knowledge is reserved exclusively to God’s personal will and initiative. The nature and function of this event is a mystery, depending entirely on God. Hence, while the event may be knowable and communicable to us, it nevertheless remains a rational mystery in its essence and form. Eastern theology attributes this mystery not only to the event of Christ—namely,

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the unique event of the incarnation—but also to the mediation and manifestation of the Church with regard to this event: to its theological formulations and structure, to the institution Church and hierarchy, as well as to canon law. Everything is inspired by the same divine energy and by the same priority of the revealed God; therefore, everything—both event and institution, both revelation and the expression of this revelation—remains “mysterious” for theological thought because everything wholly depends on the same “mystery.” Systematic theology must preserve this primordial aspect from the beginning to end in its theological reasoning. By demonstrating respect to the mystery, then, theology transforms the antinomy into a theo-nomy and informs the theologian of his rational autonomy. Thus, theology becomes a discipline of theonomic thought. One cannot of course profess only the mysterious character of revelation; it is always necessary to work with logical consequence on the “mystery” in order to advance beyond the absolutism of theological formulations, sectarian confessions, and superficial slogans. Today we face a great effort toward theological renewal, which is most frequently inspired by Puritanism or perfectionism among individual thinkers, or else by rigid and fanatical historicism that overlooks the mystery of divine revelation. All such efforts adopt systematic theology to some extent as an instrument either for partial renewal according to rational norms or else for return to a super-orthodox conservative dogmatism of the first trends. Though radically contradictory, these two attitudes share a common character: they replace the divine mystery with human “wisdom” and then use this wisdom to construct their institution and conserve their tradition. However, in both cases, the primacy of divine mystery is concealed. This camouflaged desire for theological autonomy, manifested either in the diverse forms of sectarianship or else in the form of super-orthodoxy, is today the greatest danger to authentic systematic theology as the principal instrument leading to rapprochement among the separate traditions as they seek to discover a theological language that expresses the mystery of divine energy jointly and through a veritable theonomic theology. The theology of the Fathers always attributed priority—and remained faithful—to the mystery of God. Their theocentric theology preserved the notion of the dynamic and existential Spirit, of a liberating and effective grace. It is only this notion of grace, which in turn gives primacy to life in the Church, that makes it possible to overcome any contradiction between revelation and theological or systematic thought. This position in no way disqualifies theological thought or diminishes its value. On the contrary, it gives it a true face, a liberating force beyond the rational contradiction that exists in all logical systems. The systematic the-



Reflections on the Renewal of Systematic Theology 49

ology of the Fathers and of the Eastern tradition in general—that is to say, the thought of ecclesial experience of the divine energy—seeks to resolve the theological questions presented by the human logos in communion with the divine Logos through the economy of salvation. The rational opposition between divine and human, as well as between eternal and temporal or revelation and theological expression, can only be resolved by a theology that refuses in the first place to consider itself as independent of this antinomy. The antinomy always persists but must be overcome precisely by remaining faithful to the divine mystery—to a God constantly revealed in the Church whenever the theologian approaches grace through repentance and acknowledges this knowable “mystery” as the only way of overcoming the antinomy. It becomes clear, then, that such transcendence must be realized in a way that preserves the priority of the perpetual and dynamic grace of God. In this respect, I would like to offer an outline or summary of three elements, which seems to me to constitute the fundamental core of the theology of the Eastern Church and the starting point for all efforts to renew systematic theology in light of either sectarian confessionalism or rigid super-orthodoxy. a.  A systematic theology, or confession of faith, should not be conceived primarily or predominantly as a lesson of Orthodoxy to heretics in defense of particular conceptions of the first as a result of doctrinal deviations of the second. Theology is first and foremost a response to the constant work of the Holy Spirit. It is through the Spirit that the grace of the Trinitarian God is continually revealed in the Church and manifested in the world. Theology is the thought that highlights the reality of this activity of grace. It is not a discussion of divine revelation with heretics; still less so is it an apology of God or the confession of faith by a local church. Theology is principally developed before God by divine grace. If accomplished in this manner, it can by the same grace later become a response to erroneous doctrines. Even a theology that serves the spiritual development of members of the Church, or its catechetical and kerygmatic purposes, must never lose sight of the presence of the Trinitarian God through the Spirit, since the primary interlocutor of all true theological thought is none other than God. Theological dialogue is first of all vertical and only subsequently horizontal; such should be the authentic process of all theoretical or theological. For theologians, systematic theology is not a theory about God or an abstract contemplation of God (theology in the sense of classical philosophy). It is based on the incarnation of the divine Logos communicated through the Holy Spirit in the Church at every moment of our life in the world. It is the renewal of our spirit by the ever-present Spirit of God that

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enables us to do and write theology: “being made new in the attitude of our mind” (Eph. 4.23). Then, theological thought is no longer ours alone; it exists whenever one writes something about the Trinitarian God, about God’s activity in history and operation in our lives; it is the continual renewal of “being made new in the attitude of our mind.” The purpose of theology is to grasp this renewal of thought by the Spirit and always to express it in the presence of the same Spirit. Theology does not have as its sole starting point the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ; rather, through the Spirit, theology has its permanent point of reference in God as a reciprocal act of love, action of grace, and sacrifice of logic in this renewed “attitude of mind.” The renewal of systematic theology is a movement in the Spirit of God so that our vision may expand on the Spirit’s continual work in Christ. Thus, our vision of the world and of history is renewed and enlarged. Renewed theology is a spiritual exercise in the mind and in the world continually revealed before God by His Spirit. b.  If we say that all theology is first and foremost a response to God and God’s work, it also becomes apparent that all theology is a response of the Eucharist, of thanksgiving, as an offering of human thought to its Creator. This aspect of theology, which is valid for all dogmatic formulations and all confessions of faith, further preserves the priority of divine grace over the rational autonomy of human thought. It is not a question of thanking God on every page of a theological manual, but of conceiving God’s saving and regenerating work in the mind of someone who by grace has received a new attitude of mind, capable of penetrating the mystery of God as God’s sovereign act. Theology is thus an action of “eucharistic” grace by the Spirit; for the knowledge of the incomprehensible God always depends on the deep recognition of the human person known by God. Theology is neither scientific research nor systematic description of an objective reality, but the kind of thought that becomes self-conscious, known by the gratitude to the One who not only originally created it but also continually renews it by His Spirit in the Church. The antinomy between event and thought is resolved here through an absolute recognition of God, which allows us to overcome any opposition between existential and rational, while at the same time removing any form of autonomy in the theologian’s system. By means of this theonomy—that is to say, by the fact that the theological system retains the absolute primacy of God in the perpetual event of Revelation in Christ and through the Spirit—theological thought becomes a commentary of a liberating divine grace. In this sense, the theonomy of thought is not a heteronomy that ultimately limits the human faculty; on the contrary, it is an existential call for human thought to transcend and renew itself, thereby reaching the limits



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of the unlimited, and it recognizes itself as infinite in relation to its infinitely profound source. As the revelation and renewal of human thought, the mystery becomes the spiritual force that liberates the mind from all limits and the antinomy between the revealing event and the ensuing logical-rational formulations in theology. c.  As grace and para-eucharistic thought addressed to God, as knowledge in recognition of the mystery, theology has another important goal, which is not always expressed directly or clearly in the writings of the Church Fathers. This added, unexpressed goal—which inspired the doctrine and theology of the ancient Church in addition to the two outlined above—is the spiritual and doxological dimension of theology. There is no dogma of the Church, which cannot be reduced to a doxological hymn for the glory of God, just as there is no Christian cultural hymnology that is not received in one way or another as a dogmatic commentary of the Church’s faith. These two aspects, worship and dogma, are inseparably linked in the Orthodox tradition. At the same time, one cannot offer the anaphora of the Eucharist without first reciting and recognizing the Creed in chant. Here, the act of the Church unites the knowledge of the faithful about the work of God with their gratitude for this work. The dogmatic content of theology is subsequently offered, by the Church, to the revealed glory of God. It is not the faith itself, but the symbol of faith—namely, the symbolical words and formulations—that contribute to the expression of this faith for the glory of God. The Nicene Creed thus becomes the standard and type for any dogmatic formulation, any confession of faith and any systematic theology. *** Therefore, as we observed above with regard to the origin and operation of theological thought, it is also the finality and goal of this thought that is directed toward God. The doxological element is the third inseparable link between the work of the theologian and the divine mystery; it, too, inevitably preserves the absolute primacy of the work of God. Theological doxology also transcends the antinomy between the divine event and its logical-rational description by human thought. Theological doxology is a human opinion by virtue of the divine Logos; it is no longer merely a human opinion but the reflection of the incarnate divine Logos through the renewal of thought by the divine Spirit. It is the manifestation of divine glory revealed by theological thought. And as a commentary on the divine glory, theology is offered to God as intellectual hymnology and spiritual doxology, thereby guiding us to think about the work of God by thanksgiving and glorification. The antinomy of event and its logical-rational description is further manifest in the supreme

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purpose of theological work, which is not the apologetics of human wisdom, a response to heretics, or a confessional description of my theology or faith, but a rational sacrifice to the glory of God. Moreover, this doxology must not be conceived as an expression of the theologia gloriæ, as in the history of Western thought, by contrast to the theologia crucis. Glory does not imply a triumphalist theology, which ignores the tragic element of history, the need for continual repentance, and the impasse of the human condition. On the contrary, doxological theology signifies a theology of martyrdom, suffering, and repentance. In the image of the incarnate Logos, it is through the cross that Christus Victor of the resurrection is glorified. The theology of the East has nothing to do with any form of triumphalism; doxology is the result of the experience of the Cross and renewal by the Spirit working within the thought of a sinner in recognition of the human condition. Nevertheless, the emphasis is actually on the Christus Victor rather than on the human condition, on the act of the Spirit that renews rather than on the impotence of humankind. We must always remember that theology is not first written horizontally in relation to the human condition, but vertically before God, in His Spirit, in an act of total theonomy. It is in this new condition that, without ignoring the human reality of martyrdom, tragedy, and sin, theology gives way to the primacy of the glorified act of God in Christ. However, the doxological element of theology is created through suffering, in the experience of the sinner, as well as in the divine light of forgiveness, grace, the Cross and the Resurrection. Such a theology has the potential of being consistent with the divine economy, while remaining realistic in relation to the contemporary world, where it can fully flourish. Needless to say, certain modern perspectives, for the sake of remaining faithful to theologia crucis, focus solely on the tragic side of the human condition and risk depriving the world of its unique hope through the good news of the Gospel. However, this is a unilateral exaggeration of the Cross and its unacceptable isolation from the Resurrection. These three perspectives or “principles” of Eastern Orthodox theology undoubtedly inform and inspire the theological work of the Church Fathers. Although they are not explicitly elaborated in their theology, it is sufficient to read only a few pages of their writings to discern and discover them as the basis of their thought. On the one hand, through these principles, the Church Fathers not only overcome the antinomy, but also avoid the enslavement of theology as the Logos about God to the systems and structures of scholasticism in all its forms. On the other hand, the Church Fathers are less concerned about defending confessions, condemning heresies, or describing the limits of the Church. They are writing for the whole oikoumene, for the one and undivided Church, beyond any petty confessional quarrels.



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Certainly, alongside these three principles, the theologians of this tradition embrace the reality of a new ecclesial and personal life, inasmuch as the antinomy between the event of revelation and its conceptual description is unraveled not by theoretical principles but by a new life. It is perhaps for this reason that these principles are not explicitly found in their works. For the Church Fathers, it is clear that the transcendence of this antinomy is only possible for a theologian thinking and living in community, speaking the language or expressing the thought and life of the Church. Such transcendence is the result of a thought that has undergone the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, the work of a new mind where the theological and rational antinomy appears as a vocation to new life in the Spirit. It may thus be rightly said that the theologian is someone who knows how to pray in the Church and who writes—after repentance and regeneration—the preliminary chapter of theology, a commentary on the transfiguration of Christ. Finally, the renewal of theology is also the result of a living ecclesiology and anthropology. These two aspects are inseparably linked, and it is the work of the Paraclete in the Church who works in us and grants us the vision, power and inspiration for all theological work that is worthy of its name. In this ecclesiological context and anthropological light, as a gift received by the new mind in the new creation, systematic theology is renewed as a response of thanksgiving and rational doxology. In describing the renewal of systematic theology, we are by no means implying that the task of theology can be reduced to the above postulates alone. It would also be wrong to conclude that such theology would be deliberately deprived of any connection to the problems of the Church—its history, texts and various confessional manifestations. It is precisely in order to perceive and practice this theological task in a broader perspective that we have recalled these principles; and it is the vocation and mandate of contemporary theology that led us to outline these fundamental elements of theological thought. Our concern is to demonstrate through these principles that the definitions of theological dogmas and, even more so, of theological systems are not the definitive description of truth, but only the beginning of the search for truth, the basis of our work as theologians, the arrows that provide direction to our thinking. These principles must continually be redefined in the Church by always renewing ourselves before God to whom we offer our thought. It is not simply a question of doing theology against those who disagree with us in a spirit of criticism and polemics. Through the above-mentioned elements—often largely ignored even by contemporary neo-Orthodox theologians!—Orthodox Christianity can discover its unique mission both in the ecumenical and the secularized world. Through such a renewal of Orthodox systematic theology according

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to its authentic and traditional principles, we are able to contribute to the truth, always in a spirit of love and unity. The theology of Orthodoxy must demonstrate that it is not at the service of any form of confessionalism or fundamentalism. It must also set an example of how systematic theology can once again speak to the secularized world of our time, without conforming itself entirely to Christian sociology and without yielding to the temptation of a “new theology” as a superficial response to secularism or humanism. More than ever before, our age demands a genuine theology of divine grace, a study of divine activity, and a renewal of the human mind and the entire world with a cosmic ecclesiology and anthropology. We need true courage in order to prevent a suicide of theology within interdenominational debates and sociological systems alike. We need a fresh pneumatological attitude, which speaks of Christ’s relationship to the world through the Church, just as the Fathers spoke of Christ’s relationship to the Father. It is in the very center of the world and history, through the one and unique Church, that this theological work can be achieved. Systematic theology is in the final analysis the thought of the world transformed into the Church; it is the reflection of the courageous mind that works with the deepest intellectual delight and doxology. Theology is accomplished before God as a rational liturgy “in all and for the sake of all” in His creation, in order to heal the People of God—the Church—from all division and save the world from the spiritual failure and infertility of functionalism. This chapter was written and is offered as a modest tribute to the Institute of Theology of St. Serge in Paris. The Institute of St. Serge aspires to be an Orthodox center of thought, while its professors and publications have sought to remind the Western world of the hidden principles of Eastern Orthodox theology since its foundation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Perhaps more than any other Orthodox theological school of the Mother Churches of our time, the diaspora was obliged to face directly the twofold aspect of a part of systematic theology in the West: on the one hand, confessional theology trying to justify the separation of churches; and on the other hand, Christian sociology presenting itself as the theology of renewal in the Church. By striving to remain a center of true theological renewal in the service of the unity of the Church and its presence in the world, St. Serge reminds us of the liturgical, doxological and theocentric character of theology in the one and undivided Church.

Part 2

SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION

Chapter Three

The Unity of Scripture and Tradition

Before entering into this very complex subject we have to understand that what today separates not only different schools of theology but also different church traditions is the understanding of the past of the Church and the importance assigned to it. The big question is in how far and in what way our present situation and our vision of the future of our Church depend absolutely or relatively on the past of the Church and in how far we are tied to this past when we try to “renew” the life of the Church. It is evident why this is one of the crucial problems not only in the prolegomena of hermeneutics but also in theology and present ecumenical relationships; for neither theology nor ecumenical work is possible unless we study together the one Bible which leads us together to make a sincere effort to renew all aspects of church life, trying to adapt them to today’s world and to new patterns of social life, without loosing our ties with the past of the Church. The problem begins when the Churches, being in agreement to undertake this renewal, try to think how it can be achieved on the basis of the Bible and how far one should respect or not certain existing traditional aspects of church life. Therefore, before we enter into the hermeneutical problem, we have to deal with the problem of our particular understanding of the time between the first coming of Christ, our present moment and His second Parousia. I would call it the time of the Church, which is not totally different from the time of the world but which is not identical with secular history or even with the history of a local Church. Of course one should never isolate this time of the Church without referring to the history of the revelation of God, as it is given in the Old Testament (henceforth, “O.T.”), or the eschatological dimension of the Christian faith. For the moment I would like to point out that the immediate difficulty in the theological discussion between the church traditions is the different evaluation of their past from the 57

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first century up to now, and the understanding of the O.T. period as well as of eschatology in the Christian era seen through the life of the Church. There is general agreement today to speak of a unity of the sources of revelation by bringing together Scripture and Tradition as two expressions of one and the same thing—that is to say, the event of God’s revealing Himself to His world in Christ. This very important agreement hides, however, a deep diversity of opinion in the understanding of what Tradition is and what is its content, and whether it is clearly stated and handed down to us through the past of the Church. There is a tendency today, especially among Protestants, to speak of Tradition as the primary event of the act of God in Christ, identifying Tradition with the Gospel itself, given by God through Christ. For those maintaining this attitude this concept explains then traditions (in the plural with a small “t”) as a process of transmitting this primary event by the Church from generation to generation by means of different interpretations. There is a distinction between the essence of the Tradition, being the act of God Himself revealing Himself to mankind, and traditions as a means of making this event apprehensible to men of all generations through different confessional interpretations and customs. A distinction is made between the event and the means of its transmission. This term “traditions” in the plural is used to designate the different forms in which Tradition is received and expressed throughout the ages at different historical moments by different people in different places. The problem immediately arises for the Orthodox as to whether this plural covers indeed not only external forms of church life and worship but also confessional statements, separate church organization and different interpretations of Scripture. This is because the majority of Protestants maintaining this distinction between Tradition and traditions think that confessions belong to the traditions, while the Orthodox insist that confessions belong to and have to be consistent with Tradition and therefore cannot differ very much from one another, because they are transmitted as one Tradition from generation to generation. The difference here is evident because those of the Protestants who uphold the sola Scriptura attitude, understanding Tradition as identical with the Gospel event, are ready to go so far as to say sola Traditione. For the Orthodox this is impossible because by Tradition they understand both the act of traditio of God Himself to man in Christ Jesus and the process of this traditio from generation to generation throughout the history of the Church, maintaining that the confessional truth and the interpretation of Scripture belong to this one Tradition of the one Church throughout the centuries. The distinction between Tradition and traditions is for them non-existent, and that is why all church documents, including the Nicene Creed and all other confessional statements, have their value in being closely related and



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explicitly stated in the Holy Scriptures; the key phrase is κατά τάς γραφάς (according to the Scriptures). This phrase points to two things: first, that the authentic Tradition is expressed by the church tradition rightly and consistently only if it is an expression and interpretation of something which is stated in the Scriptures; and second, that the Scriptures themselves are the one authentic link between Tradition and traditions. For the Orthodox, therefore, the plural “traditions” does not designate the different confessions of the different Churches, but only the external forms of church customs. Even the structures of the Church, the threefold ministry, the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils, Patristic theology interpreting the Scriptures, are part of the transmission of Tradition understood as common elements of life and thought in all church traditions. Therefore, the formula “Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition” remains the only one designating the unity of the source of revelation, in which Holy Scripture is seen as the authentic and unique echo of the life of the Church guiding the act of the transmission of this Tradition by the traditions throughout the history of the Church. What is very important here is the act of the Church of fixing at a given moment early in its history the Canon of the Bible. This act has paramount importance and ultimate significance for the life of the Church, because it crystallizes the truth of the Gospel and gives a solid basis for understanding the Tradition of the Gospel. Consequently it affords the norm according to which the transmission of this truth from generation to generation in the Church may be judged to be authentic or not. That is why the Orthodox maintain that the apostolic Church right from the beginning was deeply conscious of the possibility of being a pillar of truth (1 Tim. 3.15) and when necessary could usually express this truth adequately by creeds or confessional statements. The Holy Scriptures and the consciousness of the Church afford to the Orthodox this certainty, though equally it is evident that the expression of the truth is not the truth itself. There is an unexpressed distinction between the biblical expression of truth, the creedal expression of Patristic theology and theology in general. Yet they all work within the Church, trying to give voice to the transcendent event which is the Gospel, and all are in their different roles dependent on this primary event and are never identified with it. It is on this basis that one can understand why the Orthodox would never speak of sola Scriptura and even less of sola Traditione or assign to any later decision of an Ecumenical Council unique importance. Everything must always be seen as a whole, though tacitly distinguished, being an expression of the consciousness of the People of God receiving the Gospel and at the same time able in the Holy Spirit, as the whole body of believers in Christ, to give voice to this event through human means, of which the first and foremost is Holy Scripture.

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It is evident that the problem of the criterion of Tradition remains. It is evident that this criterion can no more be simply and only the Bible, because we have all learned that the Bible can be used according to our confessional presuppositions. The attempt to explain this point makes what is to my mind a rather superficial threefold distinction, in which the Orthodox appear to have as criterion the Ecumenical Councils, the Fathers and the wholeness of the Church, the Roman Catholics the deposit of faith of which the Magisterium of the Church is the guardian, and other Protestant traditions the confessions and creeds of the Reformed Churches as well as the Councils and the Fathers in a secondary way. This is a facile way of describing the differences, while the big question remains how to interpret the Bible while avoiding any kind of subjective or arbitrary interpretation, and how we today as divided Christianity can find again our common roots in the one Tradition. The question remains of the stable elements of the Christian Tradition which have to be preserved throughout the centuries against the influence of the local environment and the historical period in which the Gospel is preached. When speaking of Tradition we are speaking of something that is not only an event in Christ but also an event which continues after Him in history; this secures a continuity which excludes serious deviations from the mainstream of church life and biblical interpretation. Certainly there will always be a tension between this continuity and the different cultures at different epochs of world history, but the question with which we have to struggle is a grassroots question of how to express this one Tradition in different forms without losing any of its permanent elements. So finally we come to the hermeneutical problem which the Churches must discuss in a new perspective if they are to throw light on the crucial and controversial issue of the mission of the Church in countries which have very little to do with the Judeo-GrecoRoman biblical background or European and Middle Eastern cultural traditions. The transplantation of the Gospel makes the problem of the Bible, of Tradition and traditions one of the most acute ones. For the Churches today have to rethink together their presupposition for preaching and applying the Gospel in a situation in which the Christian Church is obliged to accept an unfamiliar culture. In such situations how the one Bible and the one Tradition can be applied and can preserve what is essential and at the same time incorporate new elements, without allowing them to affect its inner content, seems to be the big question of our days. Therefore, as the prolegomena of hermeneutics, the unity of the Bible and Tradition will be presented here in three sections: first, the biblical conception of Tradition; second, the concept of time and the history of the Church; and third, the historical continuity of the Church. In a fourth section I shall conclude by presenting some principles of hermeneutics.



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THE BIBLICAL CONCEPTION OF TRADITION In the Bible there is frequent use of the word παράδοσις, in singular and plural, which can help us at least to begin our study. We have the expression first in the Synoptics παράδοσις τῶν πρεσβυτέρων (Matt. 15.2), which refers to some accepted uses and customs which were part of the Rabbinic teaching and had to be respected by believers. Right from the beginning Jesus makes it quite clear that such traditions, though highly respected by Him, lose their value when applied to the letter—that is, given absolute value and so made, instead of Tradition of the presbyters, traditions of man (Matt. 15.7, 9). St. Paul uses this word and gives it a far richer content when he speaks of traditions, using the words πατρικαί μου παραδόσεις (Gal. 1.14). By this term he means perhaps the written teachings of the O.T. authors as well as the teachings of the Jewish Rabbis. Through them he seems to have a comprehensive view of the whole Jewish tradition and considers it a valuable expression of the authentic Jewish teaching. Further, there is in St. Paul’s teaching a threefold act of traditio that we should keep in mind when approaching the problem. This can be explained by means of the three verbs he uses: παρέλαβον (I received from the Lord, 1 Cor. 11.23), παρέδωκα (I gave to you, v. 23) and κατέχετε (keep! v. 2). In this way St. Paul refers to an act of receiving from the Lord, of transmission to the people and of the obligation of the people to keep unaltered what has been transmitted to them by him as he received it from the Lord. These three verbs are clearly repeated at the beginning of 1 Cor. 15. There is no doubt that when St. Paul refers to Tradition or traditions he is not referring simply to documents but to the whole content both of the preaching and of his letters. Therefore, the word Tradition covers a larger area than that covered by the things put down occasionally in letters. It does not seem as if St. Paul had in mind anything very precise when he used the word Tradition. 2 Thess. 2.15 bears witness to this broad understanding in that it exhorts the Thessalonians to “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.” The Bible refers in the same way to this fundamental conception of Tradition also in Jude 3, where the παράδοσις is almost identified with the content of faith, while in Acts 16.4 the decisions of the Apostolic Synod, once transmitted to the various young Christian communities of the Early Church, become “degrees for to keep, that were ordained of the apostles and elders which were at Jerusalem.” This oral Tradition, which is recorded indirectly and which takes a place very early in the Christian communities, seems to be understood as a long process, and a necessary interpretation of the kerygma.

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Concluding at this point on the biblical conception of παράδοσις, we can say: a.  In the Early Church and in the Bible it does not seem as if any tension or opposition existed between the written and oral Tradition, perhaps because the canon of the Bible was not yet fixed by the Church, and preaching in the young Church covered both the content of faith and its practical application. It is also evident that the opposition did not begin even after the acceptance of the canonical books of the Bible and the beginning of the interpretation of these books in the church community. b.  On the basis of this observation, we can venture to say that the oral Tradition, the varied forms of preaching in the first community, precedes the written form of Gospel, and, mark this, precedes not only as event in Christ but also as the act of transmission of good news that this event means to the faithful. We must be clear here that this priority is in no way qualitative, placing Tradition above Scripture, which would lead to the great error of placing all the interpretations of the Fathers and all the liturgical customs of the Church before and above the Bible. But in fact what the Bible calls authentic is a crystallization of the oral Tradition, pointing to certain events which happened in the first community without describing them. The Bible is not a codex of the customs and laws of a Christian community but expresses and guides the main aspects of its life. c.  We can therefore insist on the fact that in the Early Church as well as later in the Apostolic Church there was an absolute unity between the Bible and Tradition. There was also right from the beginning a life process of faith transmitted from generation to generation, starting from the early community, with inner authority and being able to lead into all faith the members of the Church led by the Holy Spirit and filled with His gifts. This can be seen from the Apostolic Synod and the concern of the Apostles and preachers to expound and to purify the content of the Gospel without losing this unity which faith reflected, as well as from the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, who work in the same way without opposing Bible to Tradition. Clearly these conclusions help us in our search for recapturing the unity of Bible and Tradition because we are bearers of this absolute unity of the sources of revelation, though under the threat of the confessional dispute which started only after the Roman schism and the Reformation. First, Roman practice and theology ventured to teach something different from what had been up to that time commonly accepted by the catholic and apostolic stream of life in the Church. The intention was good and a new interpretation of the structure of the Church was perhaps necessary. It was, however, imposed on the Church when it began to face either the current philosophical



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trends or the appearance of new states which posed the problem of their relationship with the Church. For the Orthodox a secular approach is not necessarily a bad thing for the Church, if the Church struggles to express its faith more clearly and more relevantly for the present situation. Schism begins to threaten the interpretation of the Bible through the one Tradition when this approach results in a split from the apostolic and catholic stream—that is to say, against the consciousness of the Church of being the pillar of truth acting only as a whole from generation to generation. In the face of this danger the Orthodox maintain that, in order to uphold the unity of the sources of revelation and face together schisms and heresies, we must emphasize both aspects of the one Tradition, the written crystallized form—that is to say, the Bible as the word of God—and the continuity of life in the Church of which the Bible is the authentic echo. We must learn once more in our ecumenical debate to appreciate the importance of both, which we see and live as one whole event. There is no Church without Tradition expressed in the various forms of traditions. I do not mean the particular Tradition of the Greek Orthodox, Roman or Reformed Churches, but all of them, having the Bible, though interpreted differently, as the true voice of the one Tradition, trying to see their traditions as consistent with the one Tradition from which they all come. It therefore makes no sense today to cast at each other polemical slogans, such as “the Church precedes the Bible” in order to attack the Reformed position, or “sola scriptura” in order to minimize the importance of the Church Magisterium and centralized hierarchical structure, but we can say that in the Church we live our Christian life carrying out and transmitting its Tradition which is clearly to be seen in the Bible. We should never forget that to read the Bible is not an act like reading any other book, but one which presupposes an illumination of our hearts (2 Cor. 4.6), an act of submission, surrendering ourselves to an event which cuts across the biblical text so that we are not liable to the accusation of the Lord to the Jews, that they read but understand nothing (Mark 4.12). Understanding nothing here definitely does not mean being unable intellectually to understand what the Bible says, but not being prepared to read this book through the Spirit in ecclesia, in common, and interpret it together and in accordance with the consciousness of the fullness of the Church which is the bearer of the living word of God. THE CONCEPT OF TIME AND THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH The axiom that I think all Christian confessions try to uphold and spread throughout the world by mission and evangelism is that the divine revelation

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in Christ happened at one point in time like any historical event of secular history, but it has to become present today through living faith, and it will be present in all generations together perfected and completed by the Second Coming. Therefore, the essence of revelation, the redemption in Christ, is not simply an οὐσία, but it has to become through faith in the Church a παρουσία. Christian faith is the result of the decision that a believer makes now as he hears the Gospel, which, though centered on a past event, has to become present when he makes this historical event a power for new life in continuity with the preceding generations. This faith, result of a free choice, transforms the word preached and read into a παρουσία, the presence of Christ through the Church and its Tradition in the believer here and now. Therefore, this conscious acceptance of the content of the Gospel message is made possible not simply by his decision, for the choice of the subject is never absolutely individual in Christian experience because the Gospel of God for all men is always transmitted to the believer through other believers in community. It is not a psychological emotional experience of the individual, but this acceptance can only be the result of what he experiences in the community of the Church past and present through the energy of the Holy Spirit. Now we can enter into the very delicate problem of the understanding of time and the past of the Church. The big question of all schools of theology today as well as in the ecumenical movement is how we evaluate time in general, and time in particular between the first Parousia of Christ and the now of our existence. There are two problems that have to be examined together: first, what is the relationship between the time of the history of mankind as a whole and the time of the revelation? Are we ready to say together that the entrance of the Son of God into human history signifies a penetration at the same time of an element which, without being opposed to time seen as a sequence of historical moments, creates within it something which cannot be analyzed by the instruments of a scientific approach? It is this that is called the history, of salvation and sacred events, which is not an isolated parallel sequence of historical moments as a kind of super-history, but which is interwoven with our time here and now. Man does not live a double existence but is called through faith to see that natural time bears from the moment of the incarnation, cross and resurrection the marks of something which transcends it. Theology sometimes ignores this fundamental theme or does not distinguish between the time of revelation seen through the history of the Church and the secular time subject to corruption. Theology of today has a difficult task in an age whose view of time is as flexible and relative as its understanding of matter. The idea of the romantics or idealists that matter is simply an outward sign of something deeper has disappeared for good. The pragmatism of today speaks of this reality behind the material forms as offering possibili-



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ties for progress. History therefore is now turned toward the future and speaks of a sure progress in it. That is why Christian theology today, as it tries to reinterpret the concept of time in order to evaluate the past of the Church and understand the importance of Tradition, has to fight against the following past and present secular concepts: a.  Philosophical idealism: with its illusionary concept of the absolute value of the thinking man, and its expectation that everything is moving toward a peak of synthesis where the absolute spirit will dictate order and truth. b.  Scientific materialism: which, as a reaction against idealism, sees the economic factor as the only decisive one in human relationships, placing the final end within this history. Here nature, time and man with his human needs are related to each other in one whole for which immediate reality is the only criterion of human existence. c.  Evolutionism in its varied forms: which accompanies the two preceding concepts of history in the belief that mankind is moving in continual progress and that science and technology can more and more fulfill human desires and aspirations. The Christian concept of time cannot be reconciled with any of these theories. All kinds of contemporary theology have to dispute, each in their own way, this superficial evolutionism. If we are to stand truly for the biblical message, we must appreciate the past of the Church and see that the present is dependent not only on the event of Christ but also on the history of the Church between that event and the present. No kerygmatic theology can be true unless it is conscious that it speaks out of the experience of the Church throughout the centuries, preaching something permanent which cuts across all kinds of idealistic and materialistic evolutionism. In the same line another danger threatening the true biblical concept of time is modern theological existentialism, which is found within the Christian Church today. It starts with a sound basis as described above—that is to say, the appropriation of faith now by the believer as the first essential step—but it goes on to sacrifice the relationship of the subject with the past. In this way faith is seen as a vertical line between Christ and the believer, eliminating the horizontal relationship between the beginning and the now of the Apostolic Church, thus threatening the very important ecclesial, community element of the Christian faith. This understanding of Tradition sees time as a series of unrelated points where the line is almost effaced. It seems to me that the radical existential theologian takes the risk of speaking of every generation and every individual of this generation as having its own Tradition which is unique in its newness, insofar as the pure event of Christ has to be completely independent of the experience

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of the past, and to be accepted by the believing subject. In this way I am afraid that the Church risks not only losing its unity but also its profound conception of time and its continuous reference to eternity. We should not forget that today the concept of the physical world and nature has changed so much and the time dimension has been so well related to the space dimension that the materialistic view of the world of the last century has been finally destroyed. What remains today is a mysterious relationship between natural elements of which modern physics simply traces the phenomena and results. I am not saying that science is not still positivist. Science can only exist if it is positivist. I simply say that this positivism is of another type and that theology should not be afraid to enter into discussion when it speaks of the historical moment more comprehensively than the materialism of the last century. The duty of the Christian theologian is to pass from history to Tradition; by doing so, he admits that the historical basis of the Church has absolute value for the present. In other words, he must always understand revelation in a real relationship with our history, with the persons who form living links to unite us with our past, and see that it is moving toward its fulfillment at the end of time. History in Christ recaptures its communion with eternity, and church Tradition is an arrow pointing to this connection. Christ is to be found only after His Gospel has been transmitted to us with the whole historical reality personified in the Church by His apostles, saints and martyrs. That is why the biblical now, νῦν, is one of the richest terms of the text. It includes all possible conceptions of time, including the end of the succession of historical moments (Matt. 24.21), the beginning of the new life in Christ (Phil. 1.20), placing thus the believer now and between the two appearances of Christ (Luke 22.31, John 12.31, Rom. 11.31). The “now” of the Bible is thus placed at the point of intersection of the Cross, uniting in the horizontal line the past and the future, and in the vertical eternity and time. There is no now which can be isolated and defined in the biblical language. The now is a passing reality between these four elements, uniting them in one. On this “now” everything depends, because it is not a static moment but involves the continuous and renewed decision of faith between these four poles which determine the personal decision. A human life in Christ thus by faith grasps the fact that it is a product of the past but always turned forward to its final fulfillment, living between two worlds and incorporating eternity into it. This is not a theory about time but the reality of the Church militant marching in history united with the Church triumphant of the martyrs. What now is Tradition according to this concept? Tradition is not simply history but a sequence of consistent acts of the Christian community on a stable basis which helps the individual to become a member of a new fellow-



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ship, which goes beyond simple historical and natural criteria of nation, race or language. This is the church Tradition as taxis and akoloutheia, order consistent with continuity. Tradition is not, therefore, what people accuse the Orthodox Tradition of being—a sterile past which predicts our present existence, obliging us to conform to past forms. But it is a decision in the present of the individual who stands in communion with the other believers, from whom he receives faith and with whom he makes the decision regarding the future, but based on the experience of the past. Tradition is always a movement toward the future but on the basis of the past which sustains and fills it. Tradition is an agreement of the individual with the Christian community facing the future, but an agreement which is to be found already in the past. Scripture is the link always present, as it was in the beginning of this movement forward with the first announcement of the Gospel. It is in this way that dynamic Tradition transforms the written word of God into an uninterrupted stream of life. It is not a normative codex or Patristic wisdom to which we must always refer, but it is a living process of interpretation of the Bible by the People of God gathered in one historical family and on its way toward its final destiny. We are not creating Tradition and we are not receiving a perfected Tradition, but we are creating out of the Tradition our new life, and what we receive we hand on to the coming generations as a new beginning. This understanding of Tradition excludes the three very dangerous deviations which signify for me a betrayal of the freedom of this dynamic conception of Tradition: a.  The theory that in the past there were implicit in the life of the Church things that the present of the Church can make explicit (for instance, the Roman concept of primacy). b.  The desire to adapt the Church to the modern world by making, instead of the Tradition, the world the criterion for this adaptation. But we must bear in mind that the modernization of the Church is something which can be achieved only by the inner force of the Gospel once it comes to grips with the secular world. It is the past interwoven and united with the present of the Church which will give the power for creating a new future on the same solid basis. c.  The effort to return to an idealized past of the Church which exists in our minds, and here we have to deal with two equally dangerous abuses. One makes a leap of fantasy into the Early Church which was not yet institutionalized and so far pure and free from all human shortcomings (some Protestants); and the other wishes to return to an idealized glorious period of theology and of the unity of the Church (some Orthodox). Both movements limit the Tradition of the Church to one single form and deny its heart—that is to say, the inner power in the Holy Spirit to become a

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moving stream of life throughout the centuries. Therefore, the problem is not how to rediscover a pure Tradition but how to purify continually the Tradition of the Church and see that it expresses the continuity of the Church and at the same time becomes the means of maintaining it. THE HISTORICAL CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH Unfortunately, the subject of historical continuity is not yet taken seriously in the present inter-confessional discussion on ecclesiology. Two factors have helped to push this question into the background: on the one hand, the existentialist interpretation of the past, and on the other, “General Church History” as a subject of study, which has been mainly limited to a simple description of the historical events in the life of the Church. Nevertheless this question belongs essentially to the present ecclesiological discussion. The Orthodox believe there is no way to a true understanding of the One Church and of the οἰκουμένη without considering the basic elements of this continuity. For the Eastern Church every historical moment of the life of the Church and the unbroken continuity of the Church in time are of fundamental importance, not because of the central role of Tradition but because of the Eastern theological conception of time and history. Historical time seen from the point of view of Christ and His Church is not simply an element of fallen creation. God has recapitulated all things in Christ. By Him all things consist, and He is the Head of the Church (Col. 1.16–18). This means that the moment of time reveals the nature of God’s creation. The first and central reality of world history is revealed to all the faithful in the life of the Church, in the Holy Spirit and in the historical continuity in eucharistic communion. This reality is the Coming Lord, as He came at a certain moment in history in order to reconcile fallen humanity and the whole creation with God, and as He is present now in His Church continuing His work of reconciliation. After the theological understanding of time and history comes the history of the event of God’s emptying of Himself, giving Himself in love to His human creatures in order to call them to life and to keep them in the communion of the Trinity. In the power of the Holy Spirit the Church realizes this communion among men in history in a concrete and visible way, founded and preserved by God, and so reflects the eternal life of the Trinity in historical continuity. Thus if the unity of the Church is understood as union given by God in charismatic and sacramental life, the unbroken historical continuity is the inevitable result and the final concrete proof of the working of the Holy Spirit in history. This working comes from the fullness of the revelation of God within history.



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That is to say that the Holy Spirit realizes the work of Christ here and now in that He continually makes effective the reconciling grace of God among men in history. Thus understood, continuity is not simply “apostolic succession through a historic episcopacy” in the institutional sense, but the saving presence of Christ continually working in history in the power of the Paraclete, who from Pentecost on is realizing ever anew the communion of Head and Body in our world. For the Ecclesia is first of all not a “sacred institution,” not a juridical order, but the continuance of Christ’s work of salvation through the Holy Spirit in history. This continuous and permanent energy makes history become Tradition. The Holy Spirit creates through His grace the community, He acts through it in history, He creates the charismatic order through specific persons and so serves the eucharistic community, in that He builds it up out of the blood of reconciliation of Christ (Acts 20.28). The institutional element must therefore at the same time be preserved and transcended by the eucharistic, charismatic, sacramental element, and not vice versa. The authority of the Church is in no way based on a representative of Christ by divine right or on any individual in the community, but on the unbroken historical continuity of Tradition of the community which is sustained by the charismata. This is the center of true continuity in all times and in all places. Through the liberating grace of the Holy Spirit the Christian community is subject to a charismatic order. The ministry of the bishop has a particular importance in this continuity because in the eucharistic community it serves the apostolic teaching and links the community with the universal Church preserving the communion in love. Historical continuity as a gift of the Holy Spirit means true personal communion through the centuries. That is Tradition: it is not anonymous continuity. Tradition is not to be understood as a theory of the continuity of faith in Christ, but as concrete charismatic unity which has been preserved throughout history, independently of all schisms and so-called movements of renewal outside the eucharistic communion given by God. Thus it becomes clear that, when one speaks of the continuity of the Church as the historical unbroken life of the Christian community throughout the centuries, one is speaking of the unity of the Church in actu maintained and manifested by this continuity. The specific question, however, with which we have to deal when we examine the content of the one Tradition is the question of its limits and its marks. The question of the limits of the Tradition of the One Church is understood and answered by the Eastern Tradition according to its understanding of the reality of historical continuity. The unity of the Church is not to be understood only as a confession of the work of Christ, but at being fully one in church life, in order, doctrine and sacrament, with the indivisible apostolic

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Church throughout the centuries. The historical line of the One Church is expressed by the visible signs of the unalterable Tradition, such as Ecumenical Councils, dogmas, canonical order. Yet these do not constitute the essence of the One Church; they are only signs of its nature and signposts; they are only means which, in guarding against the danger of heresies, help to define the limits of the One Church. The essence of the Church is threatened by a heretical interpretation of the life or teaching of the catholic and apostolic Church. Yet the decisions of the Councils express the essence of church life only when they are in accord with the practice of the One Church, stand in the unbroken historical continuity and afterwards are accepted by the consciousness of the whole Church. The belying of the practice of the Church, which is from the beginning implicit in all dogmas, is the main cause of the division of the One Church. One cannot simply speak of the “division” of the Church. One can only speak of division when it is a question of schisms within the One Church—that is, when two parts of the One Church adopt different positions on the basis of different interpretations of church orders or of social and political questions. Schism is a lack of love and leads to dispersion and finally to a disavowal of communion in the sacrament of the Lord’s table. However, where the practice of the Ancient Church and dogmas which the whole Church has accepted are denied, one can no longer speak of “division,” but in strict dogmatic and ecclesiological terms of “falling away” from the One Church. In the Eastern Tradition the limits of the One Church in its historical continuity are not laid down once and for all by dogmas and regulations, but are defined anew through every act of falling away. This means that Orthodoxy has not set the limits of the One Church once and for all in a strictly institutional way. Formulations of dogmas and canon law are not in themselves the final expression of the essence of the Church. The forms of the Church, its structure and its visible marks have of themselves no absolute worth which is valid once and for all. Gregory of Nyssa regards all verbal definitions and concepts as “idols.” Statements of dogmas and canon law are to be understood neither as laws nor as ontological statements about the Church. They are expressions of praise and thanks of the One Church for the saving work of the Holy Trinity. By virtue of the charismata of the Holy Spirit the One Church offers to the Triune God a hymn of praise expressing doctrine. The value of the dogmas of the One Church does not consist in the human wisdom which they contain, but in the energy of the Trinity which is expressed in them and the glory of God which is revealed in them. Dogma is not the product of the understanding of a certain historical period that we can deny because it appears to us today to limit human reasoning. Dogma is thanksgiving for the work of God in His revelation in Jesus



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Christ which is experienced and preserved here and now through the Holy Spirit in the communion of the Church. The form of the Tradition of the One Church and its visible limits, determined by the writings of the Patristic tradition, canon law and the decisions of the seven Ecumenical Councils, are expressions of the deep, incomprehensible essence of the Church which is directly experienced by the whole Church. This nature, which can only be understood from the point of view of God’s plan of salvation, Christology and pneumatology, determines the outward visible form of the Church and at the same time makes it transparent so that we can share directly in the essence hidden behind the forms. Church order and doctrinal theology follow immediately from this nature of the Church; they are a constant invitation to all men at all times and in all places to share in the redeeming work of the Triune God. To remain faithful through church order and doctrinal theology and to receive the grace of God as members of the One community is the main task of every believer. If he is ready to receive the grace and to participate in the work of God, then his intelligence is no longer offended by the difficulties of formulated scholastic dogmas. The closer and the more living the relation in which the believer stands to the source of ecclesial life, the charismata of the Holy Spirit, the less is he dependent on doctrinal formulations. Eastern Orthodoxy has preserved the apostolic Tradition of the one undivided Church, not through confessional writings of a part of the Church or doctrinal definitions, but through that which constitutes the content and essence of these writings. The catholicity of the One Church is experienced in every local Church; it is continuously and visibly given through common participation in Christ’s saving work. The fullness of grace in Christ, its fulfillment through the Holy Spirit in the One Church and the sharing of the members of the one community in this fullness of grace constitute the qualitative and at the same time geographical catholicity of the One Church, which eliminates the possibility of falling away from this community. In defining the limits of the Tradition of the One Church, Eastern Orthodoxy keeps together the transcendent energy of the Triune God and the actual existence of the One Church. Both factors are existentially bound together when the actual church community becomes communion in sacrament and in order, in grace, in faith and in doctrine, when the static, structural and institutional element is quickened and used by the Holy Spirit, first to build up the Church as an οἰκοδομή and second to send its members out into the world. To summarize we can make the following general observations: a.  We can maintain the unity of the sources of revelation as Scripture and Tradition only if we have a broad understanding of each and see that

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they are interdependent, that when one refers to the Bible one is referring at the same time to the life of the Church recorded in the Bible, and when one speaks of Tradition one is speaking of the interpretation and the actualization of the biblical message in the world throughout history. Giving priority to one does not merely limit and minimize the other, but fails to appreciate truly the one which is accorded absolute importance. For instance, when one says sola Scriptura in a polemical way, one risks making the Bible a codex of principles since it is no longer supported by the richness of the life of the Church springing from the Word of God; and when one uses Tradition in the same way one risks making it lose its center, guidance and inspiration and become a collection of historical events which dictates our present attitude and faith. b.  We must distinguish between secular history and the history of the Church as Tradition, without separating or opposing them. The Tradition of the Church is the heart of all history and gives to time a deep inner meaning by opening it toward its pre-historical past and its eschatological future. The time of human history does not belong to fallen creation. History belongs to fallen creation, but the moment of our time in which we live is an essential element in the creation of God and stands in a mysterious relationship with His eternal moment. Contemporary theology dealing with this problem of Scripture and Tradition must recapture the conception of the eternal Word of God incarnate and spoken in our time, coming to His own household. The historical moment is not opposed to the Word of God but belongs to it, gives it its framework, and allows it to become visible and remain present. It is in the same way that the Bible, the word of God, is related with the church Tradition. Therefore, the separated traditions must now study together these events which, like links in a chain, bind the succession of moments of secular history, affording to them at the same time their hidden relationship with eternity. The Church with its life in word and sacrament fills secular time and gives to it an apocalyptic meaning where the past through remembrance can be apprehended as a reality which is given anew, and where the future is already a sure hope in the present. For the Orthodox the moment really bears these three dimensions only when the word of the Bible is preached and the Eucharist is offered. At this moment secular history knows its origin and prepares for its destiny. If Tradition is seen in this perspective, then it becomes with the Bible the dynamic enactment of the revelation of God. c.  This implies that the Churches, discussing the problem of Scripture and Tradition, have to get rid of their limited confessional ecclesiologies and see the Church through the local reality as a universal event which transcends all barriers. They have to regain, in the technological and secular-



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ized world of today, their faith in the mystery of the Church and avoid identifying it with any kind of social activism. We must all be convinced, despite all appearances to the contrary, that in this history God has given us a secret foretaste of His kingdom. God as seen through the Church is not transcendent, unapproachable, unrelated to the history of mankind. The Holy Spirit is working with “secret groanings,” and the line of His working can be traced if we stay together; it is seen in the marks of the continual παρ-ουσία of the Word of God from the time of His incarnation until His second coming. This time between, the time of the historical Church, has paramount importance for the whole plan of salvation. The Tradition of the Church is the outcome of the divine action through particular events, maintaining the Church as a continuous stream throughout the centuries. This is what we call the sources of revelation, the Word of God living and flowing in time. d.  Let us now try to enumerate these signs of continuity, links in the chain of the one Tradition. First, we must beware of the error of the past and remember that the Tradition of the Christian Church as a whole is far larger than we might think looking from our confessional viewpoint. The Tradition is never identical with the traditions understood as different confessional expressions of the one Tradition. If we take traditions to be only the external forms of expression of the one Tradition, then these confessions of the divided Tradition can be understood only as ways of explaining in a given situation the one Confession, which is the act of confessing the one apostolic Church. Second, before we attempt to draw up any kind of list of signs of continuity, we must agree that this list can be only of limited value; beyond it there is the consciousness of the Christian Church which recognizes that it is possible to express, though approximatively, the truth about the Gospel and discern between the mainstream of catholicity and the deviations. I say this because of the danger of seeing truth as relative for the sake of maintaining a unity which is neither visible nor has any historical reality. If in speaking of Tradition we refer to the historical period between the coming of Jesus and our present moment, we mean at the same time a reality which bears all the characteristics of a historical event. So we can classify as follows the signs of the continuity of the Church, consistent with the Bible: (i)  There is no doctrine of the Church which has no biblical reference. (ii)  There is no institutional aspect of the Church which has not been a characteristic of the life of the Church right from the beginning. (iii)  Tradition is not a separate line of development parallel to the Bible. As stated above, it is a whole which can be interpreted by an authority which can grasp this whole without giving a partial interpretation on

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the basis of a particular culture; this authority is the consciousness of the whole of the Church. Therefore, an Ecumenical Council, which seems to be the highest authority, is not an authority in itself, mastering and expressing Tradition, but it is an instrument to express the mind of the whole and at the same time to speak to all the members of the Church if there is an urgent need for it. The Councils, therefore, are not regular signs of the continuity of the one Tradition, but they are a necessary means of maintaining it and solving occasional problems. Their authority reflects the authority of the whole Church and depends on it. That is why for the Eastern Tradition an Ecumenical Council is not de facto ecumenical because it is convoked as such. Its being ecumenical depends on whether the consciousness of the Church accepts its decisions as valid. Certainly, there is an enormous difficulty in the case of a part of the Church not recognizing the decisions. It is one of the greatest problems in the history of the Church, and no one can easily pass judgment on what is the position of the minority which disagrees. The Church sees here the tragedy of sacrificing unity for the sake of truth. It is another question whether a division which occurs after a sincere struggle to interpret truth correctly can be regarded as final or as temporary. I would say, though this is a personal opinion, that it depends on whether and how the minority continues the one Tradition apart from the particular point of disagreement; because a division can mean the renewal of the life of the Church if the part which splits from the mother Church continues the fullness of the Tradition inherited by it, and proves it by maintaining the two fundamental signs of catholicity in the broad sense, word and sacrament, within an ecclesial frame. Then I would not call this division a deviation from the one Tradition but another interpretation which judges from within and without the one stream of Tradition. (iv)  This understanding of continuity liberates the Churches now engaged in the discussion from their dogmatic, scholastic approach. The most difficult link in the continuity—that is, the ministry of the Church and in particular the ministry of the bishops—has to be seen in another context, where the practice of the ordination overcomes the difficulty of the different interpretations. In other words, the Churches in their search for the meaning of continuity have to abandon a nominalistic approach and see that apostolic succession is the backbone of the continuity of the Church, without isolating the line of succession by defining and naming differently functions which are, however, practiced by all Churches. I know that here lies the danger of seeing truth as relative, but now a clear understanding of what maintains the



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unity of Tradition and its continuity is by winning the sincere desire of all the Churches, not to interpret their own approach by developing different theories, but to explain them on the basis of their common origin and practice. I am persuaded that the most difficult thing for a local Church to do is to dissociate itself from its past and the life of the historical Church. The inability of these new Churches to be as new and liberal and free as they profess to be is proof of this truth. All kinds of sectarian movements are condemned, against their own intentions and desires, to take on in the course of history ecclesial characteristics. They are obliged to do so by the need for an institution; it is the effect of their work of evangelism, preaching the same Gospel and maintaining the same sacraments. CONSEQUENCES FOR HERMENEUTICS Let me now mention some of the key principles that the Orthodox believe must be taken into consideration before entering into the complexities of the hermeneutical problem. a.  First of all, hermeneutics should not be left exclusively to New Testament scholars and exegetes. Hermeneutics is the business of all theologians and of the Church as a whole, since all use the Bible, either as a basis for their theological work or for their devotional and liturgical life. If the New Testament scholar is left alone his view is very limited, and he is more concerned with methodological problems than with theological ones. b.  So we must discuss what is our ecclesial responsibility when we deal critically with the biblical text. Unless we have clear ecclesiological presuppositions, the problem will remain that of the crucial issue of the authority of the Bible. This chapter presents the authority of the Church as something relying on the fullness of the community of believers, clergy and laity. It is this attitude which allows the Orthodox to transcend the institutional aspect of the Church, which is yet maintained by the Holy Spirit after Pentecost as a profound event, the Ecclesia of Jesus Christ, unbroken in continuity in all ages throughout the whole world. Therefore, the Orthodox cannot join in the Western discussion about authority or about guarantees of the right biblical exegesis. I can try now in another way to express the Orthodox hermeneutical principles regarding authority. The Orthodox regard exegesis as an offering of the whole community, as the voice of the Church in a given situation, a reinterpretation which helps the believers struggling in this

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world and for this world to readapt the message of the Gospel to a new situation. This attitude implies a severe criticism, a struggle for truth; it is a process of mutual correction through mutual obedience, but it is in no way individualistic or sectarian, regarding the exegete as acting outside the Christian community. The Orthodox attitude to hermeneutics is not an uncritical unreflected repetition of old-fashioned principles, but an effort to work, with the dynamis of the Spirit given to the Church, for the building up of the body and its inner coherence as well as for evangelism. With this presupposition, no critical attitude to the text—and there have been many of them in the Eastern Orthodox tradition in the past and in the present—risks splitting the Church by introducing theories which condemn parts of the Bible as uncanonical, discriminate between essential and inessential parts of the kerygma or even those which go against the spirit of the Bible as a whole. c.  This ecclesiological presupposition places in its right biblical context the understanding of the prophets after Christ. Some modern exegetes, deeply conscious of their mission and charisma and eager to help the Church in its renewal, regard themselves as exercising a prophetic mission. The Church has always been renewed by inspired leaders and theologians in this way, but I would hesitate to regard the prophet in the Ecclesia as acting in the same way as some of the Old Testament prophets, who were sent by God to change completely the Jewish understanding of the Kingdom of God, condemning the ceremonial exaggerations in the Jewish worship, pointing to the presence of Christ as the only mediator. This prophecy has been fulfilled once and for all in Christ; of course, Old Testament prophecy, like the law, is not destroyed by Christ, but it is fulfilled (Matt. 5.17), as can be expressed by the Greek word πληρῶσαι, meaning here restoration by incorporating prophecy within the Christian community for building it up. So prophecy takes its rightful place among other charismata of the Holy Spirit, with which it is named again and again by Saint Paul (1 Cor. 14.1, 3, 31). A New Testament prophet cannot go so far as by himself to judge the text of the New Testament as not simply deuterocanonical but anti-canonical, and to give a one-sided interpretation of the Gospel, introducing in the end a new type of Christianity above its institutional structure; this kind of prophet is totally unknown in the New Testament and in the Early Church. In the very serious question (perhaps the most serious that the Church ever faced) of how to accept the Gentiles in the Church alongside Israel as members of the Church, St. Paul as an apostle exercised his prophetic charisma only after having submitted his opinion to the other apostles and presbyters and the whole of the Church in Jerusalem and after having obtained their unanimous approval (Acts 15.22). This



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phrase, “Then pleased it the apostles and elders, with the whole church,” must be the basis for all efforts to build up the Christian community and interpret the Scriptures. d.  With this attitude we must face the problem of contradictions, contrasts, different opinions and emphases, approaches and explanations of the biblical authors in dealing with the key subjects of reconciliation, justification, regeneration, sharing in the sufferings of Jesus and being glorified in Him, living in the eschaton of time and still awaiting the fulfillment of the promise: one would be blind not to see this diversity, but there is no reason to conclude from it that the Bible does not contain a clear and direct line of thought, giving the fundamentals of the Christian faith and the reality of the Church. On this most controversial point in hermeneutics today the Orthodox need to stress two things. First, the Bible is not supposed to be a codex giving to the Church clear directions for organization and a systematic moral teaching or a dogmatic theology. The Bible is the book of life of the Ecclesia; it does not dictate to it rules of behavior and canon laws. I repeat the essential point: the value of the Bible lies in the fact that it reflects the event of the revelation in history, bearing the marks of the tension between eternity and time, holiness and sinfulness, and between the earnest of the Spirit and the fullness of the Second Coming. It is the true voice of the Christian community, living in this world and bearing at the same time the victory of the Risen Lord by sharing in His sufferings. The Bible never presents the Church only as glorified or as a failure, never as spiritualized, remote from the world or as a social institution which can be easily judged or which must die in order that the pure individual faith can survive. The Bible, by using a great variety of images to describe the Church sharing in the glory through the sufferings of Jesus, does not allow an easy solution to the hermeneutical problem. The contradictions within the Bible reflect the cruel reality of the Church’s life, but one should not think they can never be resolved. Theology has a part to play after the exegetical work is done—namely, without eliminating and ignoring the contradictions, to try to see what unites the antitheses and the different approaches. The second thing to be stressed is that the Orthodox attitude is neither one of triumphalism nor of quietism. The antitheses are true and have to be respected. The Fathers saw the unity of the Bible and Tradition as a struggle for maintaining unity, understood as the truth which is not simply taught or learned or written, but which is practised, experienced and transmitted as life in the Holy Spirit from generation to generation, as the living voice of the one Church in its struggle and martyrdom throughout the centuries. Behind these contradictions it is the same Spirit that works, even when we accept that the Holy Spirit is a polemic power quickening

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the whole Body with charismata which create crises, judgments, oppositions and splits; all these are for the sake of the forward movement of the one Body and never to separate members of the community and threaten its inner coherence. We can accept the Holy Spirit as a polemic Spirit when we accept Him as the charismatic Spirit of the ecclesial community. e.  So scientific biblical criticism must take into account ecclesiology and examine carefully what is its function in the Church. It is true that biblical scholarship exercises open criticism in all realms of church life and theology; it tries to purify the biblical text from superfluous interpretations; it must help theologians to avoid the great temptation of harmonizing the Christian Gospel. It has to show that confessional statements are only relative means of expressing truth; it has to analyze the historical situation in which the books of the Bible were written, often to face needs of the Christian community of the time. But in doing all this, the scientific exegete must keep in mind that in dealing with the Bible he deals with the testimony of the Holy Spirit and is serving the renewal of the Church. The scientific exegete above all must be deeply concerned with the problem of mutual obedience, and more than anything else concerned to love his Church and not condemn it because of his opposition to a very limited part of it—his old-fashioned synod, his theological school, his university or his congregation. After considering the ecclesiological presuppositions, one might touch on many hermeneutical principles belonging to the prolegomena of exegesis. In this chapter I have dealt with this part of the prolegomena of hermeneutics from the point of view of the Orthodox tradition, which, without accepting easy systems in theology or harmonies in biblical exegesis, has secured its unity by placing the Bible with all its contrasts and different images and expressions at the heart of the historical Church. This chapter is intended as a modest contribution to the ecumenical study of the problem of hermeneutics because I do believe that we all have in our different Churches the same gift of God which is recorded in the whole of Scripture; for the Orthodox this is the paramount expression of the unifying and dynamic grace of God in His Spirit. When we stand before the text of the Bible, let us repeat the phrase of the liturgy said by the deacon before the consecration of the gifts. It is one that can unite us when we open alone the Bible for exegesis, acting in the Church and for the Church: “Let us stand aright, let us stand with fear, let us give heed to present the holy offering in peace.”

Chapter Four

Corporate Worship and Individual Prayer

A PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION Prayer is the central event of religious experience for an individual who practices religion. It gives expression to his religious experience and at the same time leads him to a deepening of the experience itself. Without prayer religion remains an abstract theory about transcendence or supernatural beings or realities and leaves faith in them without concrete realization. Prayer is the heart and mind of a living faith. No type of rational definition of prayer is adequate to represent the enormous variety of religious experience created by different kinds of prayer. Closer attention to this experience from the psychological point of view, by experimental methods or psychoanalytic approach, proves it to be the most differentiated and complicated of all experiences. This is so because prayer crystallizes the manifold possibility of religious feelings caused by the sense of the immediacy of God, with whom prayer tries to establish a personal relationship or intercourse. With God grasped as the infinite, absolute, ineffable, and incomprehensible summit for human reason and as the goal of human aspiration, man reveals at prayer his own infinite depth. Prayer sets in motion religious experience and allows the praying subject to realize the broadest possible range of his existence in its unlimited richness of potential relationships between his own aspirations, extensive tendencies, subconscious trends and a transcending reality which escapes all rational interpretations or affirmations as a definite object or person. From both ends—that is, the praying subject and the deity addressed in prayer—prayer is a “risk,” a venture into the deepest psychological experiences.

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If man is correctly described as that being in the whole of creation who can consciously pray and experience a personal relationship with a supernatural power or personal divine Being, then prayer cannot be limited in the variety of its expression, in the attitudes, ways, and forms of prayer that derive from different modes of understanding God. Prayer to a Supreme Being or power has, therefore, an immediate reverse effect on the inner being of the praying subject and endows him with a new kind of knowledge of himself and his profound unconscious reality. Experience is always a kind of knowledge, but it is not a knowledge that results from agreement between categories of thought and the values of the subject on the basis of the laws of logic, immanence, and universally accepted proof. Experience is rather that knowledge which unites all aspects of conscious operation—that is: knowing, feeling, and willing—in an attempt to assimilate the object or the person or to share intimately in an event happening objectively. Experience in this sense is a purely subjective operation. Though caused by the external environment, it takes place within a subject, uniting in him all basic psychic and conscious trends, including the fundamental trends of human existence as it tries to share in the life of other beings by various mental or sentimental operations. The experience of prayer tends to possess the object consciously and to enjoy the feeling of being part of a broader world or of a higher Being. In prayer all of these trends are called into action in a special way. Being, having, willing, and desiring are united to alert the praying subject to the open possibility of a maximum probable assimilation of another Subject that bears all the highest qualities of his aspirations. Prayer can be the most fascinating psychic function of the subject. It affords man the deepest of experiences by uniting in him all the volitional, cognitive, and sentimental categories of his consciousness. For this reason prayer is always a subjective reality as far as psychological research is concerned. It has to be interpreted as a strictly subjective operation and consequently as an individual affair. This is especially true for depth or psychoanalytic psychology, which leads to applied clinical observation and treatment. Prayer is personal experience par excellence, and psychology concentrates its whole research on the data acquired from the expression of prayer by the subject. It draws consistent conclusions only on the basis of observing inner, deeper subconscious and conscious motives to be found strictly within the subject. Thus psychology can deal only with individual prayer as an autonomous subjective operation. Such a methology has serious repercussions. To a great extent, several interpretations of prayer, which appear to theology as one-sided or partial, are put forward by the scientific methods of psychology, which does not



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and should not extend its research beyond this limitation. On the other hand, though this methodology is respected and appreciated on scientific grounds, it raises several questions for a psychology of religion that is linked with Christian theology and pastoral work. It is a primary duty for the latter kind of psychology to use a fundamental biblical, theological, and especially liturgical basis to illustrate, complete, and develop psychological research on prayer in a broader sense and in a more comprehensive way. This is the purpose of the present chapter: that is, to make a contribution to a broader research on the personal experience of prayer, using especially—apart from the biblical and theological basis—the Orthodox tradition of worship, with the conviction that it can offer some help for solving the crucial problem of balancing the subjective and objective poles of prayer by examining the inseparable relationship between worship and individual prayer. INDIVIDUAL PRAYER AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE It is apparent that all kinds of prayer can be conceived of as an individual process of relating ourselves to God: by asking Him to fulfill a personal need, to heal a sickness, or to forgive one’s sins, by interceding for other persons in need, by expressing thanksgiving for the gift of life, by praising His name. Prayer can be seen at first glance as a strictly personal affair, an experience comprising petition, intercession, thanksgiving, adoration, and praise. The Old Testament contains all these kinds of prayer. Jesus taught his disciples the prayer of petition especially, but he himself also interceded for his disciples and for his persecutors on the cross and continues to intercede at the right hand of God the Father, and he gave thanks and praised God for His gifts. Paul insists on the need to pray unceasingly and to give thanks in all these different ways. The refrain of the whole Bible is to pray in all these forms, and this has placed a distinctive mark upon the personal piety of both the Jewish and the Christian traditions. What is more important is the fact that the Bible continually presents man in personal communion with God, either as expounded in the Old Testament, by His particular call addressed to specific individuals, or following the incarnation, cross, and resurrection of Christ, in union with Him according to the image of the union between God the Father and His Logos as recorded for us in the New Testament. All of the Old Testament prophets speak and act as persons called by God, and the Apostle Paul declares that he lives not himself but Christ lives in him. This inner relationship between God and man, due to God’s particular call to His chosen people Israel and their prophets, or realized and fulfilled in Christ once-for-all and thereafter affecting all those who believe

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in Him, leads to another kind of individual praying attitude. Prayer now presupposes a direct intercourse of heart and mind between God and man.1 This biblical basis has inspired the different ways of individual attitudes of prayer in the Judeo-Christian tradition, to be found also to a certain extent and with great variation in Islam and other living faiths, namely the prophetic and the mystical. The prophetic is caused by God’s personal appeal to man for salvation. It is the strong and firm request of the believer answering God’s call by making it his primary vocation. Prayer here relies on man’s confidence in God as his redeemer, as the distinctive and all-transcending personal “Thou.” The main characteristic of this prayer is the attitude of the praying man vis-à-vis God as the source of his call to salvation, and the hope in Him as coming to establish His kingdom in history. In the prophetic type of prayer man struggles to reach out to the distinctive, clear, dominating, overwhelming, and all-embracing personal God as Savior and regenerator of life.2 In the mystical type of prayer there is the same happy confidence in God as the unique Savior of man and His call to him to share in His salvation. But the main element is a very strong desire, like a nostalgia to return and dwell in one’s real home, to reunite with God. The attitude of prophetic prayer with man vis-à-vis God becomes here an intimate relationship, a coexistence, and in the extreme forms an unutterable delight in the identity and fusion of the divine and the human. In mystical prayer the believer is not principally asking, requesting, or interceding, but he interiorizes the grace of God. It is a kind of deepening of one’s own profound being through the concentration of all volitional, mental, and sentimental aspirations on God’s presence “in me,” in my spirit and soul. Petition to God in this prayer becomes a process of selfabandonment in God, purifying will and desires, silencing the rational and thinking operations, stilling all disturbing explosions of the flesh. Dialogical prayer is here the self-evident reality of total reciprocity and mutual comprehension. Presupposing the prophetic answer to God’s call, mystical prayer leads further to self-recollection and meditation on the effects of the indwelling of God’s grace “in me.” And it leads to an illumination of heart and mind for bringing about a transformation or transfiguration of one’s own being by sharing in God’s grace in Christ; in extreme cases of mysticism in Oriental religions it leads to identifying oneself with the One and all-dominating Spirit of perfection, goodness, and purity. This kind of prayer involves a manifold and rich diversity of specific cases of application, which depend primarily on the particular type of religion in question as well as on the particular psychological and characteriological type of man. It is also the case that the two kinds of prayer can be practiced by the same person in different circumstances and for different purposes. There is no need for a radical opposition between the two. It is usually a matter of



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emphasis, but in fact both types ought to coexist in the same person for a fuller experience of prayer on the basis of the biblical tradition. Psychology of religion will treat both these types of prayer as equally individual, or better, personal experiences. It aims to detect the psychic effects of the praying ego on behavior, mental health, and psychic balance. If, as a positivist and applied science based on experiment and proof, this psychology is detached from any concept of revelation as objective transcending reality, it is evident that it will regard prayer of both kinds as a purely subjective product of self-affirmation in the highest possible form. We may distinguish here three main trends in the interpretation of prayer in general psychological schools: first, projection theories which maintain that man prays because of a strong inner impulse toward ideal forms of being and because of his own insufficiency and insecurity;3 second, transformation theories according to which violent impulses of the unconscious are repressed by the conscious and reappear transformed into the opposite kind of aspirations with subliminal trends;4 and third, self-affirmation theories which defend prayer as an inevitable means of realizing the given transcending potential of oneself in the maximum possible way for achieving an absolute self-identification.5 The first two categories, disregarding completely any objective reality for the object of prayer, may admit that prayer itself is illusory. The third category also considers that prayer, as the realization of an existing pattern of archetypes in the collective subconscious of the praying subjects, is rather deprived of any kind of objectivity and therefore can be regarded as a monologue, a self-affirming process of introspection. Of the two types of prayer, mystical prayer is certainly the more interesting case for psychology and especially psychoanalysis, presenting for it, in its extreme forms, all possible psychopathological symptoms. The subject lives in another world of fantasy, illusion, and deception. For this psychology, the mystical way, which accentuates the intercourse and union between divinity and humanity, expresses transformed, repressed sexual trends sublimated in the “Thou” of God, who is clothed with the typical expression of a person who has fallen in love, surrendering completely to an illusory God. Love in this case is a transformed erotic illusion and has substituted even for faith. It appears to be of higher value than faith.6 For psychology of this kind the praying subject is entirely caught up in a hidden erotic relationship, a selfdeceiving love-relationship, which is now “masked” by a divine aura.7 This psychological interpretation seeks the motives of prayer within the subject alone. It is man’s violent subconscious and repressed sexual impetus and trends that cause the will to pray through a self giving to an imaginary, transcendent, personal Being. But non-mystical prayer too, for the projection theories, is caused by motives rooted in the subject alone, even when they are

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stimulated by the surrounding world. For example, threats against the life of a person bring about in him the need to pray because he reacts to his natural inner instinct for self-preservation. Fear leads to prayer as an almost instinctive reaction against threats from outside. Similarly, a person’s inability to cope or to adjust to his environment might lead him to an attitude of prayer, which is then used as a refuge and a consolation. These are all situations that can be detected in psychopathological cases by psychoanalytical processes. There is no doubt, and one should not dispute the fact that they exist. The question remains, however, why a person turns to God in these cases and especially in others where there are no psychopathological symptoms.8 Clearly, man betrays an inevitable relationship with the source of his being. It is a kind of deep dependence that takes precedence over all later operations of transformation and sublimation. Man turns to this primitive, primary relationship when his life is threatened, or when he feels unable to fit into his environment, or when he experiences profound and shattering failure and deception. The third category of possible psychological interpretations of prayer, the self-affirmation theories, is closer to this primary dependence of the subject on his source of being in that it introduces the archetypal structure of consciousness, which is a given pattern, existing a priori within man’s psychic world. This allows the subject to realize that his consciousness is far broader and transcends what he appears to be in his isolation. The introduction of the collective subconscious by C. G. Jung has pointed to a larger relationship and dependence of the subject than his own limitations betray. Though this psychoanalytic interpretation remains strictly within the boundaries of subjectivism, it is also evident, as we have mentioned, that it affords new possibilities for interpreting prayer in a more holistic way, taking into account elements that lie beyond the boundaries of an isolated individual subconscious. In a Christian psychology of religion, then, we have to reappraise individual prayer within a larger context, thus regaining the biblical elements of authentic prayer and appreciating the Christian tradition, which centers individual prayer on corporate, communal worship. INDIVIDUAL PRAYER WITHIN CORPORATE WORSHIP When investigated psychologically, experience is commonly described as a strictly subjective psychic phenomenon. It belongs to the subject completely. Nothing else of his comprises all mental and psychological operations as experience does. Every person is characterized and develops his particular



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psychological type on the basis of his experience. That is why all subjectively bound philosophies, such as phenomenology, existentialism, voluntarism, and vitalism, are experimental philosophies in addition to being anti-idealist and antirationalist. In today’s technological world experience appears as a category of life and thought that opposes anonymity, purely mechanical objectivity, and technical functionalism.9 But when we speak of religious experience in the Christian sense and especially of the experience of prayer, we have to realize that a type of experience that liberates from a crude positivism and functionalism is not enough. My thesis is that individual prayer is not and should not be regarded as a type of strictly subjective experience of this sort. To be sure, prayer is a personal event par excellence, but this does not mean that it is caused primarily by subjective motives and can exist without a communal link and an objective reality. It may be the case that this sort of subjectivism interprets religious experience in prayer in a natural way, conceived as a man-centered, selfprojected, and self-operating reality. The question for a Christian psychologist is this: What new elements have been introduced into the experience of prayer by the Judeo-Christian tradition based on revelatory events, beyond any understanding of God as an abstract supernatural Being? What is fundamentally new is the right and full understanding of worship and the fact that the experience of individual prayer cannot be understood apart from this new understanding of worship. Worship, latreia, after the personal call of the living God acting in history and therefore after the Christ event, is no longer based on lytron, the ransom paid for expiatory reasons to abstract deities. We must be careful here not to use the wrong terminology to describe the Christian lytrosis, salvation, in the traditional religious terms, lest they give reason to the Freudian school to characterize the Christian latreia as the result of a guilt complex. Latreia now, in the Christian era, is not strictly cultic anymore, or perhaps it is cultic in a different sense. After the once-forall self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, the expiatory element is replaced by Eucharistic thanksgiving as communion achieved by participation uniting God and man by keeping a clear distinction between them. Latreia, worship, is now in spirit and truth, not religiously located in any one place or centered around bloody sacrifice to appease an angry deity and release human guilt. Worship is now a remembrance, a reenactment, a symbolic representation of the historical event that took place in Christ. It is the community gathered in his name, which by a eucharistic act shares in his body and prays together over the event. Worship is now a celebration of the crucified and especially the exalted Christ, who is present in the midst of his community through the Spirit.10 Worship now turns into liturgy, and Christ himself is the leitourgos who replaces all sorts of cultic religious worship. The whole of human existence is the living

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latreia, worshipping in God’s Spirit. Liturgy now signifies praise, adoration, giving glory in the presence of a new objective reality, which has changed man’s attitude of prayer to God, leading to a different kind of “objective” pole as basic for the prayer experience of the individual. The inner impulse toward the abstract source of our being and its dependence on it is now fulfilled through an objective event, for those, of course, who believe in it. But they have to pray in a different way to overcome the strictly subjective motivation based on natural subconscious trends, as it is detected by psychoanalysis in psychopathological cases. This still exists in the subconscious of the praying believer, but it is now subjected to the acknowledged new objective reality that transcends man in a different way. The repercussions of such an acknowledgment are evident. Prayer cannot be a self-projected, illusory phenomenon. It is not a self-generating act resulting from inner subjective motives. The new worship implies that individual prayer is principally an answer to the call of God. The initiative in prayer belongs to Him who initiates the movement from outside the isolated self, the ego, the consciousness of the subject. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will sup with him and he with me” (Rev. 3.20). That is why only Christ can teach man how to pray (Luke 11.1), and why God knows what we need before we ask (Matt. 6.8). In this manner individual prayer is personal but not individualistic or subjective; that is, it is prayer in relationship with God who keeps the initiative, and above all it is prayer with all of His faithful. Acceptance of this principle through faith saves man from selfishness, self-centeredness, and psychopathological threats. Conceived in this way, prayer respects the movement from God to man as a primary and sine qua non condition. For the Bible the movement of prayer is always from “above,” enabling man to ask something appropriate from God. He then proceeds to change his life accordingly and in the end to glorify God’s name by thanksgiving and adoration. Even the most representative prayer of petition in the New Testament, the Lord’s Prayer, follows this movement and integrates these main elements. In the Lord’s Prayer, which appears to be purely petitional in nature, the heavenly Father appears as though “coming down” with His kingdom. His will is requested to be done “on earth as it is in heaven” as He is finally arriving among us. Then follows man’s petition (for daily bread), and immediately we have the personal change taking place as the condition and effect of the prayer of petition (forgiveness from God as we forgive those who trespass against us); and finally there is the doxology. The same process takes place at the beginning of all Orthodox worship services, which try to illustrate the divine initiative in prayer through the new type of worship in the Holy Spirit and symbolically represent the movement of God from above toward the assembled praying



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community. It is the invocation of the Holy Spirit—coming as the heavenly King, the Giver of life, filling the whole creation, treasure of good things—to come down among us and abide in us to purify us. Prayer is always “epikletic,” invocative. It is not a klesis to God, but an epiklesis to Him. It is an invocation; the vocation, klesis, belongs to God’s grace addressed to us. The epiklesis of God’s Spirit is the right reserved to the Christian community, given by Christ through his unique and once-for-all sacrifice and promised to his disciples, which opens to man an authentic way to pray as an individual within a new worshipping reality, the liturgy. In reality, in the Christian experience of prayer as answer to the initiative of God in Christ, there is strictly speaking no individual prayer. It is there insofar as it is part of the communal prayer. One can petition for his needs or his health, one can intercede for others, meditate alone, or be in silent self-recollection, but only as a part of the praying and worshipping community. The communal event that is dominant in worship has immediate repercussions on individual prayer and the subjective experience of it. Worship is the corporate prayer of individuals who have overcome their individuality and all their “monistic” tendencies. As an indication I may be allowed to remind us here that in Orthodox worship there is no invocation or blessing by the priest in the first-person singular—only in the plural. Nor is there any “private mass” of the priest—only the Creed, because it must be a personal confession of faith, is recited in the liturgy in the first-person singular. There are no improvised, spontaneous prayers in the liturgy either; all hidden individualistic tendencies are leveled out. In all cases of worship it is the Church as One, Catholic, and Apostolic that worships and celebrates, not any particular person or class of people. The objective and communal element in the Christian tradition in both the Old and the New Testament is the consistent initiative of God seeking and calling man back to Him. No one can be allowed to pray alone as an isolated person any longer. It is true that Jesus recommended a strictly private prayer “in secret,” but he intended it only against the selfish show of the Pharisees praying publicly (Matt 6.5–6). More essential for individual worship conceived as communal prayer is Jesus’s saying: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18.20). CORPORATE-INDIVIDUAL PRAYER AS A CELEBRATION IN REPENTANCE It is necessary that individual prayer be focused and practiced and interpreted psychologically only in this communal and Christocentric way. Because

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subjective experience takes place on a broader basis that prevents any kind of psychopathological symptoms, we require sound theological premises for Christian worship, for the possible contribution that individual prayer can make to support the mental and psychic health of modern man and to restore it in cases of neurosis, which for well-known reasons threatens modern superdeveloped societies. It is clearly seen and felt that Christian, especially Orthodox, worship centers about the victorious aspect of the life of Jesus. It is well known that from ancient times, always on the basis of existing liturgies, the Christian East has experienced the reality of the Christus Victor of the resurrection, while the Christian West has insisted more on the mystery of salvation and redemption. The Eastern tradition consequently developed a theology of participation in the revealed glory of God (the Logos theology), and the West a theology of grace by careful research on the mystery of the cross (theology of grace). These two trends are equally legitimate and mutually complementary. Eastern liturgical life emphasized worship as a continuous celebration of the revealed glory of God. Further, it inspired a global vision of the created cosmos and history, where the final victory has already been won by God in Christ. This element of celebration means that worship symbolizes the incorporation of all things that become new, and it has led the Orthodox worshipping community, and individual prayer within it, to a cosmic vision. At the same time the same Eastern tradition, along with this celebration, brings to the fore in the worshipping community and especially in individual prayer the strongest awareness of “broken hearts” and the need for continuous repentance. From a psychological point of view this contrast may prove to be very instructive. As a matter of fact it is as if the extreme emphasis on the glory of God in the liturgy brings about a realization of the extreme misery of sinful man. There is a strong dualism, a dialectic movement, in the corporate prayer of the Orthodox. Two mutually interpenetrating realities are present: on the one hand, the enactment of God’s glorious presence among his people, and on the other, the consistent repenting attitude of man brought about precisely by this revealed glory of God. The more the one is accentuated, the more the other becomes real. That is why the glorious representation of the victory of God celebrated in the liturgy with such symbolism is interpreted by a continuous neurotic ailment, but there are hosts of different kinds of neurotic persons. In modern societies each one of us is in danger of developing his own particular neurosis, which in general terms could be characterized as “an underdeveloped relationship with others and a lack of joyful sharing in our environment.” Young people who try to cope with this threat today turn to new types of worshipping experiences in community. A rebirth of the joy of celebrating the glory of God is evident in many of their gatherings and songs. Individual



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prayer is happily subordinated to this communal celebration. Does Christian worship respond to the request of today’s younger generation? This was the anxious question that possessed my mind when writing this chapter. I believe that an authentic relationship of corporate worship with individual prayer on biblical grounds can meet many of the needs of modern man and contribute to his psychological stability and health. But perhaps we, especially the Orthodox, need to pay careful attention to the symbolic element of corporate worship as an expression of the feelings of repenting celebration. We are called to a continuous critical re-examination of the structures and forms of our worship without losing its substance, for it is a worship that subordinates all divisive individualistic trends to the overwhelmingly dominant corporate worship as the celebration of the Ecclesia. Orthodoxy will never agree that liturgical symbolism is not necessary for strong and well-rooted subjects who have achieved full identity with their consciousness, or that prayer is not necessary for those who are already morally developed.11 People who are well rooted only in their subjectivism can easily become uprooted, egocentric, isolated individuals bearing a hidden neurosis. The symbolism of the celebration of repenting sinners in worship is an indispensable means for overcoming all sorts of imaginary self-sufficiencies. But we must be aware that this statement means that our responsibility for liturgical symbolism is one of the paramount issues in the Christian churches today as we try to maintain a dynamic, authentic, biblically correct relationship between corporate worship and individual prayer, one which has the power to create a psychologically sober, balanced, and healthy experience. By way of conclusion I shall describe authentic Christian experience in prayer as passing through a series of stages which, however, should not be understood as successive but as coexisting and interrelated. The stages include the profound awareness of a personal God coming to the praying subject, appealing to man, calling him out of his subjective isolation. A prayerful response to this call is possible through communion with Christ and the community of co-believers brought into being by the Spirit. In psychological terms, the praying subject grasps and experiences the personal God as the concrete “Thou”—that is, as the One who knows me as I am, and as no one else can know me, and as I myself cannot know without this praying meditation before the “Thou.” The statement “He knows me as I am” is the most profound self-affirmation in a new situation in which I am offered a new knowledge of myself. Experience always involves knowledge, but this experience makes me grasp the hidden aspects of myself and overcome all the negative elements that obscure my conscious being. This purely objective “Thou,” by knowing me as I am, causes in me a momentous restructuring of all cognitive, volitional, and sentimental conscious

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operations. There is a kind of “invasion” into the center of consciousness, as a unifying process of all experiences, acts of will, and sentiments, by elements which were at the periphery of the consciousness up to that moment. The consciousness of the praying person is now unified in another way on the basis of a new personal relationship. At that point prayer is not simply petition, request, or self-recollection as an end in itself. It opens the subject to a new experience of what transcendence really means: not something absolute in the human mind or a summum bonum, but a process of change in one’s structure of consciousness and consequently in one’s whole life. In the experience of prayer that goes beyond petition and meditation, the proper word for transcendence is transformation, transfiguration of one’s life. Prayer of request has a kind of power that transposes the praying subject into a new existence. The experience of prayer releases new creative power. It is the possibility of a choice, which re-creates the axis of consciousness and directs life into new paths. If this does not happen, prayer has not had its effect, and the experience remains superfluous, momentary, and superficial. The choice and the effect reveal precisely the dialectical essence of human freedom. Freedom is not independence but communion depending together with others on God. It is then that celebration in penitence acquires a transforming power over human life. This must be precisely the final purpose and achievement of the experience of prayer for religious psychology. NOTES 1.  For a short and comprehensive exposition of the rich variety of understandings and practices of prayer in the Bible, see the article by C. W. F. Smith, “Prayer,” in Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 3 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 857 ff. Among other things, he remarks: “In the Bible prayer moves from the level of magic to the heights of spiritual communion and identification of will and activity with God. No definition is possible except in general terms: Prayer is attempted intercourse with God with or without mediation of priests or heavenly beings; it is usually but not necessarily vocal. It is designed by means of the creation of personal contact to affect the nature and course of the relationship. Its means and ends always depend upon how the nature of God is conceived.” Terms: “petition, entreaty, expostulation, confession, thanksgiving, recollection, praise, adoration, meditation, intercession” (857ff.). 2.  On the distinction between prophetic and mystical prayer, see Friedrich Heiler, Das Gebet, eine religionsgeschichtliche und religionspsychologische Untersuchung (München: E. Reinhardt, 1921), 407ff.: “Vergleich des mystischen und prophetischen Gebets.”



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  3.  On this point especially see Alfred Adler, Individualpyschologie, ed. Heinz L. and Rowena R. Ansbachen, trans. G. Janssen (München, 1972), chap. D; see also Heiler, Das Gebet, 420ff.   4.  Apart from figures like Feuerbach in the realm of philosophy, this is the wellknown interpretation of the Freudian school in psychology.   5.  This is more or less the main trend in the “analytical psychology” of C. G. Jung.   6.  In this erroneous interpretation one can make use of religious literature and biblical passages such as 1 Corinthians 13.   7.  For a critical survey of psychoanalytic theories on this subject, see G. Stephens Spinks, Psychology and Religion (London: Methuen, 1953), especially chap. IX and the paragraph on mystical prayer and erotic language, 125ff.  8. Orlo Strunk, Religion: A Psychological Interpretation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), rightly refers to and analyzes these motives of prayer; he observes, “Neither frustration nor affect alone is adequate to account for prayer. Together they appear to account for a large part of the covariations in the experiment” (94).   9.  Walter Bernet makes the appropriate remarks on the issue in Gebet (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1970), especially in the chapter “Erfahrung, das Schlüsselwort der Moderne,” 51ff. 10.  H. Strathmann, “Latreuein,” in Theolagisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, vol. IV, (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer) 59–65, proves that this new understanding of “spiritual latreia” is also at the center of the Old Testament notion as the term is used in the Septuagint. 11.  The same criticism of Jung’s attitude on this subject is made by the Reformed theologian and psychologist of religion Walter Bernet (Gebet, 34); he quotes a passage in which Jung appears to admit the necessity of symbolism but finds it unnecessary if there is a brave attitude on the part of the subject alone, without assistance from outside. (Jung prefers the sober Reformed tradition to the Roman Catholic one in this respect.) Cf. C. G. Jung, Psychologische Typen (Zurich: Rascher, 1921), 76, and Psychologie und Religion, 85ff., to which Bernet refers (34).

Part 3

TRINITY AND CREATION

Chapter Five

The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity in Church Life and Theology

It is very difficult to describe the main characteristics of a Church tradition within the limits of a chapter. This is especially true of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which does not have as a basis a confessional statement defining in a few words the essential features of the tradition, but which comprises a rich variety of theological trends and forms of worship throughout its long existence. What I shall try to do in this article is to take a central doctrine which allows the presentation of the different aspects of our tradition. It is in this sense that I have chosen the title, because I think that this is the foundation upon which Orthodoxy stands and from which the life and theology of the Church have developed. In the first section the reader will be able to follow something of the current theological discussion about the Trinity in Western theology and the deviations which threaten the basis of the Christian faith and of which the Eastern tradition has to offer clear criticisms. Then in the second section a new approach to the interpretation of this doctrinal basis is made, again in the light of the contemporary theological discussion between the Churches. In the third and fourth sections the bearing of this doctrine on the theology and life of the Eastern Orthodox Church will be considered. It is quite certain that, throughout the centuries of the Church’s history, the Trinitarian God has always been the beginning and the end of theological reasoning, not primarily as a formulated dogma, but as the basic reality from which the actual life of the Church springs. In Greek patristic thought there was no doctrine of the Trinity in the form of a well-constructed scholastic definition; rather, it was understood essentially as the infinite and unbounded grace of God revealed in the life of the Church and in the Bible. This revelation must always be considered in terms of the nature and scope of man’s knowledge, confronted as it is by the incomprehensible nature of God, which 95

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remains ever a mystery. Therefore the Trinity is not a particular theological theme in the Greek Orthodox understanding: there is merely a reference to the revelation of the Trinity in the Bible, but in such a way as to show that the grace of the Trinity is the fundamental reality of the Christian faith. THE NATURE OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY It seems necessary today to attempt a general explanation of what one means by constantly referring to the doctrine of the Trinity. Some comment should be made on the various attacks on this doctrine by modern schools of theology, and an answer given to the easy modern interpretation of the Christian faith in terms of its application in service and social activism. I would summarize the objections in three categories as follows: a.  The doctrine of the Trinity is evidently the result of a sterile, contemplative, metaphysical theology, constructed on the basis of an ontologism which gives anthropomorphic incarnations to the ideas of supreme goodness, truth and spirit. b.  There is no biblical basis for this doctrine, inasmuch as there is no explicit mention in the Bible of the three Persons together (this would be indispensable for those who treat the text in a fundamentalist way). c.  This is the one doctrine which one should never broach with contemporary society. The paradox involved in speaking of the absolute Oneness, in order to safeguard the basic Christian position, is in no way eased by the strange doctrine of His Triune personal existence. Without denying the validity of these three objections to continual reference to the doctrine of the Trinity, it should be emphasized that Greek philosophy has certainly influenced Trinitarian doctrine, not so much in the formulation of the doctrine itself, but in its rigorous expounding by the Greek Fathers of the Church. It should, moreover, be pointed out that, while there is no clear biblical reference to the doctrine as such, it is a fact that the modern world, in its desire for easy proofs, cannot readily accept and understand the Trinity in the way it likes to understand everything else in the realm of science today. However, all these objections seem to be a very dangerous simplification, not only of the theological depth of the Christian faith, but also of the unbounded reality of the freedom of the Spirit and of the richness of the grace of God’s revelation in Christ as it is presented to us in the Bible. The Triune God is not a product of human speculation. Behind this speculation, which is always tentative, remains the existence of the Christian God, whom



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we know to be triune because He is revealed as such in the Bible. It is a great mistake to look for a biblical definition of God, because the Bible does not set out to describe the essence of God. It is simply an echo, a reflection of His life. It is characteristic of the human intellect to compound definitions. Through his intellect man controls and directs everything, applying exhaustively the categories of human knowledge. But he should not apply his intellect similarly to what Almighty God has given to man for his salvation. The mere act of seeking to understand the Trinity and find written proof of the Trinitarian God in the Bible is a denial of His power, His immediacy and His personal revelation in Christ. The doctrine of the Trinity tries to reveal to us that the Christian God is not hidden, static, unapproachable, whereas the Deus absconditus is a monistic, theistic, speculative abstraction of God. The Trinity is God in relation to man and in His creation, enabling man to transcend the limitations of his intellect and its metaphysical speculations. The denial of the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of the above-stated objections is the eternal refrain of man striving for mastery over everything, even the source of everything. There is a noble obsession apparent in the whole history of human intellectual enterprise, in every sphere of intellectual life, which seeks to conquer and take possession by understanding completely. But this effort automatically excludes from the scope of human intellectual operations everything which is given to the whole of man as a mystery. It is the essence of the grace of God in His revelation that this grace does not depend on the human intellect: it is given directly by God Himself, through His life acting in three Persons, as an immediate reality without any human limitation. Man cannot know God unless God has known him. The Trinity gives us this paradoxical definition of God, but at the same time reveals His unbounded grace for saving man. Without this presupposition everything in the life and theology of the Christian Church becomes empty, superficial, theoretical and unrealistic. DOCTRINAL DEVIATIONS One should not state the doctrine of the Trinity from the Orthodox point of view directly, even in a summary form, without an introductory confrontation of contemporary deviations from the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. In the two following sub-sections I shall try to do this, in order that this short exposition of the Eastern Orthodox position on the vital and fundamental issue of the doctrine of the Trinity be more easily understandable for Western readers. I shall take three of the most important deviations, which cover a number of secondary ones, which there is no space to deal with in detail.

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Monistic Tendencies A serious deviation from the true Trinitarian theology is the overemphasis on one of the three Persons. This danger is inherent in all kinds of theology which begin with a partial vision of the divine economy. Not only in systematic theology, but also in contemporary New Testament scholarship, a particular view of history is often held in order to make the kerygma more easily understandable and acceptable for modern man, which emphasizes one single event or one single Person of the Trinity in order to avoid the complications of the doctrine of the Trinity. The first type is the well-known Unitarian Patromonism, which is a simple rationalistic approach to the problem of the existence of God. In its extreme form this deviation has little in common with Christian theology, belonging rather to the sphere of theistic religion. It maintains that Christ and the Holy Spirit are not of the same essence as God the Father, and so there is no problem of explaining the doctrine of the Trinity as the basis of the life and mission of the Church. Unitarianism results from a misunderstanding of absolute monotheism, which would be endangered if one were to introduce a plurality of personal existences into the one God as Father of all. There is a confusion here between monarchism and monotheism, and in their interpretation of monotheism Unitarians exclude not only the plurality of Persons but also the uniqueness of the revelation of God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is evident that in the last analysis this kind of monotheism does not belong to the realm of Christian theology. The second kind of monistic tendency is of a far greater interest from the Orthodox point of view. We mean Christomonism, which is the most common deviation from the true doctrine of the Trinity in contemporary Western theology. It is a very delicate task for contemporary theologians to discern the non-Trinitarian character of this deviation, because it is camouflaged by a Christocentric theology which is the true heart of the Christian Gospel. Therefore Christomonism appears at first sight to be the true Christian theology; in modern times it has won great acclaim for purifying Christian theology from a number of elements which it borrowed from philosophy in order to explain the mystery of the Trinity of the Christian God. In reality, however, Christomonism in its extreme form can be a great threat, not to the doctrine of the Trinity, but to the fullness of the life and action and worship of the Church. There is some justification for the rise of Christomonistic tendencies, since idealist systematic theology and the scholastic analysis of the existence of God and the whole system of analogies can result in a purely philosophical conception of God’s revelation in Christ. The specific causes of the Christomonistic reaction against the abuses of systematic theology may be analyzed thus:



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a.  The concept of general or natural revelation, considered as a parallel and equally important revelation with that of Christ, which made it necessary to stress the cross of Jesus as the unique historical event. b.  The theories and speculations of philosophical theology concerning the hidden God, the remote Almighty One, and the abuse of His attributes implicit in the claim that it is possible for man to know Him, which led Christomonism to regard Him as Deus absconditus and to center on Christ alone as the Deus revelatus in time. c.  The doctrine of perpetuated incarnation, as found in some extreme schools of sacramental theology, which, by identifying absolutely the unique sacrifice of Jesus with the “repetition” of it, provoked a reaction; however, the answer of Christomonism does not take into account the energy of the Holy Spirit here and now, which realizes again and again among us in the Church the fruits of the salvation which is given oncefor-all in Christ. d.  Various extreme forms of Christian mysticism, which, in the end, out of enthusiasm, neglect the Christological basis of the relationship between God and man. In our own day, especially, the many sects which emphasize the Holy Spirit in complete isolation from the two other Persons of the Trinity make Christomonism appear a solid Christocentric interpretation of the Christian faith. In other words, it would be foolish to deny that there are abuses which give rise in contemporary theology to Christomonistic tendencies, but Christomonism, in combating the abuses of other theologies, results in another kind of deviation from a well-balanced Trinitarian approach to the fullness of church life. Christomonism is inevitably related to a partial and inadequate vision of the mystery of salvation seen only as redemption, as a cross-centered event, failing to see salvation also as regeneration, as a continuous process of the biblical oikodome and as a perfection of the whole of creation. Resurrection and the cosmic Christ play a secondary role, the Church is regarded as only a juridical institution and the sacraments as superfluous ceremonies not absolutely necessary for salvation. Another monistic tendency is pneumatomonism, which again can be regarded as a justifiable reaction against a narrow concept of salvation as it is envisaged by the different theories current in Western theologies. If we may again enumerate shortly the reasons for the rise of pneumatomonistic tendencies, the following may be mentioned: a.  The desire to liberate faith from a uniform application and from too great a dependence on institutionalism.

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b.  The refutation of all kinds of easy speculative theology which, on the basis of the cross of Jesus and by theories of justification, try to interpret exhaustively the nature of the existence of God. c.  The refusal to accept the historical interpretation of the mystery of salvation through the cross of Jesus alone, without reference to the present reality of the Holy Spirit. d.  The reaction against the neglect of the distinctive person of the believer and his problem of faith, within this machine of justification as portrayed by the big theological systems. e.  The need for a second conversion to appropriate God’s presence as a personal experience, a new inward power for life. Pneumatomonism thus has good reasons for its departure from the true doctrine of the Trinity, but in its extremist forms it is in danger of separating the individual from the community and of taking a sectarian view of the Church which is unrealistic and enthusiastic, resulting in the denial of any objective norm and in a subjective spiritualist interpretation of salvation as occurring in a moment of excitement. The Filioquism of Today It is commonly said that the schism between East and West was due to their different interpretations of the mystery of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father. For the Orthodox the deviation lies in the addition by the West of the phrase “and from the Son” to the Nicene Creed. There is a tendency to regard this difference not only as the primary cause of the schism, but also as the doctrine which led to all the other differences in the theological thinking of East and West. This is an exaggeration, and any such simple solution to the very complex problem of the division between the Churches is to be avoided. But, as a matter of fact, in contemporary theology the old scholastic quarrel about the procession of the Holy Spirit takes on another form, and one which is opposed to a right understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity; not only in the West but also in the East systematic theology is failing to construct a rich theology of the Holy Spirit. Thus in its treatment of the reality of the Church and the whole of creation our theology is not dynamic. Without pneumatology its subject is limited to a one-sided theology of redemption. It is evident that Christocentrism, which in its extreme form becomes Christomonism, is threatening a genuine theology of the Holy Spirit. This is what has caused the tremendous increase of enthusiastic movements, emancipated from any Church order, Quakers, Adventists, Mormons, etc. They bear witness to a nostalgia for the Spirit, which takes the form of



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a reaction against Christomonism and its application in theology and in the structure and life of the Church. In other words, even if the filioque is not such a burning issue in theological discussion today as it was in the past, filioquism appears in a new form which threatens East and West alike. Both are reluctant to offer a deep theology of the Holy Spirit because they think that the modern world is not interested anymore in this kind of Trinitarian “reasoning”; but the true doctrine of the Trinity is not “reasoning,” especially where it is concerned with the theology of the Holy Spirit. It is simply a commentary on the biblical text, on the one tradition of the Church and on her life and mission. Therefore, I do not propose to discuss these details of the procession all over again, but I would insist that the old filioque quarrel in some sense appears today in a new context; without direct reference to the problem itself, that is to say to the procession of the Holy Spirit, it presents a theology which does not see the charismatic energies or the Holy Spirit as fundamental to the Christian faith in action. Apart from the importance which the Bible attaches to the charismata of the Holy Spirit for building up the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 12; Eph. 4.1–13), it is quite clear on the question of the procession, at least for a Greek-speaking church (John 15.26 and 16.7). The two words are clearly distinguished: “procession,” meaning origin of being and action, and “mission,” meaning instrumental cause, so that a Greek would immediately say that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father in eternity and is sent in time through the Son. This may seem an arid discussion; but it is very important today to give a clear diagnosis of Christomonism, of redemption centered on the cross alone. Filioquism in the form of Christomonism leads to a partial vision of revelation. The Holy Spirit loses His personal existence and becomes simply an impersonal power and agent of Christ in man. Thus the Holy Spirit is reduced to a secondary element in the Trinity, functional and instrumental. To understand the Holy Spirit simply as a divine power in man, deriving from faith in God the Father as Deus absconditus and in God the Son as the only Deus revelatus, deprives the triune essence of God of its dynamism. The result is that baptism, the Eucharist and the other sacraments are either understood as machinery for the repetition of redemption, always looking toward the past, making the Church an institution de jure divino, or they are simply denied and lose their importance in the life and theology of the Church, being regarded ultimately as unnecessary religious ceremonies. We must have a clear idea of the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete, that is to say the personal Being which fulfills, makes present and works among men here and now the salvation given in Christ. He is the Spirit which was from the beginning with the Son, creating the world, leading the prophets, incarnating the Logos of God in man, being with Jesus always, raising Him from the dead

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and constituting the Apostolic Church, uniting it as the Body with its Head which is Christ on the day of Pentecost. Without this idea of the Paraclete there can be no true Christian theology. The duty of contemporary theology is therefore to understand the procession of the Spirit from the Father, being sent by the Son, as the re-creative God among us. He is the hypostasis, the personal and dynamic God, the Holy Trinity, that is to say the loving God who makes everything fruitful, animates the whole of creation and directs it toward its final end. He is the Paraclete, who, as the God of history in action, calls all mortal flesh out of nothingness into the reality of the new creation. This is accomplished by virtue of the redemption and the resurrection. It is a paraclesis—that is, the answer of the Trinitarian God to the invocation of His name by the Church—in which the Spirit acts in place of the exalted Christ, re-enacting the whole of the divine economy as if Christ with the Father were present among us here and now. Without this conception of the Spirit, filioquism makes theology into a kind of superficial intellectualism, and the inevitable result is that the communal life of the Christian faith becomes a show of power, either in the form of the massive collectivism of ecclesiastical institutions or of the broken individualism of different schools of theology which threaten to divide the Church still further. Against an austere scholasticism, against the abuse of filioquism in contemporary theology, and for the joy and glory of God in the humility of His earthly community, we are invited to write again a theology which aspires to the true evangelium, the good news, the happy news, the news which brings real paraclesis, consolation and strengthening, from the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth. This is what Eastern Orthodoxy stands for in the ecumenical dialogue, warning in humility, reminding in repentance, exhorting through its worship and theology against the dangers of filioquism and the neglect of the theology of the Paraclete. Filioquism has affected us all unconsciously, as an easy way of organizing chapters of theology, explaining a salvation granted automatically without existential participation in it. The most important and most difficult task of theology was, and remains, that of delving more and more deeply into the doctrine of the Trinity, on the basis of pneumatology. This does not require merely a system or categories of thought. It is the thinking of the act and the act of thinking, the commentary which reflects the worship, the life and the mission of the Church. Modalism One of the most dangerous deviations is the old Sabellianism in a new form. It no longer holds that the doctrine of the Trinity must be understood simply phenomenologically, but it sees it rather as the expression of the different



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ways of action of the One God. Contemporary modalism is thus tempted to conceive of the personal being of the Triune God as a threefold mode of appearing or Seinsweise. It understands the revelation of the Trinity in the Bible as God’s appearance in three different forms, which establish either mythologically or symbolically the relationship between God and man. This deviation opens the door to the interpretation of the personal revelation simply as a phenomenon, without the dynamic and binding koinonia which is established once one accepts that God acts in history as a Person and establishes among men a real fellowship. Modalism can result in an indirect denial of the reality of the Church as the Body of Christ and can lead theology merely to analyze the phenomenon instead of speaking of the real coming of Christ and the personal communion with Him realized in the Spirit. In the absence of a personal God and in the face of a superficial understanding of the Church as an unnecessary institution, existentialism is the only alternative. I mention this as the third kind of deviation because I think that it secretly poisons many theologies which aspire to the so-called renewal of the Church by emancipating it from its tradition and historical reality. OUTLINE OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY The life of the Church, the faith of man, the presence of the Christian in the world, are reflections of the grace of the Trinity. The doctrine of the revelation of the Trinitarian God should not be thought of as a speculative theory or a kind of religious metaphysics. In patristic thought this revelation is described in terms borrowed to a certain extent from philosophy; but in this way the Fathers give a commentary on the immediate reality of the divine presence revealed in the world. It is through the operation of the Spirit of God, as seen in the Bible and the life of the Church, that the profound secret of creation and of the revelation is revealed. This secret is that life springs out of the communion which exists in God and leads to communion between God and men and among men in His Church. Relationships are the backbone of divine creation and revelation. We can say that this creative God who is revealed to us can only be a personal God. We say: the Christian God is personal. This does not mean that He is an isolated Person; rather, He is personal in that He is always in a mutual movement in Himself, which is caused and quickened by His essence, which is love. According to the Bible, the Holy Spirit as Paraclete is ever present within the Trinity, effecting the relationship through a movement of personal communion with the Father and the Son. The Bible sees this action in the creation of the world, the election of Israel, the prophecies of the Old Testament,

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the mystery of Christ’s incarnation, His baptism and above all on the day of Pentecost. On the command of the Father, the Spirit proceeding from Him sets all things in motion here and now, as if the whole Trinity were present. He governs and actualizes the work of God among men. The essence of this communion is beyond our comprehension, but through the energies of the Spirit it becomes fully accessible to us in the form of new life in the Church. That is why the Eastern Orthodox tradition makes two observations which are of the greatest importance for all theology, ecclesiology and anthropology. a.  The adjective “personal” refers to a movement toward another being, motivated by love and requiring that the other be capable of responding in the same way. Therefore, the will of the personal God is expressed in a personal appeal to establish communion with man. The theological basis of freedom does not allow us to define it as a movement of alienation or emancipation, but rather as mutual responsibility in a communion of love. God acts freely in His creation, and the Spirit blows where He wills, because He is personal. He is the Spirit of communion, the κοινόν τῆς φύσεως, to take up the phrase of St. Basil in the De Spiritu Sancto. What is common in the nature of the three Persons is ἡ κατά φύσιν κοινωνία, and τό ἀχώρητον, namely the communion in their nature and the inseparability of the three Persons. The ἀλλότριον τῆς φύσεως—the particular individual characteristics of each of the three Persons—do not separate them, but constitute their deep mutual belonging together. The Son is born and the Spirit proceeds from the essence of the Father through a movement inseparably bound with Him, like His two hands, as Gregory of Nyssa would say, in the tradition of Irenaeus. The “personal” character of each of the Persons gives the mutual movement its internal power. The distinguishing characteristic of the Father is the ἀγέννητον, non-birth; that of the Son is birth in eternity, whence birth in time and incarnation; and that of the Holy Spirit is the fact of proceeding eternally from the Father, being sent in time by the Son. The words of Christ in the Bible establish clearly this fine distinction: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father . . . ” (John 15.26). The distinction between proceeding eternally from the Father, the giver of life, and being sent in time by the Son is of the greatest importance. This distinction forbids us to subordinate the Spirit to the Son. The mission shows precisely that the coming of the Paraclete is the climax of history, for the day of Pentecost is the moment when Christ’s work for man is fulfilled in time; the second part of the same verse from St. John (“he shall testify of me”) shows how the communion between the Trinitarian God



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and the Apostolic Church is actualized through the energies of the Spirit. Verse 27 then declares: “And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.” It is not, therefore, by any subjective power which He might give to man that the Spirit is manifested; nor is it that the Spirit of Christ gives life to the ecclesiastical institution. The Spirit is the continual presence in the Church of the uncreated energies of the grace of the Trinity. b.  The Holy Spirit who in this way establishes full communion between the divine Persons and the Church is a principle of oneness, a unifying principle. He does not work simply as an organizer, but as a regenerator and, as such, a Comforter. The work which He accomplishes is that of a Savior. The transmission of the divine energies by the charismata of the Holy Spirit, as we see in the Bible, shows us how He works to bring into unity the Trinitarian God and man, by realizing the incarnation in man. He works also to bring unity among men, by uniting them in the Body of Christ and by making them new creatures (Gal. 3.5; Col. 2.12). On the basis of this operation, the Greek Fathers clearly distinguish the incomprehensible essence of God (οὐσία), identical in the three Persons and the principle of their oneness, from the energies (ἐνέργειαι), also incomprehensible, but which can be communicated to man through the Holy Spirit. In the Bible we see that these “energies” reveal a God whose dynamic existence is the expression of the three Persons, who draw near to each other and give themselves to their creatures. By effecting our salvation in Christ, the Paraclete demonstrates to us that His work brings into complete unity the three divine Persons, so that the grace of the Trinity may be communicated to men, re-creating them as members of the Body of Christ. It is in this way that the Greek Fathers spoke of hypostasis. This expression is an attempt to give an approximative description of the internal cohesion of the Three who are One by virtue of their divine essence, which is identical in all three. Thus, by the notion of hypostasis, they show the flowing together of substance within the Trinity. The Fathers did not arrive at this conception by speculation or philosophy, but by the revelation of the Bible. It is by this revelation that we can imagine what the pre-existing unity in the Trinity is. This unity of the Trinity is revealed to us by the particular action of the Three in accomplishing the salvation and regeneration of man, of history and of the whole world. Thus we can say that in the Holy Trinity the union is neither static nor merely functional: it is hypostatic; that is, each of the Persons retains His unique characteristics in a union without confusion, and the union communicates these characteristics to men in order to establish communion through the Holy Spirit in the grace of the Son and the love of the Father.

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The idea of hypostatic union excludes any kind of monism centered on one of the Persons (whether Patromonism or Christomonism). It does not allow within the Trinity any kind of ontological analogy borrowed from philosophical systems. Within the Trinity there is a sort of ontological communication, incomprehensible to men, which results from the divine consubstantiality of the three Persons: “I am that I am”; but the Holy Spirit reveals and communicates to us the characteristics of the divine hypostases. The hypostatic union between the Three is revealed by Christ and is experienced in us as a loving communion with the Triune God through the Spirit. A profound sense of the hypostatic union is experienced in the Church through the Holy Spirit. Orthodoxy will never accept the scholastic system of created grace as the “supernatural created,” which is in danger of becoming a sacred thing in itself. This can affect ecclesiology, soteriology and anthropology, and bring in its wake other deviations, by introducing ontological analogies of a logical kind (justitia originalis, natural theology, purgatory, surplus of grace deposited in the Church, etc.). The theology of the Holy Spirit does not allow a pure objectivization of the Trinity, nor an analysis of the divine essence or substance in rational categories. A true doctrine of the Spirit is one which describes and comments on the life in the freedom of the Spirit and in the concrete communion of the historical Church, whose essence is not of herself nor in her institutions. The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is a type, an “icon” of the hypostatic union; everything static and ontological in her becomes existential and dynamic by the quickening energy of the Holy Spirit. THE TRINITARIAN BASIS OF CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY A Christian biblical or systematic theologian should begin his anthropology with a confession of weakness, realizing that it is beyond his power to theorize on the fullness of the divine mystery which is contained in human existence. For, in speaking of the Christian doctrine of man, we are obliged to consider not simply man himself, but man in the light of the divine-human relationship. This is, however, a relationship which is masked by sin, and its origin is beyond our understanding. For this reason we cannot pretend that this doctrine is a final explanation of the whole truth about man, his creation in the image of God and his Fall. On the other hand, a formulation of the Christian conception of man is essential, especially in the world of today, where modern science, art and literature are completely egocentric and anthropocentric, in order to strengthen the mission of the Church in the secularized world by offering a more profound



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and realistic picture of what man really is. One must always bear in mind that the Christian and biblical faith envisages the whole of man as a single entity, by virtue of his divine origin and through his redemption in Christ and his movement in the power of the Spirit toward regeneration and fulfillment in Him. To a Christian the secular doctrine gives only a partial explanation of man, based only on immanent relationships and in many cases on physical behavior. Most non-Christian doctrines of man seem unable to maintain a balance between the spiritual and the material. Consequently they adopt a one-sided view, whether moralistic, idealistic, psychological, anthropological or materialistic-economic. Man is seen in a very narrow perspective and only in his human condition. The essence of humanity, namely the divine origin and the divine-human communion, is missing. Man is seen only at the level of his passions and aspirations. The Christian tradition, on the other hand, offers a mosaic of interpretations of human nature. This is not a bad thing, because, as we have said before, it is impossible for a theologian fully to comprehend the divine element which is fundamental to an understanding of the human being. Therefore Christian theology cannot reach a single doctrine of man, acceptable to all the Churches, with which to confront secular anthropology, and for the same reason most of the great variations within the tradition, especially between East and West, are to some extent legitimate. They are to be accepted as humble contributions to the understanding of the mystery which God has set in man by his creation. Different interpretations of the Bible are permissible, provided that they seek to understand the Trinitarian basis of the doctrine of man revealed in Christ. Secular conceptions of man run the risk of imprisoning the human being in his sinful limitations when secular forces alone are held to determine his nature. In this case one can have no conception of man’s supra-natural dimension, his origin and his end. But Christian theology, too, can be one-sided, when a theologian bases his interpretation of human nature only on man’s sinfulness. Then, too, man is imprisoned within his own incapability. An unbridgeable gulf is created between him and his Creator. It is not surprising that this results in a disguised humanism, which seeks emancipation from any kind of divine authority, because this attitude entails a radical contradiction. The fallen man, who has completely lost the imago Dei and is unable as a free being to do anything of himself for his salvation, is elevated, since he has been justified by God in Christ Jesus, as the subject I before the divine “Thou.” The “I-Thou” theology of justification becomes a prelude to all kinds of humanism when man, his free will broken, fails to participate with continual repentance in the communion of saints, believing that he must make his own contribution to God’s action for his salvation. In contrast to this theology built upon the sinfulness of man, another tradition tries to see the human being through Christ, and takes as its basis the

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divine element implanted in man by his Creator, in his indestructible image, redeemed in Christ and fulfilled by the Spirit. Though this second attitude is clearly more congenial, we should acknowledge that to take this as the only basis of our understanding of man would also be one-sided, resulting in an otherworldly vision and ignoring the tragedy of man’s present situation, as he moves between sin and redemption toward death. If the first attitude takes account only of the sinful condition of man, the second in its extreme form may dehumanize man, exalting an individual mysticism outside the communion of the Church. Speaking from the Greek Orthodox point of view, I shall consider this second approach to the doctrine of man, in an attempt to clarify the spiritual background to the doctrine, which always has a Trinitarian basis. I shall try to avoid both extremes and to explain how, in the spirit of the Orthodox tradition, the revelation of the Trinity can help in the study of the doctrine of man. A CHRISTOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE CREATION OF MAN The Bible offers us a basis for thinking about man in his relationship with God. It would be a mistake to go directly to the text of Genesis and interpret it independently of the revelation of God in Christ. The Christocentric approach to all problems of theology is a necessary presupposition. It is neither redemption nor justification that solely or primarily illumines the mystery of man’s creation, but rather the whole mystery of incarnation, which includes redemption and is directly concerned with the act of the Creator. If God said, “Let us make man in our image after our likeness” (Gen. 1.26), we understand that He did not simply make a verbal declaration but acted through His Logos, through which everything was made (John 1.3). His spoken word in the creation should be understood as His act in the incarnation, in the personal communion that He establishes by making His Word flesh. Therefore, it is not only by His Word, but fundamentally by His Logos, that “all things were created and all things by him consist” (Col. 1.16) and are “reconciled unto himself” (1.20). In this way, as a presupposition for the understanding of the whole of creation, but especially of man, we are invited to conceive of our nature as springing out of the relationship within the Trinitarian God, who takes humanity upon Him as belonging to His nature. He is revealed through Christ as a unity, a whole, in His acts of creation as God the Creator, of redemption in Christ as the Redeemer and Creator, and of regeneration by the Holy Spirit also as Creator. It is in this relationship which the incarnation reveals that we



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are called upon to see sinful man as always depending on, and sustained and restored by, his Creator, in His revelation of the Trinity in Christ Jesus. Man in the Light of Christ Therefore it is not out of human darkness that one conceives of the Christian doctrine of man; in the light of Jesus man is invited to respond of his own free will and thus to illumine the darkness of his condition. This is the direct result of the union of the two natures in Christ, which is the prototype from which the type of man is to be conceived. It presupposes a faith in the mystery of incarnation. This faith is the gift of God in the Spirit, after man’s decision to repent before Him. Without closing one’s eyes to the darkness of sin, one must be cleansed in the Spirit in order to be able to contemplate the light of Christ made man. In one sense, therefore, we may isolate the event of the revelation in Christ as the only truly historical event, and try to understand human nature solely from that standpoint; but it is a mistake not to look through that event to the wholeness of the energy of the Trinity which is given to man through creation, redemption and sanctification. This is a truly Christocentric approach to the problem of man’s origin, nature and destiny, and avoids the danger of Christomonism, which is apparent when it is suggested that the cross of Jesus is a more authentic historical event than the incarnation or the resurrection. The historicity of revelation as an action of the Holy Trinity is rooted in the fact of the incarnation, cross and resurrection. The primary and crucial event of New Testament history is the Logos becoming flesh: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory” (John 1.14). As an historic event the incarnation belongs to the same order as the rest of history. This is affirmed not only in the prologues of the three synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of St. John, but also in Pauline theology: “When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons” (Gal. 4.4–5). We stress this point because the understanding of the biblical νύν, the “now,” the kairos of the repentance of the human individual, which is the presupposition of a truly Christian doctrine of man, is closely related, through the power of the Holy Spirit operating in the Church, to this election by God of a time to make His Word incarnate. The relationship between human nature and the two natures in Christ is not allegorical, nor is it an audacious fantasy. According to the Bible, it is based on the act of the Holy Spirit, by whose operation the incarnation took place. The ascension of Christ is followed by the descent of the Holy Spirit at a historical moment of time, in a

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concrete place, on actual historical human beings. These historical events make a continual appeal to every individual to see his own existence only in relation to that sequence of historical events. Man is thus called to, and given the power to attain, an inner union, through the Holy Spirit: “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3.18). On this basis the Bible does not simply call us to recognize an external similarity to Christ as a gnostic principle or psychological archetype, symbolizing the unity between Creator and creature, or an example of the relationship between God and man. We are invited to share the divine life and energy. God is therefore the nourishment of our nature: “that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (2 Peter 1.4). Man is to be understood only in the light of Christ as the revelation of the Trinity, a light which springs out of His humanity and is given to man as new life insofar as He took upon Himself man and his sinful nature, thus revealing what man should become, recovering the sense of his life as it first sprang from the breath of God the Father. The light of Jesus is not to be seen as a quality uniquely His, incommunicable, transcendental, divine and unapproachable. This is the light which gives life to man, and establishes the inner relationship of Christ’s natures with the nature of man: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men” (John 1.4). I do not claim, therefore, that it is absolutely wrong to study the nature of man through justification in Christ: but I do say that this should not be regarded as the one and only key to the divine revelation in Christ. It is simply that it is not the whole of revelation in Christ, and it does not do justice to the fullness of the image of man presented in the Bible. The Christian doctrine of man must take account of the Christological aspect of creation. Certainly the act of creation should always be seen in the light of the redemption in Christ, but not apart from the continuous transfiguration of sinful man through repentance in the Spirit, or from the fulfillment at the end of time. A Christological interpretation of the nature of man must refer to the whole divine economy. Man cannot be fully defined through one single moment of the divine economy. Through that moment a theologian should try to interpret the whole of the biblical revelation of man’s nature—created, fallen, restored and regenerated by the Trinitarian God. Imago Dei (“In Our Image”) The most important factor which must be seen in the light of the incarnation is that God, in creating man in His image, implants in him love, which is of



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His very essence. Before we try to analyze the significance of the imago, we must establish the whole doctrine of man on this first creative movement of God, inspired by His love as it was revealed in Christ. God can do everything, but He will not deny His own essence (1 John 4.8) and not love man (John 3.16; Rom. 8.37). This is the “love bondage” of the absolute freedom of God, as it is presented in the Bible. This act of love “binds” God eternally to man in freedom. Man is the image of God: he can have no existence of his own will, but can live only out of his prototype, his archetype, to which he is continually returning, compelled by the creative love which works in him and makes him a being. This is the movement within the “slavery” of love. God does not create man in His image as an object, as He did the other creatures in the world, but gives Himself to man. He gives Himself directly through His Word, His breath, His Son and His Spirit, and in so doing brings to Himself what He has created. Before we begin to examine man as made up of body and soul, and the Fall and the redemption, we must see the basis of all these things in something which comes directly from the Creator and upon which all other elements of human nature depend. We must begin, in fact, by looking at man in the light of Christ. The imago Dei in man is the outcome of the boundless love of God. It is expressed firstly in the face-to-face relationship of man with his Creator, necessarily bound to Him yet still retaining his free will. Freedom, the quickening power of the imago Dei, is neither a grace (superadditum) nor a justitia originalis, but springs up as its very nature, whether before the Fall or after it. Therefore the essence of the original relationship of love between the Creator and His creature cannot be effaced, because it constitutes the being of man in relation to His Creator. Though the imago Dei is not a constitutive element of man in the sense that body and soul are, the existence of body and soul presupposes the imago Dei, which is therefore essential for any study of man in the light of Christ. The imago is not a moral state of man, and should not be identified only with man’s condition before the Fall, or with something extrinsic to the human being, such as life in paradise. The imago is not added after the creation of man. It is not a state in which man was put by His Creator. It is the very essence of the creation of man (Gen. 1.26). The imago should not be regarded as one quality among others given by God to the human personality. The imago is the esse of man ex esse of God. It constitutes what is distinctively human. It means the whole human being in relationship with his God. This can be seen only in the revelation of Christ as the Divine Logos of the Creator. To be created in the image of God means being taken into the grace of God, without living in a supernatural or paradisaical situation. The imago is the root of the real humanism, created and sustained by divine love.

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The imago does not simply need to recover through redemption its lost origin; at the same time it is the force which elevates man, degraded by sin, but now once more in Christ, into a state of liberty. It is the synthesis in man of all his spiritual, intellectual, conscious and unconscious operations as the first creature of creation. Thus when we speak of the imago in Christ’s revelation we are not merely referring either to the lost point of contact of man with God or to the remains of the justitia originalis, but we point to the means of continually restoring the substance and the origin of our being, and to the end toward which we move. To be renewed in Christ is to be renewed “in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Col. 3.10). Therefore the imago is the element which sustains man as a created being and makes him in his fallen nature still responsible for his sin. The imago can be spoiled; it can be reduced to silence; it can be sterile; and still God preserves it essentially in life, even though a life condemned to death. This incomprehensible mystery of human life can be understood only through the appearance of the Logos-Christ in the sinful flesh of man. Therefore, in man the imago Dei is not re-created, but it is renewed, healed, revivified, fulfilled and perfected in Christ, and communicated to man by the Holy Spirit. Similitudo (“In Our Likeness”) This understanding of the imago Dei embodies the biblical truth that human life cannot exist apart from God. Man’s life receives its essence from God, who works in man by His Spirit. It is not man who elevates himself, but God who out of love humiliates and empties Himself in order to reach man and make him a receptacle of the divine life in Christ. Gen. 1.26 can be fully understood only by reference to John 17.23: “Ί in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one” (Cf. 1 Cor. 2.12; Gal. 2.20). Life in Christ (the biblical ἐν χριστῷ) is the crux of the Bible. The imago is the essence of man, while the similitudo points to his ethical being. If the image constitutes the original bond between God and man, the likeness is the freedom of man to realize the potentialities of the imago. If we define the imago as ontological, we may define the likeness as existential. Both terms point to the eternal movement of the life flowing from the Trinitarian God to man. It is this movement which quickens man’s free will to maintain the inseparable communion with God as it is revealed in Christ. The likeness makes active the essence of the imago; it provokes free man, created in the image of God, to prove the image and to prove the true freedom given by God by maintaining the communion with Him.



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Body and Soul We say in traditional terms that man is composed of body and soul. Body and soul are two comprehensive expressions which attempt to distinguish the material and spiritual elements of human nature. But in reality a whole complex world is covered by these two terms, so that a clear definition is impossible. There is a mutual penetration of elements from both sides, and a clear separation can be made only by an idealist philosophy which emphasizes the spiritual side. The Bible uses both terms metaphorically: the “flesh” denotes the inclination to sin, and the “spirit” points to the ethical possibility of receiving grace and acting accordingly. But in many cases the adjective ψυχικός, derived from ψυχή (soul), is used also to denote surrender to the secular world (1 Cor. 2.14; James 3.15). The Bible uses “spirit,” as opposed to σάρξ, to refer to man’s higher relationship with God in His Spirit. It would be a wrong interpretation of the biblical understanding of the nature of man to introduce here without qualification the trichotomy—body, soul, spirit—in order to explain the constitutive elements of human nature. The operation of the Spirit becomes a third element in a human being, but as an operation from outside man. This operation is the act of reaffirming the image of God in man through the cleansing of the whole of the human person, a unity of both body and soul, so that Christ’s grace may dwell in it, as the Holy Spirit works in man and makes his body a temple of God (Rom. 8.11): “But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you” (Cf. Rom. 12.1; 1 Cor. 6.19). Therefore, we should regard every radical separation of the material and spiritual in man as leading to an anthropology which is from the biblical point of view unbalanced. The spiritual man does not have a body, but is a body. Man is “bodily” a spiritual being and is “spiritually” a material being. The breath of God quickens matter and His Spirit unites them. Man is the type of the whole of creation. Through His living image, the human microcosm, the cosmos is offered back to its Creator. God sanctifies the material nature in the human body: “God formed man of dust from the ground” (Gen. 2.7). The true and comprehensive explanation of the wholeness of man is to be found in the biblical understanding of καρδία, “heart,” which has no sentimental or emotional overtones. We are invited to see in this the union of all the faculties of the human being, so that it is bodily and spiritually the conscious center of the personality, which comprises and reflects the whole creation within the one world of man. God deals with the heart directly, as the center of the human being (Matt. 5.8; 18.35). The heart is not the seat of the emotions, but the spiritual center of human life; in it and through it the

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true circumcision takes place, for as St. Paul writes, “circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter” (Rom. 2.29). Man and Woman If the synthesis in freedom of all faculties of conscious life is the character of the imago Dei implanted in man by creation, the distinction between man and woman is a further reflection of the imago Dei in which man is created. The existence of more than one sex arises out of the abundance of the divine love and the mystery of the unity in Trinity of the creative God, who, from the communion of His own being, establishes communion with man as a condition for human community. The words of the Creator—“It is not good that man should be alone” (Gen. 2.18)—make an analogy of God’s incomprehensible being in three Persons the principle of human existence. The Trinitarian God does not create an I from the “I” of God, but the “thou” of man—man and woman—out of which the “we” of the human race can grow. That is why it is only in the Church that man can be defined as a being-incommunion. The Ecclesia is the center of the creation. It is not by chance that St. Paul clarifies the relationship between husband and wife by referring to the relationship between Christ and His Church (Eph. 5.25–33). There the image of God is reflected as the rejection of the self-sufficiency of man. Thus the individual is enabled by his free will to make a personal choice, not in emancipation but in a deep inner interdependency (1 Cor. 7.4). IMAGE, FALL, AND REDEMPTION What has been said so far in defining the imago is sufficient proof that the image of God in man has to be redeemed and justified by Christ and fulfilled by the Spirit, who requires man to live according to it. It is only through the infinite grace of a loving God that the imago has been left to depend on the free choice of faith and the free will of His creature. This second human element does not mean the συνεργεία (cooperation) of man in restoring the broken imago Dei, but it confirms the freedom of man, which is the power of the same imago and the grace of God. It means simply that the union between God and man is the supreme gift of God, and that He leaves it to man to accept or reject it. The confirmation of God’s creative act in His image is to be found precisely in the mystery of the self-determination of man. Man confesses himself in that moment of free choice before the loving God as created in the image of God. The freedom that God gives can be used either as a real freedom, preserving the communion with God which was the purpose



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of man’s creation as a free being; or as a movement of emancipation, breaking this direct union with the Creator. The Fall of man means precisely that the communion was reduced to an external relationship which was preserved only by the law for the maintenance of order and justice, the very opposite of the freedom of communion. St. Paul writes: “The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the law” (1 Cor. 15.56). Image and Fall This conception of the Fall as free man’s rebellion against his communion with God implies that one should only investigate the Fall of man, its causes, nature and consequences, from the point of view of the restoration of the imago Dei in Jesus and the greatness of the imago Dei restored in man by the Holy Spirit. We should never forget that the cause of the Fall is external, something from outside human nature, and that it becomes internal only by the free choice of man (Gen. 3.1; 2 Cor. 11.3; Rev. 12.9). Unlike the imago Dei, sin has no essential character; it is the rebellion of man against God by yielding to temptation from external evil forces. In order to understand the biblical conception of the Fall, one must accept the existence of evil in the personal concrete form of the devil, who causes man to act against God: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do; he was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth” (John 8.44). Without this assumption no explanation of the Fall as something caused by an external power is possible. It was possible for man not to give in, since as a creature of the loving God he was free; but he did give in, and so fell. The greatness of the imago in freedom is proved by the Fall. This evil, this “serpent,” revealed itself as a negative power, breaking the communion with the full personal revelation of God in Christ, which is perfected in the Spirit. The New Testament names him in this sense killer, liar, tempter, Prince of this world (Eph. 2.2; John 12.31). The story of Paradise is repeated in another form in the story of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. Here we see the new Adam, the imago Dei, resisting by His free will the same temptation. The temptation has always the same purpose: total emancipation from God the Creator (Matt. 4.1–12; Mark 1.13; Luke 4.2). It is the breaking of the communion with God which brings death and corruption to the whole creation. The restoration of the imago is also, therefore, a moral process in man, confirming in him the work of the Spirit. But this moral development is not understood in Orthodoxy as a purely human moral undertaking. The doctrine of the Trinity again maintains the true biblical understanding of the “new creation,” the καινή κτίσις in Christ through the Spirit (2 Cor. 5.17). For the

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Fall from communion with God paralyses the imago Dei in man; it cannot work alone, since its essence is union with God. The freedom is no longer a freedom to live; after the Fall the freedom became a freedom to choose death, because the sustaining force in the life of man is no longer his communion with God, but his rebellion in the moral choice between good and evil. Without the communion of life this choice is always bound to be the wrong one. Freedom becomes a condemnation to death. But we cannot say that the imago is entirely lost on account of the Fall, because if it were lost the essence of humanity would be lost and man’s existence would become purely animal. We say that the imago cannot resist temptation alone. All the divine qualities in man, especially the freedom, are working in the wrong direction. The imago is struck by an incurable sickness. It is not that the imago is no longer the essence of humanity, but it is bound by the slavery of false freedom. The sinfulness of man cannot altogether destroy the ties of creation, because God, the Lord of creation, holds them eternally in His love, so that the whole creation remains dependent on Him. Nothing can destroy the essence of the act of God in man which is the climax of creation. Orthodoxy would insist, however, that the divine image cannot function after the Fall as it should. For the imago, perverted by the Fall, is now not under grace but under the law. Thus the presence of sin (in the law) is revealed (Rom. 5.13). But the image is still there; it is present as the essence of God’s act in His creation, and this remains. These words of God in the Bible, spoken after the Fall, demand that man’s life be respected because of the imago: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image” (Gen. 9.6). Man, therefore, can live, act, remain and preserve the order of the creation. The difference after the Fall is that the same act can be, in the perverted freedom of man, either a use or an abuse. To eat and drink is legitimate, and yet still becomes a sin in its abuse. Sexual relations are necessary to maintain the creation, and yet can become corrupt and perverted. The existing imago Dei moves away from God, in false emancipation, while God maintains His creation by law, which is therefore good, but also reveals sin and death and is a substitute for grace, which springs out of the direct and loving communion of man with God. The Universality of the Fall and the Redemption Thus it is impossible to define sin, since it cannot be put into any category of human reasoning. To consider it only in terms of moral evil is to deny it a reality in human life, because by so doing one is apparently able to overcome in spirit its real cause. On the other hand, sin does not become an essential element in humanity after the Fall; but this should not lead us to interpret sin



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as something which morally characterizes a human being at a certain moment. Here Orthodoxy carefully avoids the two extremes. We say that sin is rooted in man’s personal existence and continually breaks the communion between God and man. It transcends all human relationships and binds everyone together in the fate which man has wrongly chosen in order to justify his freedom over against the communion of God. It is thus wrong to conceive of sin either as an essential element of the fallen nature of man or simply as the absence of moral good. We must affirm with the Bible that there is a solidarity in the sin of the human race (Gal. 3.22; Rom. 3.10–17), which reveals the appalling dimensions of a sinful act of a specific person committed at a historical moment. This act, like every concrete sinful act, springs out of the devilish forces that have penetrated human existence once-for-all through one man (Rom. 5.12). In this way Adam is the image in which man has created himself. His act does not create a biological or psychological inheritance for all generations, but all generations choose their freedom through him, in emancipation and in rebellion against God. The difficulty of Romans 5.12 (ἐφ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον—for that all have sinned) should not be resolved by a one-sided exegesis. And in the discussion as to whether this ᾧ is neuter dative, denoting the act of Adam only, or masculine dative, denoting his person, one should maintain that this ᾧ points to both and binds the whole of the human race in Adam and his act. Every one of us, as a sinful man, includes both in his being—Adam’s person and his act—for he is equally responsible for himself and for his act before God. Adam binds us together on the one hand as a person, on the other through his act of rebellion. This is an abuse both of the grace of creation and of man’s God-given freedom. The solidarity in sin of the human race is an obvious consequence. In the Bible it is, however, certain that the love of God, who creates man in His image, does not cease to maintain the relationship through the law and through the election of Israel. Through the redemption in Christ this relationship again becomes a solidarity of salvation in Him, and it is fulfilled by the Spirit. His Person, being divine and human, unites us through His act in the Spirit. This new Adam and His act stand opposed to the solidarity of sin, for in His Person Christ, through the actualization of His redemption by the Spirit in man, brings us back to communion with the Triune God (Rom. 5.12–21). Man’s solidarity in sin is a strange revelation of the wisdom and the grace of God: “For God hath concluded them all in unbelief that he might have mercy upon all” (Rom. 11.32). With St. Paul, one should say that the universality of sin explains how it is that man is saved and still remains without exception sinful. The sin of Adam binds us in sin, so that by the grace of the Triune God Christ saves us all together, opening human nature to the work of the Spirit.

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Man in the Power and Energy of the Holy Spirit It is in this sense that Christ said to His disciples: “Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you” (John 16.7). The coming of the Paraclete is the main purpose of the redemption of man in Christ. What St. Paul means by man’s being ἐv χριστῷ is possible only in the Church after Pentecost ἐv πνεύματι (in the Spirit) and in the Lordship of the same Spirit of freedom (2 Cor. 3.17–20) which leads to true humanity, recovered by man within the ecclesial community. Freedom in Communion Between the Fall and the redemption of Christ the situation of the human being in his pilgrimage toward the Parousia is based on the freedom given by God. In freedom man can become a mikrotheos, by living, of his own free will and in obedience, the life of union with God, from which comes the power to keep the commandments and to do the works that He has prepared for us (Eph. 2.10). Only thus does the human being rise above the mass existence of animal life, without being cut off from the community, in order to become a “person.” “Person” is the key word in the relationship between God and man in the Bible. Communion (koinonia) is not an abstraction of the relationship between individuals: on the contrary, it is the relationship of persons with God in Christ. “Person” is the image of God in man. It both implies and leads to freedom, in which the communion of God and man may be preserved. The final blessing accorded to human nature is to see its Creator face to face: “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13.12). This is not to be understood as a meeting between “I” and “Thou,” but rather as a re-establishing of the communion beyond death, in the way that Christ has revealed through His incarnation, redemption and resurrection. It is the light as life which brings the knowledge of intercourse: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4.6). “And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads” (Rev. 22.4). Therefore, to be a “person” is the result of acting in the freedom that God has given to man. That is why the freedom of the Christian faith is the opposite of emancipation. One is free through the “burden” of communion. This is included in the essence of man as the image of God. Freedom does not result from man’s effort to acquire independence,



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thus creating himself out of nothingness in an existential way. Freedom is the very substance of the Christian truth. It is out of freedom that the Christian truth is realized again and again. In this freedom everyone must become a christophoros and hence a theophoros. Freedom must be chosen out of free will in the same way as God Himself took flesh and made it possible for us to realize this kind of freedom by and in His Spirit: “Now the Lord is that Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3.17). When man arrives at the reality of the Christian truth, whose essence is to abide in God, to know Him, to be bound by His communion—then he is really a free being, living in the human nature restored by Christ: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8.32). Only the animal has absolute independence. Man regains his freedom, not by choosing at one moment between two alternatives, but through the power of his transformation in Christ by the Spirit, and this is a continuous process beyond the power of human moral effort: it is God who accomplishes it and not man. Man is more than his actual existence, and therefore man can be defined only by reference to what God has done. Freedom is a dynamic and divine-human element. It requires the act of the free will of man to receive redemption from God. By the Spirit this redemption works in him his regeneration. This creation is not static; it has to be seen from the point of view of man’s nature in Christ. The greatness of man is therefore the continual building up of his freedom in the Spirit, in order that, from being an individual, he may become a person, a center in which the grace of God functions and which allows itself to be used as a channel of grace to others. The nature of man, therefore, is to be found not only in God and in His incarnation, but also in His incarnate image in myself and in my fellow man. “Person” implies divine-human communion and human brotherhood in the Spirit. Man is to be defined also by his relationship with his neighbor. The Fall—sin—atomizes, separates, splits, divides: the redemption and the act of the Spirit personify, unify and only thus regenerate. The nature of man is found in the movement between these two opposites, which he cannot reconcile, but which are reconciled by the Spirit of God, given to man as new life which he appropriates in freedom. In this way Jesus as the incarnate truth becomes for man both the life and the means to achieve it in the Spirit, who brings men in the Ecclesia back to communion with the Trinitarian God. A true understanding of human nature is impossible unless we realize that man is to be re-created in communion through the energies of the Holy Spirit, and not by his own efforts, as he is in danger of thinking when he proclaims the redemption alone. This fails to take into consideration the freedom of man to move toward his regeneration by a change of heart and mind—what

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is meant in the Bible by metanoia. It fails to grasp the doctrine of man in its Trinitarian dimension. Repentance binds together all the creative faculties of sinful man and allows God to perform His miracles in His Spirit: to create saints out of sinful men. Through repentance the grace of God fulfills His purpose in creating man in His image. In His Church this image is re-established because the Ecclesia is the free place of the Spirit, where true persons are seen face to face in the light of God’s action in history. There is the communion with the Trinity, the truth whose form is freedom. Man is invited to receive the Spirit, realizing again and again in the grace of God this freedom as communion, based on the redemption given in Christ Jesus. Man is what he is when he shares in the ecclesial communion, because there he becomes more than the sinful man he was before. Therefore one should never forget his life as a member of the Church, as a charismatic being in the Spirit. Man in the Spirit Christomonistic tendencies in theology have serious consequences for the Christian doctrine of man, for they prevent us from seeing the whole man as portrayed in the Bible. The neglect of the work of the Spirit as the regenerator of the life of man has led many theologians to fail to recognize, even in Pauline theology, the lordship of the Holy Spirit, who changes man into the glory of his Lord (2 Cor. 3.18). Since the Middle Ages this theology has been concerned only with Christology. In it the problem of the justification of man by the cross and the death of Christ not only occupies the central place, but leaves no room for a theology of the new creature (καινή κτίσις), of man saved in Christ, the very purpose of justification. It is not unusual in Western textbooks of dogmatics or biblical anthropology to find not a single chapter on the kaine ktisis, on the problem of spirituality or of life transformed in Christ. Theological interest is thus limited to the nature of the imago Dei as the essence of man, to the question of what the image becomes after the Fall and how it should be understood in man restored in Christ. Now in the East the theology of the Spirit, going beyond this act of God, which is a mystery impenetrable by the human mind, has always on the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity stressed the consequences of salvation for man regenerated by the Paraclete. Thus all theology leads to the theology of man by Christ in the Spirit. The question of whether the imago in man is of his essence or only a functional characteristic, whether it is fully preserved or completely corrupted and destroyed after the Fall—all that is academic or only incidental in the Christian doctrine of man. Its purpose is the study of the restored image and of man regenerated in Christ. By the energy of the



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Spirit man rediscovers in his own heart what he is in Christ. He finds again his imago, formed by the Creator and in communion with Him. So man is called, through repentance which repeats existentially in him the death of Christ, to grasp the difficulties of a continual ascension by means of his imago: Christ as verus homo. The theosis of which the Orthodox speak, and which is misinterpreted in the West as “divinization,” is that spiritual ascension worked in us by the Paraclete in the Church, by virtue of the salvation of Christ, which leads us toward true and complete humanity. By Christification the human soul, become a pneumato-phoros (Spirit-bearer), finds again its true essence. St. Athanasius writes: “Christ became sarkophoros that we might become pneumatophoros.” Here theosis confirms the true humanity of man, just as human flesh has been glorified in Christ. The true humanity (verus homo) is found only in dynamic union with the divine grace of Christ as verus Deus. Pneumatology is a commentary on the unifying work of the Holy Spirit, bringing together the divine energies and man. Christ, who saved us and redeemed us by His blood once-for-all, speaks now (and this word now is at the center of the Christian doctrine of man); He does so through the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who regenerates us by virtue of this salvation. Gregory of Nazianzen writes that “Jesus represents the archetype of what we are and can become.” The theology of man in the Spirit, of the theosis of man, means the study of man on his way to becoming what he is in the depth of his being, in his essence as it is revealed in Christ and can be actualized by man when he is borne by the Holy Spirit toward his supreme end: to be in Christ. This being in Christ (Christification) and bearing the Spirit is not a state of bliss nor of sublime tranquility. It means that Christ incognito is in our daily life, in the depth of the hearts He has visited on the invocation of the Paraclete by the Church, and that He is manifested as light in the world in the daily life and work of Christians. Or again, truly to be in Christ is a state in which, because of the human predicament caused by sin, we are obliged to repent continually, and this repentance effects the changing into the glory of the Lord who is the Spirit. But truly to be in Christ is possible only as an existential spiritual ascension. This means that sinful man is not content to recognize that he is a sinner and then to remain so. Theosis through the Holy Spirit—and this is the essential point of Orthodox anthropology—implies a great paradox: sinful man sets out to become sinless. What is a Christian? Christocentrism will reply with its usual watchword: simul justus et peccator. But the Orthodox theology of the Spirit continues and goes beyond this fundamental idea and says that he is also a pneumatophoros, regenerated by the Spirit by the power of the salvation of Christ. For Orthodoxy, man is not defined by what he is but by what he can become in drawing near to his archetype, the icon of his imago which is Christ. The

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psychologist Jung would say Christ is the image of the religious archetype stamped on us; the Greek Fathers would add that this stamp is a type of what we can also become, repeating with St. Paul: “Not I but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2.20). Man, then, is not to be defined by his sin, by his state of bondage, but in relation to his end in Christ and the work of the Paraclete in him. The Fall forbids us to turn back toward the mystery of the creation and of the imago. Man is defined by his regenerator. Through Pentecost, the cross opens the way forward toward the resurrection, which is already present and experienced in us as a gift of the Paraclete in the Church. The Orthodox theology of man in the Spirit is reflected in the Orthodox baptism, which has a double aspect. The first is negative: man is purified from original sin by renouncing his bondage to Satan; then there follows immediately the chrismation or myron, the Orthodox confirmation of baptism which is the second, positive, aspect. Human nature purified by baptism is marked by the chrism as a sign of man’s regeneration (2 Cor. 1.22; Eph. 1.13). Henceforth the whole body of the one who is baptized bears the signs of the manifold gifts of the Spirit. Pentecost is made manifest through the myron, which transmits and transfuses into the depths of the human being the power to choose the freedom of the Spirit. By baptism the chrism of the Spirit makes the restored imago the new beginning of human life, which thus sets out toward its goal (Eph. 4.30). It is the fire of baptism which makes salvation dynamic and brings new life for a new creature. It is not a question of an automatic magic, but of the power given to man to choose the true freedom of the Spirit, of remaining in communion with the divine energies. In the Bible the freedom of man is a synonym of kaine ktisis (2 Cor. 5.17; Gal. 6.15). By delivering us from the slavery of sin, baptism gives us, through the myron of the Spirit, the supreme gift of the Trinitarian God’s creation: the freedom of the Spirit in which we can participate existentially, as regenerated creatures ascending towards our archetype, who is Christ resurrected in the flesh. The Trinitarian Basis of Ecclesiology The revelation of the Trinitarian God is shown in the Bible as a gradual development of God’s work of salvation in history. The Father elected Israel, His people; then the Son became incarnate and came in the name of the Father to make Him known to men; the Holy Spirit then came to “bear witness” to the Son—that is to say, to seal with His gifts the work of Jesus Christ. These are not to be understood as separate actions of the three Persons; each divine hypostasis participates fully in the whole economy of salvation. A distinction between them is made in the Bible only in order to make evident their union; but in order to receive the full and perfected salvation, the Church, borne up



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by the work of the Holy Spirit, must remember this distinction without reducing the importance of the action of each of the divine hypostases. Indeed, the life of the Church in its sacramental and charismatic aspects must maintain the distinction between the different charismata of the Spirit and the institutional orders. While holding both together, it must distinguish the priesthood of certain persons from the royal priesthood of all believers. In the power of the Holy Spirit it thus maintains the unity of the Body of Christ, and does so in the image of the revelation of the Trinity. Orthodox Trinitarian theology takes as its basis the life of the Church and its true qualitative catholicity. The personal element should not be subordinated to the corporate element, any more than the Body should be subjected to the disintegrating influence of individuals. Since Pentecost the Holy Spirit as Paraclete establishes distinctions within the Body and among the members, while maintaining the unity. In the same way that within the Trinity He effects the hypostatic union of the three Persons, so in the Church He creates a dynamic unity through the uncreated energies of the three Persons. In other words ecclesiology must avoid any kind of division in the Trinity; it must avoid isolating Christ. But neither must it eliminate the Christological aspect of Pentecost and so isolate the Spirit, which leads to a spiritual and sectarian ecclesiology based on emotionalism. The place of the Holy Spirit in ecclesiology reminds theology of its delicate task of expressing and clarifying the distinction between the sacrifice of Christ, once-for-all, and its actualization in history since the day of Pentecost, as an event which is both transhistorical and ever present in time. This distinction helps us to understand the unity and continuity of the divine revelation; it leaves no room for confusion between these different moments, or for their separation. The Holy Spirit of Pentecost is not other than the Spirit who moved upon the face of the waters at the creation, or who guided the prophets of God, or by whose operation the incarnation took place, or who, with the Father, confirmed the mission of the only begotten Son at the time of the baptism in the Jordan. He is the same Spirit, but His work of Pentecost is a new work, distinct in time and space, essential for the perfecting and establishing among us and in us of the reality of Christ’s presence. This distinction is indispensable; it is what maintains the concrete unity of the Body. The work of the Spirit in the Church is to effect anew in us the redemption of man in Christ. The Spirit makes the work of Christ live in us. The Christ of the incarnation, of the cross and of the resurrection revealed Himself in history in order that He might remain there, in His gifts and in the work of the Holy Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit inaugurates the era of the immediate presence of the Trinity in history, on the basis of the redemption accomplished in Christ. From the point of view of ecclesiology and history,

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this presence is the new, supreme and culminating element in the revelation of the Trinity. Indeed since Pentecost the Church has been founded in time, the gifts of God are communicable and the Word, the incarnate Logos, becomes the word which is preached and the word of the Eucharist, transmitted by human mouth and by material elements. The Word becomes the tongues of flame which remained upon the heads of the apostles and remain in the Church forever, leading the apostolic Church to the truth of Christ. The apostolic hope is fulfilled, and silent fear is transformed into the proclamation of the Gospel. The Chosen People of God now become His Body, His koinonia of saints. The flesh of the Son of Man is now clothed in heavenly glory and becomes omnipresent through the Spirit. One can neither confuse nor separate the events of salvation in Christ and at Pentecost. They belong to each other, they are the two hands of the Father’s love; they effect two works equally essential and therefore distinct. One must therefore conclude that Pentecost, or the place of the Spirit in the Church, is not an event secondary to the salvation granted to men by the redemption in Christ; rather it perfects this salvation in man and makes it present in history. It is the necessary completion of the unique work of Christ, now fulfilled and able to be communicated to men through the Church in history. On the other hand, Pentecost is not an isolated event, separated from the other events of the revelation which preceded it. Pentecost is the telos, the supreme end of the revelation in Christ. At the same time it is the beginning of a new era, that of the immediate and permanent presence of the revelation in history. Pentecost does not mark the inauguration of a religion of the Spirit, but the establishing in time and space of all the gifts of the incarnation; the salvation of Christ is given by the Spirit to His Body, which is the apostolic Church. To speak of the pneumatological aspect of the Church does not mean that the Church is a chance gathering, receiving momentary inspiration from the Spirit; it is not a heavenly and spiritual reality, nor an eschatological hope; it is an experienced and visible reality, in history and with a particular structure. The Spirit gives us invisible and spiritual gifts through visible and material means, now and in the world. In order to combat the error of subordinating the Spirit to the Son, which creates a hierarchy by Christological analogy, it would be wrong to fall into a subjective spiritualism. In this case filioquism still persists, for the Spirit as a subjective agent is seen as inferior to the event of salvation in Christ, which is merely actualized “in me.” Thus to the filioquist ontologism corresponds an individualistic existentialism which may be called “filioquist subjectivism,” which tends to emancipate the Word of God from every sacred form and to give the institution a purely human form. One then arrives at an ecclesiastical ontologism based on a Christomonistic analogy directly adapted to the



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structure of the Church, in which all idea of the Spirit present in the Church is lacking. Though opposing this serious deviation of Roman theology and seeking anew the Spirit, the Reformation keeps the filioque and so risks emptying pneumatology of the priestly Christological content which is its heart. In Orthodoxy the question of a right interpretation of the priesthood of all believers and of the order of the priesthood is of capital importance for the place of the Spirit in theology and Christology. The true doctrine of the Trinity and of the Holy Spirit shows that the one Church reflects the basic relationship between the cross and Pentecost. At the basis of a true theology of the Spirit in the Church is the ministry of the royal priesthood in its truly catholic dimensions. This includes the order of the priesthood as the personal and corporate sign of the charismatic structure of the Body. It is clear that the theology of the Trinity as it has been briefly presented here has immediate consequences for the understanding of the priesthood. The main aim of Orthodox pneumatology is to keep a balance between the corporate and personal character of the priesthood, and to exclude the possibility of any deviation in the direction of a “set apart” hierarchy, separated from the rest of the believers, or of the denial of any kind of personal priesthood. The apostolicity of the Church is not transmitted directly by the apostles either to a bishop’s see or to the faith of the community. If the first attitude localizes and individualizes it, the second makes it an abstraction, whereas it is something which is given directly, the value of which lies in its having a concrete and historical form. Apostolicity was originally a personal gift to the twelve apostles, particular persons chosen by Christ. But symbolically the twelve represent the whole Church. The Holy Spirit transmits this apostolicity to the Body of the Church; but it is as a personal gift, in the image of the Trinity, and it is made manifest through persons who are personally the bearers of this gift. In the image of the Trinity, the priesthood is a work for all, but including a particular function of maintaining the unity and communion of the Body. Its personal character requires the existence of persons, but these persons form and express together the unity of the Body. Apostolicity is given to the whole Body of Christ, to all its members called as the laos of God to be priests consecrated by divine election. But this apostolicity is expressed by the collegiality of all the bishops and by the personal priesthood in the one universal Church. Thus the universality of the Church implies neither a legal center, nor—at the other extreme—a purely abstract charismatic kind of order; it is the result of something much deeper: of qualitative catholicity, in which, through Baptism, the Eucharist, the Word of God, the full truth has been transmitted to each local Church by the Paraclete. This is the truth expressed by the personal character of the communion of the Spirit, in which the

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corporate and general element is preserved and expressed by persons chosen by the community in the power of the Spirit of Pentecost. The Church’s pneumatology teaches us that there is a royal priesthood in which all those baptized into the death of Christ by the Spirit participate. It is the first act which unites us by making us members of the Body. I dare not describe this priesthood as ontological, but, in the image of the hypostatic union worked by the Spirit within the Trinity, I shall call it an “energizing” union, since it transfuses to us the saving energies of Christ. Together with this priesthood and inseparably bound up with it, one must insist on the functional order of the priesthood of particular persons chosen by the community in virtue of its apostolicity and catholicity. But this priesthood is not necessary simply to give a structure to the Church and to make it a hierarchical society. The institution of the Church is of a different order from that of any human association; for it expresses the life of the Trinity, with no preeminence given to any one Person which would tend to separate the three. It was founded by the blood of Christ poured out for our salvation. St. Paul says this explicitly to the presbyters of the Church at Ephesus; in his words we find again the priestly character given to the whole “flock” by the blood of Christ, and the personal election of the presbyters by the Holy Spirit. “Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers (episkopoi), to feed the church of God which he hath purchased with his own blood” (Acts 20.28). The Church was instituted through the power of the redemption of Christ and thus loses the character of a human institution, since the authority of the pastoral function is established by the power of the Holy Spirit. One should not therefore think of a direct line of succession from Christ—the twelve apostles and the bishops, etc.—around which the lay members are added. The institution is not a work completed by Christ and the election of the twelve apostles. It is fulfilled by the operation of the Spirit, who, on the basis of the sacrifice of the blood of Christ, transmits salvation by means of the pastoral ministry to the whole Body of believers, which precedes and makes possible the election and ordination of the bishops and pastors, who are hearers of the call of Jesus in a special and personal way. Here we touch on the relation between the Holy Spirit and the acts of the Church—in particular, worship—which allows us to understand better the reason for the royal priesthood of all believers and also for the personal priesthood, on the basis of the sacrifice of Christ. It has to do with the eucharistic aspect of the priesthood, an Orthodox expression which is intended to distinguish it from priesthood of an institutional character. By virtue of the grace of the Holy Trinity, brought by the Holy Spirit, the nature of the Ecclesia is seen to lie in its charismatic character and not in its judicial order,



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whether this is conceived of hierarchically, de jure divino, or sociologically, as an association of believers. The Trinitarian Basis of Eschatology and Worship To this kind of theology Western scholars often object that the East generalizes too easily the effects of the incarnation and speaks of the regeneration of man and the whole creation through and in the Ecclesia. This is a serious misunderstanding; for the Eastern tradition does not generalize the impact of the two natures in Christ and include as already saved all humanity and the whole cosmos. Rather, it sees Christ through His death and resurrection as the one Pantocrator, the absolute Lord, not only as incarnate but also—indeed, mainly—as the Lord who comes. The era between His first and His second glorious coming is no longer the Old Testament era of expectation but the eschaton of the Spirit, who already fills all things, making present the whole grace of the Triune God. Eastern Orthodoxy, which people suppose to live on its sacred tradition and its historical inheritance, in reality is turned toward the future hope in the Spirit, in virtue of the salvation already accomplished in Christ in the past. An Orthodox thinker must distinguish between the historical past and tradition of the Church, where the latter differs from the former as at once its enactment and its future dimension. Through the church tradition sacred history becomes in Orthodoxy a vision of the last things in hope and anticipation and therefore as already present now. The last things are already here. Eschatology is a reality lived in the Church by anticipation and in faith. The last things have begun, and the Parousia is inaugurated by the risen Lord and by the sending of the Paraclete from the Father. The Trinitarian presuppositions of Orthodox theology and life preserve the past and open the life of the future. It is by this eschatological reality already present that Orthodox theology and especially worship can be understood and experienced. Orthodoxy tries to voice through theology, prayer and hymns the words of St. Paul which unite history and eschatology: “If any man be in Christ he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5.17). From Death to Parousia Everything we have described so far is not an objective reality which can be accepted by those who have not received the grace of God. It is not a theory or a rational system, but is based on the truth which transcends our understanding. The fact that mortal man has been visited and inhabited in his sinfulness by the eternal Spirit of God is something which surpasses human reasoning. This is the sword of truth which God has brought by His coming

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into this world (Eph. 6.17; Matt. 10.34). Christian theology and anthropology embody the most realistic understanding of human life, far above illusion and fantasy. It is the only anthropology which has shown the world how death can be transformed into a fountain of life (Rom. 5.10). It does not make death a motive for being actively concerned with this life, or, on the other hand, for nihilism and pessimism. In Christian theology and anthropology according to the Orthodox tradition, death is understood not as a negative but as a positive element of human life. Christ is chiefly “the first fruits of them that slept, for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15.20). Since the death of Jesus, death is presented by God to man as a choice in freedom for new life. Resurrection and the final Parousia are the power of a living faith. So man calls himself a sinner, repenting that he might by the Spirit be born again unto God: “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6.11). Man recognizes Christ’s death and salvation for what they are precisely at the moment of his own death, but always in the light of the resurrection. A truly biblical Christian theology and anthropology should maintain both, but they point to the final fulfillment, which is prefigured in the event of the resurrection. This “real” world is no longer real. It trembles on the verge of collapse between the victory over the principalities of this world and their final defeat. Man therefore cannot be limited to the time and space of our age. The possibility of the choice of communion with the energy of the Trinity through the Spirit opens the way to real freedom, already looking through death to the Parousia of the end. On this boundary without bounds and eternally in time, God, through the Second Coming of Christ, teaches everyone according to the measure of his faith what is man and his destiny. Only through the believer can human history cease to be a circle repeating itself and subject to the corruption of time. Every historical moment becomes thus apocalyptic; in death God’s power and victory is reflected. Man is the only being capable of recovering in Christ his full humanity, being continually renewed in the Spirit and waiting for the Lord who comes back to His history. The theme of theology and anthropology written between redemption and Parousia is the manner of the coming of Him who is already present in the Spirit. In this sense history blends into eschatology and eschatology into history. In this sense the Christian doctrine of man should never be limited to the sinfulness of man’s existence between the Fall and the Redemption, for it is nourished by the absolute Lordship of God in time. Man is never merely the man he is now. He must be defined through Him that visits him and works in him the gifts of God—the Holy Spirit. Man is therefore continuously moving between the two poles of God’s glory, even in the misery of his sins. God is



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not only He who is or He who was, but the continuously ἐρχόμενος, He who is coming, the Pantocrator (Rev. 1.8). The Worshipping Ecclesia This eschatological emphasis is clearly seen in Orthodox worship. In this Church, which is rightly named the worshipping Church, theology is the echo, the reflection, the voice of the praying and worshipping community. If the theologian can be described as “he who knows how to pray,” then it may be said that the Ecclesia exists, re-creates itself and lives primarily out of, in and for the communal worship. In the Liturgy the historical and the eschatological dimensions of the divine economy are joined in an inseparable whole. The anaphora of the holy gifts, made on behalf of the whole creation, reminds us of the past: “Remembering . . . the cross, the grave, the resurrection . . . ” but the worshipping community is already symbolically placed between the past and the final Parousia of the Trinity, and sings: “Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim sing the Thrice-holy Hymn to the life-giving Trinity.” The remembrance is directed back to the historical moment of salvation, but the communion of the elements is performed in the eschatological age of the Lord who comes. The remembrance thus becomes a present act of the community, anticipating the glorious future. It is on this basis that the Orthodox worshipping community in all its poverty and shortcomings and failures is clothed in sublime heavenly glory, receiving the Lord. Hymns, colours, icons play their part in the enactment of this event. The whole world rejoices at its regeneration. The walls of the church represent the bounds of the physical world, and under the icons of the martyrs the Church militant and triumphant become one. The walls are transparent, and already in this world one can see through them to the heavenly reality. Everyone and everything is gathered in under the Pantocrator, who is coming to judge and save at the same time, as an austere judge but also as a compassionate King. The dome bearing on its interior represents the Lord of all, the mercy of heaven, which comes with Him to re-establish the communion with God in all His glory. Orthodox worship is the trumpet of victory over death. It is the triumphant voice heard by the women bringing myrrh, who found the tomb empty. This liturgical glory is not a momentary emotional paroxysm of a sentimental enthusiasm. It is the cry of the redeemed sinners. To this heavenly reality the sinful but repentant community can respond only with the refrain of all hymns of glory: “Lord, have mercy.” Surrounded by the liturgical symbolism which tries to express the glory of Jesus as Victor between heaven and earth, between history and eternity, the eucharistic community becomes

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the receptacle of the purifying grace of the Spirit, and only through Him does it prefigure the final end. All worship, but through it the whole of Christian life, is an epiclesis, an invocation of the Spirit. Every service of worship is addressed to the Triune God, to the Father in virtue of the redemption and resurrection of the Son and through the epiclesis of the Holy Spirit. It is on this Trinitarian basis again that Orthodox worship is to be understood and shared. The unity of the cross with Pentecost manifests the presence of the resurrection here and now in the worshipping Ecclesia in every place. Christ crucified is present only through the energies of the Spirit and the gifts He communicates, which are the life of the Triune God acting in His world. The celebrant enacting the priesthood of Christ when offering His sacrifice to the Father, without for a moment being identified with Him, symbolizes the Head of the Body gathered around him, the worshipping community; but this is not possible without the witness of the Paraclete. The celebrant invokes the Father, in the name of the gathered community, the Body of Christ, to send down the Spirit, as promised by Christ after His unique sacrifice. Worship, therefore, is not only the answer of man to the call of God; nor is it a spiritual assembly where everyone is individually inspired and illumined to speak in tongues or to keep silence. It is not only a gathering for instruction and exhortation. Worship is primarily the act of God, in which the Father, answering the request of the Body of His Christ, sends His Spirit. Then Christ becomes both the offering, the slain lamb, and the unique celebrant as Head of His Body. Worship reveals the Trinitarian God coming to reestablish communion with man in the Ecclesia, and endows time with a vision of eternity, death with life, corruption with resurrection. The real presence of Christ does not depend upon the repetition of the words of the Last Supper and of the institution of the sacrament; it is not limited to the material elements of bread and wine only. The real presence of Christ is real because in the Ecclesia, He comes after Pentecost as the Father’s answer to the invocation of His Name through the Holy Spirit. This sending down of the Paraclete is the promise, the arrabon, the earnest which Christ in the name of the Father promised to His historic and apostolic Church. This presence is neither an imprisonment of Christ within our limitations nor an act of binding the Spirit, but precisely the result of His freedom as communion, based on Christ’s redemption and resurrection. In invoking the Father to send the Spirit, the Church recapitulates and enacts the whole of the divine economy and effects the continuity and unity between cross, resurrection, Pentecost and the final Parousia. Worship thus moves from the past toward the assured future. It bears the signs of the cross, but through the resurrection and by the grace of the Spirit it lives already the experience of the End. The epiclesis of the Spirit points to the



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moment of eternity already present in time and unites history with its source and purpose: the last things. True Trinitarian theology and anthropology find their expression in the Ecclesia as worshipping community. I have insisted on anthropology because Orthodoxy sees in man as a new creation the crux of Church life and theology. Christ reveals and re-creates the true man. The revelation of God in Him is the center of true Christian theology, which is not only the “logos about God” but also the logos about the God-man communion in Christ, actualized in us by the Spirit. Theology tries to express the plenitude of the act of the Trinity. And this is possible only through the presence of the Spirit, through whom alone one can call Jesus Lord (1 Cor. 12.3) and through whom alone one has access to the Father (John 14.6).

Chapter Six

Pneumatological Christology as a Presupposition of Ecclesiology

If there is one thing on which all the different church traditions agree today it is undoubtedly the christocentric approach to theological and ecclesiological subjects. This agreement is the underlying factor of all theological reflection whose aim is to hasten the rapprochement between separated church communions. Whatever our church adherence may be, we owe a great debt to Karl Barth and the so-called dialectical theologians, who were largely responsible for the return to the christocentric approach in theology in the second part of this century. Nor did Vatican II remain indifferent to this universal return of theology to a sound Christological basis. Instead of the pronouncements made in the past on the two sources of revelation, the use of natural revelation and theology as parallel sources of revelation together with personal revelation in Christ, and the definition of the Church as an Institution, the theology both of the Council and of all other Churches insists on the presence of God in Christ and His personal intervention in history as the unique head of the Church and the unique revelation of God. This christocentrism is a very encouraging sign for future developments in the realm of theological and ecumenical work. However, this return to the Christological basis is not without tendencies to over-emphasis and extremism. This is due to the lack of a balanced Trinitarian theology, for this alone can keep theological reflection from monistic tendencies. It is not sufficient to confess God’s unique revelation in Christ and our reconciliation with Him. The christocentric approach cannot be valid unless it is thought out in connection with the work of the other two Persons of the Trinity, who are revealed through Him and with Him. Otherwise christocentrism and christomonism come to mean the same thing and the effect of this on the relationship between Christ and His Church, and Christ and the 133

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world, are immediate and can cause serious deviations in both of them. Here I refer to the tendency to identify Christ with the Church as an Institution. Then one risks identifying the hierarchy with the Apostles as carrying out its ministry de jure divino, in the understanding that authority is given directly to this hierarchy by Christ alone and without reference to the whole Church as the historical community of faith. There is also the οppοsite christomonistic attitude, which arises as a reaction against the previous one, and that is to refer everything directly to Christ in a spiritualized, docetic conception of His presence, beyond or outside the church institution. Following this idea, personal faith is the only reality and our unity is in Him, so that no institutional manifestation of it by and in the historical community is necessary. The attitude of the partisans of the so-called “new theology,” which makes a direct identification between Christ and humanity in general, is to a large extent the result of a christomonistic theology. This pan-christologism affirms all human realities, especially those which are seen in the dynamic transformation and the improvement of human condition on the basis of the Incarnation and Christ’s diakonia and self-offering for the whole world. We are dealing here with the most obvious type of generalized Christology, and one which has its roots both in the identification of Christ’s authority with his representatives on earth and in the total separation between Christ and the historical Church by the docetic spiritualization of this relationship—a separation, as it were, between the head and the body. Thus, although the return to a Christological basis is a very positive element in theology today, we must examine carefully all types of christocentric approaches so as not to be led into christomonistic tendencies, particularly if we want an ecclesiology which is conceived on an authentic Trinitarian basis and in an ecumenical perspective. We must be ready to examine and criticize ourselves and each other in order to help one another in this issue, which is so vital for theology today. The following points, which are undeniable from the biblical point of view, should not be overlooked: a.  Christ can never be separated from the Spirit of God. His Incarnation and Resurrection are the work of the Giver of Life, the Paraclete. b.  It is only in the Spirit and by the Spirit that Christ is present in His Church. It is only through and in the historical community that the same Spirit establishes and puts in action the Ecclesia of Christ on the Day of Pentecost. c.  Christ had to leave the world so that the Spirit might come into it in a new way, in virtue of His offering and Resurrection, and might gather all nations into one family. d.  Christ’s presence depends on this new personal revelation of the living triune God and on the foundation and life of the historical community,



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without which neither the presence of Christ nor the faith of the individual would be possible. e.  Christ is not directly present in the dynamic human transformation, which is going on in modern societies and the efforts to improve the standard of living. The Cross, the Resurrection and the Day of Pentecost stand between the Incarnation of Christ and humanity as a whole. Through the historical community they unite, potentially but not automatically, the whole of humanity with Christ. This community is the uniting “locus,” the instrument or the means by which humanity can live with Christ, but only through a living membership in it. Christ and the world cannot co-exist without this intermediary historical reality. I do not want, by these words, to raise the question of imprisoning Christ and the Spirit within the limits of the historical Church, at a time when we live in a secularized world and when there are many non-Christian religions. Christ and the Spirit exist and are at work in the whole Creation before and after its fall, creating, regenerating and preserving it. But a pneumatological Christology guards against the dangers of christomonism and solves the problem of imprisoning Christ and the Spirit, because it is a Christology which is based on the reality of the new event in history, namely on the gathering of the whole inhabited world into the Ecclesia as one family. This does not question the presence of the triune God in His creation; but it speaks of the newness of His special action, by the Spirit, on the basis of the reconciliation of all men in Christ. The purpose of this reconciliation is to re-gather all in One. It is not the aim of pneumatological Christology to affirm and study the presence of the triune God in His Creation; this is taken for granted by Christian theologians. The aim of pneumatological Christology is the new, direct and personal presence of God by His Spirit and through a distinctive community. This is the only means by which we can receive the grace of God and experience His new communion with men who are now cleansed by the blood of Christ. It is the descent of the Holy Spirit, which makes this purification possible, but only through His historical community. DIVINE ECONOMY AND HISTORY The problem of today’s theology is the relationship between God’s plan to save the whole of mankind in Christ and the historical reality. The christocentric approach very rightly places Christ as the focal point of this relationship and emphasizes the vertical line whereby God and man meet in Him. Any true Christian theology must start from this point, but it is very important that

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this line should not remain isolated, or alone, or be overemphasized as the once-for-all event, without any mention being made of the horizontal line, namely the permanence in history, here and now, of the relationship between God and man. It is not enough to remain faithful to the Christological point of departure only; it is imperative to understand Christology in the context of the whole plan of divine economy and its realization and permanence in history. To look at christocentrism in this way, as is often done when approaching the problem today, poses serious problems for the Eastern Church tradition. In the first place it cannot be denied that according to the Scriptures Christ is never alone either in his relationship with the Father or in his relationship with the Church. Second, and no less important, is the fact that the “how” of the realization of this double relationship should be examined with the “what.” In both cases it is only through a Trinitarian theology that one can do away with a monistic, christocentric theology and ecclesiology. When I speak of Trinitarian theology I do not mean—as is usually the case in dogmatic theology—that we should have three distinct chapters, each one dealing with the work of one of the three Persons of the Trinity. This kind of schematized Trinitarian theology does not provide a sufficient basis for theology or ecclesiology. When preparing the bases of ecclesiology it is essential for Christian theology to distinguish clearly between the work of the three persons—on the basis of the “how” of the realization of the divine economy in time—and yet keep a unity between the three as One indivisible God who acts in history. The work of one person of the Trinity cannot be separated from that of the other two. The distinction is made in order to reveal the dynamic union of love, which joins the three Persons into One. This love permeates the whole creation and provides the relationship between God and man and between all human beings. Thus what is at the origin of, and what is the fulfillment of, the whole Creation is reflected as a reality in the world. It is out of love that a personal God can be in communion with Himself and with all men through the personal charismatic distinction of each one acting as a person, but acting in order to contribute through these personal characteristics (the “divisions of the charismata”) to the maintenance of the Oneness. A person can act as such only through and with another person of the same nature, otherwise he is not a person. Therefore, one has to distinguish between individuum and person, or better individual and personal existence. The first lays the emphasis on the affirmation of one’s own being as a distinctive and separate entity and on subjective consciousness, while the person tries to understand this consciousness and this self-affirmation through relationship with another person on whom he depends. The individual affirmation of a being occurs, develops and is possible only by personal existence, otherwise it remains an “a-tomon” with no possibility of communicating with other beings.



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In this sense Christians claim that God is One and Personal. He is what He is, but He is “in relationship.” He acts in accordance with His sovereign will, but He acts in time through a relationship (Christology) and establishes out of it a communion (pneumatology). Therefore, the biblical revelation cannot be schematized in three separate chapters, which are not linked. Theology has to examine the three together and at the same time try to preserve a clear distinction as far as the “how” of the personal revelation of God is concerned. Christology, though the central point of Christian thinking, cannot be considered as a chapter of theology all on its own. If this is the case one runs the risk of gradually falling either into a natural theology, in order to explain that part of reality which is not included in the isolated vertical line (God-man in Christ), or one regards the Fatherhood of God as a mythological, speculative and illusory expression. The “God is dead” theology is a type of monistic Christological natural theology, because it is thought out without reference to the “how” of the realization of the Incarnation. Its aim is not to answer the question of how Christ was incarnate and how Christ is present in the world. It simply makes a general affirmation of His presence. It is therefore not surprising that the idea of the Fatherhood of God is absent, as is the necessity of the distinctive koinonia of the Ecclesia. This is because the pneumatological element is totally absent, and thus Christology is deprived of its divine origin; it is humanized in a new monophysitic way, which is the reverse of the old one. At the same time the necessity of the ecclesial community is denied as a sine qua non condition for giving to history the permanence of the presence of Christ amongst His People. This people is “in relationship” with the whole of mankind, in a distinctive personal and communal way, established and operated by the Spirit. We have to understand that according to the Scriptures, the work of the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, is as important as that of Christ. Without this work nothing can exist in history, neither the reality of the Incarnation and reconciliation in Christ, nor personal commitment to him in his community of faith. Everything degenerates into easy generalizations and docetic abstractions, and even the vertical line (God-man in Christ) disappears as Christ becomes a principle of mature or perfect man who simply approves the progress of humanity toward an anthropocentric self-affirmation. The results of a non-pneumatological Christology are equally dangerous for traditional theology, which is returning in a monistic way to the christocentric approach. Here we run the risk of devaluating the “historicity” of the reality in time and the value of the ecclesial community. This is a reaction, because in the past there has been a tendency to identify Christ with the hierarchy of the Church and this is seen more clearly in medieval theology. In both cases, however, the Trinitarian basis of theology was not and is not fully respected. Either one rejects the Church as an Institution and separates it from

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the event, because one does not consider it to be the charismatic work of the Spirit, or one sacralizes this Institution and accepts it as the direct result of Christ’s command to Peter and the other eleven Apostles. In this latter case one endows a human structure with divine authority and gives to the successors of Peter and the eleven Apostles divine authority in their capacity as the spokesmen of this structure. It is evident that in both cases the Spirit is used either as the agent of Christ for individual salvation only, or as a guarantee of the pre-existing order de jure divino of the church institution. Of course, both these things are true (namely the individual realization of salvation by the Spirit in us as distinctive persons and the affirmation of the church institution), but only if one understands them within the communal reality of the Ecclesia. Both events take place as a result of the descent of the Spirit and the foundation and maintenance of the historical community of faith by his energy after the Resurrection of Christ and on the basis of His salvation. These deviations of contemporary ecclesiology are not only due to the fact that the event of Pentecost is no longer considered the sine qua non condition of the historical realization in time and its continuity in history of the Christevent. There is also a more profound reason to which they are due and this is that Christ’s Incarnation is thought of only as the interpretation of the “what” and “why” of the interpenetration between God and man. Thus Christology is usually thought to be a separate chapter of dogmatic theology. Interest is shown in such subjects as: what is Christ, how should one understand the two natures which are united in him, and above all what is the purpose of His Incarnation? Thus the interest is in the fulfillment of His mission to redeem the world. This type of Christology does not correspond exactly to the biblical notion of revelation, because it neglects the basic element of the “how” of this interpenetration between God and man. The Spirit of God did not act only on the Day of Pentecost and after it; He played a role in the Creation, He inspired the prophets, and above all it is He who realizes the Incarnation in time (Luke 1.35; Matt. 1.18). It is the Spirit who, in a personal way, creates the “link” between God and man, through a chosen woman who gave birth to Jesus in the town of Bethlehem at a specific time. The creative Spirit is He who gives personal existence and form to the revelation of God and acts in time in a concrete way. Jesus, as the Christ of God, is sanctified and chrismated by the Spirit (Luke 4.18), and this is the essential proof of His messianic role (Matt. 12.18). It is in the power of the Spirit that He acts (Matt. 12.28; 4.1). The whole life of Jesus as the Christ of God depends on the Spirit and is inspired by the Spirit. The personal revelation of God in Christ cannot be realized or fulfilled without the action of the Spirit. The earthly manifestation of the Word of God in the person of a man begins with the Incarnation, as does the era of the breakthrough of the Paraclete into history, in a new



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way, where He has been acting right from the beginning of creation. Jesus, as the Christ of God, is full of the Spirit of God. The whole Trinity is present in, and acts through Him in a new and personal way now. Knowing, or better acknowledging, Jesus as the Christ of God means knowing the Father (John 14.7). Everything He does as the Incarnate Word of God depends on and co-exists with the work of the Father, because of the energy of the Spirit operating in Him. In the Incarnation and the historical life of Jesus the energy of the Spirit is the decisive element, because it is the Spirit who makes the “link” possible and who maintains, by His work, the union between God and man in the historical person of Jesus. This is a union without fusion or confusion. The Word of God became Incarnate in a historical person who lived in time and in a specific place. This action of the Spirit marks the climax of the divine economy, when it is seen as realizing the relationship of this economy for the whole of mankind and the whole of history. The Spirit communicates, personifies and actualizes in time the personal revelation of God. It is in Him and His energy that the plan of God is actualized and made a historical reality. The Spirit is the life-giving and the life-renewing Spirit (Titus 3.5). This is clearly seen in connection with Christ’s work of redeeming the world and His Lordship over all powers and principalities. It is the same Spirit who at the culminating moment of Christ’s messianic work raised Him from the dead, thus making the sacrifice of the Cross into the final victory. This means life out of death for all who believe in Him. The Holy Spirit, who gives the form of a man to the Word of God, gives him new life out of death: “The Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead . . . shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwells in you” (Rom. 8.11). This is the climax of the energy of the Paraclete. With Christ he realizes in time full communion between the eternal Father, the source of life, and man, through the risen Christ and his faithful people, whom he redeems from death. Pneumatological Christology acknowledges that the Spirit acted as a personal God in the Incarnation, the chrismation of Jesus as the Messiah and the Resurrection of Christ, which meant new life for man and victory over death. The aim of this pneumatological approach to Christology is not only to arrive at a more flexible and all-embracing ecclesiology. It is based on a study of the mystery of the Incarnation, the Reconciliation and the Resurrection of Christ and His immediate presence with those who believe in Him. The Spirit is essential for the personal revelation of God, and it is He who enacts and completes the divine economy. Without him neither the Incarnation nor faith in Christ and His Lordship is possible. That is why the Bible says “no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12.3). On the other hand, as a result of Christ’s redemption in history, the way in which one interprets the Bible regarding the once-for-all event of reconciliation

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in Christ is very important. One has to consider its historical realization, continuity and permanence in a visible form in the new worldwide supra-national and supra-cultural community, which extends the Jewish idea of the People of God to all nations. Here, the christological basis needs a strong pneumatological qualification also. Christ can only be present in His Church by the Spirit and everything that the Church has as a historical reality: its own being, its sacraments, its ministry, its mission—in fact, everything—is in virtue of Christ’s redemption and is made possible in time only by the “descent” of the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and is sent by Christ in time, as a result of His Cross and Resurrection. The purpose of this “descent” is to establish the Church in time. Without the Day of Pentecost there is no Church and therefore no historical reality of the presence of Christ. Not until the Day of Pentecost were the Apostles able to start their apostolic ministry or their mission, nor were they able to establish the visible, structured, charismatic and universal community. This community is clearly manifested locally and recognized by the persons whom the Apostles appointed (with the agreement of the people of each local community) to be the personal diaconate to this community. The Apostles were given the authority to establish the universal community by Christ, but the power and means to do it were given by the coming of the Spirit. As eyewitnesses of the Resurrection, the Apostles testify to the preaching of Christ to the uttermost ends of the earth and the final inclusion of all in this community. No one of the Apostles was the first presbyter or the bishop-ἐπίσκοπος (the two terms were not clearly distinguished at the time of the first community) of a particular town; but they were as the Twelve, the personification of the qualitative catholicity, the fullness of truth given only to the whole Church. As a result of the descent of the Holy Spirit they were able to start the personal ministry of the preaching of the kerygma throughout the whole world. As eyewitnesses they formed a “link” between the historical event of the Resurrection and the permanent historical presence of the Risen Lord among His people. This “link” is based neither on a de jure divino authority of the Apostles, which was then transmitted directly to the bishops, nor on the faith of the congregation or the preaching of the Word of God only. This “link” between the Resurrection and the historical reality of the Risen Lord is possible through a new intervention of the Holy Trinity by the Spirit again in time. Now that the Risen Lord has completed his once-for-all work of salvation, the Spirit acts through specific persons, for a specific reason, at a specific moment. This new intervention of the Spirit at Pentecost is a new personal revelation of the whole Trinitarian God in history. This time the revelation comes from the third person of the Trinity, the Paraclete of Truth, the Creator-Spirit of the new creation in time on the Day of Pentecost. It is thus that we should understand the words of Christ:



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“It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you” (John 16.7). One should not think of this newness as an isolated act on the part of the Third Person only, for then one falls into the danger of “pneumatomonism.” This newness is a result of action by the whole Trinity (“proceeding from the Father and sent by the Son” [John 15.26]), and it consists in realizing and actualizing in time the once-for-all event in and of Christ, the personal “link” between Him and all men. This is how we should understand the words of Christ about the absolute necessity of the Paraclete, who acts with Christ and is present through Him with the Apostles, and through them with all who believe in the kerygma “when he the Spirit of truth will come, he will guide you unto all truth: for he shall not speak of himself. . . . He shall glorify me for he shall receive of mine and shall declare it to you” (John 16.13–14). A pneumatological Christology should never introduce the idea of a separation in the Personal God; for he, being one, is the perfect communion in essence. There is only a distinction in the energy, action and revelation of God’s grace through the Son and in the Spirit. Everything comes from the Father, for He is the origin, the dynamis and the telos of everything, but it comes through the work of the other two persons also. Everything will return to Him and be subjected to Him (1 Cor. 15.28). But this revelation of the triune God in history is actualized personally and historically by Christ and the Holy Spirit together, and on the same level, through distinctive acts of revelation. A pneumatological Christology is based on the Christ-event, but sees it as possible only through the act of the Spirit, who makes the Word of God Incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. It is also based on the event of Christ’s reconciliation, but in accordance with the biblical message insists that this event is possible only in time through the new and final “coming,” “descent” and “energy” of the same Spirit. Pentecost is as important as the Cross and Resurrection in the revelation of the Triune God. TOWARD A PNEUMATOLOGICAL ECCLESIOLOGY To approach Christology from the angle of the “how” of the realization in time of the divine economy by the Spirit opens the way to some fundamental affirmations regarding the role of the same Spirit in founding the Church. Thus it poses more profoundly the problem of the nature of the Church. a.  The Church appears to be the historical reality through which the era of the Paraclete breaks through in history. The Church is not only a sociological gathering of people who have the same principles. It is first and foremost

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the fulfillment of the salvation in Christ in a concrete historical form. The wholeness of the Trinitarian grace inspires the life of the Church. The descent of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost in a new and special way means the completion of the Christ-event by a further Trinitarian revelation. The Church is not only people who are called to salvation but also the embodiment of grace, where salvation is received by Word and Sacrament. The Church is not an anthropocentric institution but a theocentric organism inspired by the Spirit. Therefore its value is neither in its hierarchical and juridical structure nor in its right administration of Word and Sacrament. This attitude shifts the center of the Ecclesia to the anthropological side and diminishes the creative energy of the Spirit, which is the main constitutive element of the Church. The Church is the receptacle of the Trinitarian presence in history through the action of the Spirit. To minimize this primordial, basic and fundamental aspect of the Church is to reduce the role of the Spirit, who makes historically real Christ’s redemption for all men here and now. If this action on the part of the Spirit is denied, the Church becomes anthropomorphic and is reduced to a sociological institution. The Ecclesia, which exists in Christ alone (without the “link” of the Spirit of Pentecost), is separated from the historical reality and remains as something remote, eschatological and spiritual. It is here that the roots of ecclesiological Docetism are to be found, and a danger of divine economy becoming spiritualized appears. The remedy is not to identify Christ and His Church directly, because then there is a risk of a human institution becoming sacralized and the anthropocentric approach becoming affirmed in an absolute way. Only the Spirit unites the head, Christ, with His Body, the historical Ecclesia. This union is historically real and at the same time avoids the fusion, confusion or full and direct identification between Christ and His Church. b.  The Church is therefore neither a sacred institution nor an association of believers only, but rather the first reality in history, its axis and its center. The Church manifests the presence of Christ in the Spirit among men here and now. This approach to the understanding of the mystery of the Church places the emphasis on the importance of the act of God through His Spirit, and does not minimize the divine origin and deeper raison d’être of the Church, for to do this usually results in an anthropocentricsociological conception of the Church. The pneumatological approach to the nature of the Church implies a thorough appreciation of the work of sanctification by the Spirit. This sanctification is often understood either as sacralization or consecration, or as an individual and subjective appropriation of Christ’s redemption by the Spirit. But sanctification is far more the fundamental structural action of the Spirit, who is continuously



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uniting the Head with the Body of Christ and thus establishing an inseparable union between Christ and His people. This is not a simple act of setting apart, or sanctifying by giving salvation to each person individually, but it is rather the sanctification through the Sonship of the people of God operated in this history who can, in the Spirit, call him Abba, Father (Gal. 4.4). It is not a sacred order nor a proclamation of the Word which constitutes the Church, but rather the sanctification of the Spirit, namely the union between the Head and the members of the Body, who share in the Holiness of God. Sanctification by the Spirit means that the sinful members of the Body live in the holiness of Christ; it means the act of the Spirit who circulates the blood of the Cross to all members of the Body after he has brought about the union between the Head and the Body. The Church embodies this act of the Spirit, and exists only as a result of this act. The Church is not primarily, and only, the hierarchy and its members, that is “us.” It is the Spirit whose purifying action reunites the Body with the Head of Christ. Therefore, the Church is holy, and its members, though sinful, can be called Saints (Rom. 1.7; 1 Cor. 1.2, etc.). These Saints have no new ontological status, but they are sanctified by participation in the sanctifying energy of the Spirit, for he grafts them into the Body of Christ. That is why the Church is holy and should never be called sinful. However, this expression does not emphasize the anthropocentric understanding of the Church. Because men, the members of the Church, are sinners, the Church should not also, as a result of the sins of men, be called sinful. This attitude shows a monophysitic ecclesiology, in which the human element has swallowed up the divine action of sanctification by the Spirit. There are expressions in today’s ecclesiology which show men’s desire to repent, but this does not mean that the Church is sinful. We can only repent in the Church, for it is here that we receive the Spirit of repentance. It is absurd to attribute to the Church ontological categories, which are entirely impossible for its primary basis of being. The essence of the Church is the purifying act of the Spirit. The act of the Spirit in Word and Sacrament is the first constitutive element of the Church. Baptism, the Word and the Eucharist, which are the immediate, visible manifestations of this holy action of the Spirit cannot be called sinful. The Church can more easily be found in this action than in our sin, which is continuously being purified by this very action. The Church is not primarily and only “us”; we belong to the Church; we are members of the Church; we are regenerated in the Church; but the heart of the Church is the energy of the Spirit who sanctifies us. The Nicene Creed mentions first the oneness and then the holiness of the Church as the second nota ecclesiae, before it speaks of its catholicity and apostolicity. If our faith in this holiness is shaken, then our

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faith in the catholicity and apostolicity becomes impossible and the unity of the Church is at stake. If the Church is not holy, then there is no hope for its members to be revivified and become members of the Body of Christ and a part of the People of God, redeemed and transformed into a new life. c.  We can speak about “renewal of the Church,” using the term “Church” in the same anthropocentric way, but here again there is a risk that the term “Church” may be used in a one-sided monophysitic way, as being constituted only by the members of the congregation. This means that the renewing act of the Spirit in the Church is not taken into serious consideration. This act, which is the energy of the Paraclete, cannot be renewed, for it is the all-renewing and regenerating grace of God in the Church. That is why all the verbs used in connection with renewal in the Bible are used in connection with persons who are inside the community of the Church, rather than in any abstract notion of “Church” and “World.” The verbs anakainizein (Heb. 6.6), anakainousthai (2 Cor. 4.16; Col. 3.10) and the noun anakainosis (Rom. 12.2; Eph. 4.23; Rom. 12.1) point to the need for a continuous process of renewal of personal faith and commitment. Another example is “washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3.5), where reference is made to renewal through baptism. Ephesians 4.23 speaks in this context of renewal in the spirit of your mind, where the pleonasm of “spirit” and “mind” qualifies the continuous act of personal regeneration, which stirs up the gift of renewal received in Baptism. Following their ecclesiological presuppositions, church traditions maintain two slightly different positions on this point; one is to use this personal renewal for speaking of the renewal of the Church, because it lays the emphasis on the Church as the gathered community of the faithful, while the other is to avoid speaking of the renewal of the Church, because the Church is seen primarily as the event of the Holy Spirit. There is therefore again a difference here between an anthropocentric ecclesiological approach to the text and a theocentric one. The first speaks of the renewal of the Church while the second prefers to speak of the renewal of the life of the Church. It is possible to make the two lines of thought converge, if both avoid an exclusive attitude and admit that in both cases reference is made to the renewal of personal faith and through it to the renewal of the church community, as a whole, within the Holy Ecclesia. In order to understand better how one may speak of “renewal of the Church” and more especially “renewal of the world,” one should use the texts referring to the kaine ktisis and the renewal of the whole creation (2 Cor. 5.18; Rev. 21.5ff.). 2 Corinthians 5.17 does not permit anthropocentric or church-centred exegesis only. It says: “If any man be in Christ,



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he is new creation.” The original Greek text betrays a verbal discontinuity, which is very significant. It says: “If any man be in Christ, new creation.” There is no verb. Behind the event in Christ and the understanding of the new creation is hidden the universal event which connects the individual and his faith with the whole reality of the world seen in a new perspective; what is hidden in this discontinuity is the fundamental presupposition, namely the recapitulation of all in Christ, who is the head of the Ecclesia. To be incorporated in the act of God, a fact which causes not only the believer in Christ but also the whole world to be renewed, is the focus of a wider understanding of the renewal of the whole creation from a center which is the perpetual event of Pentecost, the historical Ecclesia. That is why in the Book of Revelation the text “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21.5) is preceded by the vision of a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21.2) and the “great voice out of heaven saying, ‘Behold the tabernacle of God is with men and he will dwell with them’” (Rev. 21.3). The vision of the “new Jerusalem” is not entirely eschatological. Jerusalem is the city in which the Church was founded; but now it is the “renewed” city of God, and the tabernacle is the place, where He is really present and dwells among men in history. Right from the beginning of the Christian era the new Jerusalem was understood as the renewed alliance of God with men, which he made “out of heaven”—that is, through his sovereign act. Everybody, and particularly the Eastern theological tradition, understands by this the Ecclesia of God, so that the Church appears to be the connecting link between the action of God in his personal revelation and the renewal of all things. Therefore the phrase “Behold, I make all things new,” can be understood only as referring to the continuously renewed event of the foundation of the Church. Of course, the text has an eschatological significance, but that does not mean that it should be understood as referring only to a future event after the end of times. The continuous “coming” in this text has to be understood as emphasizing the dynamic and charismatic event of the Ecclesia, which is permanently renewed by God and which is oriented toward the future and toward the second coming of Christ, which shows the final fulfillment. But Jerusalem, the Holy City, is at the same time already a historical reality; it is renewed now, for its origin has been changed “out of heaven.” No one can understand Revelation 21.3, “Behold, I make all things new,” without Revelation 22.1–3, which is inseparably connected with it. There we have another vision of “the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, which flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb, and ‘in the midst of it was the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruits and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.’” The process of continuous renewal, which starts from God the Father in virtue of the Sacrifice of the slain Lamb of God

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communicated by the Spirit, is clearly stated here. The Ecclesia is the tree of life in the midst of the world, whose twelve fruits are for the healing of the nations. The movement always comes from God through the Church, and by the fruits of the Church, to and for the world. If, for a moment, we lose sight of this biblical basis, we risk being one-sided in our ecclesiology and in our understanding of the world and its relationship to the Church and therefore in the whole problem of the renewal of all things. This approach to the question of renewal shows: a.  that the Church is totally dependent on the action of the Spirit, which flows into it and through it into the world. This action “comes” from God and in virtue of the sacrifice of Christ; b.  that the Church is planted in the world like “a tree established in the midst of the street”; c.  that a unilateral introverted ecclesiasticism, which neglects the outward movement, is totally excluded. Everything is done in and through the Church for the “healing of the nations.” In accordance with the text the Ecclesia, though established in history, is not a closed circle of sacramental operations, which have no connection with the world. But on the other hand, the Ecclesia cannot be simply and easily identified with the world. It lives in and for the world, but it is not of the world. It comes primarily from the continuous act of the Spirit. All images of the Church in the Bible reflect its dynamism and its obligation to be the channel through which new life is poured into the world, thus renewing it. The event of Pentecost stands once and for all as the realization of the permanence of this act of renewal, which takes place within the communion but flows outside it. The Holy Spirit establishes the foundations of the building through men in history. They must continue to build it further on the foundation, which has been laid. On the Day of Pentecost we see, as one moment in continuity, Peter announcing the saving Word of God, which leads to Baptism and Eucharistic Communion. All these three together are the inevitable departure from which alone the world can be renewed. They remain as permanent signs of the universal ecclesial communion, which exists in unbroken continuity throughout the ages, like flowing crystal water, refreshing and renewing history through mission and diakonia. d.  To consider pneumatology in this way helps us to understand the nature of the charismata, which are given for the purpose of renewal, without endangering the inner coherence of the one ecclesial communion. The charismata have the same origin, function and purpose as the tongues of fire of the Holy Spirit, which were spread out individually on each Apostle



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(diamerizomenai, Acts 2.3). They were not split but united. In the same way the divisions of the charismata (1 Cor. 12.4) have to be understood as energies of deaconship (1 Cor. 12.5), which enable the discernment of spirits (1 Cor. 12.10). The charismata as gifts of grace of the Holy Spirit are given for the building of the body, and through this act of building they reach out to the whole world to renew it (Rom. 1.11, 12.6; 1 Cor. 7.7). Therefore charismata are recognized as being the true gifts of the Holy Spirit, if they are received inside the ecclesial communion for its further growth (1 Peter 4.10). The Spirit then uses them to manifest the dynamic presence of Christ in everything (1 Peter 4.10–11). This understanding of grace does not exclude the Holy Spirit from being at work in the whole creation. Everything in the universe is a charisma of the Holy Spirit, but from the Day of Pentecost onward, because of the sacrifice of Jesus, the new communion is formed through the historical establishment of the Church as a new center of history. It is the same Spirit who was active in the creation, but now as the river of crystal water He heals the nations through an established, visible and historical community. There is a great reciprocity between the charismata of the world created by the Spirit of God and the new charismata given now through the Church by Him also. The first, however, have to become the receptacles of a “new” grace, which is possible only through the constitutive signs of the ecclesial communion as described above, Word-Baptism-Eucharist. It is this new grace that flows into the world and brings about, through the charismata, a fulfillment of the creation, by establishing the communion of the Holy Spirit as a sign of Christ’s presence in history. It is always through the Ecclesia and its inner life that this happens. This is the object of our vision and of our action as renewed members of the One Ecclesia. Therefore, the theme of renewal, on the basis of the biblical texts, shows the road we have to follow when dealing with the problem of renewal in the Church and in all things. What is behind the biblical texts on renewal and what needs to be studied carefully is the theme Ecclesia, creation and continuous new creation. It demands a re-evaluation of the past, from a Church, which is looking toward the future in readiness for a new action undertaken together. This is happening in the “now” (nyn, used in the biblical sense) and saves us from the fatalism of historicism and sterile traditionalism as well as from enthusiastic futurism, for these conceptions kill all attempts at renewal in the Church before they start. Our vocation is for the “now” of the Church, but a now which is fed by the past and looks toward the future. If we have experienced together the continuity of the One Church, renewal means for us at this moment the obligation to preach together the same Gospel. Our

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attempts at renewal in the world today presuppose a renewed understanding which demands three continuously renewed acts: a.  confessing the one undivided Church, which renews us by the Spirit inside this one Church; b.  accepting visible signs of this oneness, which renew our action together at the present time on the basis of our common past; c.  growing toward perfect unity in the newness of life. Thus a pneumatological ecclesiology should look at the Church both as the continuously renewed event of the Spirit and also as an established historical reality. If the act of the Spirit is recognized as the second personal revelation of God in history, if Pentecost signifies a new and decisive epiphany of the Trinitarian God in time, which is as important as the first one in Christ and which is inseparable from it, then the Church is God’s permanent gift to men, given in Christ. The Church, then, has to be accepted as the great sacrament, the mysterion par excellence, the building, the holy oikodome of God through the Spirit. If we believe in the holiness of the Church, we respect this reality, which is revealed and is present in time. Out of this comes a new life for all men in Christ. Without firm faith in this holiness there is nothing that binds us together in the Church. Through this faith we are called to respect absolutely the priority of the saving grace of God, which transcends, overcomes and purifies all human sin. Therefore, what appears to us as an institution, as a poor, defective human organization, has to be understood and accepted as a charisma of God, and as a means of receiving His grace. The failure of the human element in the Church does not prevent the Church from being holy and from bringing the grace of God to us or from being the channel of the energy of the Holy Spirit. We can and must repent continuously in the Church for all our shortcomings; but again, this repentance is possible and has meaning only within the Holy House of God. Further, to accept fully the role of the Holy Spirit in the founding and preserving of the Church as a historical reality means that this Church is not only in via “on the way” and that it can easily change important and fundamental structures, become monarchic or polyarchic, have an institution and then reject it in order to create another one. The Church as established and in continuity is in via toward its eschatological end. It is in via not in the sense that it is uncertain of its own historical reality. It is in history, that it is established. It is an event in the Spirit, but at the same time it is a permanent event, present, structured and ordered by the same Spirit through human means in this world. Therefore the biblical notion of “the People of God” should not be used as signifying a different notion from the notion of



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the “Body of Christ.” All the images of the Church given in the Bible try to clarify the mystery of the new act of God after Pentecost by means of wellknown human realities, so that we do not fall into the dangers of abstraction. The human element is stressed equally in all of them in order that the reality of the act of the Paraclete can be clearly seen and believed. The divinohuman reality of the Church is described by these biblical images in very realistic terms for the benefit of the members of the historical community. It is evident that we are only part of the People of God in via, if we are members of Christ’s Body, and are awaiting the final fulfillment. The “arrabon” of the Spirit given in history, through the Church, to all men (2 Cor. 5.5) is a “guarantee” that God has established a visible, real community structured by His grace in order to communicate with all men in this world. A pneumatological ecclesiology respects the importance of this act of God in history; it respects the historicity, the facticity, and the visibility of the earthly community, for it is through this alone that this act is possible. Pneumatological ecclesiology requires a belief in the Church as the most important charisma of God through His Spirit in virtue of the Resurrection of Christ. This chapter does not intend to discuss the problems of ecclesiology. It deals only with the basis of a right christological approach to ecclesiology. It is therefore written only as a prolegomena to ecclesiology, and its purpose is to be of use to all traditions by a theology of the Holy Spirit which understands the Church as a theocentric event in which the institution is seen as a charisma and there is no separation between the two. It deals with the presupposition of ecclesiology, namely the “how” of the relationship between the once-for-all Christ-event and its permanent establishment and continuity in history through the Church. By this is meant not simply the relationship between the Risen Christ and Pentecost, but the relationship between the Word of God and the “how” of the Incarnation. Thus one can appreciate the great importance of the operation of the Holy Spirit in the whole divine mystery regarding the relationship between the Triune God and humanity, the world and history. That is why the chapter is titled “Pneumatological Christology.” The author believes that without this strong pneumatological approach to Christology it is impossible to face the problems of ecclesiology in a wider sense, and that is why “as a presupposition of ecclesiology” is added to the title. It is evident that on this basis one can approach more comprehensively the four notae Ecclesiae of the Creed as well as the ministry and authority of the Church, which are the stumbling blocks of today’s ecclesiology. However, this subject has not been dealt with in detail in this short chapter, which is only meant as an introduction to facilitate a wider and more flexible understanding.

Chapter Seven

Secular and Christian Images of the Human Person

The alternatives to Christian faith are usually centered around either philosophical-idealistic or scientific-realistic humanisms. In contemporary revolutionary society, however, as well as in theological circles dominated by a political, contextual and inductive theology, a new type of humanization is professed and practiced, which is too complicated to be objectively defined. The value of the human person is now rooted in his identity and solidarity with his participation in social revolution and resistance to ecological crisis. This either non-Christian or pro-Christian humanism nourished by utopian hope, in most cases, accentuates the movement forward toward the coming age of authentic selfhood by overcoming a manifold self-alienation of human beings in modern society of consumption and social injustice. The human person can be grasped now only in his struggle for establishing freedom, justice and peace on a universal scale. The subject of anthropology, already in the past central and complicated, becomes in our days for this additional reason more actual, interesting and imperative for contemporary systematic theology. The ideological-political activist replacing unconsciously by his revolutionary impetus his innate religious trends and the Christian pro-socialist revolutionary interpreting in a radical way the social message of the Bible converge in a new image of man within the framework of the Christian tradition challenging all of our theological concepts of the Imago Dei as unilaterally transcendental and therefore unrealistic. It is the paramount duty of Christian theology to face this challenge, which is to a great extent born in its own milieu, for the sake of elaborating a more authentic Christian anthropology taking into consideration the new signs of our times. At the same time, scientific research, by overcoming its deterministic trends of the past as well as a mechanistic concept of creation and its function, invites 151

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a new kind of approach to understand human being, which allows greater flexibility in scientific humanism and betrays a greater sensitivity (on account also of the ecological crisis) in face of the non-scientifically observable parts of human existence. Without pretending that modern science can or should adopt the category of mystery in its methodology—it would not be science anymore—it can, however, become more easily today a participant in an interdisciplinary approach to anthropological problems with depth-psychology, anthropological philosophy and theology of the humanum. These preliminary and introductory remarks prescribe the structure of my study. It is evident that we cannot deal directly with Christian anthropology as an isolated subject within systematic theology: I mean not simply with Christology, which is easily understandable, but with cosmology when it is conceived again not only as nature, but as a comprehensive reality of the whole created Cosmos. Secondly, we have to be seriously challenged by modern scientific and societal psychological humanisms; and then thirdly reexamine our concept of the imago Dei. Finally, fourthly, I would like to attempt a reinterpretation of the typical, central Orthodox concept of the theosis of human person (deification of man) as a contribution to anthropology on the part of the ancient Eastern tradition. ANTHROPOLOGY AND COSMOLOGY: MAN, NATURE AND HISTORY Anthropology is central for all Christian theologies, especially for the Eastern Orthodox tradition, because of the Logos theology (i.e., of the Incarnate Word of God, in Jesus, in a historical person). This centrality, due to the Christology of the Incarnate Word, makes some Orthodox theologians give priority to anthropology over abstract and theoretical theology.1 Especially because of the incarnation and the operation of the Spirit, as Paraclete, comforting and fulfilling the whole creation to its maximum highest possible end, set by God the Creator, the humanum of man is seen in his divine origin and purpose. In this way, the whole creation is centered around the human being in process of transfiguration from humanity to divinity on the basis of the Incarnation of the Logos and the operation of the Spirit. Consequently, man, in Eastern patristic thought, is regarded as “microcosmic.”2 He is the link between God and the rest of the created world because all things have been created for him as the last and supreme creature, as the King on the earth,3 and he has to act as such because of the commandment of God and in the light of the Incarnation of His Logos in the form of a man. In the Bible, to man are attributed all the characteristics of superiority and



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uniqueness over the whole created world, physical and animal, because Christ as a man becomes by the grace of God the pivot event in history. The human being becomes the center of the universe, which has no more value than the soul of one single human person. This anthropocentricity belongs to the backbone of the new gospel of salvation as good news. It is far more radical than the ancient Greek concept of the centrality of man in nature because of his rational being and immortal soul or than the ancient oriental wisdom, because of the identity of man with the Supreme all-embracing One and Whole. In Christianity the uniqueness of man is grounded in the fact of God “humanizing” in history, here and now in the form of a man. The qualification of the uniqueness of man is not expressed by reference to God’s gift or man’s similarity on the basis of man’s reasonable nature. The Christian understanding of man’s uniqueness is due to Christ’s event in history par excellence. That is why Christian anthropocentricity in creation is the authentic new message of the Christian faith and the most revolutionary event of history from within. This human centrality in creation has also nothing to do with all kinds of evolutionary theories, suggesting that the human being occupies the highest climax due to his conceptual thought or orientation toward the future, because he is on the way toward the Omega point (Ω) of creation.4 The Christian centrality of man is the entirely new event erupting into history as the one and unique explosion in the world’s physical, biological and historical order. It is self-caused by “the other side” of nature and history. That is why the effects of the Christian anthropocentricity are also radical and earth shaking. Nature has been desacralized from all latent religious mythologies and all magic, animistic or totemistic trends. Man is dealing with it now as superior and from a distance. His techne (craft) became a process toward technology. His mechanical power is now extended to increase his thinking operation by electronic machines. The revolution brought about by their Christian human centrality had, to a certain extent, an immediate effect, together with other forces on man’s behavior vis-à-vis nature. Dealing with anthropology today, we have to face the problems arising out of this concept of uniqueness and centrality of man in the creation of God. The question is a double one: first, whether the authentic Christian understanding of the uniqueness of man implies such a superiority inside the creation, especially vis-à-vis nature; and second, how are we to conceive man as the center of creation without falling into a kind of egocentric anthropomonism exploiting nature to the maximum possible point, violating it by using natural resources and causing a total disorder in human relationships? It seems to me that without reexamining the notion of anthropocentricity and uniqueness we should not attempt any positive encounter between secular and Christian images of man today.

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MAN, CREATION AND HISTORY: AN UNBROKEN CONTINUUM When we speak of the necessary interdependence between anthropology and cosmology we have to think of the Cosmos as a comprehensive reality, the whole created world comprising geosphere as well as biosphere and noosphere. In other words, one has to distinguish between material elements of creation in the narrow sense of “nature” and the order, which is the result of the summing up of all created things in a whole of the total reality, representing the world system as universum. Cosmos signifies the whole and the totality of the creation (τὸ ὅλον and τὸ πᾶν).5 Cosmology, in general, presupposes the notion of order, unity and beauty conceived as an intelligible, beautiful and harmonious universal all-embracing reality. The logos about the Cosmos in cosmology is not simply the use of human reason as an instrument for reflecting on nature and the material world. It represents more deeply an act of thinking on the unavoidable experience of man’s inner relationship with the whole of created reality. Cosmology denotes solidarity with the overwhelming given reality without which human existence is unthinkable. Cosmology is the commentary of the deep, unbroken, inseparable interdependence of the created world and mankind within the One Universe. Certainly, this kind of deeper and broader understanding of cosmology is due to the comprehensive aesthetic notion of Cosmos as “jewel” in ancient Greek philosophy, according to which cosmology was directly linked with theology and the act of creation by the Demiourgos, the wise Creator, God. That is why this kind of cosmology betrays pantheistic trends. The act of creation of the Cosmos is of a transcendental nature. It is grasped, however, as the most immanent reality expressing the wisdom of God in nature. This is the heart of natural theology in classic philosophy, whence natural religion, the respect and honor given to nature and rational paganism are to be understood. An ancient temple and a statue of religious significance are at the same time by their beauty and absolute harmony a grateful answer to the beauty of Cosmos as a gift of God. It is also incarnation of His presence in nature, achieved by human rationality and art. The word physis (nature) in this context cannot be used as a synonym of Cosmos in cosmology. Rightly, one has to speak of physiology in the sense that physis denotes something created and existing objectively and immediately grasped by senses and reason. Further, physis-nature refers to the inner, deeper quality of things, man and God. It is another term for denoting the unchanging ousia as the inner ontological qualitative structure of being beyond corruption and change. It is, therefore, both a term signifying created reality



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and its constitutive qualitative principle. We use it in both senses by speaking of φύσις as nature and as physis-nature of God, man and things. Nature, however, is more and more understood within the limits of the “natural” (i.e., what is distinctive from accidental, technical or artificial). It refers, mainly, to the created world without including humanity or the works, the objects produced by human action. It is, perhaps, Christian faith that inspired in a latent and progressive way this kind of separation between Cosmos and physis and concretized nature within the limits of the created material reality, while the term continues to be used in philosophy and theology. We can now understand why the Bible makes use of this term only either in this latter sense (2 Peter 1.4: ἵνα γένησθε θείας κοινωνοί φύσεως, “That you might be partakers of the divine nature”) or in most of the cases in the sense of the “natural” being and character, “by birth” something rooted within man “by nature” (cf. Rom. 2.14: ὅταν γάρ ἔθνη τά μή νόμον ἔχοντα φύσει τά τοῦ νόμου ποιεῖ, “do by nature the things contained in the law”) whence we have the idea of “natural” law and “natural” theology. Nowhere in the New Testament does the word “nature” refer to the whole of creation or to its non-human aspect. That, it seems, is “a Hellenic legacy in western Christian thought.”6 The New Testament also does not speak of δημιουργία (i.e., of creation in the sense of ancient Greek literature). Only in Hebrews 11.10 God is named δημιουργός (creator). The biblical text, referring to the act of creation, uses more dynamic and comprehensive terms like κτίσας (1 Cor. 11.9) or ποιήσας (Matt. 19.4) or πλάσσειν (Rom. 9.20) signifying the particular care and personal involvement of God acting with a definite purpose in creation. Replacing the word “nature” in all of the references to creation, the Bible prefers the words τά πάντα (all things) together with the word κτίσις (creation)—Ephesians 3.9: ἐν Θεῷ τῷ τά πάντα κτίσαντι. The link between these two terms is especially made when the christological approach to creation is underlined, as we read in Colossians 1.16: ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ ἐκτίσθη τά πάντα—τά πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ καί εἰς αὐτόν ἔκτισται: “all things were created by and in him and for him and by him all things consist.” “Created” and “consist” denote the absolute totality of creation. Κτίζειν and τά πάντα unite both the universality of the Cosmos and the act of creation in Christ as one of the highest meaning and in the personal, trinitarian God originated maintained and destinated creation. Ktisis cannot be determined either by identifying it simply with nature, or with man, or with Cosmos. It points more to the thorough, complete and all-renewing act of God creating, preserving and re-creating τά πάντα by and in His incarnate Word and His Spirit. The Pauline verse 2 Cor. 5.17 gives us, in the most clear and condensed form, this new understanding of Cosmos and nature in relationship with man as a holistic, total creation in its dynamic aspect of being created and renewed by a continuous concern of God acting in Christ and uniting

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all things of creation with man, renewing him and all things together: εἴ τις ἐν Χριστῷ καινὴ κτίσις- τά ἀρχαῖα παρῆλθεν, ἰδού γέγονε καινά τά πάντα (“if any man be in Christ, a new creation; behold all things are become new”). It is a paraphrase when one translates by “is a new creature,” because though more logical, this translation risks isolating man as the only new creation (the text does not offer this possibility directly). It also introduces a discontinuity with the second part of the verse, which clearly refers to the renewal of all things together with man. The use of these particular terms, τά πάντα and καινή κτίσις in Christ, has a paramount importance for understanding the unbroken relationship between anthropology and cosmology on the basis of the unbroken continuum and interdependence between man, nature and Cosmos and the dynamic historical process within the whole creation. On this biblical basis anthropology cannot be conceived apart and in isolation from Christology and cosmology. Creation is linked inseparably with the mystery or renewal of all things and the salvation of man with the whole created reality. The text of Romans 8 makes a clear reference to this interdependence. The κτίσις in this text is earnestly expecting the manifestation of the sons of God, and this ktisis also “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of God. For we know that the whole κτίσις groaneth and travaileth in pain together (with the sons of God) until now” (Rom. 8.19–22). Here in this text we are given by St. Paul the maximum possible expression of the relationship between creation, as Nature and Cosmos, with man in the mystery of salvation. The whole creation is symbolically described as a pregnant woman in pain before giving birth to a new man (i.e., the highest image ever used in expressing the inner coherence of created nature and man taken within the one saving act of God by Christ and in His Spirit, which makes intercessions for us with groanings, for us which have the first fruits of the Spirit [v. 23 and v. 26]). Anthropology implies, if conceived on this basis, a Christological and pneumatological approach to nature as creation-κτίσις and Cosmos. There is no possibility of studying man apart from a manifold creating act of God resulting in a multitude of created realities. These realities in Christ are constituted as one total-whole with inner coherence and purpose, and they are subject to a continuous becoming and renewing act operated by the Spirit. By a Christological pneumatology of κτίσις, anthropology becomes possible as the central theme of biblical systematic theology. This kind of connection as interdependence between anthropology and cosmology has important bearings in a more comprehensive understanding of man, nature and history as an unbroken God-given continuum. This is the specifically Christian element in the image of man when confronting all kinds of possible secular images, scientific, societal and ideological.



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Matter and Nature, Body and Soul: One Creation The connection between anthropology and cosmology has immediate repercussions on our understanding of the interrelationships and the cohesion between the fundamental elements of Cosmos and their reciprocal role in manifesting, maintaining and perfecting the inner unity of creation. We should not try to conceive man in Christian terms by a one-sided understanding of nature and Cosmos as a corrupted, fallen objective reality of material (physical) creation. A careful study of the notion of κτίσις, as comprising both nature and saving act of God including man and all things created in heaven and on earth, must guard us from falling into different kinds of dualisms. It is the sinfulness of human beings that creates this dualism, and not the nature of nature or the secularity of Cosmos. In the Bible there is no reference to a fallen nature as ktisis, and Cosmos has a dialectical sense either as a total reality of natureman-history for which God has such a love that he gave His only begotten Son (John 3.16) or as a resisting evil power against His will (John 17.14), but in no way is this Cosmos alienated from the intention and the plan of salvation: “I came not to judge the world, but to save the world” (12.47). The Cosmos concept should not express the secular part of creation in revolt against God as an objective reality in which man is not participating and at which man looks as an observer from outside. The cosmic dimension is man’s insight into the wholeness of creation. He is a part, the most significant, in God’s creation, but never above or separated from it on account of his superiority. In this sense, he is microcosmic because he reveals the macrocosmos of the total purpose of creation but always together with matter, nature and Cosmos and thanks to this relationship. Man is the link, the mediator between natural and cosmic, matter and spirit, and we can add, facing possible scientific images, between static and dynamic, given and becoming, necessity and possibility, obligation and freedom.7 All dualistic concepts of man are overcome by this fundamental thesis. There is no split or opposition between matter and spirit, body and soul. The oneness in creation as ktisis represents the ongoing process of final unification of all apparently opposed elements of creation. Man is continually becoming the recapitulation of material, animal, spiritual, created and further creative elements of the one ktisis in himself. Man, as microcosmic, signifies not that human beings are beyond matter as pure spirits or reasonable beings, as E. L. Mascall points out, “for we live in the borderland where matter is raised to the level of spirit and spirit immerses itself in matter.”8 In the so-called spiritual man we appreciate the conditio sine qua non, which is matter in the form of the body. There is a spiritual body and a bodily spiritual existence. Without this reciprocity man is not the creature of God, according to a consistent Christian anthropology.

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Against all kinds of dualistic idealisms or monistic materialisms the Christian image of man will defend the absolute interdependence of matter and spirit in the one human existence as microcosmic of the question of qualitative priority between the two, for they are entirely and equally reciprocal in one and the same organism reflecting thus the origins, the foundation and the function of the whole Cosmos. From one point of view matter appears to be the matrix of life, either as it is indicated by the words of Genesis 1.20 (life coming out of the waters) or in the story of the creation of man in Genesis 2.7 (God starting His creation by taking earth into his hands). The microcosmic nature of man is mainly focused on his bodily existence. Only Christian faith has accepted and consistently proclaimed body and soul as an inseparable unit with tremendous implications for appreciating matter in general as the fundamental element and bearer of life. In this created world nothing can exist without its basic material foundation. Matter is the matrix of animal life and the body is its highest expression as God’s direct creation. That is why the body, in spite of all kinds of abuses (spiritualistic-ascetic or hedonistic), is “the temple of the Holy Spirit, which is in you, which you have from God” (1 Cor. 6.19). Against all idealistic beliefs of the immortality of the soul alone, we are reminded by the authentic biblical tradition that our resurrection is a bodily one. That is why, in biblical terms, one does not speak of flesh as the inferior part of the human existence. After the incarnation the term “flesh” denotes the central event of faith, because “the Word was made flesh” (John 1.14). Flesh is the state of the “carnally minded” (Rom. 8.6), while this inferior part of man is denoted by the paradoxical expression ψυχικός ἄνθρωπος (1 Cor. 2.14), “the psychic man” (i.e., the bearer of the simple natural quality of soul is not spiritual element—namely it is not yet renewed by the Holy Spirit). In Christian faith and praxis, material creation is elevated as part of the one creation of God at the same level of appreciation and qualification with man and his bodily existence. Man as a body is fundamentally a Christian basis of anthropology resulting from its inseparable link with cosmology. The body can never become a separated object if it is understood in its identity with the spiritual foundation of man. “I am a body” does not signify only an identity with my body either; the phrase points to the solidarity of man with nature as part of the whole created Cosmos, comprising man, nature, matter and history. The Uniqueness of Man and Solidarity with Nature Christian faith, therefore, cannot accept a concept or image of man which on the one hand does not recognize his uniqueness in Creation and on the other does not profess his solidarity with the created world, Nature, as well as with



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historical reality. This is not due to man’s superiority, because he possesses reason or conceptual thought, or because he is the highest among the species of an evolutionary process, but because of the fundamental Christological approach to the mystery of creation, Christ being the recapitulation of all created things and at the same time the Savior in a cosmic dimension. It is only on this basis that we can today discuss anthropology and re-examine its attitude to the uniqueness of man in creation. The careful examination of this issue is necessary before we establish a point of contact with any kind of secular images of man. It is also very important because of the ongoing debate among Christian theologians and process philosophers on this issue, because it looks as if the uniqueness of man professed in traditional theological terms creates an uneasiness among secular anthropologists and Christian process philosophers because it risks separating man from his natural environment. This traditional approach becomes in their eyes responsible for serious deviations in Christianity due to its anthropological transcendentalism creating a gap between man and nature, and depriving man of a full appreciation of the ecological problem.9 This applies especially to process philosophers within Christian tradition who have the intention of acting as correctives against an excessive and unjustifiable anthropocentricism in Christian theology and praxis. For them, Christianity has to recover its full appreciation of matter, vegetable and animal life in Nature, by eliminating all unnecessary and defective transcendental concepts of God and man originating from idealistic philosophy, which introduces a dualistic anthropology, resulting in a false understanding of the absolute superiority of man over Nature. In Christianity, for them, nature, as the physical world, is historicized; it is included when we say God acts in history, and therefore “natural processes are part of history.”10 Like man, all creatures in Nature have their freedom of choice, and God cannot predetermine how they would develop in their evolutionary process, conforming in this way their thought to the indeterminism of modern science and modern concepts of biological growth of organisms. “Things and animals have some being and value in themselves,” and therefore “man is not only the creature who can interpret existence. He is the one who exemplifies the nature of reality and far from being the exception in creation he is the flower of a plant that is one with nature.”11 The important issue in this attitude of process philosophy is whether there is intrinsic value beyond man, and if so, how to prevent Christianity from falling into the unjustified position that all subhuman beings and material objects are there only for serving man, because of his wrongly understood unique and central position in nature. In this view, feeling is the base of the subjective side of all things. All entities from electron to man embody feelings and

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therefore are of value and share in the freedom of development of the whole creation. This attitude represents an antithesis to materialism and mechanism, and it defends the position that the universe and its parts are more like a life of an organism than a contrivance or a blunt insensitive material to be used and exploited by man. Certainly, the life of man is a better model of existence than the physicist’s construct of the atom, but this appropriate acknowledgment of man’s important position does not mean that he is the only creature which has intrinsic value and that he can live in his superiority and uniqueness without taking any account of their abuse or of non-human nature.12 The consequence of this attitude is that non-human nature has a value and can overcome Western dualistic rationalistic thought after Descartes and become more conformed to the Old Testament tradition of the value of the natural world and the New Testament pattern of relationship between God, man, and nature which excludes all kinds of devaluation of nature by reason of the anthropocentricity of the Bible. We badly need, following this attitude of process philosophers, an “ethic of nature, which will be the result of our attitude to nature’s worth.” It is evident what is the very positive contribution of such an attitude to the relationship between anthropology and cosmology. Man cannot be conceived apart from Nature. What is more important and interesting, however, is the place of theology in the context of this philosophy of nature, because God should be also and consistently conceived in a far more dynamic relationship with material and animal creation than traditional Christian theology has professed under the influence of theistic rationalistic philosophies. God, as the “maker of heaven and earth,” is not acting like a man manufacturing our object, with which he has no relationship whatsoever after he has sold it (a carpenter and his table). Created matter plants and animals cannot exist without God’s continuous sustaining activity; the one God extends to man’s cells and molecules and not only to his spiritual being. If God as Creator remains apart continually in the process of sustaining all that exists, through what A. N. Whitehead has called “God’s primordial nature,” this is how creative activity is experienced by the entities of existence. God is not the passive offstage observer but the experiencer of all created value. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His knowing . . . This is what A. N. Whitehead calls “the consequent nature of God.” It is the way God grows as the universe evolves, because His experience expands with His participation in all creation. The values that are realized in experience are saved in God’s experience.13 This dynamic, almost pantheistic, approach to theology, this growing and becoming of God along with his creation, is necessary if we want to increase our respect of nature or attribute any value to any part of the creation, because



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we have to do it not for the sake of created animals and things but as a due thanksgiving and offering to God, who is not only a God who creates and gives but also who receives. Love implies this exchange of gifts, and there is no love which either only gives or only receives. A defective Christian faith is also the one which is unable to inspire deep respect and high appreciation of nature as existing in God and of God as evolving in it as a process of creative act identical with His being. It is the most dangerous isolation of man if he, in the basis of his superiority over nature in the name of God, avoids or neglects conceiving himself in a continuum of created reality not radically separated from it. According always to process philosophy, what seem to us the cruelties of nature—the savagery, the mindless destruction of storm and volcano, the diseases—are the accidents on a trial-and-error process, accidents which in the long course of time God moves to correct by exerting His less-thancompelling influence. Of course, by this attitude the intrinsic value of nature is emphasized, the obligation of man to respect natural reality is defended, the absolute uniqueness of man on the basis of God’s creation is relativized and finally natural evil is explained dialectically with God sharing in it.14 But Christian theologians might express their doubts about the theological premises—or better conclusions—of such a philosophy of nature. Thomas Derr, for instance, remarks on this precise point: “the problem of evil is solved, then, but at the cost, of course, of God’s capacity to overcome it—at the cost of the divine omnipotence.”15 He thinks that the principal difference between process thought and Christianity is the former’s concept of a limited God, one who is not anymore omnipotent. It solves easily the problem of natural evil, by limiting God’s capacity to act, ignoring at the same time the sinful nature of man and the need of salvation. We have to do here with a weakened God who is unable to inspire submission of man to His will. He is not a God to worship either. He is a God of becoming with and for the sake of the world.16 It also becomes doubtful for T. Derr whether such theological premises for evaluating nature allow any real involvement of man in combating social evil responsibly in the face of a living personal God. This debate reveals some important issues regarding our main theme. a.  We have to admit that traditional Christian anthropology has overdone the uniqueness of man and caused a gap between human and a kind of “subhuman” creation. b.  It is to a certain extent possible that this attitude has devaluated nature and led to its unwise exploitation. It is true that anthropocentricity existed in ancient oriental wisdom, in classical Greek philosophy, in Judaism, but their attitude had not the same impact in separating man from nature.

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c.  The question is whether man and subhuman creatures have to have almost equal rights in order to have equal values (“intrinsic”), without insisting on keeping different degrees between them; whether dualism between man and nature can do justice to the creation of God as a whole; and finally and most important, whether God should be directly involved in the process of nature’s development and growth by losing His transcendence vis-à-vis His creation for the sake of preserving the unbroken continuum of God, man and nature and overcoming a wrong Christian concept and praxis about the uniqueness of man. It seems to me that this debate is an indication that Christian anthropology bears a certain responsibility because it has developed a one-sided, anthropomonistic system of thought, disregarding vital elements of biblical tradition concerning the inseparable link between man and nature, and the place of man as mediator between God and nature. It is also true that theistic tendencies in theology introduced, with the support of rationalistic Cartesian principles and the mechanistic concept of a self-governed universe, an unbridgeable gap between God and his creation and left nature in the hands of man as material for achieving his welfare, prosperity and technical progress, devaluating thus animal and vegetable life as well as matter, which is for Christians part of God’s creation, revealing His continuous concern for it without discrimination. It is true that in the patristic writings, this anthropomonistic concept of man is entirely absent. Both in the West and the East, patristic thought converges in the Christological foundation of the unity of creation. Metropolitan Paulos Gregorios Verghese reminds us of this basic patristic cosmology in view of the debate with process philosophers. Creation betrays an inner coherence, interdependence and complementarity. “Harmony,” “sympnoia” (breathing together), and “sympatheia” (suffering or struggling together in love and complementarity) are terms pointing to the inevitable link between God, man and nature as the one single and common creation. The ascending path of evolution in creation, with man created by a special creative intervention, binds all things together with man. Gregory of Nyssa believes in human interdependence with nature, and “he thinks it important to see humanity in an integral relationship to the universe of things, plants and animals . . . while man does not derive the whole of his nature from the universe.”17 If man is a mediator between God and creation and in this sense also a microcosm of the relation between spirit and all material things as soul and body, then also matter (i.e., the rocks, the sea, the mud, the inferior materials and not only the beautiful flowers and the stars praised by a humanistic romanticism) has an intrinsic value. This value is not due to the fact that it



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is used by man, or that man is related to it. Matter is what it is because it is the fundamental element for life maintaining the coherence between Creator, man and creation. It is this coherence that validates man and matter equally within the one creation. The specific and most important event in man’s creation, conceived through the incarnation, is that the Spirit penetrates matter and matter becomes what it has been from the foundation of the world, the unique matrix of life. The uniqueness of man as the image of God cannot be conceived without his material being. The physiological aspect of man’s being and existence forbids us to speak of spirit and soul without the presupposition and basis of matter.18 In the Eastern theological tradition matter occupies this central place in creation on the basis of the Logos theology. Certainly, this concept of matter presupposes also the regenerating energy of the Spirit of God. Matter has a value only because it is penetrated by the Spirit in a personal way, reminding us of the origin of the creation of the whole cosmos. Soul and body, spirit and matter are therefore equally subjects of transformation. Their value can only be jointly defended as one whole organism of life always on the way to their re-creation and transfiguration. It is this reality of the relation of Spirit and matter which makes Eastern Orthodoxy conceive of the cosmos together with man’s transfiguration in Christ by the operation of the Spirit. In the Orthodox liturgical worship and its symbolic representation of the elevated cosmos in Christ one can detect this cosmic dimension clearly. Alongside and together with the memorial of Christ’s incarnation, cross and resurrection, as one inseparable event, the worshipping Church gathered in the power of the Pentecostal event is celebrating around the Eucharist and through the material gifts of bread and wine the elevation of the whole cosmos together with man; and this makes salvation and transfiguration possible. Rightly, one can speak not of church worship, but of “cosmic liturgy” referring to the Eastern understanding of worship and of man as microcosmic.19 After the use of water for Baptism, the hymnology of the Epiphany liturgy, for instance, in the Eastern tradition is a hymn and praise of the elevated matter of creation as a whole. The river Jordan is the matrix of salvation, and iconography represents it as filling the whole canopy of the created cosmos, Christ being implanted into its water like a pillar as the pivot of the whole creation. Baptism and Eucharist are the sacraments of salvation but also the signs and antitype-symbols of the union between man, nature and history as Cosmos. More precisely, using the words of Paul Evdokimov: “The word by which the Eucharist was instituted, ‘this is my body’ designates the living body, the whole Christ conferring on every communicant a quickening consanguinity and corporality. In the same way, ‘the word was made flesh’ means that God assumed human nature in its entirety and in it, the whole cosmos. And the ‘resurrection of the flesh’ in

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the Creed confesses the reconstitution of the whole man, soul and body, and thus all flesh shall see the salvation of God ‘all flesh’ meaning the pleroma of nature.”20 This liturgical elevation of the Cosmos signifies that all of our enterprises with the created things of nature are sharing in this ongoing re-creation and transformation of Cosmos. Science is performing a God-given function. In the eyes of a Christian a scientist is consciously, if he is a believer, and unconsciously, if not, offering a para-eucharistic act by his work in the service of humanity; the God-given material is given back to Him fulfilling its purpose as part of the created Cosmos in the process of transfiguration. A scientist represents a secular priestly function and offers a continuous reasonable sacrifice and praise to the Creator of the Cosmos and on behalf of man as microcosmic mediator between Him and all created subhuman beings and things. It is on this basis that anthropology is inseparably linked with cosmology. It is in this way that a Christian can appreciate appropriately matter and nature with their very important implications for our dialogue between Christian and scientific images of man. Unfortunately, this right approach to the value of nature and matter remained a liturgical symbolism and vision. Both in the West and in the East there was no immediate effect on the understanding in this positive way of subhuman material creation. Though the explanation of the precise reasons, which have caused the inefficiency of this authentic biblical-Christological approach to nature, is not entirely possible, we can attempt to investigate some of the probable causes.21 First, the blunt materialism connected with atheism might be regarded as the origin of the Christian’s hesitation to evaluate matter. The automatic genesis of life, the exploitation of the evolutionary theories of species, the wrong conclusions of the incorruptibility of matter have led theology to defend the “spiritual” foundations of creation in an exaggerated way at the expense of its material nature. Together with this attitude, one should investigate the role played by rationalistic philosophy and by one-sided, partial interpretation of Plato and Aristotle as dualistic philosophers. Second, an overemphasis on the value of the monastic ideal, contemplative life and meditation have dominated Christians expecting the second coming of Christ. A false eschatology has greatly affected the facticity and historicity of faith and accentuated the liturgical vision of the end of time in full glory against the material nature of the Cosmos in corruption and sin. The monks rightly point to this final end of history and validate the manifold ascesis, which in the East especially has been wrongly connected with an unjustified position of the pneumatic-spiritual against the material nature of the Cosmos.



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Third, a kind of anti-fleshly mind, connected with the ascesis as the central moral principle of Christian life, nourished by the fear of falling into mortal sexual sins has greatly contributed to devaluating matter as connected with the inferior if not sinful part of creation. The threat of “pansexualism” in modern times has further strengthened this position and inspired a spiritualistic ethics as a noble struggle against the low, “dirty” and animal trends which violently assault the human body and require satisfaction. Perhaps along these lines one can look for some of the causes of the failure to draw the implications of the Christological interpretation of nature regarding the value of matter. Anyway, we have to admit that there cannot be a dialogue with secular images of man if this separation of anthropology and cosmology in Christian theology is not repudiated. Christian faith has all the presuppositions to enable it to remain a dynamic factor of progress as well as a realistic partner of dialogue within a secularized world, because of its Christological cosmology. It is not an abstract and rationalistic natural theology which inspires the intrinsic value of created subhuman beings and matter, but the faith that all things are created and recapitulated in Christ. And this makes all the difference with all other possible theories about nature and matter of a traditional natural theology. This Christological approach to nature does not allow any kind of false interpretation of man’s God-given right to the domination of nature. It is not a right of stewardship that man is given either. Man cannot be named simply “steward” of nature in order to avoid the idea of domination. “Steward” is also too ambiguous and presumptuous. Nor is it sufficient to say that man is a “guest” in nature so that he will not behave as an owner or master of it. None of these expressions, which up to a certain extent try to place man in a new responsible way at the center of creation setting limitations of his power, are the appropriate terms to be used in this connection, because, though they try to save man from his excessive egocentricity over against nature, these terms might introduce another type of distance and another kind of self-alienation from nature and in Cosmos. “Steward” and “guest” can become indications of another kind of emancipation of man within the Cosmos, reserving for him the right to manipulate or to exploit nature. In this sense there is no hope of appreciating man’s full and responsible involvement and of taking appropriate action against ecological threat. What is necessary to be proclaimed on the basis of a consistent Christology of nature is the co-naturality of man, his inner, deep and inevitable coexistence, or better, I dare to say, identity with matter. It is only in this way that we have to overcome in theology all kinds of dualistic trends introducing an inappropriate separation and superiority of man over nature under the pretext of man’s uniqueness in creation based on a partial biblical notion of anthropocentricity.

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The process philosophers and theologians can help us to focus this centrality of man according to a Christian theology of nature against anthropomonistic trends, reminding Christian anthropology of its inevitable and imperative association with a consistent biblical Christology of nature. It becomes more and more evident today that every unreflected act of man in using and abusing nature becomes a latent motif of slow but sure suicide of human life on this earth. Pollution of nature or unlimited absorption of energy predicts with accuracy man’s disappearance from this earth. The environmental problem and the energy condition prescribe the frame for human survival in the near future.22 Human egoistic superiority over nature equals human self-annihilation. Between aesthetic humanistic romanticism and materialistic utilitarianism, a new Christian consciousness of identity of man with nature in the one creation of God in Christ must develop. This can be done only if anthropology is inseparably conceived along with cosmology. It is only in this way that an authentic Christian image of man can enter into dialogue with secular anthropologies to support them in their effort to reflect on the quality of life and the value of the human person in an age of technology and false, one-sided economic growth. It is only in this way that the Christian visions about man and nature in a Christological sense can become dynamic factors in the historical process and not remain simple symbolic references or mystical liturgical experience. Above all and finally, it is only in this way that Christian anthropology can appreciate nature historicized (i.e., as Cosmos bearing the marks of world history), in which man is not the sole Creator but also and principally one of the dynamic agents and participants in creation, as Cosmos and nature have also a history of their own apart from human presence, not only before the creation of man in the remote future. But they have now with man a history parallel to human history, which has an intrinsic value in itself. It is this kind of cosmic historicity of sub-humans and material nature which is decisive in conceiving human personality in relationship to the facticity of historical process as a whole. Only in this case one can appreciate and evaluate science and technology and their effects in the formation of human personality. Especially, it is only out of this world’s historicity that a Christian image of man should be carefully constructed, correcting traditional one-sided principles of Christian anthropology isolated from the actual historical process and expressed in esoteric language. Science, psychology and social and political struggle for a worldwide human community of freedom and justice are indispensable parts of a consistent Christian anthropology which takes seriously into consideration the history of nature represented and studied by scientific research and its historical predicament as it is grasped in the struggle for liberation and transformation of the



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structures of injustice on a worldwide scale. Anthropology and Cosmology in a complementary and reciprocal relationship of interdependence signify that a Christian image of the human person cannot be conceived out of a neutral self-sufficient transcendental position. On the other side, all ideological concepts of humanity derived from science, psychology, society or politics should raise unavoidably the ontological question of human being and of the quality of human life, in an age of crisis caused by a false autonomy either of Christian anthropology or scientific cosmology. Scientific Approaches to the Human Person The interpenetration of anthropology and cosmology on the basis of a genuine Christology of nature has a direct positive bearing on the dialogue between secular understanding and Christian images of the human person. Certainly, science, psychology and political ideology rightly want to possess the whole of nature, of man and society as their own field of research and action. But the main issue is this wholeness (i.e., how one understands and serves it best). It is the right of science to investigate all things thoroughly toward achieving the fuller knowledge possible, while the interpenetration of anthropology and cosmology proves this legitimate effort to be ultimately inaccessible. It is not the notion of mystery, very popular in theological circles, especially in the East, which makes this enterprise futile. It is not the dimension of the sacred in Cosmos and man either which proves science to be limited only to one part of the cosmic reality. It is more the nature of created things and the historical predicament in the Cosmos which makes scientific research and concepts of man relative in connection with a possible holistic knowledge of them. The further authentic science develops, the more this missing dimension of holism referring to man’s image becomes evident, especially when anthropology and cosmology are interpenetrated fields of scientific research. If Christian anthropology has to be corrected and saved from its anthropomonism because of the notion of the absolute uniqueness of man in creation, scientific cosmology similarly has to be complemented by anthropology in order to enlarge its research field and ultimate reference. In reality, science has not and cannot have anthropology in the sense of ethology, philosophy and theology. Perhaps introspective psychology is closer to anthropological issues than other applied systems of knowledge. It is true, indeed, that scientific researches are, in principle, by their methodology, deprived of their probable extension to anthropology. This is understandable and to a certain extent welcome on the part of anthropological sciences. But at the same time, one has to recognize that scientific research by its conclusions can exercise a direct influence on the anthropological sciences. Especially at

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times of advanced secularization its repercussions are immediate in conceiving the human person, its origin, essence and destination. In some cases, the impact on anthropology is decisive when there is no systematic reference to it on the part of science, phychology and political ideology. Their concern for human applied knowledge, composition of matter, function of physical laws, the molecular constitution of the human body and its effects on psychic functions, the study of conscious and subconscious life and finally the relationship between economy, society and man as well as the reasons given for the struggle for a just and sustainable world community become basic introductory principles toward an unsystematically written anthropology. It has convincing power and direct bearing for conceiving an unwritten popular image of the human person with an immediate practical, ethical application. The encounter between scientific-secular and Christian images of man should take this difference seriously into consideration. The wish from the Christian point of view, however, should be always expressed that sciences, in view of this encounter, might think also anthropologically, by trying to reflect on their missing dimension of anthropology when they interpret nature. Because most of the misunderstanding and one-sidedness, or polemic attitude against traditional Christian expression of man’s nature, have been caused by a popularized vulgarization of great scientific theories, like the evolution of species. The practical application of easily generalized scientific conclusions against traditional images of man in many cases is due to the absence of concern for real anthropology in a deeper and holistic dimension on the part of the initiators of scientific theories. It must, therefore, be clarified that a genuine encounter between secular and Christian images of man can be effected only if these limitations are acknowledged on both sides and Christian anthropologists are ready to take into their interests cosmology and scientists converge also toward anthropology. Unless this reciprocal movement is there, the debate will be without point of contact and will remain two parallel monologues. We have to be conscious, however, that at this moment we have still very few examples of such converging attitudes and we are not yet, among the great majority on both sides, fully aware of our lack of holistic trends in anthropology. Theology is unable to construct a genuine cosmology, and science is reluctant to develop a consistent application of scientific research in holistic anthropology. Perhaps here in this issue we touch one of the most delicate issues in anthropology. Upon this issue the debate about the quality of human life depends especially on the so-called Christian world, which bears a major responsibility for the progressive separation of man from nature. This separation is against the authentic interpretation of man from nature. This separation is against the authentic interpretation of the biblical message regarding the wholeness of creation as Cosmos and



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ktisis. It is this attitude, to a certain extent, which made science operate in an autonomous field of knowledge and action, based on human aspirations for domination over nature and for serving human welfare and progress. Determinism and Mechanism: Science and Evolution The first problem one has to face following the assertion of the relationships between anthropology and cosmology—in other words, the concept of man within the Cosmos—is the relationship between “scientific humanism” and a humane science. For many scientists “it is today less urgent that the humanities should become imbued with the values of science than that science should become alert to the values of humanity.”23 After a period of a partial investigation of man, due to the exact, rationalistic method of scientific objectivity, modern science has moved to a more integral vision of the human person, due to this liberation from a deterministic and mechanical conception of reality. Certainly, science in its new contemporary trends also remains faithful to its fundamental principles of research: immanence, proposition and proof enjoying universal acceptance on the basis of logic and experience. Science looks for interpreting new laws derived from its observation of nature in its immediate grasp. It reflects on the common experience in such a way that it displays recognizable patterns. A simple, first contact with objective reality causes a confusion which might become an order after a scientific system of explanation is proposed. For science, knowledge derives always from definite experience of reality. Alongside scientific precise definitions, science produces a series of models of nature, which “act out only the consequences of the limited and partial mechanisms which we have put into them. . . . This is the inductive method, by which we first look for laws and then judge them to be confirmed if their consequences go on fitting the observed facts.”24 These principles and definitions make out of scientific approach a selfdetermined field of knowledge and action without necessary reference to debates about essence, substance, feeling, human aspirations. One can or should be a scientist only by limiting oneself within the boundaries of rationality, facticity and observation of things. It is out of these principles that the mechanistic interpretation of nature is introduced with the corresponding image of the universe as a huge machine. “The giant machine was not only causal and determinate; it was objective in the sense that no human act or intervention qualified its behavior.”25 The subjective rationalistic operation and the objective mechanistic concept of nature have easily resulted in the mechanization of the whole of life and man. With the presupposition of the Cartesian certainty of human reason

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against doubt and the proof of rationality as condition for understanding human existence, science, by its consistent objectivity related to this wellstructured mental operation in connection with reality, extended its conclusion beyond its limits in the areas of theology and anthropology. Descartes and Newton joined in reverence in front of a Deus ex Machina and of man operating mechanically. Causality and determinism in nature had a reductionist effect in other areas beyond strictly scientific sets of limits, which are clearly defined by the strict application of scientific methodology. Perhaps science itself is not directly responsible, because this extension becomes unavoidable as a psychological reaction in the face of persuasive scientific conclusions of reality. If science operates with such accuracy and by convincing logical and mathematical proofs illustrated by applications in daily life in continuous technical progress, its principles become parts of human consciousness and beliefs, and affect all realms of intellectual and spiritual life. Man and his ontological affirmation is the most evident and immediate area falling under the influence of such scientific approaches. The abstract notion of humanity, though it is no object of scientific research, can also become the object of scientific determinism; if it is true that “all that matters is matter” and that the function of matter can be explained by the law of causality and gravity, this means imposing “a mathematical finality on history and biology and geology and mining and spinning.”26 The so-called scientific revolution of the eighteenth century meant that “from the principles of the secular sciences to the foundations of religious revelation, from metaphysics to matters of taste . . . from the scholastic disputes of theologians to matters of commerce, from natural law to the arbitrary laws of the nations . . . everything has been discussed, analysed or at least mentioned.”27 All the notions of reality, including man as part of it, are reduced to a well-structured motion of particles or molecules, and all kinds of emotions and psychical reactions of man are interpreted by quantitative size and the relationship of mechanical laws determined by speed. Arithmetic dominating not only physics, but also psychic reactions, will prove applied psychology to operate like anatomy and physiology in the human body as a complex molecular organism, which explains cognitive, volitional and sentimental operation of consciousness. Floyd Matson appropriately makes the remark that “man had disappeared from the world as subject in order to reappear as object. Mind itself was dissolved into particles in motion by the neutralizing solvent of the new physics”28 and reminds us of the assertion of La Mettrie: “that man is a machine and that there is only one substance, differently modified, in the whole world. What will all the weak reeds of divinity, metaphysics and nonsense of the schools avail against this firm and solid oak?”29



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The radically mechanized metaphysics in the philosophy of extreme Cartesian tendencies, married with the descriptive and analytic but absolutely consistent positivist thought in physics have been strangely combined with the Darwinian evolutionary theory in their massive attack against all kinds of substance research in man. Without any appropriate reasonable motif, a generalized anti-humane system of values has been developed perhaps under the psychologically imposed necessity to negate transcendence, metaphysics and any survival of faith in a special intervention of a creating power from outside. When we study this curious alliance and some hasty enthusiastic pronouncements on the entire sufficiency of explanations in physics and biology by some of the adherents of this mechanistic outlook of man and nature, we experience a strange dissatisfaction, especially because we are given such a crippled, one-sided and partial image of creation and man. In the same way as traditional transcendental theistic philosophical anthropology and theology had neglected the natural and material reality of the Cosmos in dealing with humanity and spoke of man from an ivory tower, so from another angle science refused to allow space to man to move as a distinctive creature and spoke of him as a particle of a machine and as an organism of developing animal life. The great achievements of science in its first bold steps have betrayed a certain kind of non-scientific inflexibility and a deep intellectual weakness. The right evolutionary theory mixed up with mechanistic philosophy and physics missed the total vision of humanum and reduced human being to a process from mammalian to psychosocial organization prescribed strictly by natural physical laws of selection and biological transformation. Man is not only made of the same matter and operated by the same energy as all the rest of the Cosmos, but, for all his distinctiveness, he is linked by generic continuity with all the other living inhabitants of his planet. Man is an animal thinking mechanically, with an acquired bigger brain-stuff, automatically reacting to his natural environment and creating fantasies beyond it about himself, his origins, his destiny. Evolutionary scientists still in the twentieth century did not hesitate to negate all kinds of transcendence for the sake of this mechanistic explanation. Julian Huxley writes that “evolutionary man can no longer take refuge from his loneliness by creeping for shelter into the arms of a divinized father—a figure whom he has himself created—nor escape from the responsibility of making decisions by sheltering under the umbrella of Divine Authority, nor absolve himself from the hard task of meeting his present problems and planning his future by relying on the will of an omniscient but unfortunately inscrutable Providence.”30 No one has the right or can dispute a purely scientific biological theory with sufficient proofs, if they exist. But what is questionable is the advance

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to a totalitarian conclusion that “the only field still remaining outside the range of scientific system is that of the so-called paranormal phenomena like telepathy,” thus facilitating the creation of a sole authentic scientific religion based on this mechanistic evolutionary vision of man without reference to any kind of salvation or higher destiny or a Creator. All these constitute “a regrettable dogmatism,”31 which with the belief in an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God leads to a frustrating dilemma at the very heart of our approach to reality and introduces an inseparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. All religious, or even any, questions about the ontological being of man, his destiny, his deeper emotional trends beyond natural and mechanical existence are psychosocial organs of evolving man. There is but a simple revolutionary and evolutionary humanism against all traditional images of man. This humanism is rooted in absolute faith in the self-guided selection toward perfection in nature, by man and for man alone. This evolutionary progress is nourished by the fact that by scientific knowledge, many phenomena, which once appeared wholly mysterious, can now be described or explained in rationally intelligible or naturalistic terms. Certainly, even the most radical mechanistic evolutionist is ready to assert that science cannot abolish the mystery of existence in general. Having removed the obscuring veil of mystery, science will persist in questioning and wondering: what is life, what is mind and its relationship with all kinds of images it creates out of the observation of nature? But this self-humbling attitude does not affect the progressive investigation of reality by means of pure observation and research. The hope is that applied scientific knowledge is on the way to achieve more and more clarity. Santayana came close to the central idea of evolutionary humanism: “there is only one world, the natural world, and only one truth about it; but this world has a spiritual life in it, which looks not to another world but to the beauty and perfection that this world suggests, approaches and misses.”32 From this position a realistic hopeful vision of the future is created. Man is not regarded in his static being, which has been designed once-for-all by God. He is fully in transformation forward, inspiring confidence in the future. For evolutionary humanists of all kinds, here at this point lies the most striking difference with Christian anthropologists. For J. Bronowski this humanism implies that there will one day be different and even better human beings than ourselves.33 Psychosocial Models of Man It is remarkable how one of the most anthropological sciences, psychology, has been permeated by this mechanistic outlook in science during a later period of modern history, especially when determinism and causality



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are shaken by new scientific researches. It is astonishing how in our days a counter-revolution in psychology has joined mechanical patterns of scientific investigation of the eighteenth century. In this sense, it joins also contemporary global affirmation of the pure objectivity of society enjoying full qualitative priority over the particular human subject and its freedom. It looks as if psychology and sociology realized later than the natural science their independence from philosophy. In order to justify and accentuate this emancipation they entirely refused all kinds of conceptual theoretical systems of thought regarding man and adopted the pure objectification of his psychic operations. This psychology refused all introspective investigation because of its lack in objectivity, without which an applied scientific knowledge cannot exist. Psychology, in contrast to concern with consciousness and introspection, or with experiment and observation of psychic reactions in the three fields of the soul—cognitive, volitional and emotional—now follows the data given objectively by the behavior of the individual. Disregarding hereditary psychic facts, it occupies itself with the example of the exclusive mechanistic method of science and the data collected by observation of the behavior of each subject. This attitude is accompanied by the same optimistic view of evolutionary humanism as in the past. John B. Watson expresses it clearly on the part of behaviorists of all times: “Give me the baby and my world to bring it up in and I’ll make it crawl and walk. I’ll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood; I’ll make it a thief, a gunman. . . . The possibility of shaping in any direction is almost endless . . .”34 Certainly, this is another image of human person manipulated by scientific objectivity. The human person risks becoming empty of deeper, inner qualities, because only external, objectifiable data can afford a sure ground of scientific investigation. Man has, in reality, his authentic model and the means to conform to it outside his psychic and conscious structure. Introspective examination proves to be a vanity and an illusory operation. Psychology through this radical behaviorism, refusing the dimension of depth for the sake of pure objectivity in the service of scientific methodology, offers another image of man depending upon processes outside his conscious self-determination and existential condition and decision. “Objective” can easily mean and become here functional and mechanistic. It is a self-alienating process in which the image is supplied by objective models suggested or imposed on him from outside, as convincing, realistic, psychically healthy images to be massively realized on the model of industrial mechanical production. Introspection, selfexamination and concentration, meditation and recollection are regarded as means irrelevant to psychological scientific appreciation of man’s inner life. The value of the human person consists in repeating the objective model by consciously behaving according to it.

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Together with this kind of objectification in psychology through behaviorism, sociology also—as a new science and for the sake of achieving precise scientific knowledge enjoying objectivity—has emphasized in an almost radical way the pure objectivity of the social phenomenon. From the early times of sociology by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, the evolution of society has been proclaimed as moving from the religious and mythical through the rational and metaphysical to the positive and industrial stage or from a primitive mono-molecular to a modern poly-molecular status. Studying society, as the new, rising event in the modern scientific world, one has to apply pure scientific methods. Therefore, the social phenomenon has to be accepted by the sociologist as objectively as the natural phenomenon is by the scientist in natural sciences. No wonder that progressively, due also to the creation of big urban und industrial centers, this objectivity has been adopted as the criterion of defining man as simply part of an objective societal whole, governed by its own rules and norms. Against any religious, philosophic and humanistic anthropocentricity a new collective, mechanical, self-evident and autonomous concentration upon society has been introduced into all spheres of science, anthropology, economy and political ideology. Again, man, as a distinctive human person with his existential choices, struggling to assert his freedom as one of the highest qualities of his being, has withdrawn to a secondary, inferior position of simple participation in this global, anonymous and massive new reality of “society.” Inside this collective, machine-like objective reality, truths and values are created and spread out in a convincing obligatory way. Society possesses a qualitatively different nature of knowledge, morals and normative principles of life. It enjoys full priority and autonomy over the subjective human individual person, whose qualification depends now upon his ability to share, to contribute and to follow what is happening sociologically and objectively. Technical rationalization, methodical planning, evolutionary biological and intellectual progress, as well as pure objectivity grasped by scientific observation have replaced, little by little, ontological affirmation of human being. Freedom became a readiness of the human person to submit to external, anonymous, social principles and events. As in behaviorist psychology, sociology now will proclaim the conformity and adaptation of the individual as a human person and existence to group models, standards and norms. The objectively and collectively valid principles, the generally accepted fashion and mode will gain priority over the existential, the ontological, the subjective and exceptional characteristics of the deeper essence of man as a person. Functional rationality, behaviorism, objectivity as a unique rule of scientific investigation of reality, engineering and management for the sake of maximum possible production have suc-



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ceeded on the basis of reason in offending the freedom of human being. The individual has been degraded to the role of a particle of a gigantic personal organism with an inner mechanical order in the form of modern industrial society. This is the sole ground, source and generator of progress, a demythologizing reality and a fountain of all goods securing prosperity and healthy state of mind against all kinds of “fantasies” and “illusions” of transcendence and metaphysical beliefs. This scientific trend toward concentration on society modified the focus of the center of values from its anthropocentricity to an anonymous collective “external” center of power. Man unconsciously becomes neutral toward values and weak in his free choices. Everything happens by necessity and chance. The concern for order and discipline for the sake of the common good and the bureaucratic administration will gradually replace free ethical decision, experience of inner personal struggle for the sake of meditation, reflection and spirituality. Man has happily abandoned himself to the secure forces of protection and order from outside his troubled inner self. Many problems will be thus resolved, many deficiencies of economic and social structures will be corrected, an improvement of public health will be secured, easier communications on a world scale will be developed, but at the same time, parallel to this progress, a progressive emptiness of self from deeper cultural, aesthetic and ethical values will gradually occur. The proprietor of values is now the anonymous society and its dominating function.35 In the same direction of development, the final step toward pure objectivity has been realized in social and economic systems in sociology professing the value of collective interests over subjective aspirations toward free choice for the sake of strict social order and justice. Political ideologies will determine the value of the human person simply and uniquely by man’s sharing in the common effort to increase the general welfare in economic life. This radical application of objectivity in sociology will interpret the history of culture, traditional ethics and religion as an illusory life-product of economic relationships or as their superstructure. The personality of man is calculated and qualified only by his work as a basic factor of economic growth and by his contribution, in this way, to the welfare of the whole society. On the other hand, also, in the non-ideologically socialized countries, professing and supporting individual human rights, declaring that science can be rightly developed only within a democratic state, it is the freedom of science, it is the illogical production of all kinds of goods, it is the greedy consumption, it is the unlimited economic growth which defines the human person. Progress has become synonymous with the welfare state and cultural values have been subordinated to the manifold application of technology for the sake of economic expansion and security. Technocracy dominates in planning

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social life and computerized systems efficiently relate conflicts of interest between groups. The human person is losing his identity and consciousness as a qualified being with a distinctive origin and a higher destination. Technology makes man lose his immediate contact with surrounding nature, because it helps him to dominate it and utilize it from a distance through a highly devised system of applied knowledge. Technology makes man look at himself in a different way, at a distance from his existential problem. Mastering nature in this way, he risks becoming too weak to master himself. Losing his inwardness and spontaneity, he is to achieve individual satisfaction by an extroverted movement. Human intelligence must serve a predetermined accurate system, comprising the best of man’s scientific achievement with the highest range of efficiency as its proof. It is well known that for this reason all kinds of scientists and philosophers following thinkers like Sören Kierkegaard have in the past criticized scientism, systematization, radical rationality and superficial optimistic forecasts of the future, and more do so at the present moment. This attack comes from all parts of anthropological sciences as well as from all kinds of political ideologies and represents a general dissatisfaction, especially regarding the image of the human person as being threatened in its own basic constitution.36 We have to confess that there is a kind of fatalism in this criticism in the face of an irreversible process of depersonalization and irresistible mechanization of life. It seems to me, however, that the problem is too complicated to be faced only by this radical criticism. The threats against the individuality and the inherent worth of man are definitely there. But we have to admit that science in our technological age cannot be massively negated as depersonalizing. It is true that technology can cause all these negative effects on human personality, but it is also true that technology is “a way of humanizing the world of matter in time and space,”37 and reshapes the terrific potentialities of humanity. Certainly, it can manipulate human beings, but it can also, always in the service of humanity, reshape human life and social structures and favor positive developments in all areas of application of knowledge in all realms of science, in genetics, in medicine as well as in agriculture, and in food production. Finally, the most interesting thing is that technologically applied science penetrates all realms of life, changing social conditions and creating new lifestyles for the individual. And this is a direct challenge to all kinds of anthropologies, which are not willing simply to join the ongoing criticism, but which are ready to accept this challenge and rethink their concept of the human person today. It is necessary, though, to understand fully this kind of challenge at this moment by trying to follow the new trends in the selfappreciation of scientific research and work. The science of today abandons



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more and more the deterministic and mechanistic framework of the past described above. This change creates a new possibility of dialogue with Christian anthropology about the quality of the human person. New Challenges to Christian Anthropology Though it is not yet fully appreciated and appropriately applied in the realm of philosophy of nature and history, science has definitely abandoned the mechanistic understanding of natural phenomena and their interrelationships. Albert Einstein wrote that “the great change was brought about by Faraday, Maxwell and Herz as a matter of fact half unconsciously and against their will.”38 Maxwell introduced the electromagnetic theory and put in question the whole Newtonian mechanistic system. Further, thermodynamics with its reliance upon probability refuted any idea of determinacy and certainty. Matter has been replaced by fields of force for interpreting electricity and by “the study of the inner workings of nature passed from the engineer scientist to the mathematician in the theory of relativity,”39 and these absolutes of space and time have been deprived of their independence and form a four-dimensional continuum of space-time. Instead of matter we must speak of energy as the basic foundation of science. “The stable foundations of physics have broken up. . . . The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?”40 Energy, it is supposed, but in discontinuous packets or quanta; this “quanta theory” has affected an entire outlook on the physical world and has shaken the foundations of the classical mechanistic physics. “All the laws of nature that are usually classed as fundamental can be foreseen wholly from epistemological considerations. They correspond to a priori knowledge, and are therefore wholly subjective.”41 James Jeans does not hesitate to remark: “Today there is a wide measure of agreement which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”42 Determinism has given up in face of the laws of chance and Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty and complementarity opposing causality and sure predictability in classical physics. This counter-revolution in modern physics bridged the gap between nature as a gigantic prefabricated machine and man as a calculating spectator from

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a distance. The act of pure objective observation, presented as exact objectivity in scientific mechanistic vision and method, includes unavoidably the act of participation. Floyd Matson writes, “Man—and preeminently scientific man—was only a mechanically-minded spectator at the grand performance of nature. . . . The principal lesson derived by quantum physicists from the discoveries of the past half-century is one which is addressed directly to this venerable ideal. In the famous figure of Bohr, it is simply that man is at once an actor and a spectator in the drama of existence.”43 Scientific observation means observation, interaction, participation, mutual contribution on both sides. Objectivity now means “complementarity,” man as observer sharing in the observed object of nature composing a coherent whole with it. Instead of the mechanistic exclusiveness of classical physics, we are invited now to admit the strange development of inclusiveness of the scientific mind and the world of objects under observation. This reciprocity in scientific enterprise has tremendous repercussions on science and humanity. The mechanistic view in science “is not only antinature but also anti-human, because it fails to capture what matters most about the human in its mechanical images.” Charles Birch further remarks on this point: “a universe that produces humans cannot be known apart from this fact. It is a universe. We only begin to know what is by what it becomes. We do not start with electrons and atoms and build a universe. We start with humanity and interpret the rest in terms of this starting point . . . to bring the human into the picture is to bring in mind and consciousness and purpose, sensations of red and blue, bitter and sweet, suffering and joy.”44 Against mechanism science now accepts participation and complementarity between human thinking and objective nature. The result is twofold: first, new categories like insight, intuition, sensitivity, consciousness are included in the epistemological presuppositions of scientific research with the intention of including the whole of man as cognitive, volitional and emotional, while nature is more and more regarded as an organism (and not as the great machine) with exceptional reactions, unforeseen developments and rationally unpredictable changes; and second, and most important, that the category of “mystery” belongs to the fundamental principles of scientific work, because “scientific knowledge is based on abstractions which we choose to make from a more complex, essentially mysterious reality, though it is true that science does remove minor mysteries, such as the mechanism of heredity, but in doing so it shows us where the mysteries really are.”45 Certainly science deals with the mystery in a specific way, through reason, which excludes emotional, mystical, and psychological reaction which one finds directly expressed in religious knowledge or in artistic contemplation and creation through aesthetic values. But together with the notion of complementarity and participation, the



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category of mystery endows modern science not only with more flexibility in dealing with the objective world but, principally, it gives a total vision of reality and an inclusive rational operation with tremendous significance for creating a more comprehensive image of the human person. The notion of mystery in this new scientific context means especially that reality, in the end, remains rationally unknown. In other words, it is beyond the control of man’s power. The more human knowledge penetrates reality, the more its mysterious basic structures become evident and persuasive. Harold K. Schilling emphasizes this paramount basic truth in today’s science, which “evokes endless wonder and awe.” It should not be understood as an emotional reaction but “the evidence for this lies in the depths of the interior of matter and energy and in the character of life, mind and spirit; in the quality and extent of nature’s systematic interrelationships and interdependencies; in its lawfulness and randomness; its dynamism and evolutionary holistic creativity; its transmutability, and remediality; its limitlessness and openness to the future, in the structure and depths of space-time; in the infinite variety of its qualities, in its drives toward the social wholes we call communities and in still other fundamental features.”46 This paragraph describes perfectly the inter-penetration of the two formerly distant fields (reason and reality) in the deterministic and mechanistic science of classical physics. Now there is but one whole reality in full interaction on the basis of the category of “mystery,” which is equally animating both, reason and reality. The perpetual experience of this fundamental truth in a postscientific era, which we are slowly but surely entering, makes scientists share in existential categories which are parallel categories of knowledge toward a holistic science. Nature and reason are not simply objective or subjective qualities causing to the subject aesthetic admiration, or romantic feelings but “anxious perplexity and profound concern or even traumatic anguish.”47 Science in this new context becomes a humane and passionate operation and scientific knowledge, an existential and experiential process. The knowing subject becomes alternatively the known object. Objective knowledge includes with reason the areas of will and sentiment. Epistemology has to deal with the nature of knowledge as relationship. Its function depends on an exchange of logical with experiential, psychic and sensual categories. After the period of the isolation of reason as the unique and supreme element of knowing in classical physics—which was perhaps necessary in the first steps of physical sciences, psychology and sociology—we now return to appreciate the all-inclusive nature of knowledge accepting the interaction between pure cognitive and existential categories. It is evident that the scientist is unconsciously involved in humane problems and creates a new sensitivity and a new consciousness vis-à-vis nature and himself. The question about the

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image of the human person is raised as a para-scientific concern of primary importance in a new way, allowing a more comprehensive vision of human nature and its origin and purpose as a more open question. Anyway, scientific knowledge becomes more and more conscious that it cannot manipulate nature without paying the price of loss of human dignity. Human existence also should not be manipulated by any objective system of thought, structures of society or totalitarian ideologies. This counter-revolution in science against deterministic mechanism, rationalism and pure objectivity has occurred with more disturbing effects in the realm of psychology. If uncertainty, mystery, the inaccessible, perplexity has to accompany a fully scientific work and raise the question of knowledge in a new humane dimension, then it is psychology diametrically opposed to behaviorism and objective observation which has to be recognized as the most important area of scientific revolution for the sake of the human person. Against the threats of mechanicm and empiricism, depth psychology focused its research deep into the subject. Against conceptual psychology it turns back to the self-analysis of man’s deepest unconscious violent forces, not only to behavior but first to the Behaver. Sigmund Freud definitely began his work as a typical adherent to classical scientism. He applied determinist methods in explaining the subconscious or unconscious. The interpretation of the function of libido is almost mechanistic. Repression, transformation, sublimation create the determined pattern of the unavoidable function of libido, and the interpretation of dreams follows this scheme faithfully. But, in reality, Freud’s invention of the subconscious signifies the end of scientism and objectivism. Now, everything has to be studied through the self and subjective, inner unconscious psychic events. Introspective psychology will defeat the easy “Gestalt”-psychology of empiricism and behavior. Human existence is bi-polar in its constitution and function: a violent struggle between the life-bearing eros for creativity and the self-annihilating pathos of death. Man is an incurably guilty person linked, with all preceding generations, by the assassination of the “Ur-Vater.” All social relationships can become a source of neurosis, because of the sick “devotion” (Widmung) which makes the ego centrifugal, seeking a sick identity with the masses or with another person. No action of the human person represents what it really is. Man is participating in a continuous carnival in order to avoid his individual neurosis. Though deterministic, the unconscious seems to be a level of activity which is complementary and compensatory to our ordinary conscious life.48 By this affirmation the deterministic and mechanistic method defeats mechanism. Man appears in his authentic continuous struggle with and against himself, full of anxiety and uncertainty. Introspection as self-examination



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will reveal the chaotic, dark basis of human existence, killing all kinds of selfsufficiency, autonomy and superficial optimism regarding an anthropocentric future. All scientific evolutionary humanisms become fantasies of neurotic nature, false consolations, among others, for a momentary escape from our tragic psychic situation. That is why this first psychoanalytical radicalism will be followed and complemented by a more comprehensive scientific approach. The analytical psychology of C. G. Jung on the same basis will introduce the bi-polarity of the collective-subjective subconscious and will accept the struggle as a continuous effort of the subject to find the equilibrium between the two in a continuous tension. Man is never alone and never one-dimensional, but animus and anima, extroverted and introverted, between good and evil, archetypal and experiential, instinctive and reflective, energetic and passive. Psychic health depends on the balance between opposing but complementary unconscious and conscious trends around the axonic system, where the pivotaxis is the archetype of God. The purpose of life is the self-identity with this archetype: God becoming man. The Self (“Selbst”) is the final purpose of life as it is grasped through the analytic psychological introspective method. Starting from these presuppositions, Jung does not hesitate to describe “conscience, this unifying functional center of ego into which all impressions of the subject are referred for receiving their logical affirmation and evaluation, as a complicated and undetermined, indefinable process composed of two levels (Stockwerken).” The one, as the basic, includes a certain psychic event; the other represents a kind of superstructure. The psychological interpretation of conscience must be accepted as a permanent coalition-clash (Kollision).49 The famous “self-consciousness” (Selbstbewusstsein) becomes here the most uncertain process of basic complementarity in psychic life. Jung professes a radical bi-polarity within the most crucial operation of a human being. Conscience has a static, permanent substratum (what we usually call vox Dei) and a flexible, unstable, uncertain element which causes a perpetual change, uneasiness and insecurity in all of our so-called conscious decisions. “Conscience” is, in the end, a continuous self-questioning between two antithetical forces that the subject tries to balance and to reconcile. The “Self” is in itself a relationship, a communal event. Its wholeness is the purpose of self-consciousness. One can say that introspection in this way, though a strictly individual act, is, in reality, a communal experience. On the same basis, the so-called individual psychology of Alfred Adler will teach that only the relationship with the Thou of the other person saves us from the neurosis of the inferiority complex. The “Self” is created in connection with a partner and the ego in the realization of its relationship with the environment and the important participants in this environment.50

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This bi-polarity and reciprocal complementarity is also confirmed by contemporary biology’s abandonment of its mechanistic and deterministic past. As in individual and analytic psychology, hereditary givenness will be matched by the activity of planning for the future and the continuous effort of the Self to overcome it and become a process of re-creation without being able to arrive at a final stage of self-sufficiency. The biologist Jakob Johan von Uexküll found that, basically, a human being has molecules of “receptive and effective” nature, which organize all energies of life as a polarized movement biologically and psychologically. Every unconscious biological movement is a movement of relationship. “In this way the essence of life is no reflex-machine. It possesses from the beginning in its essential structure the movement towards inside and outside as an inseparable fundamental element of its Being.”51 This survey of changes in the contemporary sciences, it is clear, has a particular bearing on the debate about the nature of the human person, because science, though it remains rational and objective and impersonal, based on observation and experiment, is no longer tempted by optimistic self-sufficiency and assurance about its possibility to understand fully both matter and spirit. There is a tendency toward self-criticism and humbleness among the best scientists today. R. K. Merton qualifies scientists as a community governed by four imperatives—universalism, communalism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism52—expressing the new scientific consciousness at this moment. Certainly, not all scientists feel this way. Science, relativizing its absoluteness and exclusiveness, will continue to work the same security. Its credibility is not at stake, and it is neither our wish nor our expectation to call them in question. The interesting point for our particular theme is that science in change raises the problem of encounter with change as a norm of reality. Alvin Toffler makes the appropriate remark speaking about change and the future. This, in itself, places a new demand on the nervous system. “The people of the past adapting to comparatively stable environments, maintained longerlasting ties with their own inner conceptions of the-way-things-are. . . . New discoveries, new technologies, new social arrangements in the external world erupt into our lives in the increased turnover rates—shorter and shorter relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily life. They demand a new level of adaptability. And they set the stage for that potentiality, devastating social illness-future shock.”53 The positive element of this new self-affirmation of science, in its ambiguity, uncertainty and pessimism, accentuated by the ecological problem, and the ethical responsibility of the scientist in being obliged to serve all kinds of unjust societies and war preparations, is the fact that it makes scientific



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man become more and more conscious that there is a need for a self-identity of the human person. Science has caused a new sensitivity of man in face of the need to confront the issue of his responsibility frankly and honestly. “The epic of modern science is a story at once of tremendous achievement, loneliness and terror.”54 Human persons caught up in this new scientific era of ours have to reflect more seriously about themselves and reconsider their deeper identity threatened by forces of alienation as never before. Science is humanizing in this sense (i.e., by creating the sense of uncertainty, confusion and pessimism it forces man into a position of self-criticism, self-questioning). Science, of course, in itself is something good and most necessary for humankind. There is no doubt about it. However, the more scientific humanism develops, the more a new self-identity is required beyond science. Scientific humanism can never overcome its limitation (rationalistic and technical) and its ethical ambiguity. Man is tempted to relax in its scientific functionalism. Here lies the great challenge of science in today’s world: the radicalization of the problem and the necessity for modern man to find his own identity beyond science. The defeat of determinism and mechanism and the double sense of mystery as wonder and awe imply an urgent need for deeper humanization in order that scientific man may overcome pessimism and loneliness. Enrico Cantore rightly describes the challenge of science in anthropology when he writes, “for, truly if man living in the scientific age does not determinately strive after self-humanization, he is bound to effectively dehumanize himself.”55 This self-humanization is the new self-consciousness of human person seeking anew the quality of life. The current model of man challenged by contemporary science is the realization that he is a broken self in a broken world, full of uncertainty, injustice and necessity. Quality of life means both a truer measure of development and liberation, and the total repudiation of technology serving repression and economic self-interests. Quality of life means a whole man in the whole world in inseparable responsible unity through man’s concern for inner coherence of mind and energy and the historical predicament. Of course self-humanization requires a process of reference and a model to be referred to. The challenge of science imposes an introspective reflection toward recovering a distinctive selfhood. Science itself cannot create such a model and cannot even afford the point of reference. It seems to me that the question of the quality of life in the process of self-humanization, as a response to the challenge of science in the realm of contemporary anthropology, is the question about the real being of the human person. The challenge of science cannot be faced without ontology, certainly through the inductive and contextual, and not through the deductive and abstract method.

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But without this final reference of Being there is no possibility of dealing with the scientific challenge, though science will always remain neutral in face of the necessity of raising this question. It is absolutely necessary, for this reason, to conceive the ontological question about man’s nature through existential categories and living realities encountered in experience. An existential ontology is not only possible but imperative in the realm of anthropology since science unified knowledge, mystery, mind and energy with anxious perplexity and “traumatic anguish.” Finally, the challenge of science in anthropology is more directly addressed to Christian theologians. The pessimistic and tragic questioning of man’s existence requires a Christian response. Theology is not ready to accept this challenge. Our traditional anthropology risks appearing as outdated on the whole. Our models are static and our ontological affirmations too theoretical to meet the challenge. Christian theology is always tested in dealing with man outside Christian faith, while this should be regarded one of the most important and necessary chapters of Christian faith, action and knowledge. Our concepts of the Imago Dei are once more challenged by a science which reopens the discussion by its openness to the categories of mystery and tragedy in the scientific enterprise of our days. THE IMAGE OF GOD: CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY IN DIALOGUE WITH SECULAR IMAGES OF MAN The scientific and secular understandings of man do not constitute clear concepts. There is no scientific exact theory on what man really is. It is only by reference to some conclusions of scientific research that one can guess their impact on the possible understanding of the human person when one raises this question with scientists. Certainly, anthropological sciences, like psychology, and especially that which deals with the origin and function of the sub-conscious in order to promote introspective methods in their methodology, are closer to a probable construction of an image of the Self. But this “image” is still an analytical and descriptive diagnosis of the function of psychic life and not a systematic synthesis of a concept about the human person. Psychoanalysis does not suffice to produce an adequate basis for systematic anthropology. Only a “psychosynthesis” could approach the possibility of the construction of a consistent theory about human person, operating on the main issues and conclusions of a scientific anthropology, that is, the origin, function and growth of “consciousness” in man. And yet, whatever “synthesis” exists in this connection is not what a systematic theologian dealing with the human person understands and tries to conceptualize.



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Science in this case also will apply the method of gathering data derived from the analysis of psychic phenomena, experiences and evidence. In the realm of introspective psychologies these data shall be simply used towards the construction of a more comprehensive image of the psychic function in order to gain more efficient therapeutic techniques integrating into a new system of application scattered data derived from diagnoses. This is an extremely complicated process which does not enable scientists to arrive at a notion of man as a whole. The passage from the sub-conscious through conscience to consciousness in operating this synthetic process is possible but never total and adequate. Because, at the final stage, consciousness can be everything relating to hereditary givenness: conscious growth together with esoteric traditions, physiological particularities of an individual, special environmental influences and particular undetectable reactions. The determination of the selfhood of man in science is the most uncertain goal of investigation on the basis of “consciousness” which can be everything from biological and physiological to the most conscious actions including also the para-normal faculties of human being. Awareness of the Self and experience of identity of the “I” transcend human knowledge as another “genos” in cognitive operation. Conscious will and desire also cause this “awareness of Self” to change its center of reference by unforeseen measures and unpredictable developments. The scientific approach to man by a “psychosynthesis” would be a riddle for science itself. This attitude however does not imply anthropological agnosticism. In the contrary this humble position includes the category of mystery, which is becoming more evident, when scientific way attempts a “synthetic” knowledge out of the analytical data. In this direction biology will specifically define the characteristics of the biological organism and out of the scattered results of observation shall reach more synthetic global visions which accept the human being as an organism in universalistic holistic dimension, rendering thus the definition of man as a biological organism more complex and beyond precise conceptualization. In this sense it will be proved that “(a) the organism is a complex of elements in mutual interaction (b) the behaviour of an individual element is influenced by the state of the whole organism (c) the Whole exhibits properties absent from its isolated parts and (d) a biological organism is a basically active system. It has an autonomous activity, and is not basically reflexive or basically receptive.”56 For psychology this broader vision of man in biology would signify the inclusiveness of all acquired observations of behaviour and unconscious trends into a whole synthesis of psychical and mutual interaction with the environmental influences and autonomous, inner psychical movements proper to every individual but at the same time communicable on a universal scale. As in physics, the term “complementarity” is used “to account for the fact that two different

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conditions of observation yielded conclusion that were conceptually incompatible, that is, light behaved like a particle on one occasion and like a wave on another.57 Similarly in the whole process of self-consciousness and identity, psychosynthesis has the impossible task of uniting elements of psychic behaviour which prove not to be intrinsically incompatible but which are incompatible in scientific observation. On this basis, science operates in a pre-anthropological area and prepares the anthropologist to admit the difficulty of conceptualization of the human person for the sake of a more comprehensive investigation of human life. In this sense one does not simply speak of “Man, that unknown being” but of “an extended concept of man.”58 which has tremendous implications for scientific epistemology in human sciences and opens the way for the beyondness and transcendence of man within his immanence, as a biological, mental and psychological organism. Post-scientific epistemology introduces the categories of “universalism,” “complementarity-communalism,” and “organized scepticism” and affords human sciences the possibility of new points of contact—the most difficult thing in all dialogues especially in anthropology— with psychological, philosophical but especially theological approaches to the understanding of the human person. Christian anthropology, dealing with this new type of epistemology, would have committed a great error if it had conceived an image of man by an exact theory with rational self-sufficiency. Facing probable contemporary secular images of the human person, Christian anthropology, especially today, has to confess its incapacity to respond fully to their challenge, realizing that it is beyond its power to produce a rational, systematic interpretation of its own image of man. Its first duty would be to proclaim honestly its limitations in face of the “extended concept” of the human person. The first point of contact with scientific models of man has to be established on this new category both of theology and of contemporary epistemology. The Imago Dei: Love, Communion, and Humbleness Following these remarks we have to be careful not to fall into any kind of triumphalistic speculation describing man as the Image of God, because this anthropological affirmation of Christian faith is the highest and the boldest statement ever made in anthropology. Christians risk falling into all kinds of hidden “isotheia,” theories of equality with God which is precisely what Christian theology should avoid doing by all means. It is fundamental and imperative to focus our approach to the Christian notion of man in God, because of the affirmation that his image is of God. In this connection God is the Creator of man. There is an infinite difference be-



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tween “creating” and “being created.” The Church Fathers will insist on this notion by the term “diastema” signifying “distancing,” as we find it expressed in Gregory of Nyssa. Further, following the biblical text we are not allowed to speak directly of man as the Image of God, as we usually do. The biblical expression relates to the act of God as Creator. Man is created “after” or better “according to the image of God.” It is the act of Creation qualifying man as image of God and not man in himself directly. The image denotes the relationship of dependence of the created man on the creating God. It is not, therefore, man as such, who is the Image of God, but it is the act of God placing him in the inseparable God-man relationship, offering him the freedom to grow and become “after His Likeness.” The act of Creation is—as we already said—to be understood only christologically; “In and by him all things were created” (Col. 1,16). That is why the only one, the unique one called directly “the image of God” is Christ (II Cor. 4,4), who contrary to all possible triumphalistic temptations, as the unique Image of God, “thought it is not a thing to be grasped to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation and took upon him the form of a servant” (Phil. 2,7). His glory, as the Image of God, is shown in his self-humiliation as a human person. The Christian image of man is definitely theocentric (God-centered). We cannot escape including this reference to God in the dialogue with the secular images of man. We cannot, however, ignore the fact that we have to deal with an ontological affirmation of His Being and qualify His creative action as transcendent. But all of these references in the realm of anthropology have to be made in Christ, in the person of the historical Jesus in this world, in this history. The difficulty in dialogue is that Christians propose him as the realized relationship of communion with God, the Creator, and therefore, the One and Unique Image of man. But, again, this is not an abstract ontological affirmation of the absoluteness of God but of the uniqueness of the Person of Christ. Unique signifies universal while absolute refers to the transcendence of Being. Christ, because he is unique, can have a universal presence. The nature of uniqueness is relationship on a universal scale. Eikon, image, denotes the presence of a prototype or archetype. It is a representation, faithful to its original without absolute identity with the prototype. It is a “likeness,” a “resemblance” which establishes a relationship with the prototype and its characteristic traits. Eikon indicates that an object is related with what precedes it, revealing the relationship between created and non-created. It is in this sense that Christ as the image of God has said to his disciples: “he that has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14, 9). But it is evident that here the resemblance does not refer to the external traits of the prototype, but to essential elements of identity between Father and Son,

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and the accomplishment of the will of the Father by the Son in this world, in this history. The verb ὁρῶ (to see) in the Bible has a deeper dimension in many cases. “To see,” on the part of man, signifies to know, to participate, to communicate, to coexist in agreement and to follow the will of God. St. Matthew makes use of this verse in one of these senses in one of the beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart-for they shall see God” (5,8). “To see God” does not mean visionary contemplation of his glory only, but principally and primarily the desire of man to participate in his grace dynamically and existentially. In other words, mystical contemplation and union with God has to be interpreted by the existential decision of man to think and act according to the Image of God, i.e. in Christ and his involvement in history in the form of a servant and on the Cross. This is the Image of God in its uniqueness and universality in Christ. This implies for all human persons the need to relate with him, sharing through him in the holiness of God and acting accordingly in history. It is, perhaps, through this approach to the notion of man as the Image of God, in Christ acting in history and its tragedy that we can suggest a dialogical image to the scientific and secular world. Certainly on the Christian part faith in the incarnation of the Logos of God is required. Without this presupposition agreement is not possible with the non-Christian images of man. But, if agreement is not possible the dialogue with them is fully possible and can become fruitful for both sides faithfully serving humanity together and the whole creation in its movement towards continuous recreation. This christological and historical interpretation of the Image lays emphasis on historicity and facticity, leading to a dynamic involvement of man in Christ in the ongoing operation of the Spirit of God towards the new man in a new Creation. There is no strict ontological and philosophical abstract notion of the Imago here, something which could equally divide and frustrate positivist scientists or activistic secularists and adherents of political theology and “contextualists.” Of course, there is the unavoidable reference to the act of the Creator which is transcendent and presupposes also an ontological reference to the nature of God acting as love in Christ and in the Spirit. But this ontology is grasped and experienced by faith, that is, through a personal existential decision comprising the whole of the human condition in history. It is this kind of existential ontology and ontological existentialism which though a paradox in the eyes of a philosopher is however the authentic cognitive approach to the image of man of Christian anthropology establishing a point of contact with the secular images of the human person. This realistic and dynamic approach to the Imago Dei underlines the means employed by the creating act of God: Love which is his essence, and therefore communion on a universal scale (which is the result of his essence) with



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the whole creation and all men; and finally humbleness and self-humiliation which is the application of both in a concrete way in history for the sake of the transformation of the old man to a new creation. Epistemologically also, this approach to the understanding of the Imago Dei can afford us the possibility of engaging in dialogue with the modern scientific image of the human person. Instead of philosophical, ontological abstract categories of thought, the Imago Dei notion expounded in this existential way can meet the epistemological and existential notions of the new scientific outlook comprising “universalism,” “communalism,” “disinterested and organized scepticism” respecting at the same time the “mystery” as the final option of cognitive operation in the realm of anthropology. For a better dialogical exchange on these notions, especially regarding the scientific “disinterested and organized pessimism” the “tragic traumatism” and the “existential anxiety” of scientists, as well as the Christian notion of “humbleness” and the need to grasp the human person in Christ which is always in need of a continuous transformation from the old to the new man, we have to interpret the Imago Dei in connection with the fall and the sinfulness of man. Imago Dei: A Hopeful and Repenting Sinner The complementarity between the ontological and existential approaches to the interpretation of the Image of God is given in the biblical narration of the creation of the human person. There is no possibility of interpreting the image without the likeness of God. That we are the image of God means that we are created after his likeness also. There is a givenness, a constitutive element of man in God, which however depends on whether we are ready to put it into action by our free choice and will. Imago Dei means a reciprocity between the gift of God and our conformity to it through our free decision. The essence of God and the vehicle of his creative act is love, which includes both the constitutive element of the Image and the freedom of the bearer of this Image to live in accordance with it, “after his likeness.” This dialectical situation of the Image explains to us why it is never lost, because it is the creative constitutive element of the human being. But it can be seriously shaken, darkened, perverted. The Image of God is a gift of grace of God without which man cannot be constituted as a person. It is not a supernatural additional grace. The Image itself is both the basic constitutive substance of man and a gift of grace, because creation by love of God places man in a state of grace. One cannot lose entirely the Image as something “superadditum” or as “justitia originalis,” something created by a second special act, which one can lose and still exist as a natural man. The grace of the Image constitutes the Image itself, identical with the being of man. He cannot lose

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it and still exist. But the existential side of the Image is expressed by the “after our likeness.” This becomes almost a condition for the real presence and function of the Image. The “likeness” stands for the dynamic interpretation by life and existence of the Image, which cannot be lost—as the constitutive basis of man—but can be corrupted. To the constitution of man belongs the static being but its full realization and activation depends upon the existence in freedom of man and his choice. The main property of man’s nature is that he can live towards his likeness to God, which includes the possibility of his dissociation from God for “recovering” a fascinating independence which is given as possibility in his constitutive basis: the Image of God. A human being is truly human only when he realizes his communion with God which is already given as his basic being, but even when he fails to keep himself fully in this communion he does not cease to be human. From a state of grace man is reduced to a state of expectation of a new manifestation of the grace of God who shall restore his Image by re-establishing his broken communion with man in Christ. In the Greek patristic tradition we are given this dialectic between the ontological and the existential interpretation of the Image. On the one side one has the impression that sinful man has entirely corrupted and destroyed the Image of God in himself. But the same Fathers, on the other hand, defend the thesis that sin is not an ontological reality because God has not created it. It is the sin which made man lose almost everything that he was given with his creation (“immortality . . . the co-naturality with the divine life, the divine virtues, the fruits of the Spirit etc”59) and still he remains within the framework of the grace of God which cannot be entirely negated by man. At the basis of this paradoxical dialectics there is an existential approach to the Imago Dei through the “likeness,” and the Christological and pneumatological understanding of the Image.60 The fallen man can be defined in the following three stages: a.  He is the Image of God but has deviated from his main purpose. He is the living manifestation of the love of God, his Creator, but he is deprived of full communion with him. b.  The sinful man reveals the power and the transcendent nature of his selfdetermination. Freedom as of the essence of the Image of God qualifies the creating act of God operated by his love. c.  The fallen man makes manifest a perverted will, which changes his freedom as gift or grace to a false autonomy, resulting in alienation from God, egocentricity, false self-sufficiency, carnal spirit, the judgement of the law awakening the feeling of his guilt. Sin is broken relationship with God and



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with the other men, and the Creation. It is the absence of the grace of God which operates only through communion with man. The state of sin is neither a total negation of man’s nature nor a definite fall. The existential “side,” that is, the “likeness” of the Image, at the same qualitative level with the ontological, defines the fallen man, following the manifestation of the Image in Christ, as a human being who by his appropriate use of freedom is on the way to repair this state of sin. To the decision of the first man to guarantee his autonomy by using the existential possibility of independence given to him by the Image corresponds now in Christ the new decision accorded again by the Image and the likeness of God arising from a completely different attitude, a change of heart and mind, the metanoia, as a new beginning towards recovering the broken Image. Repentance is also not a status originalis but a new direction within the state of fallen man, who is now defined by what he can become through a progressive change towards his full restoration. This is possible only in the re-established full communion with God by sharing in Christ’s body. Within this same attitude of Christians towards recovering the full Image of God through repentance as the initial state towards the end, there are different emphases by different theologies and forms of praxis, which have a particular importance when we encounter Christian and secular images of man. Generalizing easily for a moment, I would risk making the remark that, while in the East we insist on the recovery of the Image through repentance in the communion of God (that is why Church, liturgy, Eucharist, and resurrection are at the center of the Eastern spirituality), in the West the emphasis is more on the redemption and justification of the fallen man (that is why prophetism, judgement and the Cross are at the center of Western Christian spirituality). Both theologies, the one of the Logos and the redemptive, are equally legitimate, but they are complementary and equally constitutive of an authentic approach to the interpretation of the Imago Dei today. These two different emphases, dissociated from each other, risk inspiring two different types of spirituality of hidden, unconscious and latent triumphalism—with many variations for each one of them—which can, if professed in a radical one-sided way, isolate Christian images of human persons from possible secular ones. The Logos theology though everything in it is entirely dependent upon the will and the energy of the Trinitarian God and the broken heart of the self-humiliated sinful man is always tempted to disregard the historicity and facticity of the Imago Dei. There is a tendency to spiritalization, to sanctification of all things without reference to a consistent involvement, oriented towards the world, in the struggle with and for the secular. The

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Logos theology as more reflecting upon the mystery, mystically experiencing and liturgically celebrating Christ’s victory, is bound to inspire a more transcendent spirituality with a cosmic vision resulting in a contemplation of eschatological fullness, which is already symbolically here in the liturgy. The Imago Dei in this case can become a detached reality from the world. It can be expressed by esoteric language and celebrated liturgically rather than worked out ethically by intense activity in the realm of secular powers. The activists in the realm of social revolutions as well as the scientists in their organized pessimism and their “traumatic anxiety” cannot find here an easy partner for action and discussion in anthropology. Redemptive theology, on the other hand, can inspire an exaggerated expectation of salvation, which might concentrate our interest on receiving grace for justification while man still remains an unchanged sinner. To escape from the Eastern “deification of man” it falls back into a justified humanism, which might camouflage another type of self-sufficiency, superiority and individual enjoyment of salvation. While the East sees in the Imago Dei a “supernaturally natural reality,” the West by professing as the supernatural element the created “justitia originalis” introduces a juridical term into anthropology and builds a theology of justification. Certainly, this approach makes the Image of God more world oriented and realistically linked with the human condition. But the “Justus” idea dominates the “peccator” in a juridical scheme and the idea of salvation becomes too individually centered. The danger here is that a justified sinner is inclined to create in himself, though everything in this theology depends on the grace of God, too great a confidence in his self-justification. The well-known psychoanalyst Alfred Adler criticizes this tendency as a probable danger of a superiority complex which is the permanent result of the reaction of the individual against his own feelings of inferiority.61 He suggests an alternative term, which better corresponds to the whole of the Christian heritage, (i.e., “repentant sinner,”) because “he is the type of man, in whom not only our times, but also the times of the greatest development of all religions have recognized the greatest value, as his position is far higher than that of thousands of justified people.”62 Alfred Adler, in the end, does not spare his criticism of an easy and superficial teaching about the biblical term “Imago Dei” given to young pupils attending catechetical classes, because of the possibility that young people easily—unconsciously—can create a false tendency to regard themselves as equal imaginary to God and fall into the complex of an imaginary superiority.63 It is only the permanent state of repentance as a sinner that can help man to understand the Imago Dei concept in the appropriate way. On the other hand, Christian anthropology dealing with the image of the human person should not insist on the sinfulness of man in a unilateral, one-



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sided direction. In many cases, theology has confined itself to the problem of interpreting the how all men have sinned and are guilty because of the act of disobedience of the first man, Adam, according to the biblical verse Romans 5,12: “for that all have sinned.” Christian anthropology has not equally emphasized that much more the grace of God in Jesus Christ “has abounded into many” (5,15). Repentance, therefore, has meaning only in the perspective of the hopeful expectation of man to be delivered from the bondage of sin. There is not only a solidarity or identity of all men as sinful but also a solidarity in hope. Perhaps the Christian message has to insist more on this dimension of the recovery of the benefits of the image of God, restored in Christ, than on the destructive effects of the fall. Otherwise theology risks offering an image of the human person threatened by all kinds of neurosis. Christian anthropology should not forget that Sigmund Freud has focussed his theory about the origin and function of religion on the universal unavoidable consciousness of guilt, which is the result of the assassination of the “first father” by his four sons. This myth explains the solidarity of guilt of all human beings and it is for him at the root of all religions, which can be interpreted as a transformation of man’s guilt complex and the sublimation of the libido. Religion in this sense should be characterized, according to Freud, as a universal necessarily imposed neurosis by which man escapes from his individual neurotic status.64 This approach to the guilty conscience betrays a certain kind of influence from an one-sided Judeo-Christian anthropology centered exclusively around the fall and the sin of man and the identity in sin of the whole human race. It is possible that a traditional Christian anthropology, which has not equally emphasized the dynamic aspect of repentance and the hope of man for sharing in the restored image of God in Christ, can offer a desperate deterministic image of man (fall—sin—redemption—justification) which provides the reasons for such a psychoanalytical, deterministic and mechanistic interpretation of the origin and function of religion and can create various complex situations in some believers. Together with the generalized sinfulness of the whole human race, which is right and fundamental according to the biblical message Christian anthropology, avoiding all kinds of absolutization of sin, has to focus its image of man also and equally or perhaps more in the positive side of salvation in Christ which is the hopeful continuous process of fulfilment of man’s aspirations and expectations of realizing a more human life in this history. The Christian image of man, on the basis of the “Imago Dei” doctrine, has to be professed against both of the possible deviations which have tempted theology in the past, against the idealistic, heavenly oriented doctrine divorcing it from its historicity and facticity, and against the pessimistic doctrine of the image oriented only towards the world and destroyed

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by sin, divorcing it from its higher original purpose and fulfilment. So to be faithful to its biblical basis, the Christian image of the human person, interpreting the “Imago Dei” concept of man, has to be focussed at the same time on the solidarity in sin but also on the solidarity of salvation as fulfilment in hope of the human expectation of overcoming in Christ his sinful state, and thereby feating all kinds of guilty conscience. Especially today, the reinterpretation of the “imago Dei” through an existentialist approach and at the same time through the ontological affirmation of its essence as communion with God, as it has been revealed in history in the Person of Christ, the image of the human person that Christians suggest points both to the tragic aspect of human existence as well as to its God-given origin and its higher purpose. The misery of sin has to be grasped in the glory of God’s realized communion in history. Repentance is a continuous change of heart and mind operated within the sure hope of the final fulfilment in realising authentic humanity as the image of Christ, who is the unique “Imago Dei.” Now, we can say of man in existentialist terms that he is what he has to become. Definition of the human person is impossible, because it can be understood only as a continuous process of change through repentance and self-humiliation in the light of Christ’s exaltation and glory. Neither sinfulness nor glorification is the permanent status of the human person. If there is something permanent in man, that is his continuous struggle to overcome the status of misery in order to share gradually and progressively in the new reality of the new man in Christ. Solidarity in sin and contemplation and sharing in the revealed glory of the unique “imago Dei” in history should make us in East and West understand and profess the repentant sinner as an alternative to the man of pessimism and anxiety. It must be understood as a hopeful and repentant sinner. The Christian image of man, without being superficially optimistic, has to be a model of sober joy and dynamic hope, which is the motive of faith. Hope is the other name of faith exercised in love. Hope is the power moving man towards the future with vision, perseverance and joy. Without hope there is no faith, and love remains a sentimental, emotional reaction. The hope of the Christian model of man is a link with the hopes of the world, but it is also their critical justification and restoration. The Christian image cannot exist without repentance. It is necessary that secular images of man should be challenged on this difficult point of contact. Metanoia, as a continuous change of heart and mind after a serious selfcriticism, is always relevant for the secular models, especially today. Modern secular images of man are the fruits of pragmatism and immanentism in science and philosophy and of the submission of all ideologies to society acting as a detached machine in which politics dominate by seeking to secure a



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welfare state without cultural and moral dimension. Paul Leslie, commenting on atheistic existentialism and popular pragmatism, makes the remark that “the positivist or empiricist’s hypothesis would necessarily be that one arrives at the concept man as one arrives at the concept house by the accumulation of a series of atomic sensations about them which upon reflection are united into a single concept, as with Locke’s theory of how we arrive at the notion of substance—an idea, which is a kind of mental shorthand to save one from repeating additive processes.”65 This concept of man indirectly refuses normal communication with other human persons in love and mutual self-limitation and forgiveness. It is an horizontal view which makes all transcending values disappear in face of a confident pragmatist development. No wonder that the new pro-communal trends in science and society are in danger of being deprived of mutual deep appreciation of the other persons. Utilitarianism applied to persons and to society has replaced the value of the distinctive person, deriving from an ontological and existential principle. These new humanistic pragmatist images of man based on simple egalitarian principles of biological, social and behaviourist similarities disregard the dialectics of freedom and unify human persons in one simple organic and mechanical function in the name of justice and progress. Freedom as a one-dimensional quality for achieving independence in this context is becoming a negation of personal values. It lacks the deeper dimension of responsibility vis-à-vis the other distinct persons, since there is no reference to the transcending person qualifying freedom’s essence as communion. It becomes evident, however, that these inherited models of pseudo-social man begin to crack and shatter in the consciousness of modern man, especially amongst the young generation. The liberal, bourgeois, democratic welfare society, as well as the directed, collectively egalitarian society, have proved to be problematic equally for today’s model of a free human person in a free society, conceived by a simple functional humanism. In the anthropology of today there is too much uncertainty, confusion and disappointment undermining by frustration the remains of an optimistic humanism. The question is how the Image of God, i.e. the Christian Image of the human person, can contribute to clarifying some basic issues and remind the present generation of a missing basic dimension in contemporary secular anthropology in the understanding of man as a “hopeful repentant sinner.” Imago Dei: A Challenge to Immanentist Human Identities The scientific image of man comprising existential categories of universalism, communalism, organized pessimism and traumatic anguish, together

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with the psychosocial model, present a challenge to any unilaterally conceived transcendental concept of the Imago Dei. This recent development is causing a new attention to be paid to the historical facticity and the humane aspect of the Christian Image which is usually neglected in our theologies. It is a paramount duty, now, that the reverse challenge of the Imago should become a factor in a broader concept of man in the secular realm. Though we again risk to easy generalization in our conclusions about the characteristics of some of the secular models of man in today’s confused anthropology given above, we can remark finally that man in this new situation of disillusionment remains a man of courage and of adventure, enjoying his autonomy and his well-being, living in the affluent, abundant society of north-western hemisphere of our globe. Satisfaction and pleasure as well confidence in progress continue in spite of all kinds of deceptions, frustrations and suffering, and in face of the rise of uncertainty in public security, terrorism of all kinds and abuse of drugs. The archetypes of Prometheus and of Dionysos are still valid behind most of the models of secular anthropology in today’s crisis. Secular anthropocentricity can survive even in the most tragic revelation of human limitation, solipsism and despair. Man can be paradoxically happy and self-sufficient in his own appreciation of happiness and momentary satisfactions within the most contradictory human situations. The immediacy of the experience of life of the autonomous human enterprise has kept its priority over any concept of a theoretical, philosophical and religious nature. The need of changing in the sense of biblical “metanoia” can appear as absurd today as during the prevalence of optimistic models of man which is definitely over. We have to be conscious of this fact and not produce any kind of easy apologetics based on the manifold frustrations of modern disillusioned man. There is, however, an evident reaction against this anthropomonistic satisfaction in today’s human secular models from within this contradictory anthropology. Dramatists, writers, radical politicians and sociologists as well as the new revolutionaries in political theology are becoming more and more aware of the human person without escape, caught up within his solipsism. To this contradictory experience corresponds a radical opposition which cannot be expressed otherwise than as a scheme opposing frustrating disillusioned human reality inherited from the past with an utopian extended concept of man which is extended to the future. Utopianism is a substitute for the new natural theology of our days in the area of secular anthropology, social radicalism and revolutionary, political theology. Utopia is for man the necessary breathing-hole for seeking a false transcendence as he deceives himself suffocated by the totalitarianism of technocracy and materiel welfare within impersonal modern society.



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The Imago Dei approach can only demythologize this new extension into horizontal utopian humanism by debating the question of identity as it is expressed in the secular models of man. Personhood and selfhood can be the missing fundamental elements in the secular image, while the image of God is precisely a model of reference and relationship which seeks human identity in man as a being-in-personal- and communal-relationship. If there is a single determinism in anthropology it is that man as individual has to pass from individuality to personhood in order to find his identity in himself as a free, responsible, communal being. Wayne Oates defines self-hood as “the habitual center of focus of man’s identity.”66 We can say this center is always a center of interpersonal relationship. It is an encounter with another person who determines my free choice of freedom not seeking independence but always returning back to the original nature of freedom as communion having its origin in God as a plurality of persons in identity of essence which is love. The Imago Dei approach in anthropology is also anthropocentric, because of human freedom, but only when it reveals to man its theocentric origin and purpose. It is the outcome of encounter with the historical Jesus as the Image of God, that is, as the incarnate Word of God. The dialogue with utopianism of today centers in this sense on the issue of identity. If “personhood is an ethical concept”67 then it is inevitable that to seek identity means to create models of life and action beyond subjective limitations. Ralph Ruddock remarks “man develops as a person in so far as personhood is imputed to him by others and by himself,” and he continues that this person is socially conditioned, so that the term person has two distinguishable meanings. One is the complex of rights and duties imputed to the human individual, embodied in ethical prescriptions and cultural value systems. The meaning is in principle universal. The other is the freely acting participant in a social system, whose capacity for such action has developed on the same basis of some attribution of personhood.68 This is the meaning of selfhood in a pure consistent immanentistic line. There is nothing against it. But there is a question about the universal principle of cultural value systems and ethical prescriptions. The Imago Dei would never admit a pure anthropocentric autonomy as a unique source of such universal concepts. Especially when selfhood relates to the anxious seeking by man of his identity, “universal validity” in the area of culture and ethics cannot be referred to or conceived without the uniqueness of a principle of transcendental order or, better, a person who by his uniqueness has universal value. It is true, precisely, as Ralph Ruddock, in the end, admits, that “religious writing informs us that ‘identity-in-the-world’ is itself transient and contingent, and requires the individual to live in the awareness proper to his ‘real self’ within a cosmic frame of reference.”69 It is not simply a matter of

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“writing in” cosmic reference, but of a Person realizing communion between God—since he speaks of religion—and the whole Creation. The Imago Dei is called upon to play precisely this role in the search for identity of modern man by recapturing his selfhood in relationship with the historical event of the personal relationship realised between God and man as the pivot event in history. It is in this sense that contemporary Christian theologies are trying to expound new identities with the Image of God within the limits of historical facticity. We can detect a twofold identity in these theologies, first, the one that God himself in Christ established by the humanity of Jesus and his appearance in the form of a servant; and second, the identity of man with this Image as he has to conform himself to this form and act accordingly. Christ as the Image of God in Jesus realizes God’s identity with these who are in the state of a servant, in the sense of self-humiliation but also in the act of service to the one and paramount duty, that man by his effort has to realize this identity of servanthood in order to become more human and also to serve the process of humanization of other men who are also created at the Image of a servant and suffering God. This double realistic identity is implied by the emphasis on the historicity and facticity of the Image of God as it can be conceived by stressing the human nature of Christ and by the Christological affirmation of the inner inseparable unity between anthropology and cosmology, man and creation in a renewed ktisis. The radical appreciation of the historicity and humanity, following also the critical attitude towards metaphysics and transcendental notions in anthropology, have resulted in an anthropocentric and activistic attitude of Christians and the affirmation of the identity of the Image of God in this immediate and realistic manner. In the liberation theologies God’s Image is to be found as identical with the suffering man, the disadvantaged black person and man exploited by the forces of injustice and repression.70 God acting in Christ as Saviour can be grasped in the person of the oppressed as “God of the oppressed,”71 and his Image in the same way can be grasped in the person of poor people.72 This implies a consistent action of man sharing in the salvation given by God in Christ by an ethical conformity to his image in the historical person of Jesus who liberates from the manifold slavery, or heals of sick, helps the poor, the prisoners and the afflicted following the biblical appeal addressed to all men as the main sign of the messianic role of Jesus (Luc. 4,18-19). The humanity of Christ is the main feature of the Image in this world, identical with those who suffer and also with those who share in this suffering in the name of Jesus for man’s liberation from all kinds of bondage in the unjust world-wide community. The humanity of Christ is professed here as not only the point of contact with the human condition in general but concretely with



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man in the state of bondage. The Imago Dei is reflected in this condition and in the struggle against it.73 History renewed as part of the new Creation of the cosmos has its own main purpose in the liberation of the oppressed people as the Image of God and his children. The fundamental traits and constitutive element of the Image of God is love and freedom and therefore the Christian image of man cannot be conceived without his identity with the oppressed and those who are denouncing it by consistent action. The love and freedom of the Christian Image of man has to become liberation of the human person. The Imago Dei must be interpreted as continuous liberating action by human persons who are professing and preaching it as it has been revealed in the historical Jesus. This understanding for a Christian Image of the human person today must be accepted as a consequence of the inseparable link between cosmos, history and man. It arises from a Christology of nature as a new ktisis and as a corrective against the traditional unilateral, sometimes pro-monophysite way of thinking in Christian anthropology which emphasized the divine nature of the Image of God only. Certainly, the contextual theologies of liberation are betraying also an one-sideness, perhaps because of their effort to call upon a more practical and active approach to Christian faith. It is necessary, therefore, now to try to construct the Christian Image of man by referring also to the missing transcendent and existential element of the Image of God, focussing it more in an inductive method on the humanity of Jesus and its implication as the necessary final reference for Christian anthropology, as seen especially from the tradition of Eastern Christianity. BECOMING HUMAN—BECOMING DIVINE Deification, A Process toward Achieving Authentic Humanum in Christ The secular images of the human person, though deprived of an immediate and direct reference to a transcendent model of humanity are however persuasive in that they envisage man in his development towards becoming more authentic in his nature as a distinctive human being. Science, technology or social and political ideologies project an image of the maximum possible perfection within this world. Man has to develop his natural capacities and to improve human conditions. It is true that general anthropology contributes towards broadening and deepening our understanding of man, and “explores the range of man’s capacity to build cultural systems.”74 The secular humanists betray a desire to serve the dignity of man. Regardless of special presuppositions in each field of knowledge and action they all

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converge in a desire to serve a process of humanization. We can detect common characteristics, therefore, which sum up all particular insights, visions and efforts towards the same end: a better humanity achieved by scientific knowledge and stewardship of nature, by facing diseases and hereditary deficiencies, by elevating cultural standards through art and creative imagination, by professing ethical norms for action and by attacking destructive and evil forces in unjust structures of society. Humanization, in this sense, is a continuous process of improving the quality of life imposed on all men at all times and in all places on account of their humanity, which implies development, progress, growth, improvement of human conditions. There are not definite criteria of this almost natural effort, which constitutes the backbone of human history, but we can assert that no human being escapes this effort. A human being has its definition as a person taken into a process of humanization and as sharing actively in this process by a personal contribution. No glorious theory about man nor any negative position regarding his nature because of his failures, moral deficiencies and his existence threatened by death can affect and hinder this humanization process as the main purpose of human life. Certainly, this humanization process is a risky affair. It includes inevitably also dehumanizing acts. It causes confusion, since its criteria are, in most cases, not entirely clear. It can cause divisions amongst man because of the competitive nature of all human enterprises. There is the danger of self-denial and offence against the dignity of the person and humanity as a whole and at the same time of a catastrophe, due to excessive technical progress that man cannot master. But in all of these negative instances humanization remains the first and dominating feature of human history. The debate is, therefore, not whether secular images of man have a value but what that value is. The image itself of man as a model humanization, an object of debate and possibly of negation, but in what way this image does not allow probable negative powers to operate against human dignity and offence humanity. The secular images of man in the understanding of a Christian are not false alternatives of the Imago Dei, but they can become ambiguous both in their impact on humanity and by the application in some of their models. The missing element of a transcendent of theological nature in the secular Images of the human person does not disqualify the Image as such a priori. The mystery of the Creation of man implies that all human beings work unconsciously as collaborators with their Creator for promoting and fulfilling this Creation. Creativity is the common characteristic of all models of secular images. It is the deepest qualification of the nature of man which can be regarded as an indirect manifestation or as of the ontological depth and



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transcendence of human being. Further the fact that one reflects on the human existence reveals that man has as his purpose in life the achievement of the fullest possible self-consciousness and the fulfilment his inner impulse to recreate his deepest Self and his concrete identity as a distinctive person. In all kinds of scientific research or social and political activities, regardless of their individual or collective nature, the quest of, search for and experience of this personal distinctiveness is inherent in man’s being and his value, and in almost all possible secular images of man constitutes the basic element of his intrinsic value and worth. Creativity and self-consciousness and therefore the sense of ethical consistent judgement and action comprise the unavoidable basic elements of the secular images of man. Humanization as a God-given Process in the Service of Humanum The understanding and appreciation of secular images of the human person depends on the value we ascribe on the part of Christian faith to these human efforts to make man more human. It seems to me that the impact of Christology on nature and the relation between anthropology and cosmology should lead us to acknowledge that humanization is one of the main purposes of Creation. This world and human history as a whole are means of man’s struggle towards perfection and salvation. It is man’s being and life work which is at the center of the historical process towards humanization. It is in this process that man proves himself to be a responsible creature in the midst of history bearing the marks of an intelligent and meaningful Creation. There is, indeed, an evident obligation of man as an intelligent being to act for his further development as man in this history without external intervention. The structure of man’s consciousness of being and possession of a deeper Self with a prescribed plan of his continuous transformation is the first thing that he experiences in all phases of his involvement in history. Without concerning himself with great philosophies about the intrinsic value of nature and the historical process, a human person, as by his nature, tries to respond to plans of life, value systems and a deeper meaning of what he has decided to do at every moment in his daily life, which are all already prescribed for him. Involvement in history signifies sharing meaning and serving purpose in history as it moves towards its fulfilment. Nothing is meaningless and vain in nature and cosmos. It is this truth that compels us to define man as a creaturein-hope looking always forward to his development and nature manhood. Without any immediate sense of God’s calling to act according to a given plan of humanization in Creation, man inevitably becomes an actor of this plan by a simple conformity to an existing order and purpose that he finds

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subjectively structured in himself and objectively present in history. Not only as religious but as a secular man, even in his radical agnostic position, a human person is defined as a self-predetermined being in process of becoming more human, that is, more conformed to his nature and purpose as a thinking creature in an intelligent Creation. Everything in the world demands that man shall work for promoting human development and his fulfilment by consistent action, and everything in human effort is subject to evaluation according to the corresponding attitude he has taken in answering this demand from the world and from his consciousness that he is a human person. Without referring to a transcendent Being, a human person transcends himself everyday by his unavoidable actions as one involved in the process of his humanization and fulfilment. It is inadmissible on the basis of a consistent Christology of nature to maintain that history is meaningless or entirely corrupted because of man’s fall and sin. This approach represents the most Promethean attitude in this Creation, if one at the same time accepts that human efforts are decisive in giving meaning and purpose to life. The fact that we cannot define what is “humanum” as the purpose of the process of humanization does not mean that history has no meaning. It means that humanum cannot become one ideology amongst many and that there is no repressive obligation for a man to become what he should become, negating thus his freedom, the main element of the humanum. Certainly, one can attempt a description of the distinctive characteristics of a human person within Creation, making him able to speak and act in the service of humanum. David Jenkins makes the comment: “Humanum should not be considered as if were a collective adjective treated as a man designed to point towards what is distinctively necessary for our existence to be a human existence.”75 This is due to the fact that one cannot make an exhaustive and adequate analysis of these particularities which construct the essence of humanum. If there is something resisting logical and systematic analysis it is precisely the qualitative essence of humanum as it is clearly grasped, and especially as it is experienced, as a process in which we are involved. Together with apophatic theology there is apophatic anthropology, which does not really mean ignorance, agnosticism or abstraction. On the contrary it means personal involvement and relationship with an indefinable object. By the “humanum” as the final stage of the process of humanization in this sense, as an unavoidable involvement of man in history, we are obliged as Christians to recognize man as created according to the Image of God permeating the natural order of man’s Creation. By the study of the humanum as the particular, the indefinable characteristic of the secular image of man and as a result of the incarnation of the Logos in this history and world reality, anthropology is a theology of the process of humanization. To consider



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the humanum in the secular realm means to do a theology of man involved by God in the world struggle in order to fulfil his God-given purpose as a human person. If there is a glory in man’s enterprise this is the glory of the deeper purpose of Creation reflected in the human process of making man more human, that is, after the image and likeness of God. All human beings are to be seen within this struggle to become human, as they reveal God’s glory in becoming human in this history. Therefore all events in history manifesting man’s effort to become more human are elements of doing the appropriate theology of the human person. The context of theology of man is the process of humanization because man can only in this context realize his calling to become more human as a God-given reality in Christ. A human person in the process of humanization becomes meaningful in so far as he is creative. Creativity is a sharing in God’s image as Creator. Humanum is precisely a sharing in God’s deepest essence and grace. Creativity does not only unite all men as one of the common characteristics of humanum. It is more important that it makes becoming humanum a sharing in divine nature. Man’s process of humanization is in itself a process of being on the way to the maximum possible end, purpose, and fulfilment of man’s nature and life, which is God’s communion and love. We should not minimize this God-given dynamic sharing in the Image of God because of the sinfulness of man and especially the tragic element represented by the existence of death in history. Humanization is a process of making the glory of God, as Creator and regenerator of human history, manifest in this world. But of course, it is a glory of the Cross in the light of resurrection. It is the drama resolved by the victory of God in this world. Death is not simply an annihilating element but also and principally in the light of the resurrection a positive one of human existence. The process of humanization reveals in human life and world history that God’s image in man is the reality of God’s being acting in history and Creation through an inner personal and unbroken relationship with the human person. Man’s sin cannot break this link. It can damage it but never destroy it without losing entirely man’s humanness. Within this process of humanization a Christian approach to the secular models of man recognizes God’s being in solidarity with the human process towards the achievement of full manhood as it has been revealed in Christ. His Being becomes in this way communicable as new life. Any static concept of God as Being-in-itself, absolute and unapproachable in his essence, is defeated by his self-communication in the God-created humanum, his sharing in it finally in Christ. Therefore, humanization is also and finally a sharing in the divine life. Becoming human is equal to sharing in the divine nature.

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Deification: A Sharing in God for Achieving Authentic Humanization It is in this direction that we can approach and try to understand the central meaning of the Image of man in God according to the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, that is, the “theosis” of the human person. It is too easy to make an interpretation of this notion as signifying a cryptic, ecstatic, mystical and visionary attitude of Orthodoxy in connection with the reality of human person. Theosis is not entirely what I understand that the term “divinization” might signify as pointing to the change of human nature and assumption of another being. Theosis is not “theopoiesis” in the sense of being made divine, though St. Athanasius uses the verb also.76 Deification is closer to the Greek term as pointing to a deified nature, which does not lose its identity though it has passed through a transformation of the existential qualities of a being. This inner change is the stumbling block for human reason because it cannot admit a change within a substance which cannot be objectively detected and analyzed. The appropriate appreciation of this anthropological Eastern doctrine has been made more difficult by the radicalization of sin in the West resulting in the idea of the immense and unbridgeable gap between God and man. But it is well known that many Church Fathers in the West have defended deification as the culminating point of Christian anthropology. E. L. Mascall reminds us of the phrase of St. Augustine: “God wishes to make you a god, not by nature, but by adoption. Thus the whole man is deified”77 and sees the difficulty as lying in the Western teaching that man has a created natural order and another supernatural order by additional grace without communication between them.78 The Eastern Orthodox Tradition does not hesitate on the basis of the incarnation to operate a Christological anthropology of “deification.” The permanent guide in Christian theology is the hypostatic union between the two natures, divine and human, in Christ without change or confusion. There is a kind of mixis, mixture, between the two operated by the Spirit which cannot be similar to any other mixtures we know in the natural order or in philosophy. It is not a totally new being resulting out of this mixture but there are not too separate things remaining after it either. As in the hypostatic qualities amongst the three persons in the Holy Trinity, so it is with the two natures in Christ and so it will be with the possibility for man of union by the same Spirit with God in Christ without losing his identity as man. There is a reciprocal communication of essential qualities without personal identity and nature being changed or affected on each side.79 Behind this notion of “mixture” there is the reciprocal movement between the Persons of the Trinity and the communication with man on the basis



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of distinction between essence and energy in the triune divine Being. This is not a speculative doctrine but a reflection on the nature of the dynamic movement in God as it is given in the Bible because of the incarnation. We shall never understand “deification” in the appropriate God-initiated movement unless we focus it in the Trinity and in the communion of God and man realized in Christ. God is love. That means that God in his ineffable and incomprehensible nature is reciprocal personal movement because love as identity in essence signifies and creates a movement towards other persons of the same essential identity. God as identical with his essence as love is One but he is never alone. He creates persons identical with himself and therefore in communion with himself. The One-ness of God in the identity of love excludes the loneliness of God. God therefore incomprehensible in his essence becomes more immediately accessible as communicable, because his essence as love becomes a dynamic movement out of which Creation is possible, bearing the same sign in its substance: communication. There is, apart from objective knowledge acquired by observation and analysis, a knowledge caused by the reciprocal movement of persons. This knowledge is the one that God has first of us (Gal. 4,9) so that we can know in Christ communicating by his grace with his nature. It is this knowledge as movement person-to-person (prosopon-pros-prosopon) (I Cor. 13,12) which is the outcome of the essence of God, as love, in communion with man, effected by the Spirit. It is this kind of movement in God manifested in Christ and actualized by the Spirit, that the Bible speaks about, as the presupposition of being able as human beings, created “according to their Image and after their likeness” (the plural is very significant in this case), to become “partakers of the divine nature” (II Pet. 1,4), because of Jesus who “has given to us all things through the knowledge of him that has called us to glory and virtue” (II Pet. 1,3). Divine essence as love, movement as energy implying personal communion and knowledge resulting from this communion: these are the categories prescribing the nature and function of theosis as the supreme telos of the Christian Image of man manifesting the fact of man’s Creation after his Image and after his likeness. Theology and anthropology are interpenetrated and interdependent areas of knowledge and there is no demarcation line between divinum and humanum. This esoteric, mystical language should not create, therefore, the impression that we are detaching ourselves from the human reality and condition. “Deification” is the strange term for the most immediate reality (consistent with Christology) and experience of life in Christ and in the world, because “theosis” is never meant in the above given interpretation to indicate

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a hidden transcendental reality. If it is regarded as a mystical trend then mysticism must be understood as the most natural experience of reciprocity and relationship, i.e. knowledge through intrinsic communion with another person. Deification is, in the Orthodox Theology, the initiative of God communicating with man out of his sovereign will and outcome of his love and concern for man. It is not another super-nature of man added by a special transcendent act. Certainly, because the movement originates in God, it is revealed in Christ and realized by the Spirit, it can be characterized as super-natural in a special sense. But it is connected with man’s nature as it is in the process of transformation without losing his identity as a human being. His change is within human nature because of the human deified nature of Christ, in which he is called to share by faith and in a concrete way by sacrament and word. The deification of man is ontologically the sharing in Christ’s human nature but a nature which is deified. Therefore, deification is an operation in natural man, here and now in history. The nature is conceived as a movement towards a super-naturally natural being in continuous, inner transformation from his manhood to his real and authentic humanity restored in Christ. Deification is finally in this sense a process of reaching out to authentic humanization. It is the implication that Christ does not reveal only the Verus Deus but he is also the Verus homo. He does not only reveal by his incarnation the movement of God towards man but also that of man towards God. He does not make God known by reason, but lie initiates personal communication between God and man, elevating man as participant of divine nature. Becoming really man means becoming divine within a process of deification that remains within the limits of human nature and condition. Human life is permeated by the deified humanity of Christ. As really human, man has his definition in the possibility of becoming partaker of the divine nature. The process of the humanization towards the humanum is the same process for recovering it in the divinum; by deification, therefore, is a process towards authentic humanization. This exchange of qualities between divine and human does not alter essentially human nature but it restores it to its appropriate order after the image of Christ, who is the Image of God, appearing in the form of a man. E. L. Mascall can express with the Western precision and clarity what happens in deification in this context. “First,” he writes “the supernaturalization which grace produces operates in the very substance of human nature far beneath the level of observable behaviour . . . second, while it works by transforming man’s natural being, grace is directly concerned with his supernatural end and makes his natural end ancillary and contributory to it and, third, intimate as it is, the activity of God at the ontological root of our being



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by which he keeps us in existence and energizes our nature far more intimate is his activity in us in the supernatural order.”80 Authentic Humanness in Humanizing Divinity This interpretation of deification as the purpose both of the process of humanization and of the Incarnation of the Logos has a particular bearing on the interrelationship between secular and Christian images of the human person conceived on the ground of interdependence of secular cosmology and Christian anthropology. Certainly, within the church life and Orthodox spirituality deification has definite and clear implications first in the area of personal ethics, initiating total conformity to evangelical virtues and the imitation of Christ in the mystery of transfiguration from glory to glory; second, in the liturgical life as the climactic manifestation in worship of the deified nature of man and his elevation in his supreme order of collaboration with God in his creation; third, in the broadening of salvation to cosmic dimension including nature and all things in the process of theosis; and, fourth, and most evident and important, in opening the vision towards the glorious final end and fulfilment in history by anticipation as a realized eschatology. This definite deification, clearly bound up with inner church life, should not be regarded as a transcendental vision detached from the world situation, which unfortunately is the case very often. In reality, this should be a reminder of the centrality of deification for historical facticity, for man’s immanent relationships as they are now re-evaluated by Christ’s incarnation and the right understanding of the Image of God implied by the manhood of Christ. “Secular” and “Christian” are related as the areas of humanization and deification mutually exchangeable, complementary and interdependent. You cannot speak of the one without the other. Humanization and deification become the two perspectives of the one movement of immanence within transcendence and vice-versa. Humanness is possible only by its reference to its divine origin and purpose and deification is the paramount reality of humanness. Man as the Imago Dei is the link between the two and therefore he has his proper definition as a man in the process of change from being human to being really humanized through his deification. Everything now becomes a flow of inner, deeper, invisible transformation within humanity which is transformed into the receptacle of divine grace for its own fulfilment, through the infinite movement towards achieving God’s likeness. In this context transcendence in anthropology is the ontological reality of the deepest humanum in God, as he is acting in Christ by the Spirit, Transcendence according to this concept of the Christian Image as the outcome of the Imago Dei and the likeness is the process of man’s transfiguration from

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natural humanity to the movement of deification. Transformation in man’s nature is a far more vital, difficult act and notion than what is meant by the term transcendence in the realm of reason and philosophy. It is more difficult to change human nature from sin to sanctity, from meaningless creativity to responsible synergia with God than to create something ex nihilo. That is why it is only God with the consent of human freedom, who can work this kind of transformation. Deification has always its origin in God like the Incarnation. There is always a priority for God’s humanizing process over the human act of accepting and operating it out of man’s free will. This type of transcendence permeates all human enterprises. More and more science realizes that knowledge in its manifold application bears an ontological, essential, deeper movement of personal relationship. Every new discovery in the realm of science is a new discovery of the inner interdependence of things with man’s mind accompanied by a profound involvement of change of one’s own person in communion with a transcending power of transformation. Research is revealing the three-fold reality behind things and human reason: personal interpenetration as a real intercourse of male and female, mutual exchange of roles between nature and human mind, and finally reference to a supra-individual focus, which are all inherent within these relationships. For Michael Polanyi: “a discovery is always creative. As man discovers, his personality changes. If man refuses to grow and evades change, his thinking becomes schematized. Unwillingness to change leads man to do violence to facts, . . . he quenches the spirit of inquiry which issues from the depths of existence.”81 Though science requires individual concentration and operation and the objective field of research is clearly objective, the essence and the character both of knowledge and objects are more deeply connected in existential terms, representing an interpenetration of transcendence and immanence. John Macmurray accepts that an impersonal science is an impossible notion and writes in this connection that the terms “transcendent and immanent refer to the persons as agents and they are strictly correlative. Pure immanence like pure transcendence is meaningless. Whatever is transcendent is necessary immanent, and immanence in turn implies transcendence. God therefore, as the infinite Agent is immanent in the world which is his act, but transcendent of it.”82 In all realms of intellectual or cognitive, volitional and emotional life all kinds of dualisms should be defeated if one thinks of man as created after the Image of God uniting dynamically humanization and deification. Man is coming slowly into an age of maturity by conceiving reality and himself as a bi-polar unity. All kinds of splits in all areas of reason, will and feeling are slowly being understood as necessary challenges for communal thinking



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and action. Life takes its deeper sense as divine humanness and humanness in process of deification in man’s effort to realize unity and equality between spirit and matter, individual and personal, subject and object, body and soul, divine and human. The greatest challenge, perhaps, in this respect is man himself as a total human person at risk and under trial in his bi-sexual being as male and female. This is indeed, from the natural point of view, the most fundamental split and striking division in himself as the Image of God. It is the encounter in transcendental dimensions, indeed, because man-woman does not constitute a simple relationship but a full interdependence. The more any kind of undue imbalance and inequality is overcome the more a human being is in the process of his deification. Humanness entirely depends on the continuous reconstruction of the Image of God as an interchange on an equal footing of full complementarity and communal interpenetration of man and woman as the one whole human being in the making within the Trinitarian God. Male and female are rooted inside the Trinitarian communion of personal relationships based on the identity of essence which is love. The perversion of this relationship is a pure and direct negation of the Christian triune God as fullness of communion. It is not the fundamental role of maternity which is decisive for creativity as external par rapport to the Trinity which makes the psychiatrist C. Jung profess the necessity of “Quarternity” instead of the Trinity. But the maternity as it appears in the Person of Mary, not as Christotokos but as Theotokos, is inherent to the Fatherhood, the Sonship and the Procession inside the Trinity. The “maternity” archetype is the manifested outcome of the essence of God as love and is implied in the Fatherhood. Christ, therefore, as the Word incarnate represents as male historical person both aspects of creativity of the new man as deified in full identity and complementarity of male and female. Discrimination against either sex is not a simple negation of ethical order but a refusal of the humanization process and humanizing act of God, in other words it is inherent in the full acceptance of authentic deification as the basis of realizing full manhood. The Image of man according to the Imago Dei is recognized only in the full identity and reciprocity of communal being reflecting the divine essence. The question of equality and reciprocity here is the basic anthropological issue for a Christian model of man in dialogue with secular images. The Eastern Orthodox approach to the human person as created in the Image of God lays, in other words, its emphasis in the effort of man to realize the Image by actualizing the “similitude” (after God’s likeness). It is the sense of “existential ontology” which has priority over rational transcendentalism. With this presupposition Christian and secular images of the human person

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might enter into fruitful encounter without discriminating between secular and sacred. Becoming human is possible through becoming divine by participation and deification. This is to be attempted only within the process of humanization, which is also a God-given order and possibility. Certainly, this concept of the human person presupposes faith in the event of the incarnation and the Christology of nature. Without it there is no possible exchange of views for the sake of a fuller understanding of humanity. But, there is from the Christian point of view an open possibility of appreciating the secular movement of humanization as sharing in ongoing fulfilment of the purpose of the whole creation: to create a new man together with the world. Eastern Orthodoxy has on this point its main and crucial standpoint facing the secular images of human person as valid partners of dialogue and action within the one Creation. Perhaps, this presentation of the Christian Image of the human person has to a certain extend failed to appreciate the reality of fallen man as sinful, in the eyes of a Western Christian. It is possible. It seems to me, however, that Orthodoxy faces this aspect of humanity in its full negative ontological content and significance by the image of the “hopeful repentant sinner.” The human person created after the Image of God and “after his likeness” should be grasped principally in his movement towards his prototype and not through its negation. Sin should not remain the abstract “substratum” of guilt, preventing all efforts of transfiguration, discouraging all dynamic attempts of a person as member of the Ecclesia to fulfil his calling. The calling of God for Orthodoxy will be always understood as an imitation of acquiring the things which are given from above and a movement forward to the future in eschatological anticipation. Sin as a permanent “guilt-conscience” can hinder this perspective. Christology of the Image of God in the human person signifies a total affirmation of authentic humanity as rooted and determined in the divinity. It is the way of the resurrection. Without the latter the Cross is deprived of its entelechia for the human person, and history becomes a meaningless circle under the domination of death. The Christian image of man on the contrary has to he understood as an appeal to all men to share in the glory of God and his victory in history, here and now. NOTES   1.  Paul Evdokimov, in his book L’ Orthodoxie (Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1959), begins his presentation of “Orthodoxy by Anthropology,” 57ff.   2.  Maximus the Confessor writes that “man is introduced at the end of all other creatures as the link between God and the whole Creation” (Ambig. PG 91.1305).



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  3.  Gregory of Nazianzus uses the term “king” (Oratio XLIV, PG 36.612) for man in connection with the Creation.   4.  Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phénomène Humain (Paris: Seuil, 1955).  5. Plato in Politeia 270b, 273e; Tim. 28c, 30b; Cra. 412d (G. Kittel, Theologisches Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament, Band III [Stuttgart: Kohlammer, 1938], 869–879).  6. Paul Gregorios, The Human Presence: An Orthodox View of Nature (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1978), 21.   7.  Maximus the Confessor: “Man is introduced as the last one into the Creation as a natural (φυσικός) link of the whole reality through his mediation of the extreme beings in himself, leading all greatly differentiated things into the oneness” (Ambig. PG 91.1305B).  8. E.L. Mascall, The Importance of Being Human (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 34.   9.  On this issue, see Anticipation (Geneva: WCC, March 1974). 10.  Ibid., 21. 11.  Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, ibid., 33. 12.  Ibid., 33. 13.  Ibid., 34. 14.  A. N. Whitehead is the principal teacher of this kind of theology, submitted to his dynamic concept of creation as a continuous recreating-itself process. He continually reverses the order between heaven and earth, giving priority to nature’s ongoing inner movement of development. He writes among other things in this context: “What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of the reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. God is, in this sense, the great companion, the fellow-sufferer who understands.” See Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 532. 15.  Anticipation, 22. 16.  The critique of T. Derr on process theology is expanded in his book Ecology and Human Liberation (Geneva: WCC, 1973). 17.  Paul Gregorios, The Human Presence: An Orthodox View of Nature (Geneva: WCC, 1978), 64. 18.  Gregory Palamas writes: “Based on the biblical physiology I should not speak of soul alone or of body alone, but of both together, what is meant by the phrase ‘according to the image of God’” (PG 150.1361C). 19. As Hans-Urs von Balthasar is doing in his book Liturgie Cosmique (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1947) and Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator. The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Lund: Gleerup, 1965). 20. P. Evdokimov, “Nature,” Scottish Journal of Theology 18, no. 1 (1965): 9 (quoted by Gregorios, The Human Presence, 88). 21.  Similar positive theological attitudes to nature and creation are to be found in the West, expressed in less symbolic-liturgical language than in the East but converging in the same basic appreciation of matter and nature. For instance, M. O. Chenu in his book Nature, Man and Society writes: “The discovery of nature: we are not now

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concerned merely with the feeling for nature which poets of the time evinced here and there in fashionable allegorical constructions . . . Rather our concern is with the realization which laid upon these men of the twelfth century . . . (when) they reflected that they were themselves caught up within the framework of nature, were themselves also bits of this cosmos they were ready to master.” Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, selected, edited and translated by J. Taylor and L. Little (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1957), 4–5. 22.  On this issue, see Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: Α Νew World View (New York: The Viking Press, 1980). 23.  Floyd W. Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society (New York: Anchor Books-G. Braziller, 1964), v. 24. J. Bronowski, “Science is human,” in The Humanist Frame, ed. J. Huxley (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1961), 89. 25.  Robert Oppenheimer, Science and the Common Understanding (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 13–14 (quoted by Matson, The Broken Image, 3). 26.  J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 46. 27. D’Allembert, Elements de Philosophie, quoted in Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 46–47, quoted by Matson, The Broken Image, 12. 28. Matson, The Broken Image, 13. 29.  La Mettrie, L’ Homme Machine, quoted in Joseph Needham, Science, Religion and Reality (New York: Araziller, 1955), 236. 30.  Julian Huxley, The Humanist Frame (London: George Allen, 1961), 19. 31. Huxley, The Humanist Frame, 38–39. 32.  Quoted by Huxley, The Humanist Frame, 48. 33. Bronowski, Science Is Human, 93. 34.  Quoted by Matson, The Broken Image, 30. 35.  Margaret A. Boden: “Examples of schizophrenia as well as the bewildering variety of psychological malfunctions associated with amnesia or with damage to the speech-era of the brain, thus indicate the subtle complexities of the computational basis of normal ‘free behavior.’” “Human Values in a Mechanistic Universe,” in Human Values, ed. G. Vesey (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 153. 36.  Against the domination of man by society as an impersonal machine people from all different systems of thought, ideologies, philosophies and anthropologies have raised their criticism. The most representative in this context is definitely Herbet Marcuse with his book, The One Dimensional Man. 37. Gregorios, The Human Presence, 89. 38. Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 101 (quoted by Matson, The Broken Image, 287). 39.  J. Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, 119 (quoted by Matson, The Broken Image, 290). 40.  A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 17–18 (quoted by Matson, The Broken Image, 290). 41.  A. Einstein, The Philosophy of Physical Science, 57 (quoted by Matson, The Broken Image, 121).



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42. Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, 181. 43. Matson, The Broken Image, 127. 44. Charles Birch, “Nature, Humanity and God in Ecological Perspective,” in Faith and Science in an Unjust World, Vol. 1, (Geneva: WCC, 1980), 65 and 69. 45.  Robert H. Brown, “The Nature of Science,” in Faith and Science in an Unjust World, Vol. 1, 39–40. 46.  Harold K. Schilling, The New Consciousness in Science and Religion (London: SCM Press, 1973), 30–31. 47. Schilling, The New Consciousness, 32. 48.  G. Stephens Spinks, Psychology and Religion (London: Methuen, 1963), 52. 49.  Carl Gustave Jung, “Das Gewissen in pshychologischer Sicht,” in Das Gewissen (Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1958), 185. 50.  Gaetano Benedetti, “Introspektion, Subjektivitat und Freiheit in der Sicht der Naturwissenschaft,” in Sich selbst erkennen, ed. T. Wagner-Simon and G. Benedetti (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1982), 236–238. 51.  Hans Mislin, “Jakob Johann von Uexkull (1864–1944),” Psychologie des 20 Jahrhunderts, Band VI (Zurich: Kindler, 1978), 46. 52. R. K. Merton, The Sociology of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Quoted in Faith and Science in an Unjust World, 31. 53.  Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (London: Pan Books, 1971), 169–170. 54. Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe (New York: Harcourt, 1969), 4 (quoted by Enrico Cantone, Scientific Man [New York: ISH Publications, 1977], 411). 55. Cantone, Scientific Man, 413. 56.  Athur J. Deikman quoted I. Bertalanfy in “The Nature of Human Consiousness,” edited by Robert E. Ornstein, (New York: The Viking Press), 320. 57.  Ibid., 319. 58.  Robert E. Ornstein, ibid., 313ff. 59.  Gregory of Nyssa, P.G. 44, 800C. 60. Paul Evdokimov writes: “It is the source which is poisoned, because the ontological norm has been transgressed by the evil spirit . . . but as St. Gregory of Nazianzen writes (PG. 37,2) by Christ the integrity of our nature is restored, because he represents in figure (archetype) that which we are” (Evdokimov, Orthodoxie, 92). 61.  A. Adler, Meschenkenntnis, (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 151980) p. 189. 62.  A. Adler, ibid., p. 27: “der reuige Sunder” is the expression and the quoted phrase. We have to remind ourselves, however, that Martin Luther has not only spoken of ‘simul Justus et peccator’ but in one case he adds appropriately ‘et penitens’. 63.  A. Adler, ibid., p. 190. 64.  Freud: Moses und Taboo: assassination of Urvater: Totem und Tambu. 65.  Paul Leslie, Alternatives to Christian Belief, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967), 109. 66.  Waybe Oates, Christ and Selfhood, (New York:Associated Press, 1961), 21. 67.  As Ninian Smart maintains in “The Six Approaches to the Person,” edited by Ralph Ruddock, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 13ff. 68.  Ralph Ruddock, ibid., 203.

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69.  Ibid., 205. 70.  For this section of identity see the book of James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, (New York: Seabury Press, 1969). 71. The book of James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). 72.  The book of Julio de Santa Ana, Towards a Church of the Poor, (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1979), especially chapter IX: Theology from the Perspective of the Underdogs of History, 114–139. 73.  The book of Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, (Mary-Knoll: Orbis Books, 1973). 74.  Margaret Mead, “The Quest for the truly human,” Study Encounter, vol. II, no. 1, (1966): 2. 75.  David Jenkins, “Towards a Purposeful Study of Man,” Study Encounter, vol. V, no. 4, (1969): 154. 76. St. Athanasius sums up the whole purpose of the incarnation in the act of man’s deification. “He (Christ) assumed human nature, so that we might be divinized” (αὐτός γάρ ἐνηνθρώπησεν ἴνα ἡμείς θεοποιηθώμεν) PG, 25, 192. 77.  Serm. 166, 4. E. L. Mascall, The Importance of Being Human, (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 65–66. 78.  Ibid., 57–58. 79.  Gregory of Nazianzus: PG. 36, 140, 93, 165,168. On this subject about “mixis” see Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, (Cambridge 1964), 372–386. 80.  E. L. Mascall, ibid., 65. 81.  Aarne Siirala comments in this way on M. Polanyi’s philosophy in his work, Divine Humaness, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 137. 82.  John Macmurray, Persons in Relation, (London: Faber, 1961), 223.

Chapter Eight

Pneumatological Christology: Nature, Ecology, and Integral Humanity

The technological progress, the intensive study of the cosmic space and the new theories about the mystery of the creation of the world pose new problems to theology and especially to Christian cosmology. The strict sciences give a kind of mandate to modern Christian theology, that of reinterpreting itself in order to make a constructive contribution to the elucidation of the problems created by the vertiginous flourishing of the natural sciences. Christian theology is one of the spiritual sources that have produced this explosion of scientific research in Europe; it is, therefore, indirectly and partly co-responsible for certain abuses and exaggerations by the modern scientific man; as a result, Christian theology understands this reinterpretation as a duty from a moral point of view, in view of the dangers that the scientific progress poses to humanity. It is in a genuine spirit of repentance—in the Biblical sense of metanoia, a total rectification of mind and heart—that systematic theology must undertake this extremely delicate task; for, if human history is going through a critical moment, because of environmental problems, the thoughtless consumption of natural resources and the pollution of the air and the water, it is because Christian theology, unconsciously by far, contributed by its teachings to the promotion of a unilateral cosmology, centered on the human being, and a hypertrophied humanism in his egocentrism. Admittedly, these preliminary remarks do not intend to create a norm for Christian theology, based on the abuses of man, engaged in modern technology, constantly threatened by aspirations to conquer nature and the desire to ensure the most possible well-being, producing without limits and consuming without measure. That these tendencies are in opposition to Christian morality, which is founded on the responsibility of man as “housekeeper” (oikonomos) of nature 215

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before his Creator, is quite clear. But it is also true that in the present situation, Christian theology must recognize that it has sometimes treated the cosmological problem with some “innocence,” an easy and exaggerated optimism, accepting the idealistic and romantic framework of the past, and especially in Europe, allowing itself to be influenced by a transcendental humanism. Therefore, without constituting a norm that would dictate to Christian theology fundamental changes in doctrine, the current ecological crisis offers the opportunity to correct itself by reinterpreting itself in the light of the unilateral technological progress and its repercussions on human life and on the conception that makes man the unique and absolute center of creation. These lines are written with the conviction that only an interdisciplinary effort in the scientific field, including the so-called theoretical and spiritual sciences, can come to terms with the ecological problem, with the conviction, on the other hand, that only a preventive, and not a corrective, morality can modify man’s attitude towards nature. It is a question of preparing the minds and not of treating the evil a posteriori. It is, therefore, urgent for contemporary theology to look more carefully at its cosmological premises as to the true meaning of creation in the Bible, taking into account the experience of the current scientific developments and the anthropological implications of the ecological problem. Liberated from the romantic and idealistic influences of the past, Christian theology must, in our area, become again a purely biblical and prophetic theology, hoping thus to offer in all modesty and repentance a new contribution to the current general effort. It is primarily a question of transforming in a profound way the dispositions of man in view of nature, his/ her mentality before matter, his/her behavior against the natural environment. By all means, we must influence the spirit of contemporary men and scientists in order to stop using nature as a laboratory, as a material in the service of human needs. We must fight against the thirst for technical progress alone. By a pneumatological Christology of nature, Christian theology should reaffirm the value of matter as a primordial element of divine creation and must exercise its prophecy against all human abuses, by demanding the respect of nature. It is the fundamental task for Christian morality in our age. 1.  Philosophy in Europe has always been anthropocentric, because of its perfectly logical and obvious insistence on human reason, whose role is absolutely dominant in all areas of life. In Europe, this rationalist philosophy has thus been at the roots of Greco-Roman culture and, later, of scientific culture. All aspects of science, its social and economic structure, as well as the so-called “human” sciences, are deeply marked by an anthropocentric rationalism. Thus, on the basis of this rationality, man is called to dominate nature, to organize it according to purely rational methods,



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aiming at efficiency, while finally systematically applying the principles of an intransigent immanence to all levels of collective and individual life. The classic philosophy of antiquity, especially that of Aristotle, had reached a reciprocal synthesis of the logical principles between mind and matter, and beyond that, between metaphysics and immanence, and between the static and the motional movement. Yet, in spite of this, modern philosophy has been exclusively developed on the rational principle—that is, on human reason as a unique “measure” of applied science. Under the moral impulse of an anthropocentric and progressive Christianity, seeking the fulfillment of the gifts granted by God to man as the king of his creation, this philosophy finally served the rationalist anthropocentrism; it has submitted too easily and unilaterally to an aristocratic humanism of spirit and science, attempting to make man ever more capable of becoming a collaborator of God, of completing his creation. Certainly, not everything is negative in this development. Moreover, this rationality, combined with the value given to man—granted with the responsibility of perfecting creation as its housekeeper—is at the roots of modern civilization and scientific progress, which we are not allowed to condemn altogether in the name of Christian faith; in that case it would be an easy generalization resulting from a few negative elements that affect especially the applications of science and human behavior. It is undeniable, on the other hand, that this anthropocentric rationality has led to a progressive separation between mind and matter, between an intellectual and scientific man and material nature, as if it were on the one hand a kind of privileged aristocracy in all respects in creation, and on the other, a kind of second, very inferior creation, existing only to serve the intellectual man in his effort to develop, to perfect and manifest him/ herself as the summit and center of creation. In this perspective, everything must be put at his/her feet to assist him/her in his/her noble endeavor. Thus, through the modern times, a dangerous alienation between man and nature has gradually taken place without the former being aware of it. Human reason could neither hide nor fill the gap between the two. It has only continually perfected the machine which is intercalated between them, while it establishes a new relation whose object is to increase the efficiency and power of man. In the perfection of electronic and “thinking” machines, we are able to admire the highest degree to which this relationship has come: here, natural matter unites with the most elaborate form of human rationality which constitutes the epitome of substitution in relation to the first, simple and natural separation between material creation and man. The results, however, become obvious: an exaggerated exploitation of nature, mechanization of life, purely functional society, generalized automation; these are

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the inevitable causes of an absolute rationalism. Nature is denaturalized, the man is dehumanized, because the natural creation is devalued; it is no more than the raw material of a mechanical and quantitative production. The aesthetic position of romanticism, on the one hand, and the multiple forms of philosophical materialism, on the other, have not been able to create an effective corrective for this implacable development. In this valorization of matter, in fact, what is it at stake? To highlight certain aspects of the external beauty of matter, in defiance of others, according to aesthetic and superficial criteria, or else to deify in a way this matter, but on the basis of the same anthropocentric rationality and for the same purposes—namely, to serve with realism and efficiency the homo economicus, by means of mechanization and industrialization. Such philosophies have only contributed to the alienation between man and nature; they have put themselves at the service of the illegitimate supremacy of man in the creation, by an inflexible rationalism, folded on itself, presenting itself as a theory of reality and a practical and effective philosophy. 2.  Christian theology contributed unconsciously to these exaggerations of anthropocentric rationalism, while it was, moreover, affected by a kind of transcendental idealism. On the other hand, there has always existed an inner threat for theology, that of a pseudo-ascetic spirituality and fear of deadly sexual sins. These tendencies have played their role in devaluing matter for the benefit of the mind. So it is not so surprising that within Christianity a certain propensity to spiritualize nature has been always present. It led to the separation of the spirit from the body, giving preference and qualitative priority to the soul, to the mind, to pure feelings, to thought, as opposed to matter, to carnal desires which, as flesh products, were identical to the body, hence of an inferior existence. On the contrary, the spiritual nature in man constitutes the true man, the supreme creature of God, and the means of communion with God, while all that was material in nature pulled man down and bound him to the lower creation, doomed to sin and ultimate destruction. It is in this spirit of a pseudo-Christian dualism that some biblical texts have been interpreted by the exegetes. For example, the text of the creation of man in the image of God (Gen. 1.27) has been interpreted in the sense of an infinite superiority of man, as a rational and spiritual creature, in relation to all other creatures. On this basis, God’s commandment to “subdue the earth” (Gen. 1.28) was also considered a sign of the same human superiority, which took away all value from other creatures and especially from dead matter. Even if these texts indicate that man is superior, Christian exegesis and especially its practice neglected to underline the responsibility granted to man, precisely because he was created in the image of the God Creator,



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facing all other aspects of creation. In general, Christian cosmology, in its interpretation of human supremacy, has failed to highlight the moral obligations that flow from it, or to emphasize the indestructible links of man with the material creation, links that make obvious the very act of the Creator. We have emphasized too much the power, the strength and the authority given to man to fight evil in nature—earthquakes, cataclysms, savagery of the animal world, diseases threatening human life—instead of putting more emphasis on the links with this creation, our solidarity with it, because it is our origin, it ensures our maintenance in life: we are therefore dependent on it. By interpreting the supremacy of man in this way, one can positively value not only man, considered independently from nature, but the whole creation along with him, thanks to his/her particular creative work. In a Christian cosmology, the more we emphasize the value of man as a creature of God, the more we must emphasize the animal and material creation in its entirety. Indeed, unlike all religious spiritualisms, Christian theology is centered on the pivotal event of history and creation—namely, on the Incarnation of the Word of God. It is not by chance that the New Testament, and especially Saint John, insists that “the Word was made flesh” (1.14) and that, by this Word, “all things were made” (1.1–5). Flesh, here, means the materiality of the body, the concrete nature of which the human body is an eminent representation. For Saint Paul, all things (τὰ πάντα), visible and invisible, were constituted, that is to say, as inseparably linked, communicated by this Word, in which they took their deep meaning because it was incarnated in Christ (Col. 1.17). In other words, for the Christian faith, the Logos (verb), the Word, is never an idea, an abstract and theoretical statement, which would lead to a religious spiritualism or a philosophy of Being. It is the Logos Creator, as a Person, having a bodily and material existence, participating in our nature in the materiality of his creation. On this basis, the Bible does not teach dualism with respect to man; it does not divide him/her into a spiritual and a bodily man. Man is a whole, mind and body, and there is no qualitative priority, difference of essence between the two. The resurrection of the dead will be bodily, too, and the first creation has been made only as a fundamentally corporeal creation. In Christian cosmology, matter must return to its central place and its fundamental role, which is to explain the Creation of the world from the point of view of the Incarnation of the Word. Then, we will better understand the signs given by the text of Genesis on the creation of the world. Matter appears in this text as the matrix of animal life, since the first life is produced by the waters (Gen. 1.20) and man is created from matter, by the breath of God, into an indivisible being (Gen. 2.7). The dust, the waters,

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the animal life are recognized in their deepest value from the beginning of the creation, because of the act of God creating all things through his Word, which finally also takes on a bodily existence. Therefore, we understand that God created all things and man in an inseparable communion, which binds them forever. This is why God places man as guardian of the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2.15) and invites him/her to give names to the animals and plants of the Garden in his presence. This fact shows the most intimate connection of paternity and filiation, emphasizing that Creator, Man and Creation are from the first moment bound together by the act of the Creator. Man obviously has a central place in the creation of God. The Bible also emphasizes that the salvation of a human soul is worth more than the whole world. It is true that the theology of Saint Paul especially has an anthropocentric view of creation. However, it would be wrong to conclude that the importance given to man denies the value of other creatures and justifies any act that dishonors material and animal nature. God creates everything for man, but God gives him/her a very strict command for the protection of trees and indicates the rest of animals as one of the reasons for instituting the Sabbath. 3.  Only a Christology of nature will allow theology to rediscover the profound meaning of matter and creation. But we must know here about what kind of Christology we are talking about. Indeed, Christianity can lead us to other unilateral interpretations, through fixed and immutable concepts. It is necessary to insist on this point: it is from a Trinitarian theology of the creation that we can approach this important subject for both modern theology itself and its contribution to the ecological field. If this theology is to be Trinitarian, it is not because the Trinity is a basic doctrine for the Christian faith. The Holy Trinity is not a doctrine; it is the reality of the personal and dynamic revelation of the Creator God, who remains inseparably connected with his creation and continues to work for its completion. It is important not to forget that the Spirit of God was at the origin of creation, hovering over the waters of the abyss to create all things. The Creator Spiritus is the creative agent of God. Now this same Spirit is also the agent of the creation of the second Adam—that is to say, he proceeds to the incarnation of Jesus; it is the same Spirit who then consecrates and leads him into his messianic role; it is the same Spirit who finally raises him from the dead; and it is the same Spirit who stays with us and gives life in creation, making the unique event of salvation in Christ a perpetual event in history, here and now. No Christian cosmology based on the incarnation of Christ is therefore valid and totally biblical if it is not pneumatological too; for the Spirit is the dimension of salvation which extends it in time, and in all places, and to all the elements of creation.



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This is why Saint Paul does not use the word nature (physis) but the word ktisis (creation) to express the fullness of the Trinitarian creative act and especially the renovating, restorative and soteriological act of the Spirit which includes all creation. Ktisis integrates nature, history and man, taken together in the soteriological and re-creating act of the Spirit, by virtue of the salvation of Christ and the love of God the Father for all His creation on the way to its accomplishment. In chapter 8 of the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul does not hesitate to indirectly make creation a person when he speaks of the work of the Spirit; and Paul includes creation in the salvation of man as a result of one and the same work of the Spirit. Nature bears the signs of man’s revolt against his/her Creator; moreover, it suffers deeply along with the fallen man, as a living person: “We know that the whole creation (ktisis) has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom. 8.22). With audacity and realism, Paul refers to the birth, to the pains of a woman who is about to give birth, in order to indicate the condition of nature as the creation of God. Like men, it expects its salvation, and as a creature of God, it hopes with them to be delivered from the bondage of corruption to the glorious freedom of the children of God (Rom. 8.20–21). This paragraph is not only one of the most beautiful in the Bible; it is also one of the most important for Christian cosmology and the pneumatological Christology of nature. There is certainly no higher and deeper appreciation of nature as creation in religious or non-religious literature around the world. These words contain neither romanticism nor idealism. With remarkable sobriety, the glory of creation is linked to the drama of history, to the Fall of man and his/her salvation, to suffering, passion, pain, natural and spiritual evil, and at the same time to the hope of the new life, to the renewal of the Spirit who realizes that “in Christ,” is where not only the isolated man as an individual, but “the new creation has come” and “the old has gone” (2 Cor 5.17). 4.  It is therefore, very clear that Christian theology must today insist on a pneumatological Christology of nature, because it is also clear that man must respect nature and adopt a new, much more cautious attitude toward it. Matter bears a unique value for the Christian. This should not be proclaimed simply by human utilitarianism, because matter produces energy in various forms, provides precious and rare metals or food. Nor should it be proclaimed romantically because of the beauty of the landscapes, the forests, the sea and the flowers. This would only be the effect of a superficial aestheticism. On the contrary, we must proclaim the value of matter in general, including its inferior and forbidding aspects—those of dust, the desert, and so on. One finds everywhere the basic value, the power of creation and life.

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Therefore, we will not protect the environment in the name of its beauty or utility, but because it is the raw material of Creation in Christ; it is an integral part of the ktisis of the Spirit; it is a living organism to which we are bound by God in a very deep, moral and spiritual relationship, waiting for the salvation of all things, which imposes coexistence and collaboration. A right culture of the earth, an adequate vision of the body, a responsible attitude in the face of the multifarious matter postulate the culture and the blossoming of the new man in Christ, because the natural matter is included in the divine act of the creation and in its continual renewal by the Spirit. The natural environment is the place where we breathe the reality of a personality renewed by God. Pollution is the suppression of the sources of spiritual fulfillment. Offending nature as God’s creation leads to the denial of the possibility of realizing the true humanity in God. The thoughtless exploitation of nature and its pollution are signs of the beginning of the end of a technical civilization which did not know how to take inspiration from the deep sense of creation and the human existence which is linked to it. Contemporary theology has therefore an urgent duty to point out this meaning to today’s men, correcting itself for its past deviations. Let me add here that for the tradition of the Orthodox Church, this task is very clear, if we know how to see that the deep meaning of material nature is continually sanctified by the Church in concrete services and by the sacraments. In this respect, the Eastern Church appears in its liturgical praxis as the most “materialistic” between the Christian traditions. Certain services, certain hymns and certain rites, for example on the day of Epiphany and because of the act of the Triune God, place the material world at the center of the work that God accomplishes with man for the salvation of the world. For Orthodoxy, salvation in Christ is much more “cosmic” than individual. The Church is much more the pars pro toto—a miniature of the creation renewed and saved in its entirety—than an assembly of men. Bear in mind that the water is a fundamental means of salvation: by immersion in it, we are purified in the Spirit and incorporated in Christ. Bread and wine are taken from nature and become Body and Blood of the incarnate Word. Oil becomes a bearer of grace and the multiple charisms of the Holy Spirit. Christians, especially in Orthodoxy, use matter extensively, not only to sanctify it, the primary task of the Church, but to demonstrate that we are participating with it and through it in the healing work of Christ, which implies a reciprocal belonging of material life and spiritual life in the mystery of salvation. 5.  The pneumatological Christology of nature does not only impose respect with regard to the material Creation; it must inspire at the same time an integral humanism in our time. In contradiction to an anthropocentric, or



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rather I would dare to say anthropomonist humanism, this Christian cosmology has immediate consequences for the current understanding of man. In their anthropocentric rationalism, scientism, technical progress, the unbridled exploitation of natural resources not only leads to a lack of respect for nature; they do not only suppress the personal God in continual and dynamic relation with his creation; they isolate also man at the center of a nature from which he/she feels more and more alienated, and this, in spite of his/her materialism and the dazzling progress he/she makes in searching, for instance, for sources of material energy. The more the man evolves in this direction, the more he is anxious to see the rupture of his/her relationship with nature. The more man penetrates the mystery of space and the nucleus of the atom, the more he/she sees himself/herself unable to dominate the immediate relation with his/her material environment, avoiding thus a catastrophe whose dimensions are constantly increasing. In romantic and idealistic humanism, the man isolated him/herself, because he/she wrongly believed in the supremacy of his/her spirit in relation to matter, considered as inferior by definition. In today’s humanism, based on an anthropocentric rationality, man isolates him/herself, mistakenly identifying him/herself with matter. The two humanisms betray two opposite extremes of the same revolt against nature, of that nature which demands absolute respect because it is divine creation. In other words, the center of nature is neither nature itself nor man alone; it is the continual act of God which constantly renews nature with man, demanding mutual respect and interdependence. The new humanism must be integral, that is to say it must profess the co-belonging of man together with nature from the point of view of the divine creation. Man does not find his/her value in his/her simple relationship with creation, without a tendency to suppress it, to dominate it or to exploit it inconsiderately for its own profit. All forms of selfishness and human pride must disappear before nature, otherwise the latter will avenge itself by enclosing man in his own self-insulating dimensions. In this situation, which is at the root of the ecological problem, Christian anthropology must be careful not to profess certain biblical concepts in an anthropomorphic way. The praise of man, as king and master of creation, will not be without precaution, so as not to feed illusory fantasies of illusory supremacy. We will draw on the Christian and biblical spirit of modesty and repentance in order to give these Christian anthropological concepts a proper interpretation. Unconsciously, man flatters him/herself and boasts in his/her naivete and vanity, and he/she comes to believe that these doctrines have nothing to do with him/her, either because he/she believes he/she knows his/her limits or because he/she is agnostic and anthropology has no direct effect on him/her. Alfred Adler, the well-known

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psychiatrist, in his book Menschenerkenntnis, warns Christian pedagogues and advises them not to teach children the doctrine of imago Dei or the similitude Dei without paying much attention, because the danger still exists for the child to unconsciously nourish imaginations and morbid ideas of superiority. For the same reasons, Adler also rejects the expression simul justus and peccator of Luther, because the man is inclined unconsciously to be satisfied with his justification and to forget his/her sin; he thus becomes “self-sufficient” and creates superiority complexes. Adler proposes, following the Christian faith, to use the term “repentant sinner” in order to eliminate all temptations of human pride. Similarly, it is imperative that the notion of Orthodox Christian anthropology—namely, theosis—should be interpreted in the context of this pneumatological Christology of nature, in order to avoid any pseudo-deification of man due to an anthropomonist vision of salvation. Theosis is also an integral concept which indicates that man can participate through the Spirit in the human nature of Christ—that is, in His deified human nature. Man does not change his nature to become God. Man remains man, but he is deified by his participation and incorporation into the Body of Christ. It is an event resulting also from the cosmic notion of salvation. Theosis is beyond any philosophical subjectivism or anthropological solipsism. In the light of the Christology of nature, as creation (ktisis) restored by the Spirit, theosis means perfect humanization, equal to the likeness of the person of Christ, and thus attains the supreme goal of the human existence. It is a process of continual transfiguration, of an event that is both universal and personal, dependent on the communion with Christ, with the other members of the community of faith, and even more with the creation of all things, and primarily with man, to universal salvation. In the face of this universalism of salvation, the man deified in Christ is a straightened man—that is to say, sanctified, because he/she participates fully in the salvation of the restored creation in its entirety through the Spirit. The same goes for the current Christian humanism. He must recover by getting rid of all the fallacious forms of anthropocentrism in front of nature. A right relationship with nature, based on a Christology of creation, can have important and constructive effects on Christian anthropology. Ecology is not only a scientific and cosmological field, but also a moral and anthropological one. This is why the theoretical sciences and Christian theology can and must contribute to the formulation of the spiritual premises of this problem, which is insoluble for the moment, by seeking a new interpretation of the nature of Creation which will require both the respect of the man toward matter and the limitation of his anthropomonism in creation, because the latter belongs to God.

Part 4

CHURCH AND SOCIETY

Chapter Nine

Our History: Limitation or Creative Power?

One of the most difficult problems faced by Christians today, and especially young people, in our secularized world, is that of understanding the past. In a technological age, history becomes the crucial question for all young people who are training for a profession and are eager to contribute through their work to the life of the country and their church. This call to the future, which they hear in their daily lives, is fascinating and promising. It is clear that science can open new and attractive possibilities, and that progress is no longer a vague hope but has become a reality. Christian young people who are expected to repeat “the old, old story” of Christianity, and, moreover, to believe it and to live by it, are today in danger of being cut off from current developments in all spheres of life. They have the most difficult imaginable task: that of describing history as presence within a world whose only conception of presence is that of the immediate moment. And the greatest risk of all is that they will lose all contact with the world. The secularized world is not grappling with any conception of history, much less that of history as the revelation of God in time, but simply tends to ignore it altogether. This is the cruel reality that Christian young people have to face, and it would be a great mistake if they were to ignore or underestimate its gravity. THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY Before seeking a Christian approach to these questions we need to examine what people mean when they speak of history. The original word means the conscious work of a man who tells others with absolute certainty of 227

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something he knows, about which he is well informed. History, therefore, is an act of self-affirmation by a man who becomes conscious of something he possesses and who expresses it clearly and objectively. History is one of the highest expressions of man’s mind as it seeks to grasp, appreciate, and interpret the realities of this world. This broad meaning of the word helps us to approach history as a profound problem, which cannot easily be apprehended by modem man. For the sake of clarity, and to avoid the superficial classifications found in history textbooks, we should distinguish between three concepts, or better, three stages in the development of history. We have to start with history as it concerns a person and his deeds, which place him in a complex of relationships. In its second stage, history, which starts with events, is obliged to bring together many different elements in order to create continuity between them and to see them as inter-related parts of a whole, ascribing the cause of this inter-relation to inevitable factors of environment, historical moment, and purpose common to all kinds of men in a given situation. However, history does not fulfill its task if it stops here. The third and most difficult stage begins when the historian, as a thinking man seeking to create continuity and wholeness, tries to find the profound meaning behind this continuity and inter-relation of the successive events of history. Therefore, history, beginning with the simple narration of facts and events recorded in documents and on monuments and expressed in art and other facets of civilization, arrives at the crucial point of interpretation and sometimes of representation. MODERN UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE PAST A Christian has to reason very carefully in order to understand the present situation and the very different approaches to history inspired by modern science. It is not surprising that today, when all minds are turned to the progress promised for the future on the basis of present developments in science, the understanding of the past is taking a curious turn. Existentialism, which is the voice of man’s hidden reaction to a technological age, breaks the static approach to history by strewing that each historical event is unique because it cannot be separated from the concrete experience of one person. Existentialism interprets history on the basis of the individual’s free decision and experience. Science, on the other hand, speaks its own language, referring continually to the past as a concrete experienced reality, which endures permanently when it is used to ensure further progress. It invites young people to taste this reality and to accept the truth of its theo-



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ries insofar as they correspond to this reality as proved by the experimental method of the laboratory. Science is not interested in the deeper meaning of reality, but only in using it to advance man’s welfare. Faced with these two positions—existentialism and scientific realism—the historian can no longer present the past as an unbroken continuity carried forward by some inherent power and expressed by an abstract idealistic principle. He must now view the past as fragmentary and without any inner cohesion. Thus, not only does the problem of history remain unsolved: it becomes more acute and urgent because its profound structure and working are ignored. This situation has led the historian to adopt two extreme positions. One is what I would call historicism, which involves a simple and objective description, as accurate as possible, of reality as we have inherited it. The historian who adopts this attitude risks becoming the prisoner of the past: he is unable to make use of it in his present life and as a vital contribution to new developments. He operates from a distance, ignoring the personal element in history, the exceptional character of every event of the past. He fails to see that, in order to speak as an historian about an event, he must understand it, seek to establish contact with it by studying the characters of the people involved in it, and, in the context of their environment, evaluating their efforts to remain in solidarity with other men. At the other extreme is the existentialist historian who, because of the contradictions in the past and its lack of continuity, works only in order to re-enact the past, to represent it in the present moment, and turns his face only to the future. He breaks the unity between the three dimensions—past, present, and future—because he does not see the past as a real event, but from the perspective of his individual, egocentric reactions of the present moment and of his hopes for the future. A CHRISTIAN CRITIQUE OF ANTHROPOCENTRIC HISTORICISM The Christian is equally critical of these two extreme conceptions of history, not because he wants to find a compromise or middle way, but because they are equally anthropocentric, seeing this world as the only place which is decisive for man’s existence. Both are clearly the result of an anthropocentric humanism. The first is an escapist attitude: in trying to avoid present difficulties, the historian reveals a romantic nostalgia for the idealized past whose unbroken continuity expresses harmony. This simplistic conception of historic science kills that which makes history a living presence: the exception, and the fact that events are subject to an inner conflict, which causes

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every failure and shortcoming in human enterprises. The second attitude— that of looking only toward the future—is tragically anthropocentric in that it regards every moment of the time in which we live as a pivotal event for the whole of history, because at any moment human existence can start anew. This makes it impossible to speak of history as such; one speaks rather of a series of categories by which history is interpreted. History is seen as time evaluated only in terms of the individual’s thirst for emancipation from his historical past. From the Christian point of view, this attitude, though more realistic than the previous one, is another form of escape from the true understanding of the inner relationship between historical events. Both make the great mistake of depriving history of its main characteristic: its dependence on profound realities, which govern a hidden development comprising both progress and failure. They express the pride of modern man who longs to be self-sufficient and who, at the same time, is disillusioned by his weakness. They are unable to appreciate these great events in the past, which are beyond human rational analysis. These conceptions efface the miraculous in history: that is, those events which are unique of their kind, which cannot be repeated in the present, but which throw light on a reality which is beyond any simple laws of constancy and regularity. In this sense, Christianity does not offer simply a philosophy of history: it is the history of mankind revealed in a sequence of events, springing from one central event, which shows that history is neither a closed, dead past nor an open future unconnected with the past. History can be interpreted only by the reality of something that penetrates it from outside in order to endow it with a paradoxical continuity between origin and end, between the failure of the past and the progress of the future. Christianity puts first and last the historical reality of the event of God’s presence in the midst of history through the cross and the resurrection. Historical redemption means historical participation in the act of God. The blood of the cross becomes the wine with which man is invited to consummate his past by opening it to the future. So Christianity asks men to look at the historical past as a mirror in which they measure themselves and their role as they seek to interpret this past in their lives here and now. Here we have the basis for the dynamic attitude of the Christian who, while remaining always young, does not condemn the past as a dead reality, but vivifies it by conforming to those events, which give his own life a perspective which transcends reality without denying it. In other words, the Christian historian does not generalize, but chooses those events in history, which can help him show humanity how to recapture its true origin and purpose.



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THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF TIME AND HISTORY The axiom, which I think Christianity tries to uphold and spread throughout the world by mission and evangelism, is that the divine revelation in Christ did not happen only at one point in time, like any secular historical event, but through living faith that is also present today, will be present in all generations, and will be perfected and completed by the Second Coming. The essence of revelation, redemption in Christ, is not simply ousia, but becomes through faith in the church a par-ousia. Christian existentialism is based on the decision made now by a believer who hears the Gospel, which centers on a past event, but which becomes present when he makes it a power for new life, as he follows in the way of preceding generations. The Christian understanding of the existential choice is that it transforms the word preached and read into a par-ousia: the presence of Christ through the church in the believer. This conscious acceptance of the content of the gospel message is made possible not simply by his decision, for in Christian experience the choice is never completely subjective, because the Gospel of God is transmitted through men and in community with men. It is neither a psychological, emotional experience nor an easy mysticism, but is a result of what the individual experiences in faith only in the church through the power of the Holy Spirit. That is why, without a strong theology of the Holy Spirit, the true existential approach to the problem of faith is impossible. SACRED TIME AND NATURAL TIME Now we can tackle the very delicate problem of the understanding of history through the past of the church. The big question in all schools of theology today is how we evaluate time in general, and in particular the time between the first Parousia of Christ and the “now” of our existence. What is the relationship between the time of the history of mankind as a whole and the time of the revelation? Are we ready to say that the entrance of the Son of God into human history signifies at the same time the penetration of an element, which, without being opposed to time seen only as a sequence of historical moments, creates within it something, which cannot be analyzed by the instruments of a scientific approach? This is what we call sacred history, the history of salvation, which is not an isolated parallel sequence of historical moments, a kind of sacred super-history, but is interwoven with our time here and now. This means that man in Christ does not live a double existence, but is called through faith to see that, from the moment of the incarnation, cross, and resurrection, natural time bears the marks of something, which transcends it.

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Christian young people have therefore to dispute the following secular concepts: a.  Philosophical idealism, with its expectation that everything in history is moving toward a peak of synthesis where the “absolute spirit” will dictate order and truth. b.  Scientific materialism, which, as a reaction against idealism, sees the economic factor as the only decisive one in human relationships, placing the final end within history, which concerns only the material welfare of man. c.  Evolutionism in its various forms, which believes that mankind is continually progressing and that science and technology can increasingly fulfill human desires and aspirations. REVELATION AND THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH The Christian concept of time cannot be reconciled with any of these theories. If we are to stand truly for the biblical message, we must evaluate the past of the church and see that the present is dependent not only on the event of Christ but also on the history of the church between that event and the present. No kerygmatic theology can be true unless it is conscious that it speaks out of the experience of the church throughout the centuries, preaching something permanent which cuts across all kinds of idealistic and materialistic evolutionism. However, modern Christian existentialism is a danger, which threatens from within the true biblical concept of time and history. In this view, faith is seen as a vertical line between Christ and the believer, eliminating the horizontal relationship between the beginning and the now of the apostolic church and thus threatening the very important ecclesial, community element of the Christian faith. This understanding of history sees sacred time as a series of unrelated points and almost effaces the line of the continuity of the church. It seems to me that the radical existentialist Christian runs the risk of speaking of each generation and of each individual within that generation as having their own tradition, unique in its newness, since he holds that the pure event of Christ has to be completely independent of the experience of the past and be accepted by the believing subject. In this view, there is a danger that the church will lose not only its unity (which is the inevitable result), but also its profound conception of time and its relation to eternity. We should not forget that the concept of the physical world and of nature has changed so much, and the time dimension has been so well related to the space dimension, that the materialistic view of the world held in the last century has finally been destroyed. I am not saying that science is no longer



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positivist: science can only exist if it is positivist. I am simply saying that this positivism is of a different type, and that Christian young people should not be afraid to enter into discussion with those who uphold it and to speak with them of the moment of the exceptional event of Christ within history. It is the duty of the Christian today to pass from a Christian understanding of history to the tradition of the church; by so doing, he admits that the historical basis of faith has absolute value for the present. In other words, he must always understand revelation in relation to our church history, with the persons who form living links uniting us with our past, and see that this revelation is moving toward its fulfillment at the end of time. In Christ, history recaptures its communion with eternity, and church tradition is an arrow pointing to this connection. Christ is found only after His Gospel has been transmitted to us in its whole historical reality personified in the church by his apostles, saints, and martyrs. Everything has to be grasped anew now: the present moment has for faith absolute priority. That is why the biblical “now,” nyn, is one of the richest terms of Scripture. It includes all possible conceptions of time, including the end of the succession of historical moments (Matt. 24.21), and the beginning of the new life in Christ which places the believer between the two appearances of Christ (Phil. 1.20, John 12.31, Rom. 11.31). The “now” of the Bible is thus placed at the intersection of the cross, uniting in the horizontal line the past and the future, and in the vertical eternity and time. There is no “now” in the biblical language, which can be isolated and defined. The “now” is decisive in that it is a transitory reality between these four elements, uniting them in one. Here we agree with the Christian existentialist: that on this “now” everything depends, because it is not a static moment but a continuous and renewed decision of faith between these four poles which determine the decision. Thus a human life in Christ becomes by faith a product of the past, but always turned forward to its final fulfillment, living between two worlds and incorporating eternity. This is not a theory about time but the reality of the church militant marching in history with the church triumphant of the martyrs. TRADITION: A MOVEMENT TOWARD THE FUTURE BASED ON THE PAST What is tradition according to this concept? Tradition is not simply history, but a sequence of consistent, orderly acts of the Christian community which help the individual to become a member of a new fellowship, and which go beyond simple historical and natural criteria of nation, race, or language. This

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is church tradition as taxis and akoloutheia, order consistent with continuity. Tradition is not what people accuse especially the Orthodox tradition of being a sterile past, which determines our present existence, obliging us to adapt to past forms. But it is a decision made in the present by an individual who stands in communion with other believers, from whom he receives faith and with whom he makes the decision legal in the future, based on the experience of the past. Tradition is always a movement toward the future, but founded on the past, which sustains and fulfills it. Tradition is an accord of the individual with the Christian community facing the future, but an accord which is already found in the past. Scripture is the link, which has always been present since this movement forward began with the first proclamation of the Gospel. So dynamic tradition transforms the written word of God into an uninterrupted stream of life. It is not a normative codex, patristic wisdom to which we must always refer, but a living process of interpretation of the Bible by the people of God gathered in one historical family and on their way towards their final destiny. We must affirm that we are not creating tradition, nor have we received a perfected tradition, but that we are creating out of tradition our new life, and what we receive we hand on to succeeding generations as a new beginning. This understanding excludes three very dangerous deviations, which betray the freedom of a dynamic conception of tradition: a.  The theory that in the past there were implicit in the life of the church things that the present church can make explicit. b.  The desire to adapt the church to the modern world, using the criterion of the world for this adaptation rather than that of tradition. The modernization of the church can be achieved only by the inner power of the Gospel as it comes to grips with the secular world. The past of the church will provide the norms for the present, not vice versa. The fundamental experiences of church history may not be denied. c.  The effort to return to an idealized past of the church which exists only in our minds. Here we must avoid two equally dangerous views: the one which makes a leap of fantasy into the early church, which was not yet institutionalized and therefore pure and free from all human shortcomings, and the other which longs to return to a glorious period of theology and of the unity of the church which we must all respect if we want to restore the one tradition which is the history of the one church. Both limit the tradition of the church to a single form and deny its heart—that is, the inherent power of the Holy Spirit to become a moving stream of life throughout the centuries. Therefore, the problem is not how to rediscover a pure tradition, but how continually to purify the tradition of the church



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and to ensure that it truly expresses the continuity of the church and is the means of maintaining it. HISTORY, TRADITION, AND THE NEW CREATION The Christian conception of history sees the whole of history as centered on the event of Christ. It never divides history into past, present, and future, each part unconnected with and independent of the others. It sees history as a whole, moving toward its final fulfillment, which is already revealed. History is the house, which God visited and made his own and which is therefore expectant; fulfillment is not an abstract notion but a concrete interpretation of daily life in the light of God’s action in it. Man’s life is never lived only in the “now” of the historical moment but in the expectation that hope will be realized. This realization is not meant to be purely harmonious, without any suffering, full only of joy and happiness. The hope of the Christian is the resurrection of the crucified Lord. According to Pauline theology, hope means sharing through suffering in the hidden victory of the risen Christ. History seen thus in the light of Christian faith requires that Christian youth, especially today, have courage to be and to live. To be exposed to the dangers of time means to live as a redeemed sinner. Secular history deals with heroes in whom human power is exalted, but sacred history deals with the redeemed sinner in the communion of saints in which God’s power is clearly visible. The hero revolts against the corruption of time; the Christian saint, in obedience to God, revolts against his sin. They are marching forward together, constrained by the inner necessity of time, but they are not in step: the one has chosen revolt for the sake of the welfare of mankind; the other, in obedience, to hasten the coming of the kingdom of God. Therefore the secular and the Christian interpretations of history represent different understandings of its newness. Christians today should speak of this newness with great care, never starting with triumphant praise of what Christianity has offered the world in the past. For here we are approaching the key difference. Secular history either explains the past and classifies it, spurred on by a desire to discover a self-sufficient world order composed of successive events, or else escapes totally into the future, where it hopes to accomplish what the past has left undone. In either case, as in all non-Christian conceptions of history, we miss the acknowledgment of the failure of mankind which is the result of general culpability corrupting history from within, and of the fact that the greatest historical successes are inseparable from the most abject failures. Because this is missing, there is no sense of historical judgment and, therefore, no sense of metanoia, of the repentance, which, after

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every success or failure, results in a complete reversal, in humility, in order to serve in another way. HISTORY UNDERSTOOD THROUGH CHURCH TRADITION History seen in the perspective of church tradition bears the marks of efforts made in common obedience and repentance to renew the old world from within, that it might be in accord with its origin and destiny as revealed in Christ Jesus. Therefore, between secular history and Christian tradition there lies an immense gap: the former gives a one-sided view, while the latter tries to be more realistic, more human, closer to the tragic reality of human existence. Christian youth are not trying to go beyond the reality of the corruption of time by idealizing it, but rather are grappling again and again with the reality of life lived between the cross and the resurrection, bound by the moment of time, struggling to transform it so it may serve God’s purpose in history. To see history as tradition means to begin again with God and his Spirit in this world with all its sins and failures, in order that we may share in God’s grace for the re-creation of all. History is not the repetition or imitation of prototypes, but the actualization of the power (energeia) of God which is potentially available to all those who believe in him in history, seen as the tradition of the living Christian faith handed on from generation to generation. The true dimension which God prepares for us is the future, and so man must remain always young by trying to reincarnate the living past of Christian history within the present reality, offering himself as an instrument to the energy of God. However, we should never lose sight of the fact that Christian history, seen as tradition, which is given to us to continue as we create our life anew, does not assure us a peaceful, harmonious existence. We know that, in Christ, the struggles, the anxieties, the uncertainties, the fears, the shortcomings, the failures remain and will be judged by him who is the unique Lord of history. It is therefore this final judgment which gives to history its profound meaning and wholeness. This judgment reveals the universal guilt, the human plight, while at the same time promising a sure hope. CHRISTIAN HOPE: HEROIC ABANDONMENT TO GOD The Christian hope is not the optimism of secular history, an optimism that all things will finally be brought into harmony by inner laws, which govern their relationships. This optimism regards sin as an evil arising from disorder, often from a lack of material goods to meet human needs. Nevertheless, it



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would be very wrong for Christians to oppose such optimism, a fatalism and quietism, which result in a withdrawal from the historical task and the scene of the struggle in a technological civilization. This is not the Christian hope: it is but a caricature. Christian hope, as opposed to secular optimism, grows and moves forward in humility and with confidence both in God’s presence in history and in the possibility for men to work according to his grace, falling and rising, failing and succeeding, as they face the demands of God today. Christian hope surrenders itself, abandons itself to God. It is this truly heroic abandonment, which enables the believer to grasp again both his own life, renewed by Christ, and also the whole world, created anew at that moment. “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory” (Col. 3.3–4). This is the key to Christian hope: not as something remote which will be fulfilled at the end of time, but as something which is hidden in Christ now, and which reveals the reality in which we share and for whose transformation we as Christians struggle, for it is not our reality but His, redeemed in glory. This hope is not supernatural, nor metaphysical: it is neither only historical nor only eschatological, but an amalgam of the two, working for the future of this world. This hope is realistic and does not promise that we shall be rewarded tomorrow if we behave well today. The understanding of history as church tradition implies one tradition in which all Christian traditions participate by the constraint of Christ. This “participation” means that the hope is not my hope, but our hope, just as the tradition is our common tradition of the one church. The Spirit never acts only for me, but for us and through us. How different hope becomes if it is hope in others and with others, all together on the same foundation looking forward to the same goal, yet with the same realism, which recognizes our common culpability and sin! Hope is true only if it is fed by our solidarity with the hope of other Christians. Christian hope must be ecclesial, for only then can it be realistic, based on the past and moving to the future as a power of renewal for the whole world. Hope is, of course, expectation, but how can we expect something in the future if we do not remember together with others, on the common ground of our past, promises already fulfilled in time? Hope consecrates time, gives to it its inner power, and is expressed in prayer and worship centering on “thy Kingdom come.” THE CENTRALITY OF SACRED HISTORY Sacred history, the history of salvation, the history of the church, thus becomes the whole of history, the cradle in which secular history is born again. The secular is ever invited to move within its all-embracing reality: the sacred

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event in Christ. For Christian youth, history is identified neither with superficial hopes for progress and the solution of all human problems by society and science, nor with the rejection of any contact between Christ and the world. The Christian understanding of history as a creative power cannot be rightly interpreted by either identification or radical separation. It is precisely the struggle between these two extremes, carried on in solidarity with, and in, and for this world, that can reveal to us the real meaning of the promise of God that for the secular world today everything is made new in Christ. “Behold, I make all things new” is not a subjective vision of the individual believer before his Christ, nor can it be entirely identified with the objective reality of the world. When history is understood through the tradition of the church, it becomes clear that this newness is hidden and must be revealed by the members of the One Ecclesia as, trusting in God, they act in his one world which is given to us today for continual transformation. In this world, all kinds of failures must be accepted as leading to the repentance which brings about a new beginning. This service to the world is possible only if it is understood as the diakonia of the church. Newness is then revealed little by little as old things are given new life and made dynamic by the Spirit of God, who uses us as his instruments when we act together as living members of his church.

Chapter Ten

The Unity of Grace

It would be a great error if we were to support the idea that the intense work for restoring church unity is a main characteristic of our century only. Church history teaches us that there were always noble men who worked to bring separated churches together in all times and even immediately after the first schisms. But what is perhaps new in our century—and this is, thanks to the men of the Ecumenical Movement, seen in the World Council of Churches and described as early as 1920 by the Encyclical of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople—is the way in which the restoration of church unity is continuously in the path of realization. It is a life process of the churches— being together and staying together within a koinonia of life, a fellowship of a “practical” nature, which conceals a deep understanding of the reality of the growing responsibility for sharing in the inter-church diakonia. It is only in this situation that the question of the nature of the unity we seek is posed afresh today and in a new way, that is in the koinonia of fellowship of the World Council of Churches, comprising faith and witness, confession and life, dogma and engagement of the churches together in this world. Therefore, we should no longer examine the dogmatic differences alone and seek to impose on the others any kind of consensus in matters of confession in order to reach a formula of agreement, unless we are first ready to share in the key work of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit to build up his community of newness of life beyond any kind of scholastic prescriptions which block the way to the biblical understanding of “keeping the unity of the Spirit” (Eph. 4.3). This concept in actu of unity is far richer and more dynamic than all other definitions of unity that the human intellect, separated from the charismatic fountain of the Spirit of life in the Church, may suggest through the system of any school of thought. From the theological point of view the most 239

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interesting theme of our days, forced on us by the growing relationships of the churches, is the study of unity through the right understanding of the work of the Spirit to build up the community and the correct interpretation of the biblical charisma, the gift of grace of the same Spirit, as the constitutive power and element for maintaining church unity. DIVINE GRACE AS GIFT It is rather strange that theological discussion on grace has very often, in the history of theological thinking, been marked by confessional dispute between separated traditions. The result was that the theology taught in colleges and universities dealt more with the different interpretations of the effect of the grace of God in man, and centered the interest on the participation, the collaboration of man accepting this grace; or on the other hand with the question of the surplus of grace, or not, and the right of the Church, or not, to dispose of this grace as God’s treasurer in this world. In this way the study of the nature of grace has been overshadowed by all these disputes. It is in modern times and to a great extent due to the event of the gathering together of different confessions, bringing as contribution to the restoration of Christian unity their charismatic life, that through the particular gift of grace, given by God to different people standing in different traditions, the fundamental question of grace can be posed anew to today’s theology. At the same time we owe a clear answer to today’s laymen, standing on the border between the life of the Church and the life of the world, about what we mean when we speak of the grace of God realized in Christ Jesus. If we are allowed to attempt an approach to show the direction in which the interconfessional discussion in an ecumenical setting should seek to find its way again in studying the most fundamental biblical term of the Christian faith, we would say that the grace is the power which flows out of the act of redemption in Christ in order to restore man through the Holy Spirit to his original position, that is to say to communion with God. It is difficult to understand now what this communion with the trinitarian God is, but this very meeting of the different church traditions makes us realize more and more that the gifts of grace reflect this communion as an historical event which has already taken place in this world in a visible form in the concrete fellowship of all of us in the One Body. The echo of the incomprehensible grace of God is clearly heard only in His earthly community. “God is faithful, by whom ye are called, unto the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1.9). It is a fellowship of the biblical koinonia and exists as grace in movement and action, both for the restored communion



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with God in Christ and for the immediate reality of the earthly community, the other koinonia that we have in His Body, our community of believers, “as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (John 17.21). We have here both things; first the restoration of communion with God in Christ, and second our belonging together as an inseparable whole, a community which reflects the power of the grace realized in Christ; therefore, only when we come together and live together in the One Body do we dispose of the reality of grace and the possibility of returning again and again and remaining within the fullness of belonging together with God. In this sense we must recapture as separate traditions the power to reaffirm that this fellowship with God of which the Bible speaks is not a category for philosophizing or theologizing in a formal way. It is not a simple principle of life or of thinking, or a moral code for social life. This communion is the immediacy of God’s presence in time with us saved men as concrete historical unbroken fellowship. Therefore, communion with God is to be understood only through and in the established communion of God among men. St. John, who, like an eagle, in the prologue to His gospel, flies over the earth with a celestial vision gained through the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, alights on the earth and brings this whole vision into the immediate reality of our life together as One Body and on this earth. “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar” (1 John 4.20). Every vision and theory about the restored communion of men with God is judged and decided in the historical fellowship of His Body. The theological problem of the communion as grace realized is for us the everyday problem of an ecclesiological and anthropological nature; it is the axis of the whole creation, the center of history, namely the unbroken community of believers. In this we are invisibly fitted together . . . there we have to live; there is the fact that we have to accept—this community which does not derive from our agreement on what we understand of grace, but from the reality of receiving it through His One Body on the condition that we remain there. We must make it clear again and again in our minds that this is His community; it is what He has done in order that we might have immediate access to the tremendous event of the restoration of our communion with God. It deprives us of understanding in an intellectual way what is happening, but it gives to us his reality as a new life. The nature of grace is not to be identified with the result of grace, justification by faith; neither with a surplus of grace and the rights of the Church deriving from this quantitative understanding of what God has done for us. The nature of grace is the once-and-for-all gathered communion of saints and believers to live, with all those who are saved through faith, with God. The matter is, therefore, more how to grow in this community, how to keep this community a real and unbroken one. The grace of God is not a simple

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discussion of the justification of man, but it points the road back to God by fitting us together in His family. God never obliges us by grace; He does not give a gift like a king or a tyrant, but he liberates men from themselves and their isolation and invites them back, having given already the immediate means of achieving this. The Trinitarian God of the Christian faith is not the isolated “it” but a personal will—that is to say, a God who is always coming to meet and create a gathering in His name. The doctrine of the Trinity tries precisely to express what is the life-process that comes to meet us and create a communion of persons which defeats equally individualism and collectivism. This process should never be thought of as a set form which governs the life of the group. The grace of the Christian God does not seem to be of this kind in the Bible. We can never possess with absolute certainty the reality in which he has fitted us together; there are moments of solidarity and moments of alienation; there is a struggle, a falling away from His will and a coming back to it. But what affords the community of God its unshaken basis is the transcending power of His grace, seen in the fruits of the Holy Spirit—that is to say, the manifold expression of His person is through the gifts of grace. That is why the Bible teaches so very clearly that: the incarnation and redemption imply that God abides here among us in His Ecclesia; his communion with man is this communion that we have in the Ecclesia. Everything in the life of the Church has to be continuously restored and renewed, but only in and through this Ecclesia, or else it has no sense at all. The People of God is His community here and now: it is this affirmation that the Bible makes by pointing continually to the close relationship between the Head and the Body and the consistent functions of the members fitted into it. THE HOUSE OF GOD AS BUILDING This idea of the community as a given and accomplished reality in time and yet as a process of becoming and growing is expressed in the Bible in an outstanding way by the idea of the building, oikodome. The biblical oikodome bears both aspects described above—a solid basis and a continuing process of building. The building is not an entirely finished house; it stands here bearing all the necessary elements for habitation, but men are not yet entirely equipped to live in it. God’s act of giving does not overcome by His grace man’s limited ability to receive. To explain these words especially to Evangelicals, I must say that we do not mean that the gift of grace is conditioned by man, but rather we take into serious consideration the sinfulness of man, received into the holiness of God’s building. The paramount importance of grace is precisely that



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man’s revolt against God’s holy will is unable to affect the building of God. On the other hand, it affirms that the grace of God cannot operate as an automatic machine. It is given for salvation in a complete way; therefore, it points to a new freedom of man to abide in God’s house and to share in the restoration of His community. Here the grace of God can be given in vain if we fail to share with God the immense responsibility of maintaining His building and abide in it as one community growing together through His gifts of grace. It is in this way that we can understand the words of St. Paul, “We then, as workers together with him, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain” (2 Cor. 6.1). It is the tragic refrain of the Christian faith that one can receive the grace of God in vain, a fact that has nothing to do with the fullness of grace but with man’s failure to respond. The question is how we can be certain that we have received the grace not in vain. The answer in the Bible seems to me to be clear, insofar as the grace for remaining in the community is seen always as an operation of the charismata of the Holy Spirit. We can, therefore, say that the grace is not given to us in vain when it is used for the edification of the communion of saints, as a contribution for preserving and permitting a close link between the members of the one unbroken Body. It is in this way that the building of God in the Bible is continuously being perfected. This scandalous phrase that the Body of Christ, already given and established, has still to be built further by men means that being a member of the Church, one has to become a true member and justify his membership by offering his particular gift of grace, not in order to provide for the Body, not as an exceptional power, not as a revolutionary uprising, but as a responsibility given by God in order to maintain the solidarity of the members throughout the whole world. THE BUILDING INTO WHICH WE HAVE TO BE BUILT TOGETHER We can, therefore, say that the gift of grace—charisma—is the grace in action given in a personal way, namely that one member contributes through it to building further the community. The charisma is the existential expression of charis; it is the vessel of grace, grace shown forth in action. The right use of the gift of God deriving from Christ’s redemption is to maintain and edify, with the other members, the One Body. “As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God” (1 Peter 4.10). The answer to the big question of what maintains the unity of this Body should never remain in the abstract form either of a verbal confession or of a

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global but docetic statement, such as, “Christ Himself the Head of the Body maintains it.” The Bible presents us with an existential struggle which begins when the Head transmits to the Body concrete tasks, in whose fulfillment the Body is quickened. These are the gifts of grace, the manifold charismata, which once put into operation among us by the Holy Spirit can be recognized as authentic only if they are used as dynamic connections, binding the members together in the One Body. No single operation of any gift of grace can be exempted from this truth, according to the biblical text. When making an act of simple thanksgiving to God, the individual who has received the gift must seek to express it in a corporate way. In, through and for the community, all charismata are tested as true or not, and every act of every believer has to be judged as truly done in the Name of Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit. Corporate, communal thanksgiving seems to be in the Bible the seal of the authenticity of a personal gift of God given to an individual, because it reminds us simply that all gifts are given to one person but in, through and for the whole Body, the one unbroken community. “Ye also helping together by prayer for us, that for the gift bestowed upon us by the means of many persons thanks may be given by many on our behalf” (2 Cor. 1.2). The gift of grace is received only in the community. The charisma at first intensifies our personal life of faith; out of a confession, ever new action springs in a particular situation, thus contributing to the maintenance and growth of the same community. This means that to face the danger of generalizing and accepting superficially every apparently good action of an individual, the Bible gives us the criterion for discerning the true charismata from the false and distinguishing between the gifts of grace received in the Body of Christ and for codification in it, and the gifts of grace received by all men within the creation of the One God and Creator of all. This criterion is precisely the work of the building up of the house which is already built for us “upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone” (Eph. 2.20). This is the fundamental truth of the operation of the charismata. Only on this basis can we understand and maintain the infinite diversity of the gifts of grace and regard them all as indispensable, though so different one from another, for the building of the community. It is on this basis that the second chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians presupposes the act of God implanting us, fitting us into the already existing building prepared by him for us. But this building is not made of stones which remain passively where they have been placed. It is becoming an active body, and the living stones are endowed with new life through the gifts of grace, only if they live, move and work together in a close interdependence. That is why St. Paul, after he has spoken of this first act of God fitting and framing us together, speaks of us



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in this building of the Lord, where we are built together. It is very significant that, for the first act of God, St. Paul has used the passive form with the preposition “upon” (epi) saying that we have been built upon the foundation (epoikodomethentes) but for the second he used the middle form of the verb with the preposition syn, “ye are builded together” (synoikodomeisthe) (Eph. 2.22). The text shows us clearly that the first act of God leads inevitably to the second. The passive form of the first verb does not signify that man remains passive, but that God acts; the second verb again does not mean that man acts, because the form is middle, but that man acts only through the grace received from God by being built together upon the foundation, and only together with the other members, in and for the community. It is only in this way that man reaches the supreme purpose of his redemption in Christ, namely to become “an habitation of God through the Spirit” (Eph. 2.22) and thus by being built together in God’s oikodome he becomes his own building: “Ye are God’s building” (1 Cor. 3.9). Here we must take careful note, because this biblical verse has often been subjected to two extremist interpretations. To become God’s habitation through the Spirit means very often, for some totally devoted members of the Church, a kind of exclusive and “individual-churchly” experience which leads them to neglect the communal and missionary aspect of the charismatic life. On the other hand this strong affirmation of the Bible, that God is always working to make His people His habitation through the Spirit, combined with the cosmic, universal meaning of Christ’s redemptive act on the cross, has led many in our days to regard many of man’s actions in daily life and in the secular realm as charismatic, almost in the same sense as those actions that the Bible describes as constitutive charismatic elements for the building up of the Body of Christ (as described in texts such as 1 Cor. 12, Rom. 2.6ff, etc.). The first extremist attitude seeks to isolate the Christian from the world and introduces a rigid separation of the House of God—His building—from the cosmos, His creation redeemed and restored in Christ. The second attitude generalizes the charisma, seeing it as spread throughout the whole world, without necessarily the personal commitment in the Church through faith, and the fundamental gift of grace springing up from the act of being fitted into the Body of Christ through Baptism and participation in the Eucharist. The first separates the Church from the world; the second identifies her with it. Both of these attitudes find their point of departure in the Bible and are to a certain extent justified exaggerations, but only in a rigid and single direction. They represent easy and enthusiastic exaggerations, while the biblical text does not allow of such simple and monolithic interpretations. We must notice that the charismata in the Bible are not so simply and exclusively, ecclesiastically and sacramentally bound, but on the other hand they are never

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entirely set free from the Church to become merely worldly phenomena on the basis of a vague, cosmic and general salvation given to all men in Christ. The charismatic texts of the Bible should never lead us, either to a false separation between Church and world, or to a superficial identification of the one with the other. We should never oppose sacramental to profane, but rather distinguish between sacred and secular. On the basis of this distinction the sacramental grace is the fountain of the gifts of grace. These charismata are not given to us in order to enclose us in the Body as saved members, but in order that we might through them look at the gifts of grace scattered throughout the whole world as given also by God the Creator to all men. We must, in other words, distinguish these charismata which edify the church community from the others which operate in the world and are also under the Lordship of the same Lord of the Church and of the world. The whole creation exists and is preserved by God the Creator, and all cultural, scientific and economic developments are possible only thanks to the manifold grace of God. But these charismata are still natural talents, certainly God-given but not yet used to the full, not Christ’s gifts to the members of His Body—that is, they are not yet ecclesiastical. This distinction—and not separation!—has a very great importance for the activity of the churches in the modern world and for their concern for promoting church reunion. It signifies that the churches, on the one hand, have an inner charismatic life, but, on the other hand, this life cannot remain an internal ecclesiastical affair. Through the inner charismatic life the historical churches, liberated from their sectarian and parochial vision of the world, look for and recognize the gifts of grace of the One Lord also in the world outside the Church, yet not in the same way as the charismata within the Church. The “outside” charismata are an invitation to those inside the Church to act together in order to use fully these gifts outside the Church, because those inside are vehicles of the power of the Holy Spirit to manifest the Lordship of Christ in the world. They are signposts pointing to the restoration and recapitulation of the whole creation, and they are still to be incorporated into the One Body of Christ, which is the Ecclesia. We should not confuse the charismata given for the maintenance of the unity of the Body with those given to the world. The purpose of this distinction is precisely to enable us to understand in the right way and act accordingly in the world as one Church, equipped by the Spirit with the manifold gifts of grace given to the historical churches. The diversity of the gifts of grace exists within the church community so that it may keep its unity and at the same time turn to the outside world and use fully the “outside” charismata that God has given to be a point of contact between Church and world. Everyone outside the Church lives by virtue of



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a specific charisma of God. That is why all can receive Christ as Him who fulfills all in all, by using fully the life-bearing charisma given to them by the grace which flows from the church communion. The charis, the grace of God, always springs up from within the Ecclesia to the outside world through the diversity of the charismata with which it endows the members of the church community. There is maintained, therefore, on the basis of the distinction between sacred and profane, a contact, better an existential continuity, shown as solidarity between Church and world by the threefold operation of the diversity of the gifts of grace in the Church; this operation is the receiving of the grace in the One Body, the maintaining through the gifts of grace of the unity of this Body and the extending of this unity to the secular realm, using fully the charismata, given to the world as vessels of this grace. That is why only the faithful, living within the charismatic ecclesiastical community, engaged in missionary activity today in this period of universal history and in the modern technological age, can understand the meaning of the triumphant words of the Bible “. . . by him all tilings consist. And he is the head of the body, the church” (Col. 1.17–18). The vision of the restored creation (ktisis) belongs only to the consciously faithful church member; and not to the man living in a selfish isolation owing to his strong conception of sacramental grace as saving once and for all; nor to the “incognito” nonecclesiastically bound “Christian” in the realm of secular life, simply serving the world through his talent as artist, poet, physician, etc. Both are deprived of this vision by their non-communal use of charisma, received in the Church for the whole cosmos and summed up in the same One Church. God, after the redemptive act of Christ and His resurrection and by His Spirit, penetrates and fills the whole world by the gifts of grace which flow out of his Body, the Ecclesia. The movement is always from within the Church to the outside world and not vice versa. “But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ . . . that he might fill all things” (Eph. 4.7, 10). We should never confuse the order which preserves the fallen creation of God with the charismatic ecclesiastical community. The natural order, after Christ’s redemption, has to pass through the personal commitment of faith, the incorporation in the One Body through Baptism, and thus become the charismatic church community. It is only in this way that the Bible, through the diversity of the charismata of the Spirit in the One Church, speaks of a direct Lordship of Christ within His building, and through it points out the indirect one yet to be achieved through the mission of the charismatic Church in the whole world. There is, therefore, no separation between the two aspects of the gifts of grace, but we must make a clear distinction for the missionary purposes of the historical churches acting together in the world. This distinction prepares for permanent solidarity maintained by the charismatic nature

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of the Ecclesia flowing out to the world by a charismatic mission in which all the historical churches are engaged together. THE CHARISMATIC COMMUNITY WITHIN THE CHURCH OF UNITY The diversity of gifts of grace is given precisely for the maintenance of the unity of the Christian community within a changing world and for church mission, diverse in forms and methods still one, yet appropriate to different times and world situations. The clash, therefore, between those who have received the gifts of grace is an immediate sign of the sinfulness of man and his desire to keep individually all that he possesses, introducing separation instead of working further for the spiritual equipment of the charismatic community. The great danger arises where anyone, on the basis of his charisma, thinks of himself more highly than he ought to think, not respecting the measure of faith that God has assigned to him by giving him a special charisma (Rom. 12.3). St. Paul shows how this threatens to split the charismatic community as a devilish spirit. The Christian is always tempted—for the sake of defending truth and right action!—to abuse his God-given charisma. In the twelfth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul speaks of the charismatic community after giving them a severe warning, trying to restrain them from any kind of selfish and individualistic use of their charismata. The gifts of grace have meaning—as we have several times remarked above—only if and when, put into operation by the Spirit, they become means for binding the members together, strengthening and nourishing the community as one unbroken spiritual family. An objection can be made here; namely that we sacrifice truth and new developments in the church community simply for the sake of unity. This problem is extremely complex; we admit it. However, one should not interpret our words as referring only to those who, for the sake of truth, “depart” from an established and hierarchical church community causing a split in it, but equally to those responsible leaders and members of the community, who fail to use and incorporate a new charisma, which at first seems to be revolutionary! The problem that we face here is very delicate, and no easy answer can be given because a charisma does not seem to have always, solely and automatically, a good and positive effect on the community. When God gives, he never uses man as a machine, but he invites him to a hard effort of sacrifice and humility, whether he is a church leader, bearer of the charismatic order of sacerdotal leadership in an organized church community, or a simple charismatic church worker who wants to lead the church people to new ways



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of interpretation of the Bible or of mission and evangelism. It is, therefore, imperative that, in this difficult question, we try to find the solution in every particular case and avoid general conclusions. Church history tells us of a dramatic clash between the charismatic hierarchical order and the charismatic persons; in many cases we cannot say where the responsibility lies for the sad event of church division, and the answer is not very easy for us. If we attempt to draw general conclusions from the biblical text and in the light of church history and the ecumenical relationships of today, the only thing we can say is that every charisma given to every member of the Church must be accepted and practiced as a gift of grace which flows out from the redemptive sacrifice of the blood of Jesus on the cross. This signifies that every charismatic person cannot be simply and automatically truly charismatic unless he sees his charisma through the self-humiliation of Jesus (Phil. 2.5–8). The kenotic understanding of the gift of grace belongs to its essence and forms its backbone. Sacrifice is the charismatic essence of the Christian life par excellence. Therefore, to be truly charismatic and edify the community through a special charisma means a period of suffering, of self-denial, of temptation and above all of patience till one makes faithful use of one’s charisma in the community. God, in his mercy and precisely for the sake of the charismatic person, does not always allow the fruits of a charisma to be seen immediately during the short period of a lifetime. It is from this angle and after a thorough and deep study of the biblical understanding of the charismatic life of a church community that the churches in ecumenical relationships have to look back again and again at church history to try to find the deeper causes of the church schisms. It can be that there are schisms which are to a certain extent results of individual “apostasies”; there are other schisms that clearly show us today that a charisma was wrongly rejected or scorned and unjustifiably condemned by the official leadership of the church community. Accordingly, one could say that in every schism there is a dangerous, risky and delicate moment of decision, which reveals the immense responsibility of the charismatic person, applying his charisma to the service of his church or of the world. We should never forget, and let us repeat it, that on the basis of a gift of grace a charismatic person cannot operate as a robot or as an automatic machine always producing good results in the hard work of building the community. If the charismata were like this, to keep church unity would be a very easy affair, for it would be a God-given, God-maintained and God-promoted solid unity. It is evident that a study of the process of building up through the gifts of grace the already-built church community is of primary importance if we are to enter into an effective discussion of the problem of church unity today. Without a careful study of the charismatic community, its nature

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and function, and particularly without sharing existentially in prayer, study and action, in a charismatic community composed of members of different church traditions, no fruitful encounter on the problem of unity is possible. Especially for Eastern Orthodoxy, which has always maintained its unity as charismatic and through an ever-renewed decision of all charismatic persons to submit freely to the charismatic order expressed by the consciousness of the whole Church, laity and clergy, this life together with the “others” and the careful study of the function of the charisma seems to be the necessary prelude to the theme of church unity. Eastern Orthodoxy witnesses to just this, that in every schism there is a heavy ethical responsibility on both sides. The choice of a new direction in church life and theology is possible only within the one unbroken Church; no charisma, if it is a true charisma applied in the true biblical way, should ever cause a split in the Body of Christ from which it springs. What do these words really mean? Do they imply a pious fatalism or a false passivity incompatible with the evangelical kerygma of a continually renewed missionary action in the contemporary world? It can appear so to an activist who sees the Church solely and always in pilgrimage in this world, without inner life and unshaken coherence as One Body by the grace of God to live in unbroken continuity by means of specific church actions and by the submission of the individual to an already framed pattern of life, faith and thought. But for an Eastern Orthodox this unbroken historical continuity, namely the respect for the unbroken and pre-existing unity prescribed and maintained by the “inner” charismatic life of the Church as such, is the one and indispensable condition both for building up the Christian community and for acting as One Church in the world of today. Certainly, it is through the charismatic life of separated Christians living together that we can recapture the vision of the unity of the whole Church; it seems so today in the abnormal situation of church division. Yet the careful study of charismatic life in the Bible reveals to us the fundamental truth that the churches do not create their unity. The very concept of “Church” is nonsensical except as the Church of the charismatic unity, which God establishes, pouring out His grace upon His chosen people on the Day of Pentecost through the Holy Spirit, and which is based on Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. Without faith in this pre-existing charismatic unity which binds all together, no vision of the One Church, through the gifts of grace and common action of the churches today, is possible; for the foundation of the Church is coincident with the establishment of the Oneness of the Church. The charis of God, through His Trinitarian energy, binds God and all men who believe in Christ in one family. The gifts of grace consequently do not only create unity, but before this they spring up from the union of God with men; therefore, they are charismata which come from the



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pre-existing charismatic unity of God in His Church. The current expression, “the unity of the Church we seek,” has to be understood as referring to the Church of the already given charismatic unity, because a church community cannot exist unless it is the outcome of grace, redeeming and uniting, and through this unity edifying further the community through the gifts of grace of the Holy Spirit. The gifts of grace which bind the church members together in their life in the One Body and in their action together for the world are visible reminders to us of the Church of the charismatic unity. In other words, the whole difficult operation of the gifts of grace in an ecumenical era such as ours should point out to us the first essential of our being and belonging together to the charismatic oneness given by God as corporate life; through it we are framed together in His own building. This means that before the expression of unity through confessions of faith must come its origin and the continuous activity of maintaining and promoting unity through life, which we call tradition, whose echo we find in the Scriptures and whose power we receive through the manifold charismata of the Spirit, which form all believers into one family. Unity and union precede and prescribe our whole charismatic life, because the charismata are possible only as results of and only in this unity flowing out in charismatic life and action. “The Church of the charismatic unity” means that our whole being and action as church members are utterly dependent on the uniting grace of God; it is the grace, which in Christ constitutes and nourishes the churches through the Spirit by specific gifts of grace. It is in this way that we have to understand the paradox of being framed together in the one building of God on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets and, on this basis, still having to be further built together till we become a habitation of God through the Spirit. We understand thus why we have to make the fine distinction between the charismata within the Church and the charismata given to the world and to avoid all kinds of generalizations. Without this distinction the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians might seem to those struggling honestly for restoring unity a riddle presenting a dilemma, or rather a dualism. But on the contrary, once the distinction has been carefully made, this text shows clearly how the members are fitted together in the One Body. There is not a word in this chapter about creating or seeking or restoring unity through the charismata, but about keeping the unity of the Spirit (v.3) and growing into the perfect unity of faith (v.13) through the charismata which are given for the edifying of the Body of Christ. All this is possible only if and because we are called in one hope, having one faith and being baptized in the one baptism (v.5). These acts are not to be regarded either as confessionalistic or as magical but as the indispensable and distinctive charismatic source, within the Church, of all other

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gifts of grace, the sine qua non beginning of the long and difficult process of dynamic charismatic life which has to follow; this life is possible only when the local churches try to maintain the unity by the gifts of grace, through their charismatic members acting together with a universal vision of the Catholic Church; for their charismata are given to them only after those fundamental acts of being incorporated together into the One Body of the whole Ecclesia. The incorporation is given through Baptism, which is the source of all charismata, but the charismatic life in the one Ecclesia is the growth in faith and the confirmation of this faith by a life continually renewed through the charismata of the Holy Spirit. That is why the Eastern churches regard only as the first step the threefold baptismal immersion as symbolizing the death with Jesus, and the rising from the waters as symbolizing the resurrection with him into a newness of life (according to Rom. 6.4). But this “newness of life” is given by the Church as a charismatic gift of the Holy Spirit through the second phase of the baptism, which is seen in the Eastern traditions as of equal importance with the first, namely the “chrismation” through the Holy Myron (chrism) according to biblical texts, such as “in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise” (Eph. 1.13). (See also Eph. 4.30; 2 Cor. 1.22.) The incorporation of the faithful through Baptism becomes then dynamic sharing in the gifts of grace of the Spirit, which manifests and maintains the preexisting unity of the Body. The chrismation as “sealing” has a double meaning: it is first the grace which strengthens and endows the baptized person with the newness of life in the One Body, and second it is the certain and glorious manifestation that the faithful baptized is once and for all numbered among the members of the unbroken and undivided Church of the charismatic unity. The Holy Spirit as Giver of life and treasurer of all good things binds all into the one family, where alone the charismatic unity can be maintained and His charismata can be practiced as binding connections and inseparable links between the “sealed” members. Without this act the whole of the charismatic life loses the genuine ecclesiastical basis directly related to the act of incorporating a new member into the Body through Baptism. When we speak of Baptism, we must recapture this old act of the charismatic unity for all historical churches engaged in a charismatic community life through the ecumenical movement. It is then that we could together face the difficult problem of re-articulating our faith in the One Church, if this proves to be necessary, and speak again of communion from the one eucharistic cup without using the scandalous word “intercommunion,” which betrays a noble desire to restore unity but in an abnormal situation. For in the One Church of the charismatic unity, there must be only One Communion which is not simply the means to restore unity but that which par excellence nourishes and maintains the pre-existing charismatic



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unity of the “together-and-through-one-myron-sealed” faithful in and through the One Universal Church. We are not yet mature enough in our ecumenism to work out the practical details of the restoration of this fundamental act for all churches throughout the whole world, as the churches might decide to apply it anew as the beginning of the end of their ecumenical, charismatic movement in the Spirit. The great thing is that this question is going to be raised from within the churches in their ecumenical relationships, because they are already sharing charismatically their God-given fellowship. They grow, as potentially full members one with another, toward their unique source which is at the same time their unique goal. That is why, as was said above, the ecumenism of our days approaches the old problem of restoring unity in a way different from past generations. This way can be described as passing through prayer, study and life together as well as through missionary and evangelistic action together. That is, without being sealed in the same Spirit by and in the One Ecclesia, the church members of the divided traditions are called upon by the Spirit to see the infinite dimensions of their pre-existing charismatic unity; to see, beyond theories, agreements and disagreements in the restoration of unity, the charismatic praxis. Though this praxis is not immediately manifest in the churches as they lack the concrete charismatic act of the common concrete beginning within the One Body, they are, nevertheless, converging upon their common origin, namely their charismatic unity, which alone articulates the faith and faces the problem of keeping the unity. Today’s ecumenism as charismatic, therefore, places at the center of our enterprise, and rightly so, the problem of communion in the One Church (and not intercommunion between churches). The charis to sustain us in the One Body is given in and through the eucharistic fellowship both as the beginning and the crowning event of a consistent ecumenical, charismatic dialogue, and as the sole necessary condition for the exchange of all other charismata among the separated traditions in worship, preaching, evangelism, mission and inter-church diakonia. Without any revolutionary act it seems that the young ecumenical generation is on the right charismatic road to restoring the One Communion in the Body and Blood of Jesus, not as a show of unity for ecumenical propaganda but as the expression of the preexisting charismatic unity, which holds the churches together in ecumenical discussion and action. It is precisely through their intense preoccupation with building together the Body of Christ as active members of this One Body that the Church is appearing afresh to the minds, eyes and faith of this generation as the One Ecclesia of the charismatic unity. It is by building the community that the Church of charismatic unity becomes a reality, a conquering power which demands the sacrifice of all kinds of individualism and

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self-sufficiency and poses the problem of the one eucharistic communion for all who recognize their common charismatic origin, being sealed in the One Church. They prepare themselves for common missionary and evangelistic action as members of the One Body, continuing to build the community and acting together through the diversity of the gifts of grace, the charismata, that they can receive only in the One Building of God. Only in this way can the ecumenical movement be a sincere and pure effort in the sight of God and meaningful in and for today’s world. For it is a movement of charismata for the sake of action together by all believers of different traditions, “for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ” (Eph. 4.12). This is the unseen goal of today’s ecumenical charismatic intercourse which does not immediately raise the problem of the restoration of confessional unity but which silently poses it through the charismatic inter-church fellowship within the one unbroken koinonia. This is the path in which the Spirit leads the churches in our time, without allowing their members any superficial optimism, any emotional and enthusiastic naïveté, any revolutionary act. The idea of unity, which each tradition conceives, springs now from the work they do together in the One Church and for the whole world. No docetic, formalistic concept of unity is possible anymore but a conscious life of the churches together, a life consistent with the charismatic nature of their pre-existing and God-given unity. Ecumenism consists in trying to express this kind of charismatic unity by a common faith and common evangelism and mission in today’s world, thus believing, praying and acting in close interdependence bound, together through their mutual liturgical, evangelistic and missionary diakonia.

Part 5

ECUMENISM AND MISSION

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The Ecclesiological Foundation of Mission

The development of the interconfessional relationship of the past to the close cooperation and the existential reciprocal interdependency of the churches of the present day is leading us together to a better understanding of our common calling, facing the secularized nominal-Christian and non-Christian world. The task of the churches to preach the gospel in these two realms of the post- and non-Christian world becomes the essence of our being and staying together. Our practical co-operation or our theological discussion has no sense unless we realize together what separately animates our church life yet cannot find an adequate expression because we are separated—namely, mission and evangelism. The inability of every local church or denomination to deal appropriately with its secular environment, the futility of the missionary work of separated churches, and the many problems that they face acting independently in the mission field create those negative elements which prevent the churches from coming together in the common calling of God in His Spirit for corporate evangelism and mission. On the other hand, we realize that to be, stay, and pray together as separated churches means a profound regeneration of our lives as church members of the One Undivided Church in the Will of the Trinitarian God. This constitutes profoundly in our minds and hearts the positive signs of our pre-existing fundamental unity and creates the elements which make church people think of their inevitable belonging to one another, and gives expression to it through common evangelistic action. After the first period of external contacts and meetings in which the main emphasis was on getting to know each other, churches are rapidly, yet without sufficient preparation, entering together into a new period of ecumenical work on obedience and devotion to their calling. This calling is made more intense and more impelling by their ecumenical relationship. The meeting of 257

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the churches in the name of the Lord and the power of the Holy Spirit should no longer remain a dialogue between intellectuals, degenerating into a polite exchange of theological views, or merely leading to a polite church policy marked by friendly visitation of church leaders among themselves. Coming together as churches, we allow ourselves to hear more clearly and become more profoundly aware of the event of Pentecost and thus we are more anxious to be and to act as the One Apostolic Church. In the light of this kind of experience of their common pentecostal origin, it becomes absolutely necessary that the churches study together their common ground and prepare their common action. Therefore, the ecumenical movement, in this new stage of its existence, obliges the participating church members to reconsider their position as members of the One Body and called to one action. Ecclesiology, under this presupposition, can be authentically expounded only according to the new development of this interconfessional co-existence, which leads us to share our church-life in the Holy Spirit. If we do not believe that this is the essence and the purpose of the ecumenical movement, it is better to participate in it no longer, because we thus ignore the presence of the Holy Spirit who has called us to be, to study, and to act together for the preaching of the Gospel to the contemporary world. But if we continue, that which school theology calls ecclesiology has to be rethought, rephrased, and become the fruit of the Spirit in our life together and lead to new life in the Church and the world.1 The time of the traditional apologetic and polemic ecclesiology, which fought against the other churches rather than expressed the life of the Church which produced it, is definitely over. It is not only out of date but against the calling of the Spirit to the separated Christians today to write an ecclesiology which does not bear the marks of the trans-confessional spirit and experience. It is to be conceived between the dispersion and the re-gathering of the people of God, on the boundaries between study and action, professed as the preludium to a united evangelistic and missionary action. One is allowed to use ecclesiology only as a foundation or basis for a new regenerated church life, transcended and animated by the pre-existing event of church unity, and leading to a continuously fresh approach to the main problem of the inner church life. This problem is the preaching of the evangelion to the world. These two extremes are today proved to be out-of-date conceptions of ecclesiology. There is, on the one hand, the idea that ecclesiology stands on and can be expressed only in ontological terms; and on the other, there is the view that this is only possible through existential categories. For these two radical attitudes, the Church is what it is, either only in itself and for itself, or, alternatively, the Church, not having an inner life, becomes a mere standpoint. Both conceptions, though each one separately contains an aspect



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of the truth of the Church, should be regarded today as the fruit of an antiecumenical, anti-catholic, anti-apostolic, and one-sided ecclesiology. Both represent the remnants of the post-polemic period and exclude the possibility of real interchurch life and united action. To profess today that everything happens only in the Church—and let those who want to be saved come into it!—renders church life introverted, isolated, and quenches the Spirit for evangelistic and missionary work. At the other extreme, to write that everything happens outside the Church, outside the camp, because only there does the Church really function, makes the Church a spiritual, humanistic, philanthropic society and renders void the inner sacramental life and the immediate communion between the Trinitarian God and His gathered community. The first approach, out of complete devotion to the vertical relationship with God, sacrifices the horizontal one with man, making the inner fundamental and absolutely necessary life of the Church an element which is static in itself, and prevents the desire for transmitting the Grace to those outside. The second, dedicating itself entirely to the horizontal relationship with the unbeliever and the care for his conversion, sacrifices the inner mysticalsacramental and pre-existing communion with God, and minimizes the importance of church life as such. The first isolates and usurps the wholeness of the Grace as a dynamic element for the regeneration of those who are already Church-devoted Christians, placing holiness as the only goal and ideal. The second identifies the wholeness of life in Christ with the fulfillment of missionary preaching and the care for contemporary life, human condition, and the effort to discern the Will of God in today’s social development. By acting in that way one forgets to return to the Church which is the established trans-historical communal reality, standing on the unbroken unity of being, of belonging together through and in the uniting power of the Holy Spirit. The former sacrifices the action outside for the sake of total devotion inside the Church. The latter, for the sake of the functional operation of the evangelist, sacrifices the essential being in the Church as the certain, objective, historically real Christian sacramental community. The task of an authentic ecclesiology today is neither to force these two tendencies as “either/or,” making an absolute choice, sliding into a kind of one-sided radicalism; nor to make a simple and easy synthesis in order to reconcile the extremes, using them as complementary, and thus fall into a superficial syncretism. The two extreme attitudes do not only overlook a part of church reality and life, do not only accentuate one of the two aspects of it: they are based on a wrong understanding of the nature of the Church, and they heretically apply the consequences of the two natures of Christ, on which not only the whole theme of the relationship between Church and World is based, but also by which the historical unity of the Church is preserved.

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Therefore, the task of Ecclesiology is a valid expression of the universal Church living out of the triumph and the Lordship of Jesus, its life which has remained unshaken through the centuries, while continuously engaged in a struggle against the principalities of this aion with all its shortcomings and failures, is to conceive both aspects as a whole. Its two contrasting characters must be correlated, innerly and inseparably, deriving, springing up, and overflowing from the Trinitarian God directly through the energy of the Holy Spirit. It is an ecumenical “slogan” approach; it is theologically nonsensical, biblically unjustified, and ecclesiologically catastrophic to limit our ecclesiological debate between the terms “the Church has a mission” or “the Church is a mission.” The truth is that the Church by its nature cannot cease to be evangelistic and missionary. In this way church life and mission belong together to the inner life of the Church. It is very difficult to maintain a balance between this apparent dualism which renders the Church the wholeness of a live organism vivified by the Holy Spirit and the consequent action of man in the Church and the world. We are not yet prepared to write an ecclesiology on that basis. Perhaps this is the task of the coming generations being brought up, not through polemic ecclesiology of the divided Christendom, but through the experience of the life of the divided churches, sharing profoundly and honestly one another’s life in the same Spirit. But let us try the impossible for the moment, knowing that we too are going to fall into a certain provincialism. Our limitations, whether or not we are aware of them, are the result of hidden vestigæ of the tradition in which we are brought up, a tradition which inevitably cries out and mystically demands its right. THE CHURCH AND ITS MISSION The first difficulty we face is: where is the starting point of our discussion? There are those who maintain that everything must be examined on the basis of the Church alone, its existing historical continuity, its undeniable present reality which potentially englobes the whole world. There are others who, without denying this presupposition, believe that the world and the church mission for it obliges the Church to change in its approach to this problem in order to meet the needs of the contemporary world. It is probable that in most of these cases the different methodological approaches to the theme “Church and Mission” comes from a different conception of what the Church is. To this question different ecclesiologies try to give an exhaustive and clear answer by quoting different definitions supported by the biblical texts, used in many cases according to their pre-conception of the Church, or by presenting the biblical basis, which gives a fantastic richness of allegorical expression



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of its nature. Both ways risk becoming factors of further separation and confusion, especially when they are used as the starting point of an ecclesiological examination of the mission. There is a danger of confessionalism and of biblical fundamentalism poisoning the effort of a theologian who wants to be creative and show his readers the way toward the freedom of the Spirit. At the same time these definitions and the biblical fundamentalism contribute more to a collective or a subjective individualistic exclusiveness which hinders the spiritual fellowship between separated Christians, becoming a sine qua non condition for the right understanding and functioning of Church mission. When we start or culminate our ecclesiology with the phrase “the Church is a divine institution founded by Jesus Christ,” or “the Church is a congregation gathered in the name of Jesus Christ,” or when we select those biblical texts convenient for these definitions and study them without relating them to the Bible as a whole and from different viewpoints reflecting various expressions of life of the Church, then our ecclesiology is doomed to a partial study and to an anti-ecumenical provincialism. Adding to these definitions the influence of our own cultural backgrounds—Hebrew, Hellenistic, Roman, which unconsciously work out in us the principles and the categories of our thinking, we arrive at the impasse of our ecclesiological dialogue, which in reality, with these presuppositions, is reduced to monologue. It is true, and we must proclaim it without fear of offending our “pro-catholic” tradition, that all the historical churches, I mean all those who maintain the Baptism in the name of the Trinity, the gathering around the Holy Communion as the visible manifestation of the Lord’s presence among us and the act of setting apart people to serve as ministers of the Church of God, have far more life elements in common than the separate ecclesiologies of the comparative theologies taught to us in theological faculties. We create a new ecclesiology by the personal existential experience of working together, facing a problem which concerns the relationship of the Church with the world, or renewing of the inner life of the Christian in the Church—and especially when we pray together. All these different phases of ecumenical interchurch penetration write a new ecclesiology which, without denying our own, operates another ecclesiological approach. This approach does not clarify only our own ecclesiology, does not simply enrich it. Therefore, it should not be used superficially merely as a mutual corrective between churches, because this church life together goes deeper by transcending our thinking, not only with a vision, but with its more catholic, universal, ecumenical calling to a common life and action out of the whole Gospel by the whole Church for the whole world. Approaching the theme “Church and Mission,” therefore, we have to operate with ecclesiological expressions which, without ignoring our doctrinal

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bases, unite us on the common ground of our belonging together, englobing both church nature and mission activity. In this sense we can start with a paradoxical, illogical definition, which by its formula denies the character of definition, but which at the same time opens to us a free horizon to think and work together. The headings of the three following sections must be seen as a whole, composed of one definition which, deprived of logical sequence in its three parts, tends to unite in one the essential and the existential, the ontological and the functional. This is not chosen as a new ecclesiological method. On the one hand, it reflects the nature of the ontological status of the Church, which being animated by the Spirit of God can never be conceived in its static structural form. On the other hand, it reflects its missionary action which can never be limited to its functional and operational external appearance without its close connection with the standing element and the permanent structure of the Church. THE ESSENCE OF THE CHURCH IS ITS LIFE The first contact with the nature of the Church comprises both its being rooted in the foundation of the Church by Christ in His Holy Spirit, and its movement inside and toward the outside, manifesting itself as a living organism precisely by this “inward to outward” movement. Life is taken here not only as a show of principles, not as performance of a task imposed by obedience to the Church, but life which bears at the same time the marks of energy of the Holy Spirit and of the human action in Him. Life as a church ecclesiological category does not mean either sacramentalism or social activism, but the fruits of the Holy Spirit which are produced by the grace of Christ received by the faithful, to be realized, manifested and preached by them in the world. The essence of the Church is a moving, powerful, dynamic process of regeneration of the Christian and of the whole world. It is not a standing philosophical principle which can inspire us for a conceptual expression with a logical sequence of what the Church is. Perhaps before the day of Pentecost the Church as potential reality was a pure, unmovable essence, ousia, incomprehensible power, which made the Apostles gather and wait in prayer. But on the day of Pentecost this unmovable essence becomes life, salvation as a gift and at the same time, apostleship, preaching to the world. Certainly without this pre-existing essence Pentecost could not take place, and without the realization of the standing element of the Apostles being gathered together “with one accord in one place” (Acts 2.1) the apostleship could not function.2 On this basis, who can distinguish between them, and how can we understand and consequently act as Church members if we separate them? Life means



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here both of them established by the Trinitarian God in man and among men. Life eternal is the salvation of man. It is not only a periodical forgiveness of sins, but a new life, the Lordship of Christ, His death and resurrection given in the Lordship of the Spirit as glory—that is, as a regeneration, a transfiguration of the whole life on earth. Salvation is not only absolution, but freedom from the bonds of sin. It is not only the broken wall of partition between God and man, but the communion of the divine-human life. And this life is never static within selected people within certain boundaries. The Church by its very existence has no boundaries. It is the cradle where the whole world is contained. Life as ecclesiological category explodes the limits of my congregation, of my denomination. If the Holy Spirit lives in the Church and makes its essence become charismatic, through His energy which overwhelms all human conditions, the Church comprehends the ends of the earth bearing the wholeness of the divine life to the existence of all men. Life is the great event of the creation of God and life is the biblical refrain of salvation. “In Him was life and the life was the light of men” (John 1.4): this is the creative, dynamic principle of the Trinity. On the other hand, the true ecclesiological, pneumatological principle in one Church and for the whole world, the heart of our preaching after Pentecost alongside the Crucified and Risen Lord is: “He that believeth on me . . . out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. But this spake he of the Spirit . . .” (John 7.38). THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH FLOWS IN MISSION AND EVANGELISM In other words, the Church has not only a transcendental essence. It is not a nature to be defined reasonably through our conceptual, normative, and gnoseological operation and categories. It is the charismatic event through which the space without limits is created in the Holy Spirit. A spiritual reality is given to us as an always-present event. This reality binds us through our faith into one family, regardless of our different theological interpretations, our personal problems, our race prejudices, our national background. Life of the Church means life in the Church and out of it—life for the whole world which is also contained in the Church, and which awaits, as men did in the pre-Pentecostal period, the coming of salvation. The Church is universal and missionary because its life is salvation as a new life for the whole world. Universalism here is not a humanitarian principle. It is not the oikoumenismos of ancient Greece based on cultural principles. Universalism here springs up directly related with the heart of the salvation. This salvation is given to man out of the death of Jesus through the Spirit in the Church where all men

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can be and are saved. This “can be” and “are” expressed in the present tense contain the past and the future sense. This static verb does not denote an unmovable ontologism, a proclamation made once and for all, but on the one hand signifies freedom and the possibility of a new regenerated life for those who believe; and on the other, preaching to those who have not heard of this salvation. Both are inseparably related in this present tense in the Church, not by us, but by the Holy Spirit, His energy, His life, His binding on One power and His sending out of men to preach (Luke 24.49; Acts 1.4 and 8). The life of the Church is salvation, communion with God, oneness, mission and evangelism. These stages are one and the same movement depending on the charismatic energy of the Spirit. How are we going to understand in another sense the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians? To be worthy of our vocation, of our common calling, means to keep the unity of the Spirit (v. 3) in the One body, by the One baptism, from whence the apostles, the prophets and the evangelists grow as inseparable fruits from their branches and from the One root. Following this fundamental biblical truth and accepting the nature of the Church as a fullness of life and at the same time a growing together by becoming a habitation of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2.22), we assert that this life is not an authentic and pure life unless it flows toward the outside world as surplus of grace. The movement is always from within and presupposes the communion of the believers established by the energy of the Holy Spirit. The apostle is sent out in the power of this inner life. The apostolicity of the Church is contained in its Oneness and its catholicity, understood not only geographically, but qualitatively as the pleroma of “him that filleth all in all” (Eph. 1.23). The mission is not a task to be fulfilled, but it flows out of this event. It is this same event that has to be announced and be spread out from itself through man to the whole world. It is this announcement that constitutes the essence and the heart of this gospel. The act of mission can never be an isolated act because it is fulfilled by the evangelistic message of the event of salvation by Christ through the Spirit, which is an historical reality in the past and the present achieved in the gathering of the whole world in the Church communion (Col. 1.18). MISSION: THE ACT OF TRANSMITTING GRACE The ecclesiological foundation of mission should never allow the missionary activity to alienate itself from its inseparable church event, because mission is the way in which church people preach and convey the Grace of God to people outside the Church or try to arouse the sleeping faith of the nominal



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Christian. By this final goal the whole missionary effort receives its profound ecclesiological character. It is a great mistake when we think that by discussing social questions, or by analyzing the secular environment, or by helping in educational and material needs we are performing mission. This activity should not be used as a means for evangelism, though it belongs to the missionary activity in a broader sense. It should never become an end in itself. The end is not even only the preaching of the Gospel, or the presentation of a Christian Weltanschauung, but the establishment through the Baptism of the eucharistic communion. Mission and missions should be united by their common purpose. The apostolic kerygma is a pure announcement of the salvation through Christ and the calling of the pagan people to share in it and within His charismatic community. There is one immediate need for those outside the Church: to be converted and become members of this community in a visible, concrete form. The power of the Christian message for salvation is to be understood out of its simplicity and purity regardless of any other assistance from the secular world. Even the “service” element, apart from the healing ministry of the Apostles, is not absolutely necessary as a sign of the authenticity of the Christian mission. Secular or heathen people are not to believe because of the philanthropic signs that precede or accompany the mission or because of the higher standards of cultural life presented by the Christians. They are called to believe because they are converted by the power of the saving grace which is to be announced to them by word and shared by them through the sacraments in the Church. It is again a transmission to them of the divine life. This life abides only in the Church through the Holy Spirit and finds expression in its sacramental life and in the preached word. The mission tends to communicate in the hearts of the unbeliever, of the nominal Christian and of the pagan, the one and the same uniting power: the Lordship of Christ which is only mystically apprehended by the converted people once they have consciously joined the Church communion. Mission is not creating societies or welfare bodies ready to help the poor, the uneducated, the uncivilized people. It is profoundly preoccupied by one thing: the incorporation of people outside the Church into its body by means of the grace, which flows in it through the charisma of the Holy Spirit and the sacraments. Without this objective, the Lordship of Christ, which is the life for believers, in common with the hidden glory of God in His relationship with man established in Jesus Christ, remains an ideal. This is the Church as an event continuously overwhelming any kind of danger or persecution. Through its multiformity of missionary methods which are applied in the name of the One Church, the whole world is called to be restored in the One Body by receiving the redemption of the Cross and the victory of the Resurrection.

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Preaching, sacraments, and liturgy are equally necessary and important to realize this transmission of the grace as new life of the Holy Spirit to those inside and outside the Church. The liturgy in the mission field is the continuous presence of the glorified Christ. It is celebrated on behalf of the whole world by the whole Church for the conversion of the whole world. A worshipping liturgical community is not only the image of the realized communion between God and man and of the union of the human race in one Body in front of God without any exception or distinction of individuals; it is not only the bulwark where the principalities of this world are weak and find no place. It is, basically, the missionary outcry of the Church triumphant to the whole world and the doxological announcement of His Kingdom which is present and which is to come. The liturgy offered to and for the world is, together with the preaching, the missionary force par excellence, the beginning and the end, possessing not only a preserving power for a church community in hard times of war and persecution but also a missionary power which leads and keeps the church communion glorified in the midst of all human miseries. CHURCH AND CHURCHES; MISSION AND MISSIONS On the basis of this kind of ecclesiology, one has to see what effect the church division has had upon mission. There are many specialists who support the idea that the time of Christian missions is past. Perhaps this can be applied to missions, but not to the Mission of the Church. Without evangelistic mission there is no inner church life. We do not mean the organized missions, but the life of the Church which is a continuous martyria—witness for those outside. The missions in non-Christian countries are reaching their culminating point of impasse, and this is a sign of the rift between the churches. The Church division is already a tragedy for those who are born in the countries of the older separated churches, but it is a scandal in the mission field of the younger churches. Unity and Mission Given the above ecclesiological basis, church unity is not the result of a theological agreement. It is not based on a local confession to justify the act of schism of the local church who formulated it. It is not a unity on paper, administration, and budget. It is not limited to a specific place. It is the unity of the Pentecost, of the Holy Spirit, of life in communion with God based on the prophets and the apostles and the saints. It is the life of the Church itself without its abnormal alter ego: the churches. Mission as the outcome of the



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inner life of the Church can offer only the Undivided Church. The separated churches are obliged to have “missions.” Yet in this difficult situation, one denies the validity of the missions,3 and another, in order to avoid the impossible development which renders the missionary work of the Church weaker and weaker, and also to defend the missions, suggests a conception of the missionary work as the essence of the Church outside her historical background,4 professing that we must accept the fact that we live in a postchurch period. These suggestions, though deriving from missionary zeal, betray a complete loss of the ecclesiological foundation of the Mission. They cannot become remedies against the weakness of the Church, but they will further deprive the Church of its own inner life. In so doing they are bound to reduce the “postchurch” churches to humanitarian social units of Christian existentialists.5 The churches, distinguished by their national background, by their prosperous material existence, by proselytizing each other, cannot be missionary in the true sense of the word. The life of the Church flows as life of the churches, but separately acting for their structures, for their particular confessions, for their units. They are distinguished by names which determine their provincialism. Adjectives deriving from names of persons, from individuals, or from local geographical qualifications are used before the name of the church. There is not one missionary Church at work in the mission field for the Church as a whole. The tragedy of our time is that we convert to our particular church, and we pour the poison of the separation into the new converts. We have not merely lost the right, the dynamic ecclesiological basis, but with it we have lost the power of the simple announcement of the salvation by a united church, which is only able by its existence as One, to convince that she is the authentic bearer of the Grace of God. This conviction does not derive from the fact that the Church is united like a totalitarian or imperialistic power, but that the One Church is the place, the communion through which the power of the Holy Spirit can flow through this unity to the world. Therefore, in discussing the nature of this unity that we seek, facing our common missionary calling, we must bear in mind the following four points: a.  This unity is given by God through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. b.  This unity is not a vague sentiment, but it is the mighty token of the Lordship of Christ over the principalities of this world. c.  This unity is realized among men and has external marks concretely seen in time. d.  This unity precedes all other acts of the Church in the world, being not an intellectual accord on commonly accepted principles, but the life process which leads to mission.

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The church unity of which we speak has not been the result of local confessional expressions of faith which were, apart from the primitive baptismal one, by necessity formulated in order to distinguish the Church from its heretical and schismatic adherents. It is based on the act of confession, and it is kept by the reciprocal obedience to the charismatic nature of the function of those selected by the community in the Spirit to be the links and the signs of the unbroken unity. It is, therefore, not simply the same message to the world about Jesus Christ and the act of preaching that can keep us united in the One missionary Church. This message must be presented as a martyria of the pre-existing unity which has to appear with and on a concrete basis in time and space. Otherwise everything risks degenerating into a kind of docetism. Mission and Unity From the biblical and ecclesiological point of view as well as on the basis of the praxis of the Church in the mission field, it is an unjustifiable attitude to reverse the two words in that way, giving temporal or qualitative priority to mission in relation to unity. But it can be accepted once the intention which inspired this formula is clarified,6 because this formula might, according to the particular approach, disregard or disrespect the biblical understanding of the relationship between Unity and Mission. In the Bible, Unity is stated to be the presupposition for Mission and the established church community, as the basis out of which and by which the power of the Holy Spirit, operating through it, is dispersed. But mission, on the other hand, is the testing ground of the real ecclesial unity. We need, therefore, a careful evaluation of the different intentions when we approach this delicate point. First, we have to eliminate the dangers of a defective use of this formula and prevent it from becoming either an ecumenical slogan or the banner of a radical Protestantism. Here, we require a sober attitude, especially for the cooperation of the separated churches in the mission field if we wish to see such a possibility created in the future. The wrong interpretation of this formula “Mission and Unity,” in its most dangerous form, would be to attempt to render relative the negative importance of Church division and the acceptance of the mission as the only essence of Church life. In that case the message of the Gospel as united and uniting power by its christocentric nature for those who preach and act and those who hear and follow, in one spiritual family under the same Lord, seems to be the only sufficient conception of unity which would grow as the result of intensive evangelization. However, though there is a great deal of truth in this conception, and certain biblical texts used in a fundamentalist



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way would to some extent support this attitude, one must repudiate it for the sake of the mission itself and in order to avoid the further division of the Church. Because the message of the Gospel, though it bears the power and the marks of a deep unity and pure love, was, is, and always will be the object of a different interpretation of the evangelist or the missionary acting as an individual preacher of the Gospel. We should never think that we can avoid this danger by the denomination or the societies because this kind of preacher is contradicto in termis. He can be replaced by individual units, fellowships, church communities with their particular ecclesiologies, once they have decided to break away from their previous church communion in order to be more effective in the mission field, thus making this mission field a criterion of their inner church life and communion, for they forget that this communion has a meaning only as a part of the whole One and Undivided Church. In accordance with this attitude, one might use the formula “Mission and Unity” as a means of pointing out the only possible way for the churches to work out a scheme for church reunion—that is, through mission to unity. But the One message of the Gospel, which is Christ Crucified and Risen, cannot be used as an instrument for reunion. The preaching of this message to the world must always be a token of the pre-existing unity, not in an abstract form, but in the concrete form of the historical Church remaining One—not only by using the one saving message to the world but proving it out of its ecclesial, communal life. The Mission should never become the means for church union, because on this basis, Mission can degenerate into a kind of probe, test and external cooperation which might cover profound diversities between the different church bodies. Reunion on the basis of today’s mission experience could lead to a concordatum of corporate action; to a system of activism in the new countries, a superficial scheme enabling the churches to forget their deeper roots.7 We cannot create between Mission and Unity a prior and posterior stage. They belong inseparably together. But Mission is understood as flowing out of the church communion, which cannot be limited to the act of declaring the One Message. We should pay attention that, by this proclamation of the message, we do not fall into a kind of docetism with regard to unity. This message is far richer in content than the simple announcement and the baptism in the name of the Trinity. It contains the wholeness of the life of the Holy Spirit acting in One Body and for the whole world. Church unity is the heart of the message. The world cannot believe unless it hears and lives and is invited to share the One Message, preached by the One Church, calling all men to become members of one church communion. We can, on the other hand, justify the formula “Mission and Unity” in an appropriate way by regarding mission as possible only on the basis of

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church unity. The “and” in this particular formula has its full sense as a conjunction. Without denying the value and the reality of the missionary activity of the divided churches today, we have to reaffirm that these missions, despite the division of the churches, are the Mission for Evangelism of the One Church, reminding us of the One Church in action. In this sense, the right use of the formula “Mission and Unity” depends on the fact that both mission to the heathen and evangelism to the nominal Christian world are rooted in the one pentecostal event which pre-exists and determines both the content and the methods of our preaching as members of the One Church. Therefore, when we say today “Mission and Unity” in our divided church existence, we like to prove the validity of this mission in the light of church unity. In this mission there is no evidence of our traditional ecclesiastical disputes and the failure of our proselytizing activities to convert non-Christians, trying to fill in the gap by converting members of another church to our own church denominations. But we create the place where our unity is proved to be of the Holy, Universal and Catholic Church brought to life by the real presence of the Holy Spirit. “Mission and Unity” means that no one preaches as missionary the one message without a full consciousness of presenting the historical church communion, being animated by his belonging personally to the One Apostolic Church in the One Spirit. The Marks of the True Apostle Certainly the above remarks seem to be out of date, ignoring the present tragic situation of church division, especially in the mission field. We do not deny that division, but we do believe that we should face this situation with the maximum of our united church vision which is the fruit of a deep and hidden reality. This vision is possible only if we are prepared to accept that we are called together in the Ecumenical Movement by the Spirit. We should never abandon the ecclesiological foundation once we have undertaken to act together in the world as churches. Our ecclesiology has to be orientated toward the possibility of the reestablishment of Church Communion, animated by the Holy Spirit, poured through the churches into all nations and not by a superficial optimism based either on missionary activism or on the churchly, ecclesiastical unity. We cannot find our remedy in abstract formulas but in the new ecumenical missionaries who are authentic incarnations of the biblical apostleship. The Apostle in the New Testament is not only an authority of the Church but the typus of the true evangelistic Church. In the image of the Apostle we have to continually re-examine our evangelistic and missionary work. The Church is apostolic because she bears as inner power the true apostolic-



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ity which is a dynamic combination of structure and life, of hierarchal and charismatic elements, of unity and mission. The Apostle who is sent out is sent out in the power of the Spirit as Christ is sent out by His Father.8 The pre-existing Trinitarian intercommunion of life between the three persons of the Holy Trinity prescribes, authorizes, sanctifies the mission of Christ to the world. The Apostles sent out by the same Spirit after Pentecost are sent out by the Trinitarian divine grace and authority which is reflected in and by the life of the Church transcending the barriers of local limitations. The Apostle, without being bishop or presbyter of any local church, feels himself related to, or rather totally depending upon, the fact of being sent out by the Church, lived by him as a pre-established communion.9 For this Apostle and Evangelist the particular local church plays the role of the makrokosmos, which represents the wholeness of space and truth within the limited scale of the immediate ad hoc congregation. The Apostle derives not only his function but his whole being as preacher, as well as his purpose as evangelist, from and for this pre-established and realised church communion. The true apostolicity and its mission has only one scope: to extend this communion by establishing new local church communion bearing the same external signs of church structure and institution. The true Apostle is not an instrument of a pre-organized mission, but he organizes ad hoc and then brings his church to give to his work the ecclesial life, the communion and the charismatic authority.10 Here, we have to distinguish between ecclesial mission and ecclesiastical imperialism. The first is the true movement from within the charismatic life of the Church through a person who is devoted to the Church, who struggles to incorporate the non-Christian into the One Church while respecting him in his local situation and his human condition. He does not act out of a particular missionary body, but on behalf of the Body of Christ which is His Church. The second goes out to serve and witness, operating through mediums of welfare organizations, preaching with the Gospel a certain cultural background which seems to him to be Christian. He risks bringing with the Gospel secular elements and imposing them as indispensable means or signs of the preaching of the Gospel. By serving he might conquer; by witnessing Christ he might present his own civilization. This kind of well-organized and financed missionary activity risks preaching a European or American Gospel and calls upon the people to imitate the European or American way of life, thus domesticating the Christian message within his own cultural background. This is particularly the case when practiced by groups who have already in their home countries negated the essential means of the sacramental life of the apostolic Church or in places where there are other churches in missionary work. These are missions in their radical form: though always serving the cause of preaching the word of God, they cannot escape from the

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danger of being regarded as contaminated by imperialistic, confessional and national tendencies.11 The true apostolicity of the Bible is based on the poverty of the Apostle, of his weakness, not having the means for his own survival, being fed even by those to whom he preaches.12 But his one weapon is almighty: the Word of God, or moreover, the Grace of God, transmitted through the Holy Spirit.13 The divided Church has lost not only its external splendor, of being One, something that would appeal directly to the unbelievers, but in addition, she has lost the inner power to produce those unknown charismatic persons who act of their own accord through the One Church and for the whole Church within the pagan mission field. The great mass conversions of people are the result of this kind of mission, which seems to us today to be such an impossible thing. A divided Church cannot be generic of this kind of missionary individual who acts individually and effectively because he acts out of the surplus of grace, derived from his unbroken church communion. The paradoxical result is that the organized mission of today is individualistic, but the individual preaching of these devoted persons of the One Church was communal and churchly. At the base of this strange dialectic we have to reseek our lost unity, recover our missionary power within the ecclesiological foundation of one church mission. On this ecclesiological foundation of mission there are not merely a few specialized theologians who can become missionaries, but all the living members of the Church. A Church is missionary not only when it has an organized foreign mission but also, and principally, when its inner life spontaneously creates evangelists in their churches who feel that they are sent out by force by the Spirit to preach the Gospel.14 Without denying the first category of organized mission we simply stimulate the latter, because this is the biblical understanding of pure mission and constituted for the Church in the past its converting power against the pagan world. In comparison with the modern type of missionary who goes out to a heathen country to teach in a college or serve in a hospital, founded and supported financially by the board of his Church the simple missionary disposing only of the power of the Christian Gospel which is directly communicated by him to the non-Christian is a more authentic incarnation of the biblical understanding of mission. The organized mission definitely has its place, but it must be based on the pure preaching and life of the charismatic missionary who paves the way for his established home Church as a part of the whole Church and its mission board to come after him and organize the new church life in the new area, that the word of God has prepared through his preaching.15 The great problem of our time regarding mission is not the organized missions, their development and growth, but the missionary, the inspired and



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enthusiastic “anachoretes” born in the One Church by the One Spirit.16 The Church in its powerful missionary expression was never so much based on organizations, or missionary boards or societies, but in those persons who were ready to leave and sacrifice everything in their secular environment, because they could not resist the inner push that they received from within their Church communion. Certainly, these missionaries have never ceased to exist, regardless of their different confessions. All church members today are still challenged by their example. But they would be more effective as leading charismatic members in the mission field if they could act on behalf of the One Church presenting the one message to the world: through their mission they could draw both those outside and those inside the Church to the coedification of the one household of God, being themselves built together on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets.17 THE CHURCHES, THEIR MISSIONS AND THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT It is on this basis that the problem of mission and missions is inevitably put forward to the churches when they meet together in the ecumenical movement. One cannot alienate the mission from the ecclesiological discussion about the nature of the Church and its unity. Mission is the fulfillment of this discussion and the power of it. Either under the formula “Unity and Mission” or “Mission and Unity,” or the definition “the Church has a mission” or “the Church is a mission,” we are constrained by the Spirit and through our interconfessional confrontation to enter into a mutual sharing of one another’s life and thinking in order to come to a broader understanding of our common ecclesiological basis and our common calling to mission in the contemporary world. Ecumenical Ecclesiological Foundation of Mission Can one speak of an “ecumenical ecclesiology”? Systematic “school” theology would revolt against this term. But an ecclesiology worthy of its name has always to be proved to be valid ecumenically and universally. The adjective “ecumenical” is not used here as a technical term expressing a special program or tendency represented by a circle of theologians engaged in inter-confessional discussion in a particular place or method. It is used to express the maximum possible goal toward which our ecclesiological thinking should be orientated. It reflects the solid ecclesial basis on which all of us stand—that is, the One Church Pentecostal Event and the One message

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that we all have to preach to the whole world. “Ecumenical” stands here as the geographical term which covers the qualitative sense of the catholicity both of the fullness of the salvation of God accomplished in Jesus Christ and the catholicity of its message for the whole world. This becomes particularly indispensable when we attempt to enter into a fruitful inter-confessional dialogue in order to find the foundation of a true missionary action of the cooperating churches in the present-day world. Then, “ecumenical ecclesiology” becomes the inevitable presupposition of all of our further thinking and action together. It is evident that ecclesiology in this perspective is a commentary of the present church reality on interchurch engagement, and not a theory which denies certain aspects of the life of the Church. It should not, however, be presented as an ecclesiology of the ecumenical movement represented by the World Council of Churches. It has to be the ecclesiology of one church but conceived in the perspective of its ecumenical relationship. It has to be written in this event of the churches being brought together by their essence of being One and by their life in this world. Ecclesiology in Catholic-Ecumenical Perspective In this connection the ecclesiology of one Church today, filled with the sharing of life in common with the other churches through the ecumenical relationship in the One Spirit, should comprise both elements in regard to mission. It should constitute the ontological, permanent-historical element which gives the Church its stability throughout the ages described by the four marks of the creed regarding the essence of the ecclesial communion; and the functional, operational element which makes this essence of the Church flow in daily life, in service and witness in the world. In this direction one Church should never hesitate to incorporate the maximum of the two extremes, because the one extreme unifies, moves, fulfills the other, since as we presented them in the first chapter, these two are not separated entities, but they both belong together to the deep essence of the Church as life in the Holy Spirit. The “ecclesiological-catholic” is the “biblicalevangelical” element and vice versa. Both aspects are called not to play a supplementary role to form a syncretistical synthesis in the ecumenical ecclesiology; but, they are indispensable constitutive parts, the inner substance of fullness of the Spirit in the action of every local church as member of the One Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Catholic and Apostolic are not to be confused with Roman Catholic and Evangelical; but they are the dynamic elements of the fullness of Grace achieved in Christ and communicated by the Spirit into the One historical Church undivided throughout



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the centuries. Due to this fullness which is given by the Spirit, the Church is evangelical, is missionary, is a continuous process of declaring, preaching, converting activity in the world and for the world. The unity that we operate here is not schematic out of an ecclesiological method. We believe that this is the Unity of the Spirit. We are called together to recapture through its fullness the essence of the Church as “being-its-own-life-for-the-world.” The Unity of the Church depends on the preservation of these two extremes within the living body of the local church. The division of the Church has its deeper roots in the desire of preserving or stimulating one of the two aspects. That represents a wrong attitude for an “ecumenical ecclesiology” since they are both the essence of a Church fulfilled and marching toward the final fulfillment (Col. 1.18); for, we are built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets (Eph. 2.20) and we are continuously “builded together” (Eph. 2.22). The past tense which denotes the completed act of Christ ἐποικοδομηθέντες (Eph. 2.20) should be seen in the power of the present tense of the Spirit which denotes the permanent effort to be built together συνοικοδομεῖσθε (Eph. 2.22). Through the present tense we have to look at the past tense and the past of the Church, which is and guards this completeness. Ecclesiology today should be conceived again by the theologians as connecting and comprising the two extremes, without neglecting, confusing or denying one aspect of them. Ecclesiology is called in the light of the “churches living together” to clarify, to illumine the essence of the One Church which is precisely its life, this life of catholicity and apostolicity, of Unity and Mission, of Fullness in Evangelism.18 Ecclesiological and Missionary Fulfillment of Ecumenism Following the remarks made above, we cannot speak of ecumenical relationships in an appropriate sense (an interchurch co-penetration of life in the Holy Spirit) if we think that these relationships consist of a polite and painless dialogue. We should never allow a spirit of high-level ecclesiasticalpolicy “ecumenism” to be created out of this interchurch life. Ecumenism is a calling of the Spirit, a promise, a hope of the faith, a vision which has to be fulfilled by life in common in the same Spirit. This is the crucial moment of our present-day ecumenism. This is the moment when we must turn our relationships into a life which fulfills our own church being with a full ecclesiological understanding of the nature of the Church, englobing ecclesial sacramental communion and missionary evangelism in one movement, in one act which is manifested in confession and preaching. Ecumenism in its present form waits for its fulfillment through this difficult process. We have to pass through death in order to render the abstract ecumenism

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a fountain of life and action both for the reunion for the Church of Christ, and also for our sending out of missionaries for evangelism. The superficial ecumenism which allows us to relax in the ease of our confessional narcoses must be replaced by its ecclesiological-missionary content. An ecclesiology conceived on this basis should never allow the extremist, radical, polemic and apologetic attitude to deprive the One Church of Christ of a part of its essence, a part of its life in the Holy Spirit. Ecumenically inspired ecclesiologists should never allow either hierarchism, sacramentalism and ceremonialism or activism and pseudo-Christian gospel socialism to dictate to them from their limited viewpoint what the Church is. This would lead the young generation of our ecumenical era to a further division in the Body of Christ, thus hindering the movement toward the fulfilled Church life. This fulfilled life is prepared for us by the Spirit in the One undivided Church. This life, through the power of its fullness, is sending us out to the consummation of its essence in the mission where this life has once again to be fulfilled. The first fulfillment, the reception of the Holy Spirit by men, is to be achieved in the second. Ecumenism, if it is in the Spirit of God, should lead us to death together in order that we may be raised together. Ecumenism is the plunging into the essence of the Church in the ecclesial established communion, for the awakening by and with its essence in the Spirit, for the preaching together of the Gospel to the world. Ecumenism means: “To receive and to go out to give.” It is a matter of arousing ourselves; it is a strange revolutionary process against our previous provincialism. Without denouncing our fundamental doctrinal positions we are cutting across them through the cleansing fire of the Spirit in order to consummate them in the fullness of the essence of the One Church in mission. As a true ecumenist, one should die spiritually in order to be raised as a member of the One Body, as a vehicle in the power of the One Spirit, as a factor for fulfilling one’s ecumenical calling. To be an ecumenist is not sufficient. We have already had enough of the soft, polite, smiling traveler—this Christian Hinduist—for whom everything is acceptable and everything is rejectable. The Spirit by His mighty Mind prepares and waits for him who is going to share His fullness in the Church by fulfilling it through devotion to church life flowing into mission and evangelism in the world. Ecclesiology, if it is to be thought out in an authentic, ecumenical way, has to have this divine calling of our time unless it grasps the plenitude of the One Catholic and Apostolic Church. Thus it remains a scholastic, faculty affair condemned to a further isolation. Both conservatism and liberal ecclesiologies, written outside this ecumenical calling of the Spirit which provokes a sacred revolution of life and mind, are doomed to remain commentaries of the already dead past of partition.



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CHURCH, CULTURE, AND MISSION This chapter is concerned with the full ecclesiological foundation of mission. It is not only the epilogue, but the crowning chapter on this theme because it refers to the crucial moment of the position of the Church, and its life and preaching in the world. It is only through the Church that culture can be understood and evaluated. Church and Creation No ecclesiology is possible, particularly in regard to mission, if one neglects to look at the world as a whole, created and supported by God and fulfilled in His Church. The Church, whose essence is the divine-human fullness of life in the Holy Spirit, represents the makrokosmos of the whole creation. Its Unity in Christ reflects the Unity of the “kosmos” created by God. In Christ, and in His Body, the Church, of which He is the Head, everything was created and reconciled (Col. 1.16–21). In the Church, and in the Church’s life in the Spirit and preaching to the world, everything is restored and has been restored and can be restored in its full meaning as creation of God. But it is only in Christ and in His Church that this vision becomes a reality, and the creation, with its essence and purpose in God, is revealed as bearing the marks of the divine powers of creation out of love for the sake of the further creative powers of man in freedom. The Fall of man cannot provoke a definite rupture between God and His creation, when one looks at the creation, not through the eyes of one whose thought is fed by the splendor of the natural revelation, but whose life is sanctified, regenerated, restored by the Holy Spirit in the Church. Church and creation is the theme par excellence of a true ecclesiology, because out of that theme the unity of origin, essence and scope of the act of God and of the whole world is not simply preserved in our minds—our theories are not needed for that!—but this theory is incarnated in and among us as Church. We are thus the people of God through whom and with whom the whole world is brought into the union of the fullness of all in all (Eph. 1.23) into the gathering together of all things which are in heaven and on earth. An ecclesiology in ecumenical perspective, ready to conceive the wholeness of the Grace of God for the wholeness of the Gospel, has to be preached to the whole world, has to recognize one of the main subjects, if not the first and the last one, as being the careful examination of the relationship between Church and creation, following the biblical text and the inner life of the Church. Due to the abuse of the scholastic attitude regarding the autonomy of natural revelation, a falsified and polemic tradition has provoked the rejection of the ecclesiological and pneumatological understanding of the

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unbroken unity of the act of divine creation in the Logos of God and the regeneration through the energy of the Holy Spirit in the Church for the whole creation. Greek patristic thought and the whole Orthodox attitude of the One Undivided Church never accepted theology on the basis of natural revelation, either to create an autonomous aspect of the revelation of God outside the Church, or as a break within the act of God in creation—once this act is seen through the Pentecostal event of the establishment of the Church as the Body of Christ in space and time in this world. The problem here is very delicate because it is not enough to admit that only through Christ can the whole creation be brought back into its unity. This christomonism, which refers to the once-and-for-all event of the redemption, does not correspond to the fullness of the creative, redemptive and regenerating act of the Trinitarian God in His creation. The pneumatological-ecclesiological dimension completes the christomonistic view of the revelation between God and His creation, and affirms the human, the secular, the world’s condition, which exists permanently in time by and in the Church and in the Holy Spirit. Church, Creation, and Culture Following these fundamental principles which direct the mind toward a positive contemplation and a deep theological evaluation of the reality of this world, and of the human freedom as the heart of it, ecclesiology embraces human culture within its immediate region of interest. There is not only a religious- theological understanding of culture but a strictly ecclesiological one since the Church, as the divine event par excellence in the creative plan and act of God, is the concrete and all-englobing reality in history, replacing the abstract religious Weltanschauung and the theological speculation. The ecclesiology conceived through the Church event only on the basis and the experience of the new life in the Spirit, looks at culture through the origin of the creation in the hand of the Creator and its scope in the fulfillment of this creation in Christ and His Church by the Spirit. Culture can be defined as the act of man in response to God. It is an act through which man actualizes the particular gifts received from God to constitute him as a free man. Through culture man proves that he is created by God out of His love, manifested in the freedom of His Holy Spirit which is acting in man. Christ incarnates in Him all in all by being this realized act of God in the fallen sinful man. But through the redemption by Christ, the Spirit brings again the creative power and restores the gift of divine freedom in man, and he no longer has the autonomous and thus satanic freedom of separation. Human creative power in its authentic context and form is possible only after, and in, and through the Church event of the Pentecost.19



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Culture is the result, the form, the appearance of this creative power of man in the name of the Creator. God repeats and manifests the scope, the fulfillment of His creation in the Church, and sanctifies, restores and regenerates culture in its relationship with Him as Creator. Through culture, therefore, man first justifies his divine origin as being: a free existence, but in communion with God, not independent and without relation. Secondly, man understands himself in Christ as sharing in Him the restoration of the whole world. Man, by his action as a responsible being in this world (in society, in art, in education, in family life) shares the fulfillment and the process toward the fulfillment of the whole creation in Christ Jesus. And thirdly, he transcends by his culture the limits of space, of matter, of finite time and corruption, thus sharing the foretaste of the eternal life in the Holy Spirit. The ecclesiological understanding of culture, after the study of the theme “Church and Creation” moves between its origin (the divine creation of man out of love and for the freedom-communion of him with God) and the final “Parousia” of this communion; thus, it moves in Christ through the Spirit in the historical Church. This strictly ecclesiological understanding of culture seems to exclude all expression of culture outside the Christian era. This would be an entirely false conclusion. Culture cannot be absent or dead outside the Church or before the incarnation of Christ. But this is another culture. It can be apparently for the sinful, fallen man of higher importance than that which is understood in its ecclesiological significance. The beauty of technique, the harmony of music, designs and colors, the system of philosophical thought, the moral codes can be, according to the secular world’s standard, independently conceived outside the Church as the remnants of the divine creation in the fallen man. The external movement, the harmony (the splendor of the Greek classicism!) can constitute an autonomous realm manifesting the wrong and profaned maintenance of this world outside its Creator, not through communion but in independence and autonomy. It is a purely human culture, we must admit that. It is also the result of the divine creation; we must confess that too. The origin is there. But the heart, the life, its incarnate “logos” as life, is no longer there. It is a flower cut away from its root to be put on temporary show in the vase of a salon. This culture is doomed to corruption and leads to destruction. It springs out of the freedom of independence from the Creator. The ecclesiological approach to culture gives it its heart, through its pleroma in Christ and its scope in the Spirit. It expresses this fulfillment and leads to the pleroma of the end, moved and animated by this end. It is a doxological hymn (letters, art, civilization, family life) to a continuous thanksgiving (the eucharistic Anaphora of the liturgy in expressing this truth), a further incarnation of the Grace of God by His Spirit in us and among us. This culture

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springs out of a freedom of communion through and with the energy of the Trinitarian God. Church Facing Culture through Mission and Evangelism The above remarks have an immediate importance for the essence of the Church as life flowing in the world through Mission. It excludes the rupture between creation, Christ and His Church. It excludes, therefore, the various acts of radical discrimination operated in the minds of certain theologians. They give qualitative priority to a particular form of culture created by the mixture of Christian spiritual backgrounds, with profane inclination to the materialistic exploitation of the resources of the creation through technical civilization. All peoples have their cultural impetus, though different, though apparently diversified by their external forms to “developed” and “underdeveloped” ones. They all, however, derive from the same almighty creative Art of God which overwhelms all our discriminating acts and thinking. To introduce the theory of discontinuity between the Creator and His Church and reject all non-Christian civilization a priori as only corrupted and a priori atheistic is a revolution, a rebellion against the revealed Trinitarian God of the Christian Church. The christomonism results very easily in anti-ecumenicity and anti-missionary complexes. The ecclesiological view of culture as we developed it above, maintaining not simply the continuity between Creator and His Church, but going farther and following the biblical text, pointing to the fulfillment, the restoration, the accomplishment through new life by the interior of any pre-existing culture, excludes the a priori hostile attitude of the missionary Church against the cultural elements of a non-Christian world. Because, if the mission is completed in evangelism, there is no mission without evangelism—that is without the preaching of the pure Gospel of the salvation and the transmitting of Grace through the sacraments which unite man with the Risen Lord of history and culture. If there is a heathen Christian culture incompatible with the Christian Gospel, this culture is going to be changed from within, through the Grace of God and the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. It is the essence of the Church, that is divine life, that the mission, through evangelism, spreads out through the world. Therefore, mission meets the backbone, the base, the fundamentals of human existence, in order to transfigure it and if necessary operate the transformation of culture, to a certain limit, posed by the sinful nature of man. Therefore, one does not civilize first in order to preach the Gospel afterward. But one plunges everybody in the baptismal water and in the eucharistic blood in order to raise them all together with Christ into the new life



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of the Spirit. This is the Alpha and Omega of the Christian mission. All the other conceptions which accompany as fruits of this (diakonia, service, education) must follow from within the primary act of the mission. Mission is evangelism of the divine salvation and the transmitting of the divine grace and leads to the participation in the pre-established communion with God in His Church of all peoples without prejudgments, according to the different external forms of culture. NOTES 1.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1932: “If the ecumenical movement is based on a new understanding of the Church of Christ it will produce a theology. If it does not succeed in doing so, this will mean that it is nothing else than a purely utilitarian organization.” In Gesammelte Schriften, Band I (München: Chr. Raiser Verlag, 1958). 2.  Dr. Visser’t Hooft comments on the event of Pentecost: “The promise is now fulfilled; the power from on high descends upon the disciples. They are now able to proclaim the gospel with authority; the Church is constituted and it is from the very outset a witnessing Church.” In The Pressure of Our Common Calling (London: SCM Press, 1959), 35. 3.  This attitude is to a certain extent represented by Bishop James, now the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church of America, in an article in the Symposium in honor of W. Freytag: Basileia: Walter Freytag zum 60 (Stuttgart, 1959), 76–81. 4. Dr. Charles West, in his book, Outside the Camp: The Christian and the World (Doubleday & Company, 1959), after a questionable exegesis of Heb. 13.12– 13, shows clearly these tendencies, neglecting to accept any solid ecclesiological basis for the sake of the mission . . . “the reconciling work of Christ operates, not in a church which meets on Sunday morning . . . not on the edge of the world but in the middle of daily life and thought” (109). “God has put us in a world where in fact, as Camus says ‘we are alone’—alone as the Israelites were when Moses went up on the mountain; alone as the Athenians were when they worshipped the unknown God and found the message about Christ and the resurrection foolishness” (97). This is Camus, Moses and the Athenians before Christ’s revelation. This is the Hebrew attitude. Professor J. C. Hoekendijk says: “Church-centric missionary thinking is bound to go astray because it revolves around an illegitimate centre.” “The Church in Missionary Thinking,” International Review of Mission 41, no. 3 (July 1952): 324–36. 5.  Dr. J. H. Oldham makes the following remark: “The real crisis of the Church relates not to its social programme but to its faith.” In The Church and Its Function in Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937), 105. Freytag, quoted by Victor Hayward, writes: “Western Missions have always had many problems, they have now become a problem themselves” (Basileia, 467). 6. Following the strict traditional line of thought based on the stable historical continuity of the Church, the Roman Catholic writer M. J. le Guillou does not hesitate

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to title the two volumes of his recent work: Mission et Unité: Les Exigences de la Communion (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 1960).  7. The Rolle Document on “The Calling of the Church to Mission and Unity,” though it is on the whole a positive element on this particular point, is not entirely clear in which sense it regards Mission and Unity. We used the words “Church” and “Mission,” which still denote in the minds of most Christians two different kinds of institution. Yet we know that these two things cannot rightly be separated. We miss here the unity between the two words, understanding them as instrumental rather than essential. “Unity has sought out of a deep conviction that only together can Christians give true witness and effective service to the world”—this is not a real ecclesiological approach to the problem but rather a functional one (WCC: The First Six Years 1948–1954), 124–129.   8.  John 17:18, “As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” Also John 20.21–23; Gal. 4.6.   9.  Dr. Visser’t Hooft writes: “In the New Testament ‘apostle’ is used only four times and then in the ‘technical’ sense of ‘apostleship.’ On the other hand, ‘apostellein’ or ‘pempein’ (to send) is used most often of the sending of Jesus Himself and is comprehensive expression for the whole work of Christ and of his Church in the world.” 10.  This has always been the practice of Orthodox Mission up to modern times. N. Struve gives a survey of this missionary activity of the Russian Church in the nineteenth century, saying that the whole missionary work was based on the personal initiative and the immediate establishment of the sacramental life of the Church. The Student World, vol. LIII, (1960): 105–118: “The Orthodox Church and Mission.” 11.  Professor H. Kraemer writes: “Western colonialism has ended; therefore the missionary era of that period which reflected the essential attitudes and structures of colonialism has also ended.” In The Student World, vol. LIII, (1960): 197–207: “The Missionary Implications of the End of Western Colonialism.” 12.  We have to study carefully the orders given by Jesus to the Apostles as He sent them out to preach. We can summarise them as follows: (a) Simplicity and poverty (Mark 6.8–9; Luke, 9:3, 10.3); (b) No change of the simple basis of preaching (Mark 6.10); (c) No use of violence (Matt. 10.23; Mark 6.11); (d) Patience till the final victory is achieved (Matt. 10.22). 13.  See Matt. 10.19: “But when they deliver you up take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.” 14.  St. Paul’s words: “Necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not evangelise” (1 Cor. 9.16). 15.  E. R. Hardy commenting on the weakness of the present missionary work in heathen countries makes the comparison with the older times distinguished for their missionary work and concludes: “[T]here was little or any planning, little impressive strategy.” “Primarily the Church grew simply by being the Church—a simple process which had both advantages and limitations.” In The Student World, vol. LIII, (1960): “The Mission of the Church in the First Four Centuries.”



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16.  Father J. Meyendorff writes: “The ministry of the monks is in its very nature very close to that of the Apostles—both witness to the sovereignty of Christ over history and over the world.” The Student World, vol. LIII, (1960): 104: “Orthodox Missions in the Middle Ages.” 17.  E. Schlink: “There is not a real understanding of the operation of the Holy Spirit distinguished from all other impulses of man without the witness of the Apostle.” “Die Einhelt der Kirche und die Uneingkeit der Christen,” in Basileia, 403. 18.  This is not only given by God, but it is also a dynamic process of continuous effort together. We are united and we have to realize our Unity (Eph. 4.13) “till we all come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” 19. P. Tillich writes: “Religion as ultimate concern is the meaning-giving substance of culture, and culture is the totality of forms in which the basic concern of religion expresses itself. In abbreviation: religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion. Such a consideration definitely prevents the establishment of a dualism of religion and culture.” In Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 42. If this is true then a Christian has to bring the consequence of that in the concrete understanding of religiosity in the Church and through the Church and speak of “Ecclesiological Understanding of Culture.”

Chapter Twelve

The Witness and the Service of Orthodoxy to the Undivided Church

Today, in many quarters, it is fashionable to be “ecumenical,” but a superficial “ecumenism” too often hides from us the tragic nature of our situation. Dissension and disunity continue to poison and pervert all our church actions, our theological thinking and our missionary activities. We no longer have any right to go on using the slogans of the first stage of our ecumenical sentimentality—to say, for example that we must sit back and wait until Christ unites His Church, or that spiritual unity cannot really be affected by our dissensions, or that it is sufficient that we cooperate with one another so much more than we used to. Do we not all constantly fall back into thinking and acting as though the Una Sancta were confined within the limits of our own Church or confession? But the experience of meeting one another in Church assemblies and conferences is shaking us forward with pressing urgency. An Assembly is a time for action directed toward the restoration of unity. Let us pray that none of us may be content to continue as passive and self-satisfied members of our separated churches. THE WITNESS OF ORTHODOXY TO UNITY In Orthodox thinking Church union is an absolute reality pre-established by God. It is not a “spiritualized,” sentimental, humanistic expression of goodwill. It is not the result of a human agreement or of acceptance of a particular confessional position. Unity among Christians is to be identified with the union of the Father and the Son—“that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17.22–23). Unity among men in the Church is the result, the reflection, of the event of the Father’s union with Christ by His Spirit realized in 285

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the historical Church on the day of Pentecost. The One undivided historical Church is the outcome of God’s revelation and His real Presence, which is realistically affected in His Communion with men. Unity is not an attribute of the Church, but it is its very life. It is the divine-human inter-penetration realized once and for all in the Communion between Word and Flesh in Christ. It includes the act of Creation of man by the Logos; the reality of the Incarnation of this same Logos in man; man’s redemption and regeneration through him, and the participation and consummation of all history in the event of Pentecost—when the Holy Spirit accomplished the communion of mankind in Christ. Therefore, the Church does not move toward unity through the comparison of conceptions of unity, but lives out of the union between God and man realized in the communion of the Church as union of men in the Son of Man. We are not here to create unity, but to recapture it in its vast universal dimensions. Unity as union is the source of our life. It is the origin and the final goal of the whole creation in Christ represented in His Church. We are not only moving toward unity, but our very existence derives from the inseparable union between the three persons of the Holy Trinity given to us as a historical event on the day of Pentecost. Therefore, unity, which is the essence of God’s act in creation, Incarnation and Redemption, and which is reflected in the historical life of the Church, constitutes the first chapter of an authentic ecclesiology. This solid theological conception of unity is the only firm foundation for ecumenical thinking about the Church. The unity of which we speak is not something subsequently given to the Church from a source outside the Church after that Church has come into existence from other causes. It is the sine qua non of the very existence of the Church implanted by the Holy Spirit among men. This unity is expressed in distinctive and unshakable historical forms and inspires that regenerating life-process which will incorporate the whole world into one (Col. 1.15–20). The cosmic Christological vision of the economy of salvation in this biblical passage reaches its climax with the v. 18 “and he is the Head of the Body, the Church,” reminding us of the text Ephesians 1.22: “and (he) gave him to be the head over all things to the Church which is His Body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.” Thus this cosmic vision of salvation does not remain a theoretical, contemplative or eschatological vision. Through the concrete act of God at a certain moment in this (our) time (“he gave him to be the Head of the Body”) everything is decided and realized in this historical Church in which and out of which we live in this world, on this earth. It is therefore at this moment of “He gave” and at every Church moment that this whole cosmic, universal vision is concretized in and for every Christian community and congregation, which has to grasp its existence as part of an



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undivided whole, as being unavoidably rooted therein. Therefore we can say that the unity of the Church on the day of Pentecost reveals the mystery of the act of the creation of the whole world out of union, through union, and for Communion. Thus “unity” does not mean waiting for agreement to be reached between the different conceptions which are held in our churches, but imposes on us the obligation to remain in that condition in which we are re-created by the Spirit as One in the One Undivided Church. It is not only through consideration of “what” we believe this Church Unity to be that we hope to advance to the continuous re-establishment of reunion, but also through “how” we exist as Christians. It is the content seen and lived in the historical churches through the act of our faith in God the Holy Trinity. When we live by faith in the Trinity, our very existence as Christians discloses what unity is. We do not find the nature of that unity by devising subtle pseudo-theological formulas, which would capture its essence in polemical concepts. No, we find it in the life of historic churches, a life that springs from the same source as the life received at Pentecost. By “historic churches” we mean churches which confess in terms of the Nicene Creed the whole of the Divine Economy of the Revelation in the Church of God the Holy Trinity, and which believe in the continuation of this event by the Holy Spirit in and through the Church by acts culminating in the Sacraments and the Word, administered by those set apart to do so. This is what for me is implied by the definition of unity agreed by the representatives of the churches at the Central Committee at St. Andrews in 1960. What the churches actually do as churches constitutes the authentic expression of their undivided unity, and this is far more important than the theories and declarations of individual members as to what the churches do. The life of God the Holy Trinity in the Church and the acts of the churches in this world are the categories and the criteria of a true ecclesiology, which is able to contribute to the struggle for reunion. This unbroken continuity of Church-life points to the same acts performed by the power and in the freedom of the Holy Spirit, who has yet bound himself up with undeniable, concrete historical events. This is the most incomprehensible mystery of the grace of God, which escapes all attempts at absolute clarification by mere human logic. The truth about the Church can never be totally identified with the definitions with which we describe it. The unique contribution of Orthodoxy to the discussion on Church unity lies in its simple reminder that the unbroken continuity of the life of the historical Church has a far greater authority than any confessional statement of a local church which attempts to explain and justify its separateness. The life of the Church in itself and by itself is the most solid authority because it

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perpetuates the event of Pentecost. Eastern Orthodoxy must respond to the calling of the Holy Spirit to be the pivot-church for the ecumenical movement precisely through maintaining its catholic and apostolic witness to this foundation fact and through its own unity. ORTHODOXY’S SERVICE TO UNITY This unity as union is not only revealed by God in Christ, but is also realized among men through His Spirit. The essence of this union is a new life for men in full communion with each other through and because of the real presence of God in history. We must, therefore, continuously remind ourselves that this given fact of unity has led us to a difficult process of growth toward perfect unity in Christ. It is in this context alone that we are able to understand St. Paul’s references to the unity of the Church: on the one hand, he refers to the given historical fact, which makes us partakers of an already established Oneness, being “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (Eph. 2.20). And on the other hand, he is calling us to concern for “building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4.12–13). The Eastern tradition bases its own conceptions and continuous prayer for unity on this apparent dualism: on the one hand to be supported by the unity, on the other hand to have a vocation for this unity. There is a double relationship between the overwhelming grace of God, and the weak and sinful acts of men. This vocation implies not only the proclamation of a verbal confession but the acceptance of the process of regeneration by the Spirit. It presupposes a real death in us of the spirit of separation, through continuous repentance. Eastern Orthodoxy can maintain the most substantial unity in Christ through the fact of His real presence. It does not need to formulate complicated confessional statements or to have a centralized, juridical authority. But the New Delhi Assembly demands from Eastern Orthodoxy something more than this simple witness. This witness is not simply that of a signpost, showing other churches the path toward unity, but there is to be found in this witness the power, the reality, the compulsion of the Holy Spirit to express this witness in practical service to all the churches, to aid them in their mutual engagement as they go forward or stumble together on the difficult road toward the re-establishment of church unity. This is where Orthodoxy’s witness to unity passes over into the faithful service of unity. This does not imply a change of external behavior, but is rather an obligation arising from the very essence of Orthodoxy itself.



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Witness in the biblical understanding of the word martyria is the result of Christ’s diakonia rendered to His Father on behalf of the whole human race which has been called to be One in him (John 5.36). On this primary and Christological martyria through the offering of Jesus, the apostolic martyria is based as the ground event of the continuity of the saving act of God in Christ through all ages in His apostolic Church. The Apostles possess a unique place by making the martyria of Christ through their martyria an historical process in inseparable and undivided continuity. The faithfulness of the saving act of Jesus is manifested through the true martyria that they offer through their writings (John 21.24) and their preaching (2 Cor. 4.1–3) in the power of the Holy Spirit (Acts 25.8). The Apostolic martyria is a witnessing martyria through immediate contact with the diakonia of Christ to His Father (Acts 10.39). This martyria is related with the event of the resurrection with which the Apostles as martyrs are inseparably united, uniting all of those who are going to believe through their witness to this resurrection (Acts 3, 15). But it is through this witness-martyria that the Apostles share the martyrdomoffering of Jesus to his Father by their own martyrdom in the world for him; this is the further event of witness on which the Church as One Body is builttogether. The preaching of the resurrection, of the victory of the Lord Jesus, this climax of the apostolic martyria, is precisely that which culminates in the martyrdom of those who are witnessing it (Acts 24.2 and 17.32). Without this martyria the apostolic witness is vacant and in vain (1 Cor. 1.14). Therefore we can say that this martyria is the martyrdom of the One Undivided historical Church in its struggle to maintain unity through the apostolic witness to the diakonia of Jesus culminating in the Resurrection with the Saints and martyrs. It is furthermore the martyrdom of the suffering involved in the struggle to preserve this Unity through the victory of Christ, but in the midst of division and sin. It is not its glory, therefore, but its suffering in the world that Eastern Orthodoxy brings as its contribution to the debate on reunion. Witness as martyria is not given through acts of service of a social character, but primarily in the fact of its bearing the signs of the truth of Resurrection but in the power of the Cross of Jesus in blood and tears. It is an experience of death, which in humiliation, self-sacrifice and self-denial for the sake of unity, can endure this martyrdom in the hope of the final victory of Christ and of the continuous restoration of unity in the light of the Resurrection. In its participation in the ecumenical movement, Eastern Orthodoxy as the martyria church of unity should “bear about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in its body” (2 Cor. 4.10). This witness to unity is expressed with greater force through the silence of martyrdom; through sacrifice of our self-sufficiency; through tolerance in

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difficult situations; through a self-emptying of its privileges; through sharing those privileges with other churches outside one’s own church. This would lead Orthodoxy to that martyria which we call diakonia on the long way toward the reunion of the Churches. The uniqueness of Orthodoxy as described above is not expressed by and does not need to make easy judgments upon the other Churches by enlisting the aid of new confessions to serve this purpose. This would mean a betrayal of the Orthodox contribution to unity. It would result in the Eastern churches becoming involved in the controversy between the churches of the West by copying their own methods, and Orthodoxy would thus become entangled in a fanatical attempt to define absolutely the mystery of God. We do not condemn the making of all local confessional definitions, but we do say that these confessions are put to a wrong use when they are employed in a polemical spirit and when the claim is made that such a local confession is the only true answer to what the essence of the mystery of the Church really is. From our point of view, that is not the use to which a local confession should be put in a divided Church. It too often happens that a church seeks to impose its own conception of reunion, instead of allowing the life of the Church itself to communicate the gifts of the Holy Spirit to the other local churches, which are separated from it. Eastern Orthodoxy has not committed itself to this grave, ecclesiological mistake. But it is tempted again and again toward such a narrow-minded confessional polemic attitude. If this ever happens we must realize that it would lose its uniqueness in witnessing to the biblical martyria by diakonia, its witness to the unity offered to the other churches directly through its undivided “mysterious” life. The passage from witness to service or to the right expression of Orthodox witness is possible only if we understand the full significance of the word “Orthodoxy.” “Orthodox” is not the adjective or the qualification of one local church or even of all of our Eastern Orthodox Churches: it is the synonym of the words “catholic” and “apostolic.” It is not an exclusive but an inclusive term, which goes beyond the limits of the churches which call themselves Orthodox. It includes all those churches and believers who seek to offer an honest confession and achieve a life, which is untouched by heresies and schisms, and to arrive at the wholeness of the divine revelation in Christ. We could echo the words of Father Georges Florovsky in his analysis of the word “Orthodoxy” as meaning precisely “right-doxa”—that is with a view to sharing in common in rendering glory to the Lord in thanksgiving, in and through the One Undivided Church. Orthodoxia is the right martyria of truth and is based on the union of God with man in Jesus, lived and understood as the full communion of all those believers who are ready to share fully with each other the glory of the God revealed in the Orthodoxy of the One



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Catholic and Apostolic Church. If, therefore, Orthodoxy silently accepts that there is salvation in other churches outside its limits, limits which, in this context, seem to be narrow as a result of the very fact of the abnormal situation of division, this means that an Orthodox, through his faith, is invited to become really “Orthodox” by offering himself in humility in order to effect a full realization of Orthodoxy in the life of the Universal Church. It is only then that this ecumenical Orthopraxia would prove and confirm the locally existing Orthodoxia. This dynamic understanding of Orthodoxy enables us to see Church history in a new perspective. It excludes labeling movements within the Church as “apostasies”—thus placing them “outside” the Church. It is impossible to locate an ecclesiological event extra ecclesiam. Neither the Roman schism nor the Reformation which resulted from it should be described in this way. The Orthodox witness as service to unity can by self-sacrifice put all separations in their right place within the One Undivided Church and share the glory of God with them. This means in practice that Orthodoxy must give up its defensive, confessional-apologetic attitude, and in the glory of the Holy Spirit, become a mighty river of life, filling the gaps, complementing opposites, overcoming enmities, and driving forward toward reunion. This was how the Church lived in the time of the Fathers, creating new ways for achieving dynamic unity, richer forms of worship, a really ecumenical theology which regenerated the world through its authentic interpretation of the mission of the Church. The pseudo-conservative attitude, which simply condemns the past of other confessions, is not a genuine Orthodox attitude. Perhaps our negative judgment on the past of other churches is one of the reasons for our weakness today. To use such slogans as “come back to us” or “let us go back to the first eight centuries” as though we were inviting others to deny their own traditions is unorthodox. Such an attitude denies the action of the Holy Spirit in baptized Christians in long periods of Church history. Orthodoxy would fall into a false Western type of conservatism, which longs for an idealized first century, if she merely calls others to go back—in this sense, back to the past. The right expression of Orthodoxy should be to say: “The presence and witness of the Eastern Orthodox Churches and their witness to the unbroken Orthodox tradition can help all the other historical churches to recover their own true life.” It is through the dynamic openness and inclusiveness of Orthodoxy that the Eastern Church can fulfill its function as the pivot of the reunion movement today. Let me briefly illustrate this principle in relation to the Church of Rome and to the Churches of the Reformation. Eastern churches never denied the primus inter pares, the honoris causa primacy of the Bishop of Rome. But

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in the service of unity we must now rethink our conceptions of this primacy. We must regard it as a response to the desires of the local churches for an initiative in convening pan-Christian councils and for a link between the churches such as the Patriarchate of Constantinople provides for the Eastern Church today. The Orthodox martyria for unity must include psychological and theological preparation for the restoration of this function of the undivided Church as one of the most fundamental means of preserving unity. And we must hope and pray that the Second Vatican Council will re-evaluate the diocesan system by a reinterpretation of the primacy of the Holy See, in the full Catholic and Orthodox sense ex consensu Ecclesiae et non ex sese. Again, ceasing to live in the past, we should cease calling each other “schismatics.” There are no “schismatics,” but the historic churches in their division represent a schismatic situation in the One Undivided Church. This means that the churches, which came out of the Reformation as new churches, will have to study and consciously accept all the consequences of their belonging to the Catholic stream of church life through the centuries. They are invited by the witness of the Eastern churches to see themselves as particles of the One Church, which cannot be circumscribed within the limited forms of congregational existence only. Through ecumenical intercourse they can experience the main ecclesiological dimension hidden in Christ beneath the simple forms and without which there is no historical Church, no congregation. It is not a question of “confessions,” but of accepting the fact that they live as churches within the universal Church, in which the Holy Spirit creates, sanctifies and shapes the historical-charismatic order of an ecclesial institution, not invented by man but created by the grace of Pentecost, in which real freedom is experienced in unbroken communion. Only through such witnessing together can the Orthodox witness to unity expressed in service be accepted by other churches as a reuniting power. THE NATURE AND GOAL OF CHURCH UNITY The representatives of the Churches have frequently declared that unity does not mean uniformity. But in practice there is great reluctance to accept different forms of church life, worship and doctrinal expression. We tend to use our differences as defense against other churches, instead of accepting them as external signs of the inner riches of the infinite and unbounded grace of the Holy Spirit. But we cannot and should not impose on others our own forms of church life. Perhaps in this respect we have to experience the fact that the road to reunion may involve a kind of death in order that we may receive the new life of the Holy Spirit, which flows deep within the differing forms



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of church life. The unity we seek to restore must necessarily have room for a multiplicity of different forms. It is not to be established through the acceptance of one central human authority or of one program of action on social and political issues. Nor can it be based on using the Bible as a kind of Koran, that is as a source of inflexible rules applicable under all conditions. The unity we seek is neither that of Church discipline under a centralized authoritarian institution, nor is it based only on the kerygmatic message of the Gospel to the world; but it is primarily based on and maintained by the charisms received from the Holy Spirit by the People of God in the historic Church. It is therefore a charismatic and eucharistic unity, expressed through and for communion with the grace of God the Holy Trinity. These words are not to be interpreted as introducing a relativization of the importance of the confessions for re-establishing unity. On the contrary they intend to situate the confessional statements in their right place and function as pointing to the same fundamental event of the unbroken unity realized in the event of the revelation of the life of the Holy Trinity in the Church, whose only verbal witness a Church confession has always to be. A confession should never be used as a separating force but as a uniting one pointing toward the One central event of the Church: its Oneness, realized by the Trinitarian God in His historical Church. By the power of the Holy Spirit, Church Assemblies of divided confessions reveal this event more and more convincingly. Our prayer and worship in common, as separated confessions, reveal our origin as One Church and our goal as far as the nature of the unity we seek is concerned. The more we dispute on the basis of local confessions as separated churches, the more we feel ourselves engaged in walking together toward the origin, the nature and the expression of this unity that we have and we seek, namely the communion in the divine life in common in the One undivided Church. All our different theologies and confessions are already pointing to this eucharistie unity in which all the scholastic confessional differences have to be consumed and reconciled within the communion of the Body and Blood of our Savior. It is only in this way that we can understand how this unity is the fulfillment of His purpose to bring the whole world, which is already potentially saved in Christ, to share in salvation through the charismatic Church, and so to be called into His unbroken Unity. Church unity, therefore, has both its origin and its goal outside itself. It is given by God the Holy Trinity and for the sake of the world which He has already saved. There is no analogy here with political power. The world is not going to be convinced by our agreements about social and political problems; but Church unity is the expression of the purpose of Christ to save the whole world. Unity and Mission coincide in the nature of the Church; for mission

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means: sharing directly in the grace of God the Holy Trinity in His Church. It does not imply witness and service apart from unity, but out of, in and for this Unity. Mission is the calling of all the peoples of the world to become partakers, in repentance, through the mysteries of the Church, in that Oneness which is the origin, essence and being of the Church, through the regenerating, all-embracing and uniting mysteries of the Holy Spirit. In the crises of the deeply divided modern world, the One Missionary Church has to witness to the divine purpose to unite and restore all things in Christ. Unconsciously, the world that is still outside communion with God through the One Church cries out to the churches to affirm their Union and to act as One. Suspended between “dispersion” and “gathering,” divided Christianity has to seek again for its origin in the One Undivided Church. Witness and Service thus become for all men the martyria of the real and uniting presence of God. In full consciousness of their God-given responsibility in today’s world, the historic churches are called to sacrifice the self-sufficiency of their forms and their confessional security, not for the sake of some theological unity, but for the sake of the witness and service for God and for the world of the One Undivided Church.

Part 6

THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION

Chapter Thirteen

Toward an Ecumenical Theological Education

Between the efforts of humanity to preserve and develop its identity by respecting the human person and the efforts of the separated Christian traditions to restore the wholeness of the Gospel message through their fellowship in the ecumenical movement, there exists a relationship which is implied in all definitions of “ecumenical” and “ecumenical education.” The world is looking to the Church to contribute, through her own oneness and renewal, to the task of building one human family, liberating peoples from all kinds of historical injustice, exploitation, and discrimination based on race or sex and eliminating the divisions among classes of society and nations. In using the term “ecumenical,” we are referring to that which “helps to describe everything that relates to the whole task of the whole Church to bring the Gospel to the whole world.” The main element of this definition— the search for the unity and renewal of the Church in her relationship to the world—implies for ecumenical education a threefold task: first, an affirmation of the wholeness of the Gospel, comprising the good news of salvation for all human beings; second, an emphasis on the need of the churches to renew their lives and commitment as they grow together within one fellowship; and third, a call to students of theology to confess Christ through involvement in the struggle to build a just, participatory, and sustainable society. It is of paramount importance for the renewal of theological linking today that we undertake a critical self-appraisal of our application of these principles of renewal, unity, and involvement, and theology needs to examine its ability to build up an authentic ecumenical education on this three-fold basis, seeking to alert theological educators, students, and church people to the ecumenical vocation.

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Eastern Orthodox theology possesses sound principles for contributing to such an ecumenical education, being nourished by the experience of an intense liturgical life, with a very strong emphasis on eschatology and cosmic salvation. These include: 1.  A global vision of the divine economy in relation to the whole of history. The Church is a pars pro toto, a miniature of creation in the process of renewal and salvation, as the “kaine ktisis.” The oneness of the Church is the vehicle for the re-gathering of all things into the oneness of the whole universe. The liturgy invites everybody to pray for the “union of all,” and the faithful share in the foretaste of the restoration of the whole creation. 2.  Orthodox theology, thus, does not allow any simple division between sacred and secular and does not favor any kind of sectarianism in the Church, either within herself or in opposition to the world. On account of its fundamental principle of universal salvation, the world is seen as potentially saved. The historical reality has, therefore, a primary importance, and the Church does not alienate herself from any world situation. 3.  This attitude affects the understanding of the Church as the world that has been already saved and transformed, or the New Creation, with the implication that the Church cannot but be one throughout the centuries. For the Orthodox, a particular confessional identity separating a local church into a new ecclesial community is totally impossible. The Church is identical only with the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, in unbroken continuity right from the beginning of the Christian era. 4.  In this sense every local church possesses the fullness of divine grace and catholicity within all different cultures as part of the whole Church belonging to all times and all places. The local church is never foreign to the prevailing culture of the place where she exists and yet retains her identity with the One Catholic and Apostolic Church. 5.  The Church is permanently renewed by the cleansing operation of the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth promised by Christ and given to her on the day of Pentecost. Being able to invoke the Spirit of God is the only assurance the Church has of remaining in full communion with Christ and maintaining at the same time a positive and constructive relationship with the world. Guided by these fundamental principles in the understanding of the threefold task described above, Orthodox theology is by its very nature ecumenical, and has contributed, especially through its fellowship in the World Council of Churches, in the following ways to the ecumenical movement: 1.  By a fuller understanding of the Church as the presupposition of all sacraments and of the word of God. The Church is not only identical



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with the gathering of the local congregation but also with the event of Christ as enacted again and again in her sacramental life and her kerygma by the Holy Spirit. The Church is not simply an association of believers whose life can be modified by the application of new administrative rules. She is the Body of Christ, and her nature is a mystery in which one shares only by faith and full commitment. Although the Church is composed of repenting sinners, she is holy, being continually cleansed by the Spirit. 2.  By professing an absolute unity between Scripture and tradition, defeating the dualism in Western theology of the so-called two sources of revelation, which led to the problem of authority in the Church, the acceptance or rejection of magisterium, and the acceptance or rejection of tradition, the opposition between Bible and tradition. 3.  By the importance of the liturgical-sacramental life centered on the Eucharist, the event which reaffirms the Church as the Body of Christ, renewed by the Spirit and preserving her identity in all world situations. The Church, thus understood, does not depend on confessional statements or scholastic definition. She is her own life in Christ. Ecclesiology is a commentary on the operation of the Holy Spirit. Church structure, apostolic ministry and succession have to be interpreted through a charismatic pneumatology. Church orders are not de jure derived from divine potestas or a pyramidal hierarchy but are a communal event, a gift of grace to the Ecclesia, which guarantees its authenticity. That means that there is no qualitative difference in essence between a general and a special ministry. Instead there is a particular, indispensable diakonia, incarnating not an order and a discipline but rather the love of the Spirit, binding the members of the Church community into one body. There cannot be an organic unity in the Church without one mutually recognized ministry, and each local church is recognizable through the one who presides at the liturgy and thus unites it with the universal Church. 4.  By its understanding of the unity of the Church, which is given in one faith, one baptism, and one spirit and is gradually being realized in the life of the Church. Unity is both a gift of the Spirit and also a goal which the faithful must strive to achieve so as to grow into mature manhood or womanhood in the image of Christ. This dynamic concept of unity is a sine qua non for authentic Church life and the indispensable precondition of the presence and action of the Church and her ministry in and to the world. 5.  By the insistence that unity in faith and praxis, with the bond of love and peace, is the condition for sacramental communion. The

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non-acceptance of intercommunion by the Orthodox in ecumenical gatherings should not be interpreted as a judgment against other churches. It is the expression of an attitude consistent with the fundamental principle that unity is full union and communion. The practice of intercommunion must presuppose this kind of full union or should lead to the immediate abolition of church divisions among those who practice it. The Orthodox, without passing any judgment on those practicing intercommunion, play the necessary role in reminding the ecumenical movement of the final requirements for re-establishing a full church like the Orthodox, which is in the end a rather positive contribution to a realistic, hopeful, and authentic vision of the unity to come. On the whole one can say that the Orthodox have helped ecumenical theological circles to regain their sacramental ecclesiology, the centrality of the liturgy in Christian life, and the theology of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, controversial theological issues between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, like the question of ministry and apostolic succession, have been discussed in a more flexible manner with the broader Orthodox vision of Eucharistic theology, which can overcome a unilateral, confessional theology. On the other hand, Orthodox theology has certainly benefited from: 1.  The insistence of the Western reformed theologians on the centrality of the Bible and the kerygma of the Church. • The critical approach which is wary of an easy acceptance of church history as the unique criterion and norm of present church life. • The work of the historical critical method applied to biblical texts. • The need for permanent renewal of church life and theology. • The continuous concern for man’s daily life and the sharing in human efforts to improve the human condition. • The missionary character of Christian theology as contextual and inductive (i.e., in permanent relationship with a changing cultural and social environment, which has to be taken seriously as a norm for theological thinking and methodology). While the contribution of Orthodox theology is undeniable regarding ecclesiological subjects in the realm of ecumenical education, it appears that its contribution in the field of renewal and social ethics is not proportionately high. The Orthodox appear to be reactionary as regards certain recent trends in the World Council of Churches that are considered by many to be vital to an authentic and full ecumenism—for example: attempts to create new forms



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of Church, to readapt church structures in conformity with the modern world, and, especially, assisting in liberation movements of all kinds. It is true that the Orthodox, by their total devotion to the “inner” sacramental life of the Church, are tempted to neglect this other dimension of ecumenism. It seems that their fidelity to their distinctive Church life has led them to a one-sided, partial interpretation and application of their ecumenical vocation. There is a kind of esoteric language developing in Orthodox circles which proves to be more and more incompatible with the ecumenical mandate’s sense of profound responsibility; they are not, in fact, fully and rightly interpreting their ecumenical tradition. Social ethics and liberation movements which help to create a just, participatory, and sustainable society by eliminating the power centers of unjust structures and of racial and sex discrimination are not a political program, nor are they a reflection of the outlook of certain very revolutionary societies in the so-called Third World. This action is implied in the doctrine of the Trinity as communion revealing the communal nature of the whole creation; in the mystery of the incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection, pointing to the human-centered world reality, which needs continual restructuring, defeating all kinds of attempts against human dignity; in the operation of the Holy Spirit renewing the whole world by liberating it from the forces of evil which disrupt its peace. For the Orthodox, the liturgy itself is linked to all aspects of daily life and history is taken into serious consideration. The role of the Christian and of the churches is not simply reconciliatory, passively irenic, assisting the poor and the sick a posteriori, but also revolutionary in the face of injustice and exploitation, preventive in the face of threats of famine and sickness, and creative of new, more just and more participatory structures. Confessing Christ today as an ecumenical task does not imply only fidelity to creeds of the past and spiritual devotion to the sacramental life. It is precisely the confession of the faith through ancient creeds and churchly devotion that forces Christians into a dynamic presence in the world. This is not another modern, politicized, activist, and human-centered act of confessing Christ, but precisely the other side of the same coin, the other indispensable, inseparable dimension of the one and the same confession. Under difficult historical circumstances, among enemies of the Christian faith, the Orthodox churches were obliged to preserve their faith by concentrating on their church life “internally,” “mystically,” “liturgically.” Nor were they allowed to interpret and apply their faith in the way the ecumenical nature of their church life and theology would imply. But these restrictions of the past should not lead them now to a one-sided fulfillment of their ecumenical vocation. Orthodox patristic thought, as it must be followed up and reinterpreted today, is equally as activist, creative, and revolutionary (in a

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positive sense) as other kinds of theology that profess a strong social gospel of liberation today. The difference, perhaps, is only that patristic thought is continually fed by a sacramental-ecclesiological vision of the world that does not allow any kind of absolutization of sociopolitical action. Here, certainly, Orthodox ecumenical education must allow itself to be affected by contemporary trends of ecumenical activism. Orthodox ecumenical educators must be willing to accept a beneficial exchange, with nonOrthodox ecumenical teachers and students, of the elements missing from their respective ecumenical curricula. This does not signify that they are to copy or imitate a type of social gospel foreign to the principles of Orthodox ecumenical theology. In this connection the following remarks can be made: 1.  Sociopolitical action cannot become a substitute for the sacramental life, but is its natural and self-evident outcome. 2.  Liberation activism is not another confession of faith, uniting Christians of separated traditions into a new type of Church commitment and reality, but the same ancient act of confessing the faith in its right and indispensable application. 3.  There are not different kinds of Gospel messages to be applied in a pluralistic society by a multiform human-centered activism, but the one allembracing and all-uniting Gospel. 4.  Though the need to change the world’s political, social, and economic structures may be a priority on the agenda of a local church if human dignity is under immediate threat, it cannot become a criterion of church life which excludes those who cannot share in this activism; sociopolitical puritanism should not replace the old ethical puritanism, leading the Church to further divisions and schisms. 5.  Sociopolitical action cannot become the unique and final Christian confession and shape the core of ecumenical education, but it must always be authorized, cleansed from human absolutisms by a serious Christian discernment of the Spirit. Thus the Orthodox may regain from other church traditions a dimension missing from their ecumenical theological education and at the same time contribute a certain restraint to any extremist tendencies in the application of the Christian social gospel. As a matter of fact, some enriching exchange is taking place between Orthodox theological education and non-Orthodox traditions within the ecumenical movement. To favor and foster this exchange, several chairs in Ecumenics have been established in Orthodox faculties, and far more chairs in Orthodox theology have been created in Protestant and Roman Catholic universities and in church institutions in non-Orthodox countries.



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It is true, however, that in most cases this exchange is not really taking place. It remains one more dimension in theological education. It is also descriptive and informative in character. No deeper influence is exercised on the way of thinking about our theological task today. Though there are some interesting exceptions, theologies remain untouched in their traditional vision. There are only specialized theologians, who are able to interpret more authentically the others’ traditions. In this respect, however, a certain progress has taken place. There is also more readiness to include the others’ approach while preparing books on theology, without a defensive attitude. Theological chairs in Ecumenics are of great help and we should wish that their numbers continue to increase. What is more necessary, however, is (a) more frequent two-way exchange of more students and teachers (not only Orthodox students studying in non-Orthodox faculties); (b) the establishment of institutes of an ecumenical character to provide possibilities for life and prayer together; (c) attempts to teach theology through teams of lecturers of Orthodox and non-Orthodox backgrounds; and (d) the introduction of extension programs in theological faculties with the participation of nontheological educators. Especially if we want to promote a deeper knowledge of Orthodoxy, we should organize special courses of intensive study of Orthodox theology and Church life. The annual liturgical seminar for non-Orthodox students, initiated at Bossey twenty years ago, can serve as an example. This fifteenday intensive course combines theoretical instruction with attendance at the Holy Week offices of the Orthodox Church, thereby giving the students a double enrichment. In all the methods we use to promote ecumenical education, we should try to bear in mind that Ecumenics is not just one more theological discipline for specialists. Rather, it is intended to permeate the whole theological curriculum with an alert ecumenical spirit. This is especially true in the interaction of Orthodox and non-Orthodox undertakings. Here, however, we cannot say that there has been satisfactory progress. In the area of studies of Orthodoxy there is among some non-Orthodox a sentimental pro-Orthodox attitude, which narrows ecumenism into a sympathy, an appreciation of the symbolism and richness of liturgy, and an admiration of the exotic or extravagant elements. On the other hand, the Orthodox must appreciate the ethos of the non-Orthodox and be ready to listen and comprehend attitudes and positions that may appear to be unilateral or extremist. Here, ecumenical education must be concerned with very profound problems, not necessarily all of a theological nature. There are prejudices derived from cultural, political, and ethical presuppositions which affect the theological attitude of an Orthodox vis-à-vis a Roman Catholic or a Protestant; a certain psychological barrier

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often renders the possibility of a new, open horizon toward a non-Orthodox very difficult. Education, in the narrow sense of increasing knowledge about subject matter, does not help to change attitudes at this point. What is needed is a thoroughgoing exchange of experience and sharing of community life. This must have priority in any exchange of theological programs with traditions foreign to the Orthodox. The same difficulties exist with those non-Orthodox who are eager to penetrate the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Orthodoxy is deeply enmeshed in its cultural and national backgrounds as well as in specific ethical choices the Orthodox have to make in their particular environment. One cannot study Orthodoxy dissociated from these non-theological elements. That is why a non-Orthodox can enter into the life and mind of the Orthodox churches only if he is ready to appreciate the popular religiosity of their members and the simplicity of their appreciation of national and church history, as well as their uncritical acceptance of the sacramental life that sanctifies their entire social, family, and professional existence. In that end, what is necessary is not to overemphasize the need for a special Orthodox/non-Orthodox axis, thereby intensifying one particular branch of ecumenical education. Although we accept this as an area requiring special attention, experience has convinced us that this “specialization” should be treated as an integral part of the broad ecumenical concern. It would be a tactical error to isolate the Orthodox/non-Orthodox axis as if this were a special area on account of the particularity (strangeness, extravagance, conservativism) of Orthodoxy. The Orthodox must be involved in ecumenical education as a whole, feeling that they are making their contribution by shaping it from within. There cannot be a true exchange of educational experiences, nor can ecumenical education in the service of the Church be truly authentic, without the wholehearted participation of the Orthodox. Unless the Orthodox are accepted without the slightest open or hidden discrimination—arising from the fact that they appear at first sight to be conservative, past-oriented, and politically hesitant when confronted with radical liberation theologies—they cannot share to the full extent of their potential in the promotion of ecumenical theological education. Their contribution in developing a more comprehensive program could be most fruitful, given their global vision of the relationship between nature and grace, Church and world, Church and state. There is a particular qualitative catholicity that Orthodox devotion presupposes and professes in very simple, non-theological terms. Such an existential approach can be of some importance for ecumenical education today.

Chapter Fourteen

Toward an Orthodox Theological Education

The subject is enormous and complicated because, first, we understand the task of theology in different ways due to the different purposes that are set forth through theological education, and second, because we apply different methods of educating which reflect different local educative traditions expressed by different Orthodox schools which teach theology today. In the Orthodox world at this moment there is a great variety of theological schools. Some are related to universities and share in the academic discipline with the other faculties of theoretical sciences, and some are directly under their Church auspices serving as theological academies, institutions or seminaries for preparing the future priests of their Church. There is also another aspect, which renders our subject very difficult. It is the fact that theological education is composed of a variety of disciplines of knowledge—hermeneutic, historical, practical, systematic—which require corresponding scientific methodologies linked with philological, historical and philosophical ways of research. This situation has to be kept in mind, and differences of all kinds should be expected and taken into consideration when either we make a survey of the actual reality of theological education or we suggest ways of renewing it. Due to this greatly diversified field covered by the term “theological education,” those who have gone through their basic formation and are now specialized in one of the particular branches of theology are bound to understand “theology” and “education” in radically different ways because they are conceiving the terms through their experience working in their special fields of theological research. Some of them feel the need to apply theological knowledge in contemporary society by taking seriously the social milieu

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of our times; some others lay emphasis on the historical material and try to interpret through it developments of church life; some others are interested in the authenticity of the different traditions which are recorded in constitutive elements of the biblical texts, etc. On the other hand, it is also true that there is a consensus in the understanding of theological education as a discipline of knowledge, which presents a definite and clear coherence. Regardless of the different natures of our schools and the emphasis of a particular scope of theological education, we all—as theologians—feel and think within a given framework of concern which unifies us in one clearly distinguished scientific work. One can especially refer to the Orthodox theological consensus and admit certain solid bases of unification, which to my mind might be grouped in the following three categories: a.  Theology is the articulate expression of the event of the ecclesial faith as it is lived within an Orthodox ecclesial communion. b.  Theology expresses the unbroken historical continuity of the apostolic faith as it is clearly stated basically in the Bible and consistently explained, expounded and systematized by the Church writers of all centuries. c.  Theology is the reasonable interpretation of the liturgical experience of the continuously worshipping community of faith rendering glory to the triune God as Creator, Incarnate Logos, and Savior renewing all things. Certainly, this solid basis is a given, almost a priori factor for the theologian, but there remains always the open question of how theology develops, interprets and communicates this fundamental givenness of faith in different places, times and social environments. Of course here we face the need of a critical survey of theological education; and again here we Orthodox differ in our appreciation of the diversified situation on account of the different value we attribute to the need of communicating the Gospel and especially how to do it, and in how far we want, we are obliged—or not—to take the world’s situation—social and political—seriously. Therefore, our survey and evaluation of the existing reality in Orthodox theological education has to be understood as a limited personal contribution expressing a particular situation, which cannot be valid for other places. Our effort should be more to compare different experiences and investigate the existing common elements, which can be studied in common with the scope to share in a common effort to renew Orthodox theological education in the measure that this is possible, feasible, and accepted by the people directly concerned.



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SURVEY OF THE SITUATION The first remark has to be made that all Orthodox theological schools, as far as I know, are loyal to their churchly nature and faithful to their theological tradition as it is described above in its basic self–affirmation, regardless of whether they belong to state universities or are schools under church authorities. It can be also said that, though with different emphasis, their main purpose is the preparation of church leadership and in some cases clearly of theologically trained clergymen. In some cases academic research is developed independent from this immediate purpose, and in some others it is linked to it, or even subordinate to it. And still, in my situation, we have a very strong (perhaps dominating) emphasis on theological education as preparation for teachers of religion in the state secondary schools and lycées. There is also a growing, very encouraging phenomenon of study of theology by graduates of other university faculties without the intention of pursuing a professional career as teachers of religion afterward, or of fulfilling a vocation to the priesthood, but first as education in the reality of the Christian faith by profession al laymen, who can put themselves to the service of the Orthodox Church as theologically educated laymen in the future. For all of these categories, theology, more or less, is also a vocation inspired by a living faith and the desire to serve the Church as a priest or teacher. But during the three last years in my country we have something of a new phenomenon insofar as we receive graduate students into the two theological faculties from other sciences. At the same time, more and more, we receive students in state theological faculties who are simply seeking an academic career or a university degree, or a teaching profession in the state schools, without a clear special vocation. It is evident that a great number of these students, coming out of a society in a process of profound secularization and change, are studying theology without a special vocation. In this case, theology has to find the point of contact with these students, who are deprived of the immediate and conscious experience of faith, and have to create the vocation during the course of their studies. One can say that theology in this situation passes a test as far as its validity as science and its credibility as Weltanschauung (theory of life based on Christian faith) are concerned. I mention this latter category of students because of the fact that, especially through them, theology in our country receives more directly the general uneasiness and the student uneasiness in the universities today, which started around 1968 in Western Europe and North America. On this point one has to distinguish between Church schools which are not parts of universities and theological faculties which are under the same roof with other faculties within

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state universities; because, in the first case the student radical movement is not made manifest or it cannot exist altogether, while in the latter case theology is unavoidably involved in it. We have to recognize that we have today a serious and unprecedented new reality, which makes the hidden dissatisfaction, which always might have been there, especially against the methods of theological education, more outspoken. Within the process of growing relationships between radical political ideologies and university studies and life in general, the groaning and grumbling against all educative systems of higher education as being one-way traffic from the professors and institutional authorities to the students who feel manipulated as passive objects of the authoritarian system, is further intensified. The more politically biased student movement, which in some cases has reached theology directly or indirectly in state universities, will proceed to a more concrete and a threefold criticism: a.  for not being sufficiently critical of established pyramidal, authoritarian structures in church and education which are not allowing student participation in them; b.  for not being sufficiently critical of the unjust society of production and consumption and therefore for not taking seriously into consideration the class mentality which today’s science is representing and is condemned to serve; and, c.  for not fighting against the alienation of man in today’s technological society. Certainly, this kind of protest and criticism can be either unjustified or one-sided, politically colored and ideologically directed from sources outside of theological education, but to my mind theology cannot remain absolutely passive and indifferent in front of it. If one cleanses this criticism of its specific political origins, means and orientations, there is a lot that Orthodox theological education can admit for the sake of its renewal and better service of the Church, being engaged in evangelism within a world gradually emancipating from traditional patterns. It looks as if our education wants to ignore this criticism for the moment or better; it is not prepared to operate the necessary changes and meet it. Certainly, one should not generalize on this point by simply accepting a radical criticism in all of its aspects which cover too many ideological premises, or a hidden idealism seeking for perfectionism only by the other, the so-called dominant side. But this criticism can have a benevolent effect for making us proceed to an honest self-criticism on both sides, teachers and students, in a sincere effort to renew structures and methods of theological education in common.



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In this sense, I would suggest that on the part of the teachers, we should pay attention to being in general more cooperative, more prepared for dialogue with the students and limit the ex-cathedra one-way teaching to the minimum possible. At the same time we have to give examples of an honest research of truth by our constant teaching and living of it. Especially, we have to become conscious of the dangers which are involved in our occupation and which we are continuously tempted to perpetuate almost unconsciously: a.  a one-sided sacral overtone; b.  a super-developed academism; c.  a historicism and dogmaticism; d.  a conservatism which reflects a hesitation to change; e.  an esoterism by using ideas and language cut off from our milieu. On the other hand, students have to be challenged to think the fact that theology necessitates a self-affirmation on one’s living faith if one is to serve Church and society today (and not just study theology as a discipline of academic education). Students have to make use of academic freedom in its right sense. It is only by a continuous existential relationship with all aspects of the life of a theological faculty or school (unbroken attendance of courses, even the most boring ones, of liturgical gatherings and life, of cultural events). Academic freedom in some state universities has led through its bad application to a total distortion of education, by the alienation of students from their natural faculty environment, with the result of seeing studies only through the periodical or final exams. All sciences, but especially theology, have need of a continuous close relationship with all aspects of education and are profoundly damaged by the threat of the exams, which remain the only possible way of evaluating one’s own progress and knowledge in academic life. This system must be overcome, especially in mammoth universities, and the numerous classes of theology. Residential students on campus are greatly favored in this respect. Certainly, I repeat, this survey is too general and too limited at the same time, as containing remarks, which are not valid in most of the other situations, and as expressing the experience that one can get only through his own situation. THOUGHTS ABOUT AN AUTHENTIC FOCUS OF ORTHODOX THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION Bearing in mind this short practical survey of the actual situation, one has to rethink the main focus of Orthodox theological education. We mean by focus the real relationship of the authentic content of theological education with the

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how of its application dictated by the clear scope or scopes we are pursuing by theological education. We mean, in other words, origin, basis and scope as well as procedure and methods for realizing them within today’s Church and society. In rethinking our focus we have to be comprehensive regarding the different scopes that Orthodox theological schools are pursuing. I would enumerate them in the following way: Formation of Priests and Church Leadership This focus has to remain the fundamental one, though for the Orthodox tradition a priest does not have to be a theologian as a prerequisite for his ordination, as is the case with other Christian traditions. Theological training with an emphasis on pastoral and clinical psychology and on religious philosophy and psychology is absolutely necessary for Orthodox clergymen in all parts of the world. Theological preparation in view of the priesthood, however, should not be regarded as a technical training and formation. It has to envisage the spiritual development of the whole personality in a broader and deeper sense. Theological knowledge is inseparable from a method of training comprising the whole of a person’s aspirations and possibilities to become an integrated personality. This is necessary not only in view of the delicate pastoral ministry of the theological students aspiring for ordination but also and especially in view of formation of members of the hierarchy in the Orthodox Churches. Training for the Ministries of the Church Theological education also has to continue to equip the so-called lay-members of the Church (who compose the fullness of the Church) in view of their functions as charismatic persons within the Orthodox Church communities. School teachers, lay preachers, deaconesses and Christian social workers as well as medical doctors and educators who want, out of their Christian commitment, to serve in the world as faithful members of the Church have to remain a central focus of Orthodox theological education, according to a very eminent tradition of the Orthodox Church. This aspect of theological education fulfills the requirements of our Orthodox charismatic ecclesiology which envisages the Church pleroma as composed of clergy and laypeople equally engaged in the responsibility of developing Church life, action, and mission in the world. A one-sided clerically centered focus on theological education presents serious symptoms of clericalism and threatens the authenticity of theological education in Orthodox understanding.



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Academic Research Theology is a discipline of knowledge that works under the auspices of either state universities or church authorities. The academic character of theology is due to the subject matter of its function and the scientific method of its work. Research is always necessary when the human mind tries to grasp the deepest roots of truth and when it is concerned with the intellectual and spiritual development of human personality. In this sense, academic research cannot become an end in itself. It is the necessary presupposition of all educative endeavors envisaging the integral personality of an educated person who has put himself at the service of truth without prejudices and fanaticism. Theology without academic research is seriously crippled, and sooner or later it will prove to be unable to serve its educative purposes. Spirituality If academic research is so absolutely necessary as a focus of theological education, spirituality is its counter but inseparable part, according to Orthodox theological tradition. The more we honestly search within the Bible, the documents of history of theology and the writings of theologians and reflect on them critically, the more we delve into the treasures of the Christian commitment which is necessary for understanding, developing and applying the sophia. This is the biblical “wisdom” which combines knowledge, commitment and transformation of one’s mind and heart according to the biblical and patristic witness. That is why theological education cannot be separated from the liturgical-eucharistic and kerygmatic experience. The liturgy and the kerygma of the Church is the framework and the basis for building up a theology which comprises spirituality as an inseparable part of academic research. A theology which neglects the aspect of spirituality in its focus is a weak, and in many respects unnecessary function of human intellect among the other disciplines of knowledge. Spirituality is the genuine and self-evident focus of theological education and it is the basic element, which must distinguish it in the university and church education today. Continuous Renewal of Church Life Theology, functioning in an authentic Orthodox way, cannot but be an element of primary importance for a perpetual restoration of Orthodox Church life. This does not mean a change for the sake of change or, because the world is continually changing, a sudden break with the past has to be dictated by theological schools. This kind of renewal is not of the Orthodox theological focus.

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There are neither changes, which are imposed by a principle of change, nor an absolute criterion of change imposed by the abstract notion of a “secularized” world. But there is a continuous renewal of church tradition from within, which is identical with the dynamic function of theological education. Learning patristic theology with church history in an academic research process one is called upon to think anew, in a fresh and contemporary way, of the Christian message in a given situation today. Renewal, as part of the focus of Orthodox theological education, is the reinterpreting function of theology in all realms of Church life, of the past knowledge envisaging the present situation and the future. Without this element of renewal, theological education is neglecting to serve its full purpose of being and risks to become a study of sacred archaeological findings. It remains static, historical, analytic and descriptive of an ancient glory, which overwhelms and surpasses the present, discouraging any present action for necessary transformation and changes from within the Church life envisaging the future. Prophecy in Witness and Diakonia Theological knowledge is a reasoning of the presence of Christ and His Church, His people in the world (i.e., a reasoning on how the Gospel can be present in today’s society). Theology should never forget that it operates not only on books, but on living examples and people who voice the word of God of reconciliation and judgment, of salvation and crisis to the world. In other words, theology cannot forget its prophetic function preparing future Church leaders, preachers, charismatic persons and educators. Prophecy is the consciousness that one has, as a committed Christian, to speak and act on behalf of God’s word to the world. This consciousness urges theologians of all kinds, as described above, to be ready to place the world under the judgment of God, boldly and frankly, against any nationalistic, racial or economic discrimination. Certainly, theology cannot serve directly this purpose as an educative discipline, but its focus has to include this function of the Church, which is absolutely necessary at all times and in all places. The perspective in theology should not be identified with any ideological, political or economic system, but it should, first, keep in contact with those who struggle for justice, freedom and peace. It should educate church leaders and responsible church people to perform their prophetic function as an act of witnessing to Christ. This is a diakonia to their world environment. Witness and diakonia according to the prophetic word of God in this sense has to be a sine qua non condition of Orthodox theological education today; otherwise, Orthodox theology will remain at the fringe of the social reality and will present an esoteric system of thought which does not do full justice to its basic premises and



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obligations prescribed by the word of God and the living example of Christ and the multitudes of His witnesses throughout the centuries. In other words, on the basis of these six areas in Orthodox theological education we can state its focus, finally, in the following threefold pattern and way: a.  quality—that is to say scientific excellence, intense and genuine scholarship and study; b.  authenticity—that is to say true Orthodox theology comprising ancient wisdom with contemporary open attitude to new streams of thought and patterns of action in today’s world; c.  creativity—that is to say reasoning in view of a renewed action of the Church in the field of mission and witness. In this sense the focus of Orthodox theological education will enable Orthodox theology to display its full identity (i.e., to remain in all changing circumstances and in all parts of the world, within different cultural, political and economic systems, in the same way faithful to its long and rich tradition, loyal to its calling, consistent, with its given framework in service to the Church renewal, and finally, dynamic and creative, inspiring to all of its students an aspiration for a deeper consciousness of the need to present a theology as witness to the Gospel on the one hand and as an authentic and profound reflection on life, history and human destiny). NEW PERSPECTIVES IN ORTHODOX THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION Having exposed some of the basic principles and elements of the focus of Orthodox theological education, we can now look at some new perspectives for this education today. When we write “new,” we mean new approaches to some problems, which were always there with the Church life. We mean also the realization anew of needs that theology has to face in a new way, through a new method and with a renewed spirit. It means our full conviction that a reinterpretation of old thesis should and could be made in order that theology can fulfill its task in a fuller way and on the basis of its authentic focus. The new perspectives are created either by an inner necessity of theology in its service to the continuous renewal of Church life or by requests presented from the new environment of a changing society and culture. To some extent these new perspectives are opened to Orthodoxy as a challenge by modern theology of other Christian traditions. This fact does not mean that Orthodox

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theological education has to copy or adopt attitudes of non-Orthodox theologies. It simply means that in some concrete cases our theology recognizes the validity of new attempts of other theologies to meet today’s needs of modern man on the basis of Christian faith and the biblical message, and that these needs are recognized by Orthodox theologians as being equally valid for them. At the same time, the fact that these new perspectives are opened as a challenge by other theologies does not prejudge and prescribe the way that Orthodox theology has to grasp them and work out its own method of interpretation and elaboration of these. Challenges, in this sense, have not to be understood as norms or models, but as simple “reminders” that these problems exist for us also and require our own Orthodox theological thinking for the sake of our diakonia to its renewal and its dynamic witness in the world today. In the following, I am attempting again very briefly to review some of these areas and to give some hints of a possible Orthodox approach. The End of “Theism” in Systematic Theology The challenge of modern science to theology has led theological thinkers to review their way of recognizing God as a revealed person in history. The traditional language, borrowed from a kind of idealistic philosophy insisting on the idea of God as an absolute Being, of absolute transcendental nature, does not resist the new dynamic concept of creation and nature of modern science and the philosophy of history, closely related with it. The “God out there” who reposes in Himself as a pure Being and who intervenes from “outside” and from “above” to keep His creation in order or to prevent it from deviations, appears more and more to become mythical language and pure speculation. The developments in modern science as well as the violent rise of ideological conflicts and the urgency of racial, economic and social reforms challenge such an irenic and aristocratic concept of God as the enthroned King of heavens. Christian theology has all of the reasons, as a theology of the revealed, personal God who shares in the suffering of man in history and who restores the whole cosmos in Christ, to rethink its theistic premises and abandon a framework and a language which does not do justice to the reality of a God conceived out of His personal revelation. Theism is always in between an idealistic philosophy and a rational apologetic Christian theology, which tries to arrive at a concept of God which preserves His absolute transcendental character. Today this type of Christian philosophy does not appeal either to modern scientists or to the common mentality of a man who conceives life without a pre-existing rational pyramidal structure, whose top is rationally conceived as “out there” where abides the supreme Being with



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His sovereign will. Certainly, the extremist attitude of God’s death theology should not impose or dictate a new theological interpretation; but this extremism points out to the need of rethinking the basis of systematic theology on a more realistic concept of the revealed God. A process theology, which lays emphasis on the continuous creativity of God in nature and history, is definitely closer to a Christian theology, which wants to remain faithful to God’s personal revelation in Christ recapitulating the whole creation in Him. More especially, Orthodox theology insisting on the trinitarian nature of God and on the continuous renovating act of all by the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth due to the salvation given in Christ, has to abandon the theistic language and mentality and adopt a dynamic approach for communicating a dynamic theology today. Ecclesial Theology in Context The school theology has been greatly challenged by the urgent need of consistent thought for action in situations where human dignity is at stake. There was a strong request on theology for a serious concern about the equality of races, antitotalitarian movements in politics and support of revolutionary forces against all kinds of violations of human rights and social justice. The social Gospel of Christian faith has been seriously put to a test as far as its validity and relevance are concerned in today’s struggle for justice and liberation. A new image of the person of Jesus as a revolutionary has gradually developed through biblical theology, and social ethics have taken primacy and priority over the other branches of systematic theology. The result of these new trends has become evident in theological methodology in the so-called “contextual theologies.” They are characterized by their inclination to give preeminence to the socio-political context within modern societies as the point of departure for theological reason over against the traditional Godmanward movement as an independent event embodied in the sacred history. Contextualists are bound, therefore, to work on an inductive theology over against a deductive theology of the past. They conceive their task out of the world situation where God is always in action more than out of global statements about the nature of God. Inductive theology edifies theological systems out of the experience of the world struggle in situations of clash for the sake of human dignity and thinks of God on the basis of a theological evaluation of these situations. God appears, in some extremist theologies of this kind, identical with the suffering side of the struggle. This attitude permeates the whole of theology consistently and dynamically. Orthodox theological education cannot remain indifferent in front of this new approach. Again, it cannot adopt an unreflected activist theology of revolution as a definite norm of theological reasoning. It is with

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profound gratitude, however, that one has to let himself, as an Orthodox theological student or teacher, be challenged by inductive contextual theologies, because they are correctives of a theological tradition, which has neglected to link its reflection with the existing contextual situations. A deep grasp of the meaning of incarnation obliges theology to respect more the historicity of the theological message in the world here and now. Of course, theology cannot accept all kinds of adjectives. It is a Christian theology and its point of departure is the event of the personal revelation of God in time. It is preferable, therefore, to speak of this new perspective as theology in context in the sense that it is Christian theology respecting the primacy of the act of God and His Word over all other kinds of norms and conditions limited in time and space. It is, on the other hand, imperative that this Word, because it is incarnate and because it opens the era of the Spirit restoring all things, be studied and enacted by theology in a definite, concrete world and historical context in order to affect it. In this way theology has a relevance and fulfills its task and does not remain a simple speculation. It can also be said that in some extreme cases of urgent need, where human existence and dignity are immediately and inhumanely threatened, priorities can be reversed and the contextual situation can oblige Christian theology to be primarily inductive. In all cases, Orthodox theology must remain a voice and a thought of the whole of the Church in all centuries and at all places. The Gospel is one and the Church is Catholic. That is why this new perspective in theology has to be accepted within Orthodoxy as a challenge to renew theological education as a Church thinking within a situation with which the Church is inseparably linked. If the Church is really the microcosm and the pars pro toto of the world and there is no opposition between the two as between two realms, the sacred and the profane, then “the context” in Orthodox understanding must be seized in and through the Church. In this way the ecclesial theology has to be always in context if it is an authentic Orthodox theology. The Eschatological Dimension The emphasis on the importance of the appearance of the incarnate Word in time, and the beginnings of the apostolic and early patristic theological tradition led to a one-sided attitude of Christian theologians, especially Orthodox attached to the past. Certainly, the past dimension in theology has an evident and basic importance and no one is allowed to contest it. This attitude, however, proves to be exclusive and unilateral if it causes a devaluation of an equally important dimension (i.e., that of the future). Theology is nourished and supported by the past, but it is oriented to the future. We exist as theologians out of the wisdom of the past but for the sake of the



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future. In this respect theology as a whole has been greatly gratified by the rediscovery of the importance of eschatology in contemporary theological thought. Eschatology in this respect does not mean the word about the metahistorical situation for Christian souls after death, but the always-present reality of the End, as the end of time and the fulfillment of history by the saving judgment of God. It is an eschatology which exercises pressure on our present times and gives to life here and now a deep meaning by pointing to the final destination of humanity. It is, therefore, an evaluation of life from its end in this double sense. This aspect of eschatological theology has offered to contemporary theology the basis for the realization of its mandate to work as a future oriented thought. Again this attitude cannot be identified with any optimistic man-centered and science-dominated futurology. It is more a new perspective, which reminds theology of its genuine orientation concerning its dynamic concept of history and its task of continuous service to the renewal of Church life in a world, which aspires for a better future in manifold man-centered ways. Theology, here, has to remain faithful to its eschatological nature as it is prescribed by the biblical message which makes all men attentive and aware of the fulfillment of Christ’s promise for a new heaven and a new earth. Orthodox theological education again has to become more sensitive in front of this theological rediscovery. It is not because it has to adopt a new attitude. It is simply because our theology has to be consistent with its liturgical theology nourished by the liturgical praxis based on the eschatological expectation. Orthodox liturgy is a foretaste of the End, of the telos, of the fulfillment of the promise of Christ and the earnest of the Spirit. All liturgical acts of the Orthodox worship are taking place in the light of this sure expectation. A Eucharistic liturgy based on the historical offering of Christ in the past is an enactment of the incarnation, cross and resurrection, but in reality it opens the faithful as a community representing the whole transfigured world toward its final consummation and fulfillment by the glory of God. The rediscovery of the eschatological dimension in theology has a tremendous importance for the dynamic understanding of tradition, which is one of the fundamental characteristics of Orthodox theology. It is indeed that with a renewed emphasis on eschatology tradition cannot be conceived simply as a historical dimension, which requires repetition. It becomes a stream of life and thought, which cuts across all Christian centuries as a continuous and mighty life process. It is a witness to the Christian truth in the Church but which turns us to the future. It is again the same double movement: nourished by the past but oriented to the future. We have to experience this complemented sequence of the two dimensions by our existential decision of faith at the present moment and situation.

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Eucharistic-Charismatic Theology over Provincial Confessionalism Following a long period of polemic inter-confessional debate due to the separation between Christian traditions, a new perspective in theology has appeared during the second part of the twentieth century. For the Orthodox, this new perspective has already been initiated before this period by Russian Orthodox theologians in the West facing the Western confessional theology early in the century. As a matter of fact this new perspective represents Orthodox theology rightly, because it always manifested beyond all scholastic formulations of faith and definitions of sacraments, which are necessary to a certain extent that the authentic dimension of theology coincides with the operation of the Holy Spirit through the sacramental liturgical life of the Church. Though precise in its formulation when necessary, Orthodoxy afforded the framework to the human mind to enter into the mystery of God as it is lived within the Eucharistic community which is the culminating reality for the Orthodox faithful. It is there that the unity between the personal revealed God is reaffirmed and shared, and it is there that the gifts of Grace are spread out by the Spirit. Without refusing a scholastic side, Orthodox theology emphasizes this dimension over against a narrow-minded apologetic confessionalism which renders dogmatic theology into a system of thought. This attitude can lead theology to a limited operation of rational catechetic nature denying the mystery of the charismatic operation of the Spirit which draws theology into an operation of the mind liberated from its boundaries by the Spirit’s continually renewing act. Orthodox theology was never bound by the obligation to defend a confessional statement through which a “new Church” has begun its own life in history breaking from a mother Church. This theology has never been tempted to fall into an excessive rationalism interpreting the mystery of the revelation and especially the sacramental reality of the Church life either. Church structures have always been conceived on the basis of the Eucharistic-liturgical and kerygmatic praxis and experience. That is why Orthodox theology has been distinguished by its great flexibility, openness and profound thought within the experience of the ecclesial communion. Rediscovering Pneumatological Christology These new perspectives in theological education would have been unthinkable without the new emphasis in contemporary theology on the central role of the operation of the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth in divine economy, in Church sacramental life and in the renewal of the whole creation. After a



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long period of emphasis on theology in Western thought, followed by an absolute Christocentric approach as a reaction against the liberal theologians by the “theology of crisis” early in the century, a strong pneumatology has shaken the one-sidedness on Trinitarian theology after the early fifties. A greater attention on the biblical text led theologians to rediscover the basic role of the Spirit in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, in the foundation of the Church, in the mission of the apostolic Church, in the sacraments, and in the eschatological dimension. Beyond any kind of extremist unreflected and enthusiastic charismatic attitudes, the authentic pneumatology is always linked with the fundamental and once-for-all sacrifice and victory of the crucified and risen Christ and the overall reigning love and providence of God the Father. Pneumatology is in this way part of a consistent Trinitarian theology, otherwise it can lead to all kinds of extravagant strange and curious attitudes of groups of believers who are gradually falling into enthusiastic movements, and in theology are in danger of separating the Spirit’s operation from the Trinitarian revelation of God. Orthodox theology has played an intense role in this rediscovery. It can be said, to a certain extent, that it has initiated a pneumatological Christology as a presupposition to a genuine ecclesiology in contemporary inter-confessional dialogue in the framework of the ecumenical movement, for supporting fundamental theses concerning the true sense of qualitative catholicity over a quantitative geographic one, the sense of the pleroma of the Church against all kinds of clericalism and vicar representation of Christ on earth by an absolute monarchic system of church structure, the meaning of the charismatic nature of the sacraments and finally the significance of the eschatological hope and expectation as a present reality of the Church gathered around the Eucharist as a sign of the Kingdom of God breaking through in history. The emphasis on pneumatology had two direct effects apart from those presented in the previous paragraph: a.  the limitation of the legalistic spirit in theology imposed either by the “confessionalistic” precision on defining the mystery of the Church or by the jurisdictional understanding of order and canon law; b.  the universality of the Christian message by a renewed appreciation of the operation of the Spirit making all things new in Christ. The Cosmic Dimension of Church Unity It becomes thus evident how contemporary theology came to realize that Church unity is not an end in itself but a channel, an instrument, a factor and a sign of the unity of all for which we pray in the Orthodox liturgy. It can be

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said that Church unity is a foretaste and the core of the world unity, because the unity of the Church reminds us of its final scope (i.e., the re-gathering of all peoples of the earth within the same family of God). This universal perspective of Church unity is of tremendous importance today for the close and inseparable relation between Church and world. It is also the basis on which we can grasp anew the role of non-theological factors (racial, political, cultural, economic and nationalistic) in dividing Christians in the past. We have to think now how a possible positive role of the same factors can play in the Church, working prophetically in its mission. The unity of the Church cannot be fully realized unless these disruptive factors cease to operate their dividing role amongst men. In this way the effort and debate to reunite Christian traditions is linked with the active presence of the Church defeating the dividing issues of injustice, exploitation and racial discrimination in the world of today. Unity of the Church—unity of mankind is the new perspective in the whole debate about the unity of the Church, which is of vital importance. Orthodoxy, on this point again, has stood in its history for the universal vision and reality of the One Church. For the Orthodox the Church is the miniature of the One Creation, including peoples and nature. It is the pars pro toto of the whole created world. Orthodox ecclesiology in patristic thought as well in the liturgical praxis is a commentary of the prologue of the Epistle to the Colossians, especially the verses 1.16–17. Therefore, this new perspective is also a challenge to Orthodox theology and action in today’s effort of the gradual re-gathering of the peoples of the earth into the family of the One God. Church Unity is not simply a result of confessional agreement. It comprises a struggle for all men in all parts of the world and a profound sense of responsibility on the part of Church people for the ongoing influence of inhuman elements of injustice dividing us into classes, races and selfcentered nations. Theosis and Humanization A new perspective has been created for Orthodox theological education by the modern emphasis on anthropology both in science and theology. All kinds of scientists and philosophers make anthropology more and more the main chapter of their investigations. The defeat of speculative idealism and transcendental theism has progressively led to anthropocentric research in all branches of sciences. Biology and clinical and social psychology have anew occupied themselves with the mystery of man and its inseparable psychosomatic unity. Certainly, this new intense anthropological research has very little to do with the humanist framework of a romantic past, which saw man



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out of ivory towers. Today’s anthropological research deals with the greatness of man and his centrality in creation through man’s misery and tragedy of existence and sees the human condition realistically. The general trend, however, is to render man human, to make him fulfill his destiny on this earth by seriously taking his existence into his own hands, in view of a continuous transformation of himself and his conditions of life. One speaks in this sense of man who comes to his adulthood in our times as a man who is consciously concerned with his deeper self. Man who comes to an age signifies a process of becoming, a dynamic struggle to realize his highest possibilities afforded to him by creation and nature. The “New Man” is a slogan, which more and more becomes a symbol of the necessary change from the old man. It is the motto of man’s struggle to realise his full identity with himself as member of a community of people. Man, meant here as man and woman without discrimination, looks today for another type of transcendence able to affect his being. It is that which one can call “transfiguration” in Orthodox theological language. The new anthropology is definitely scientific, therefore worldly and immanently bound. But it is pointing to the need of man’s transformation toward the fulfillment of his purpose in history. It is the new type of anthropology as a continuous process of transformation. This is the new type of anthropology expressed by the term humanization. Christian theology of our days is trying to deal with the modern scientific trends in anthropology by adopting this idea of new man as biblical. It works out the importance of man Jesus, insisting on the human nature of the historical Jesus as a prototype of humanity revealing the potentialities of human nature away from all kinds of triumphal humanisms. Orthodox theology is again seriously challenged by the new perspective in scientific anthropology and non-Orthodox radical anthropological theology. The question for Orthodox theological education is how to cope with such a new trend in one of the central chapters of Christian theology. The whole of the Orthodox anthropology stands on the basis of theosis of man. Divinization, in English, is a risky terminology, a rather wrong term but for a justified cause. Are we now to interpret theosis as pointing to the identity of man with God (man becoming God?), or better, should we try at the present moment to see it as a gradual transformation of the person of man by sharing in the deified human nature of Christ? Because theosis can also be grasped Christologically signifying the real humanization in the sense that it makes man realize his authentic manhood as it has been created from the beginning by God at His image and likeness. The real humanization is the verus homo revealed in Christ. It is this “new man” that we are invited to regain by Baptism and share in the Eucharist.

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Anyway, modern anthropology and the radical theological response to it raise for Orthodox theological education a vital and very interesting issue in one of its most favorite and genuine Orthodox topics of research. Salvation and Social Ethics Finally, Orthodox theological education has to be aware of the most fundamental issue in all branches of theology today. This issue concerns the question of conceiving salvation in Christ in relationship with the sharing in transforming the unjust structures of modern society and with the ongoing struggle for liberation and humanization in general. The problem has become very acute today as all theoretical sciences have been greatly challenged by the ongoing activistic and positivist trends in modern social sciences, which have affected theology. The former traditional way of Christian theological ethics which emphasized the priority of individual ethical preparation as a necessary prerequisite for influencing society does not seem to be the answer anymore. The emphasis is more and more laid on the transformation of structures first which are affecting individual ethics. Furthermore, the theological approach to salvation as an apart reality of the individual saved by Christ crucified and risen and as envisaging eternal life as its scope and fulfillment has been seriously challenged by a more history-bound sociological approach to salvation with primordial accent on saving man from inhuman situations here and now as being the main part of the Christian message to the contemporary world. Certainly, Orthodox theology will always maintain the priority of salvation in pure christological and pneumatological terms. Again, extremist positions, which tend to reverse priorities on account of situations of emergency in the realm of social action, cannot dictate another theology of salvation. We have, however, to become more sensitive on the inseparable nature of salvation with social action. It is absolutely true that salvation in Christ comprises also for a genuine Orthodox theology the dimension of concern for human dignity and welfare. We cannot continue to speak of two qualitative levels of theology (i.e., the one dealing with the heart, the center of Christian Gospel—salvation in Christ—and then the other secondary, inferior subject which is professed as “ethical duty,” which deals with social thought and action). We cannot just insist only on individual salvation in a puritan’s or a pietist’s framework. For Orthodoxy the social dimension in theology has to be rooted inside the meaning of the salvation in Christ. It is the reality of this salvation, its nature as well as its immediate, necessary and self-evident impact, that a saved man in Christ is the one who takes his earthly life seriously and his sharing in the struggle of authentic humanity as it is revealed by Christ as the sine qua non condition in living this salvation here and now in



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the world. As Orthodox theologians we have to accept humbly the challenge, because we have too easily neglected the coherence of individual salvation and social action in modern times and allowed in our theology to distinguish between a vertical line (God-man priority) over a horizontal one (man-to-man relationship). The priority of the salvation in Christ and its centrality must be certainly preserved but this priority does not signify the establishment or two qualitatively different dimensions with the result that the second becomes so secondary that in the end it becomes non-existent. The two are but one within the same reality of salvation in Christ. Orthodox theological education has a difficult task to face today. It has to reinterpret a very rich heritage taking into serious consideration very clear new perspectives, which though of a non-Orthodox origin are absolutely legitimate within a changing world and a rapidly developing society. It seems to me, however, that in most of the cases the theological perspectives today are reminding Orthodoxy of its genuine tradition. To a certain extent, if the Orthodox want to proceed to this reinterpretations of their theological tradition, they have to try to conform more to it and be more consistent with its authentic principles. This operation requires a careful study of the Orthodox premises in theology (pneumatological-eucharistic-eschatological) as a condition for successful renewal of Orthodox theological education. At the same time, Orthodox educators and students in theology have to listen more carefully to the requests of our times and profess the coherence of theological thought with the prophetic witness in their own social milieu avoiding esoteric language or self-sufficiency. It is for the sake of our theological education and its renewal that it is challenged by new perspectives which are opened by non-Orthodox theologies or by new societies, which are in revolt against traditional patterns combining nationalism and social conservatism. Orthodox theological education has nothing to be afraid of and nothing to defend apologetically apart from its full devotion to the One Ecclesia of Christ involved in the same struggle in all parts of the world. We should not forget the great changes that occurred to the Orthodox Church in the twentieth century, which have caused such a differentiated structure in its theological education as it is exposed in the introduction of this chapter. There are Orthodox Churches in entirely new situations not anymore characterized as Eastern Oriental. They have to witness in entirely new settings and cultures, and their national identity is put into a terrific test. This is a moment of crisis, but of a positive, corrective and purifying nature for Orthodox education. We should not miss the challenge to share in its renewal and contribute also to all efforts of theology in other Christian traditions facing these new perspectives in the way prescribed by the one and the same tradition of the One Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Bibliography

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Kittel, G. Theologisches Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament, Band III. Stuttgart: Kohlammer, 1938. Kraemer, H. “The Missionary Implications of the End of Western Colonialism.” The Student World, vol. LIII (1960): 197–207. Le Guillou, M. J. Mission et Unité: Les Exigences de la Communion. Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 1960. Loomer, B. “Tillich’s Theology of Correlation.” Journal of Religion 36, no. 3 (1956): 150–156 MacAloon, John J., ed. Bearing Light: Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Mascall, E. L. The Importance of Being Human. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Matson, Floyd W. The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society. New York: Anchor Books-G. Braziller, 1964. Merton, R. K. The Sociology of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Mettepenningen, J. Nouvelle Théologie–New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II. London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2010. Meyendorff, J. “Orthodox Missions in the Middle Ages.” The Student World, vol. LIII (1960). Mislin, Hans. “Jakob Johann von Uexkull (1864–1944).” In Psychologie des 20 Jahrhunderts, Band VI. Zurich: Kindler, 1978. Needham, Joseph. Science, Religion and Reality. New York: Araziller, 1955. Nikos A. Nissiotis: Religion, Philosophy and Sport in Dialogue. No publisher: Athens, 1994. Nissiotis Nikos. Existentialism and Christian Faith According to Sören Kierkegaard and the Modern Existential Philosophers Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Athens, 1956, 21965 [in Greek]. ———. “Interpreting Orthodoxy: The Communication of Some Eastern Orthodox Theological Categories to Students of Western Church Traditions.” The Ecumenical Review 14, no. 1 (1961): 4–28. ———. “The Witness and Service of the Eastern Orthodox Church to the One Undivided Church.” Ecumenical Review 14, (1962): 192–200. ———. “The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity for Church life and Theology.” In The Orthodox Ethos. Essays in Honour of the Centenary of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, edited by A. J. Philippou, 32–69. Oxford: Holywell Press, 1964. ———. Prolegomena to Theological Gnoseology: The Incomprehensibility of God and the Possibility of his Knowledge, Athens, 1965 [In Greek]. ———. “Pneumatological Christology as a Presupposition of Ecclesiology,” Oecumenica 2 (1967): 235–51. ———. Die Theologie der Ostkirche im ökumenischen Dialog: Kirche und Welt in orthodoxer Sicht. Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1968. ———. “The Apology of Hope.” Theologia 46 (1975): 273–291, 482–510 [In Greek]. ———. “The Importance of the Faith and Order Commission for Restoring Ecclesial Fellowship.” In Sharing in One Hope, 13–19. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1978.

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Index of Names

Adler, A., 9, 17, 91n3, 181, 192, 213n61, 223–24 Aristotle, 164, 217 Athanasius (St.), 22n59, 121, 204, 214n76 Barth, K., vii, 2, 9–10, 12, 133 Basil (the Great), 12, 22n59, 104 Benedetti, Gaetano, 213n50 Berdyaev, N., 14 Birch, Charles, 178, 211n11, 213n44 Boden, Margaret, 212n35 Bohr, N., 9, 178 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 281n1 Bronowski, J., 172, 212nn24–26–33 Brunner, Em., vii, 2, 9 Camus, Al., 281n4 Cantore, Enrico, 183 Cassirer, E., 212n27 Castro, Em., 2, 20nn14–16 Chenu, O. M., 211n21 Cobb, J. Jr., 2, 4, 19n11, 211n11 Comte, Auguste, 174 Cone, James, 214nn70–71 Coubertin, de Pierre, 7 D’ Allembert, 212n27 De Chardin, Teilhard, 211n4

de Santa Ana, Julio, 214n72 Deikman, Arthur, 213n56 Derr, Thomas, 161, 211n16 Einstein, Albert, 9, 177, 212nn38–41 Eiseley, Loren, 213n54 Evdokimov, P., 2, 15, 23n78, 163, 210n1, 211n20, 213n60 Faraday, Michael, 177 Feuerbach, L., 15, 91n4 Freud, S., 9, 180, 193, 213n64, Freytag, W., 281nn3–5 Gabriel (Archangel), 33 Gregory of Nanzianzus, 24n93, 211n3 Gregory of Nyssa, 19n9, 41n1, 70, 104, 162, 187, 213n59 Gutierrez, Gustavo, 214n73 Hardy, E. R., 282n15 Hayward, Viktor, 281n5 Heidegger, M., 11 Heiler, Friedrich, 90n2 Heisenberg, W., 9, 177 Hoekendijk, J. C., 281n4 Hooft, Visser, xn10, 3, 281n2, 282n9 Huxley, J., 171, 212nn30–32

331

332

Index of Names

Irenaeus, 12, 104 Jaspers, K., 2, 9 Jeans, James, 177, 212n39, 213n42 Jenkins, David, 202, 214n75 Jung, C. G., vii, 2, 9, 84, 91nn5–11, 122, 181, 209, 213n49 Kierkegaard, Sören, 176 Kittel, G., 211n5 Kraemer, H., 282n11 La Mettrie, 170 le Guillou, J., 281n6 Leslie, Paul, 213n65 Luther, 213n62, 224 MacAloon, John, 7, 20n23 Marcuse, Herbet, 212n36 Mascall, E. L., 157, 204, 206, 211n8, 214nn77–80 Matson, W. Floyd, 170, 178, 212nn23– 25–27–28–34–38–39–40–41,213n43 Maximus the Confessor, 15, 210n2, 211nn7–19 Maxwell, James C., 177 Mead, Margaret, 214n74 Merton, K., 182, 213n52 Meyendorff, J., 2, 19n3, 283n16 Moses (Old Testament), 213n64, 281n4 Oates, Waybe, 197 Oldham, J. H., 281n5 Oppenheimer, R., 212n25

Palamas, Gregory 211n18 Pannenberg, W., 2 Rifkin, Jeremy, 212n22 Ruddock, Ralph, 197, 213nn67–68 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 21n32, Schilling, Harold, K., 179, 213nn46–47 Schlink, E., 283n17 Smart, Ninian, 213n67 Smith, F. W., 90n1 Spencer, Herbert, 174 Spinks, G. St., 213n48 Stransky, Thomas, 20n19 Strathmann, H., 91n10 Strunk, Orlo, 91n8 Thunberg, Lars, 211n19 Thurian, Max, 19n8 Tillich, P., 14, 23n70, 283n19 Toffler, Alvin, 182, 213n53 Vischer, L., 2 Von Balthasar, Hans-Urs, 211n19 Von Uexküll, Johan, Jakob, 182, 213n51 West, Charles, 281n4 Whitehead, A. N., 160, 211n14, 212n40 Wolfson, Harry A., 214n79

Index of Terms

anamnesis, 33 anaphora, 51,129, 279 anthropomonism, 16, 153, 167, 224 apophaticism, 10, 21n42 apostolic: kerygma, 10, 61, 76, 98, 140–1, 250, 265, 299, 300, 311; succession, 69, 74, 126, 299–300; synod, 61–2 arianism, 10 Aristotelism, 28 arrabon, 13, 130, 149 Babylonian captivity, 8 body of Christ, 6, 13, 43, 101, 103, 105–6, 123, 125, 130, 143–4, 149, 224, 243–6, 250–1, 253–4, 271, 276, 278, 288, 299 charisma(ta),40, 69–71, 76, 78, 105, 123, 136, 146–9, 240, 243–254, 265 Christification, 121 christomonism, viii, 10, 12, 98–99, 101, 106, 109, 133, 135, 278, 280 christophoros, 119 christus victor, 52, 88 confessionalism, 46, 49, 54, 261, 318 contextual theologies, 199, 315–6 cosmic liturgy, 163

cosmology, 16, 152, 154, 156–8, 160, 162, 164–9, 198, 201, 207, 215, 219–21, 223 creation: nature, xn8, 13, 15–18, 47, 66, 152–172, 176–8, 200–1, 211nn14– 21, 212n21, 213n44, 215–224, 232, 314–5, 320–1; Cosmos, 13, 88, 113, 127, 152, 154–8, 163–9, 171, 199, 201, 212n21, 245, 247, 314; ktisis, 13, 16, 120, 122, 144, 155–7, 168, 198–9, 221–2, 224, 247, 298; ex nihilo, 11, 208 De Ecumenismo, 3 depth psychology, vii, 9, 152, 180 Deus: absconditus, 97, 99, 101; ex Machina, 170; revelatus, 99, 101 diakonia, 19n5, 41, 134, 146, 238–9, 253–4, 281, 289–290, 299, 312–14 dialectical theology, 9–10 doxa, 30, 34–8 ecology, xn8, 5, 211n16, 215–224 economy, divine, 11–13, 46, 52, 98, 102, 110, 129–30, 135–142, 287, 298, 318 ecumenical: councils, 43–5, 59–60, 70–1, 74; ecclesiology, 273–5; education, 297–8, 300, 302–4; 333

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Index of Terms

institute (Bossey), 2; patriarchate, (Constantinople), 239 ekstasis, 11 epiklesis, 87 Epiphany, day of 163, 222 eschaton, 77, 127 eucharist, 3, 5, 19n8, 20n16, 40, 50, 51, 72, 101, 124–5, 143, 147, 163, 191, 245, 299, 319, 321 Eunomianism, 32 Evangelism, 63, 75–6, 231, 249, 253–4, 257, 263–5, 270, 275–6, 280–1, 308 evolutionism, 65, 232 existentialism: atheistic, 195; Christian, 65, 231–2; philosophy of, vii, 2, 9, 15, 21nn32–33, 28, 85, 228–9 Faith and Order, Commission, 3, 6, 19n7, 20n17 Fall, of Adam, 16–8, 35, 106, 111, 114–20, 122, 128, 135, 189, 193, 202, 221, 277 fathers, the Greek, 11, 29, 31–2, 34, 39, 96, 105, 122 filioque, 101, 125 filioquism, 10, 100–02, 101, 102, 124 Gestalt psychology, 180 hermeneutics, the prolegomena of, 57, 60, 78 homo economicus, 218 idealism, 13, 65, 218, 221, 232, 320 imago Dei, 16–18, 107, 110–12, 114– 16, 120, 151–2, 184, 186–199, 200, 207, 209, 224 incomprehensibility, divine, 10, 23n85, 31–2, 35–7, 47 intercommunion, 252–3, 271, 300 Judaism, 161 Judeo-Christian tradition, 82, 85 Koran, 293

Lamb of God, 145 Last Supper, 130 libido, 180, 193 Logos: divine, 30–3, 49, 51, 111; theology, 15, 88, 152, 163, 191–2 magisterium, 44, 60, 63, 299 metanoia, 17, 120, 191, 194, 196, 215, 235 metaphysics, 28–29, 34, 103, 170–1, 198, 217 microcosm, 15–16, 113, 162, 211n19, 316 mission, 231, 247–9, 253–4, 257–283, 291, 293–4, 310, 313, 319–20; ecumenical ecclesiological foundation of, 273–4; unity and, 266–70 modalism, 10, 102–3 modernity, 9, 17, 19 mysticism, 10, 34–5, 82, 108, 206, 231; christian, 99; orthodox, 31, 34, 99; ontological, 35; psychological, 35, 38 theological, 36; neo-positivism, 28 Nicene Creed, the, 51, 58, 100, 143, 287 Olympic: games, the, 20n22; ideal, the, 7 Olympic committee, 7 Orthodoxia, 290–1 Orthopraxia, 291 Paraclete, 45, 53, 69, 101–5, 118, 120– 3, 125, 127, 130, 134, 137–41, 144, 149, 152, 298, 315, 318 Parousia (of Christ): first, 64, 231; second, 57, 118, 127–30, 279 patristic: ethos, 8; tradition, 8, 15, 20n25, 29, 71, 190 people of God, 13, 43, 45, 54, 59, 67, 124, 140, 143–4, 148–9, 234, 242, 258, 277, 293 perichoresis, 11, 18 personhood, human, 14, 15, 23n74, 197; see also person, human, 18, 50, 113,



Index of Terms 335

151–214, 297; see also humanum, 18, 152, 171, 199, 201–3, 205–7 philosophy of religion, 3, 19n4 Platonism, 30 pneumatological: christology, xn8, 12–3, 16, 133–149, 215–224, 318–9; ecclesiology, 141–9 prayer, individual, 79–90 psychoanalysis, 9, 17, 83, 86, 184 puritanism, 48, 302 Reformation, 62, 125, 291–2 repentant sinner, 18, 192, 194–5, 210, 224 Sabellianism, 10, 102 sacred history, 127, 231, 235, 237–8, 315; see also history of salvation, 64, 231, 237 scientific: humanism, 152, 169, 183; materialism, 65, 232; realism, 229 second Vatican Council, vii, 3, 292 secular world, 13–5, 18, 67, 113, 188, 234, 238, 265, 279 sola Scriptura, 58–9, 63, 72 sola Traditione, 58–9 similitude (Dei), 209, 224 spirituality, 3–4, 120, 175, 191, 192, 207, 218, 311 steward (oikonomos), 165, 215–16, 243; See also stewardship, 165, 200 subconscious, collective, 83–4

theologia: crucis, 52; gloriae, 52 theological: education, 297–323; legalism, 39 theologoumena, 46 theology: doxological, 31–2, 34, 37–40, 52; eastern or orthodox, vii–viii, 1, 8, 11, 20n25, 21n42, 39, 44, 47, 52, 54, 121–2, 127, 206, 298, 300, 302–3, 312–22; German, 27; liberal, (theologians) 27, 319; liberation, 214n73; of crisis, 319; of grace, 88; scholastic, 10; systematic, viii, 8, 20n24, 27–8, 43–54, 98, 100, 151–2, 156, 215, 314–5 theosis, 18, 121, 152, 204–5, 207, 224, 320–22; See also deification, 18, 152, 192, 199–201, 204–10, 214n76, 224; mixis, 17–8, 204, 214n79 Thomism, 27; See also neo-Thomism, vii, 9 Thrice-holy Hymn, 129 unitarian patromonism, 10, 98 universalism, 182, 186, 189, 195, 224, 263 voluntarism, 85 World Council of Churches, vii, 20n16, 239, 274, 298, 300 worship, corporate, 79–91

About the Editors

Born in Athens (1975), Nikolaos Asproulis studied theology at the Theological Faculty of the University of Athens (1993–1997) and earned his master degree (2007) from the Hellenic Open University on the topic “Existential Implications of John Zizioulas’ Trinitarian Theology.” His doctoral thesis focused on the topic “Creation, History, Eschata in Modern Orthodox Theological Hermeneutics in the Work of Georges Florovsky and John Zizioulas,” to be published in Greek (St. Sebastian Orthodox Press, 2019). Since 2003, he has worked as a religious teacher at the secondary level state education, while from 2008 to the present, he is an academic associate and currently (2017–) deputy director of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies and lecturer at the post-graduate program Studies in Eastern Orthodox Theology at the Hellenic Open University. Since 2014 he has been the coordinator of the Network of Ecumenical Learning in Central and Eastern Europe. He has participated in many international conferences and meetings and authored many articles in collected volumes and journals related to various aspects of modern orthodox theology (history of theological movements, methodological and doctrinal issues), eminent (not only orthodox) theologians (J. Zizioulas, G. Florovsky, S. Bulgakov, N. Nissiotis, and T. F. Torrance, among others), ecumenical theological education and more. He has co-edited with P. Kalaitzidis and C. Hovorun et al. the Orthodox Handbook for Ecumenism: Recourses for Theological Education (Volos Academy Publications in cooperation with WCC Publications and Regnum Books International, 2014), Andrew Louth’s, “For He Is Our Peace Who Has Made Us One, and Has Broken Down the Dividing Wall of Hostility”: Fathers, Tradition and the Theology of “In-Between” (Volos: Volos Academy Publications, 2019); and other collective volumes.

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About the Editors

The Rev. Dr. John Chryssavgis, Archdeacon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, was born in Australia (1958), where he matriculated from The Scots College (1975). He received his degree in theology from the University of Athens (1980), a diploma in Byzantine Music from the Greek Conservatory of Music (1979), and was awarded a research scholarship to St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary (1982). He completed his doctoral studies in Patristics at the University of Oxford (1983). After several months in silent retreat on Mt. Athos, he served as personal assistant to the Greek Orthodox Primate in Australia (1984–1994) and was co-founder of St Andrew’s Theological College in Sydney (1985), where he was sub-dean and taught Patristics and Church History (1986–1995). He was also lecturer in the Divinity School (1986–1990) and the School of Studies in Religion (1990–1995) at the University of Sydney. In 1995, he moved to Boston, where he was appointed professor of theology at Holy Cross School of Theology and directed the Religious Studies Program at Hellenic College until 2002. He established the Environment Office at the same school in 2001. He has also taught as professor of Patristics at Balamand University in Lebanon. A member of the Office of Ecumenical and Inter-Faith Affairs of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, he coordinates the Social and Moral Issues Commission of the Orthodox Churches in America. Currently, he serves as theological advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch on environmental issues. The author of over thirty books and numerous articles in several languages on the Church Fathers and Orthodox Spirituality, Fr. John’s most recent publications include Soul Mending: The Art of Spiritual Direction (Holy Cross Press, 2000), In the Footsteps of Christ: Abba Isaiah of Scetis (SLG Press Oxford, 2001), The Body of Christ: A Place of Welcome for People with Disabilities (Light and Life, 2002), Letters from the Desert: A Selection from Barsanuphius and John (St. Vladimir’s Press, 2003), Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch (Eerdmans, 2nd ed., 2009), Light through Darkness: The Orthodox Tradition (Orbis Books, 2004), John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain (Ashgate, 2004), The Ecumenical Patriarchate: A Brief Guide (Ecumenical Patriarchate, 2005), The Reflections of Abba Zosimas (SLG Press Oxford, 2006), Beyond the Shattered Image: Insights into an Orthodox Christian Ecological Worldview (Light and Life, 2nd ed., 2007), In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (World Wisdom Books, 2nd revised ed., 2008), Diakonia: Remembering and Reclaiming the Diaconate (Holy Cross Press, 2009), and Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation (Fordham University Press, 2013). Two volumes with the full correspondence of Barsanuphius and John appeared in 2006–2007 in the Fathers of the Church series of Catholic University Press. He is the editor of three volumes containing the select writings of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (Fordham University Press, 2010–2012). He lives in Maine.