I’m working on a long essay on ecclesiology and eschatology, called, provisionally, “The Church that Forgot Her Future.” And I’m thinking of including, in the apparatus at the back, an appendix with jokes.
I think one of the deficiencies of theological textbooks is the absence of jokes. I aim to fix that problem.
Appendix Ω: The Last Laugh
An Eschatological Collection of Jokes That Even God Will Eventually Forgive
Q: Are you a universalist? A: Hell yeah.
Q: How do you know this comedian isn’t an infernalist? A: Because he can tell, and take, a joke.
Q: How many universalists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Eventually, everyone.
Q: Why did the Calvinist refuse to attend the heavenly banquet? A: He hadn’t been told he was invited.
Q: What’s the difference between an infernalist and a universalist? A: The infernalist believes hell is eternal. The universalist believes it’s temporary—and the infernalist is furious about it.
Q: Why doesn’t God believe in eternal conscious torment? A: He has better things to do forever.
Q: What did the infernalist say upon arriving in heaven? A: “This place has really gone downhill.”
Q: What did the universalist say upon arriving in hell? A: “Well, this won’t last.”
Q: Why was the infernalist disappointed at the Last Judgment? A: The Judge kept asking the defendants to stay for dinner.
Q: What’s the difference between purgatory and a theological faculty meeting? A: Purgatory eventually ends.
Q: Why did the Calvinist bring a guest list to heaven? A: To check whether God had made any mistakes.
Ecclesiastical Difficulties
Q: What did the Orthodox theologian say when he discovered the New Jerusalem had no iconostasis? A: “But where’s the Great Entrance?”
Q: What did the Anglican say when everyone finally arrived at the heavenly banquet? A: “Splendid. But who arranged the seating?”
Q: Why did the ecclesiastical committee postpone the Second Coming? A: They hadn’t finished discerning whether Christ had the necessary credentials.
Q: Why did the Church appoint a committee to investigate the New Jerusalem? A: There were serious concerns about unauthorized access.
Q: How do you know the Church has forgotten her future? A: She’s changed the locks on the gates that God explicitly said would never be shut.
Q: What did the church growth consultant recommend for the New Jerusalem? A: “Close the gates. Exclusivity builds brand value.”
The Scandalous Guest List
Q: What is the real reason why people declined the invitation to the Wedding Banquet? A: They didn’t like the guest list.
Q: What did Jonah say when he arrived at the New Jerusalem and found the Ninevites already there? A: “I want to speak to the Manager.”
Q: What did Jonah say when he discovered the gourd tree growing beside the River of Life? A: “Oh, not you again.”
Q: Why did the infernalist object to the River of Life? A: It flowed outside the approved boundaries.
Q: Why was the devil furious about universal reconciliation? A: God had offered him a job in hospitality.
Musical Difficulties in the Eschaton
Q: What did Ferlin Husky (“On the Wings of a Snow White Dove”) say when Mozart welcomed him into heaven? A: “You mean there’s more than three chords?”
Q: What did Mozart say? A: “Oh, infinitely more, Herr Husky. Infinitely more.”
A Final Theological Objection
Q: But surely somebody must be excluded? A: Yes. Exclusion.
Kierkegaard tells a little parable about a man walking down the street who spots a sign in a shop window: “Pants Pressed Here.” Delighted, he walks inside and begins removing his trousers. Imagine his embarrassment when he discovers that he’s not in a dry cleaner’s shop. He’s in a shop that sells signs.1
The poor fellow could read the sign, but he couldn’t understand what it sign-ified. Something similar happens throughout John’s Gospel. Jesus performs signs in abundance, often in plain sight of crowds of eyewitnesses. They see the signs. They marvel at the signs. But they repeatedly fail to recognize what the signs are telling them about Jesus.
So Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book. But these things have been written so that you may come to believe and trust that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing and trusting you may have life in his name. (John 20:30-31)2
The Gospel that began with the promise of life in the Logos now concludes with the promise of life in his name. Here, John breaks the fourth wall and addresses us directly. He reveals why he wrote his Gospel—and for whom. John knows that most of his readers will never see what Thomas saw. We will never poke our fingers into Christ’s wounds. We will never hear Mary Magdalene called by name. Instead, we will receive the testimony of those who did.
The Signs Have Been Pointing Us To Someone
The Gospel of John itself becomes the bridge between the first witnesses and every subsequent generation of believers. We receive their testimony “at second hand,” but John does not therefore regard our faith as second-class faith. John tells us that Jesus performed many other signs that are not recorded in his Gospel. He has been intentionally selective. John only numbers two of them: the “first” sign is the water-become-wine (2:11), and the “second” is the healing of the official’s son (4:54). Traditionally, readers have organized John’s Gospel around seven major signs. Perhaps you learned them this way, too:
Water into wine (John 2:1–11)
Healing the royal official’s son (John 4:46–54)
Healing the paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda (John 5:1–15)
Feeding the five thousand (John 6:1–15)
Walking on the Sea of Galilee (John 6:16–21)
Healing the man born blind (John 9:1–41)
Raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11:1–44)
John never gives us a canonical list of seven signs, and his concluding statement reminds us that whatever list we devise cannot be exhaustive.
But identifying the signs is not the same thing as understanding what they sign-ify. Surely something has gone wrong if we turn them into a checklist of seven miracles. From Cana onward, Jesus has been speaking mysteriously of his coming hour: “My hour has not yet come” (2:4). Finally, as he marches steadfastly toward Jerusalem and the cross, he announces: “What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour” (12:27). The signs have been pointing us toward one particular place and one particular hour. As R. H. Lightfoot famously remarked:
The crucifixion was to St John doubtless the greatest sign of all.3
Yet even that needs qualification. For John, the cross cannot be isolated from resurrection and glorification. Jesus is “lifted up” upon the cross; crucifixion and glorification mysteriously coincide; his hour is his passage through death to the Father. The climactic sign is therefore not simply one more miracle to add to our list.
The signs are not ends in themselves. They sign-ify. Jesus sign-ifies that he is the Bread of Life by providing a superabundance of bread. He sign-ifies that he is the Light of the World by giving sight to a man born blind. He sign-ifies that he is the Resurrection and the Life by calling Lazarus from the tomb. And finally, the crucified Jesus stands alive before Thomas, nail wounds and all. Taken together, the signs converge upon the great Sign: the crucified and risen Jesus, revealed at last as “my Lord and my God.”
The Signs Reveal, but They Do Not Compel
Yet John has already shown that signs by themselves cannot compel faith. One of the most sobering passages in the Gospel occurs after Jesus has performed sign after sign before the crowds:
Although he had done so many signs before them, they did not put their trust in him. (John 12:37)
The problem was never a shortage of evidence. The problem was a failure of recognition. The signs revealed Jesus’ glory, yet many remained unable—or unwilling—to see what God was doing among them. Some even reached the terrifying state Isaiah described: their eyes were blinded and their hearts hardened.
The signs reveal, but they do not compel. They point beyond themselves to the One who performs them. René Girard helps us out here:
I am convinced that God sends human beings a lot of signs that have no objective existence whatsoever for the wise and the learned. The ones those signs don’t concern regard them as imaginary, but those for whom they are intended can’t be mistaken, because they are living the experience from within.4
Girard’s point sounds as if it were ripped straight from John’s Gospel. A sign is not simply an object lying there waiting to be inspected and analyzed from a neutral distance. To recognize it as a sign is to see what it points beyond itself toward. Two people may witness the same event and yet find it signifies something utterly different to each. One sees only the event; another recognizes God’s glory.
This is why John concludes his Gospel not with another sign but with a written testimony. “These things have been written.” Thomas saw and believed. We read and believe. The beatitude pronounced upon those who have not seen now becomes the purpose of the Gospel itself. John writes so future generations may come to believe and trust that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and, by believing, have life in his name.
John does not write because his readers need more signs. He writes because they need faithful testimony. The signs point to Jesus, but the Gospel bears witness to him. Those who receive that witness and entrust themselves to Christ discover what the signs were pointing toward all along: life in his name.
We Want Proof; John Gives Us Witnesses
And please notice what St John has just done for us. He has not given us a treatise on the resurrection. He has not delivered a collection of air-tight arguments proving that Easter really happened. Instead, he has told us the story of Jesus. Now Christianity could have handed us Twenty Propositions Concerning the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as its foundational document, something like the Nicene Creed avant la lettre. But it didn’t. Instead, it handed us four Gospels. If we learn how to inhabit the Gospel story faithfully, it can teach us to see the world in ways that rational argument alone cannot. And when we become truthful witnesses ourselves, we can help others see differently, too.
Question: Why do we keep inventing apologetics? Answer: Because John gives us witnesses, but we want proof instead. We want to transmogrify their martyria into epistēmē.
John asks us to believe and trust his testimony, and he promises that by entrusting ourselves to Jesus, we will have life in his name. Yet Jesus blesses those who have not seen but nevertheless believe.
John therefore makes no attempt to give us what philosophers sometimes call “the view from nowhere”: a supposedly neutral standpoint from which a detached observer might weigh the evidence and arrive at the resurrection as an irresistible conclusion. John speaks instead from within a community of witnesses. He invites us to receive their testimony, entrust ourselves to the One they bear witness to, and discover for ourselves the life he promises.
Let’s sharpen the contrast even more. John does not offer us the view from nowhere.5 He offers us the view from the true and living way. He does not invite spectators to inspect Christianity from a safe distance. He invites pilgrims to receive the testimony and follow the One to whom it bears witness. The invitation to trust is itself part of the way of knowing.
Thomas does not graduate beyond witness. He becomes part of it. The risen Christ does not replace testimony with certainty. He creates more witnesses. The Gospel itself is the written form of that witness, entrusted to future generations who have not seen and yet believe. As David F. Ford observes:
To meet God through Jesus, it is not at all necessary to have been an eyewitness.6
At first blush, later generations of Christians seem to stand at an epistemic disadvantage. We were not present in the upper room. We did not see the wounds. We did not hear Jesus speak. Yet John refuses to concede that point. The risen Lord does not regard later arrivals as second-class believers. On the contrary, he blesses us. The goal of the resurrection appearances is not to create an elite class of eyewitnesses but to establish a trustworthy witness through whom others may believe and trust.7
Thomas’s encounter is therefore unique, but it is not normative. He belongs to the apostolic foundation. We belong to the community that receives their testimony. Faith does not become weaker because it rests on witness. Genuine faith now becomes possible.
If we have learned anything from John’s resurrection narratives, it is that they are not “evidence that demands a verdict.” We misunderstand the resurrection the moment we treat it as historical proof that compels assent. The resurrection is no more a discovery of reason than are the incarnation or the cross. It is a signpost for pilgrims. The disciples’ witness invites us onto the same journey they took to know the risen Lord. Faith remains indispensable, not because the evidence is deficient, but because only those who learn to love, trust, and follow him know the risen Christ.8
Do We Still Want Life?
But can we still trust this testimony? That question has grown especially urgent in twenty-first-century America. We have watched American Christianity discredit our own witness. Churches have confused the gospel with prosperity, spectacle, political power, and nationalism. Others have watched the faith they inherited come apart piece by piece and have wondered whether anything worth trusting remains.
Among Christians today, deconstruction has become a loose metaphor for taking apart an inherited faith, piece by piece, to ask what belongs to the gospel, what belongs to the culture in which we received it, and what can no longer be believed or trusted.9
That is exactly where John’s Gospel becomes newly urgent. He does not ask us to trust American Christianity. He does not ask us to believe in the Church’s competence, respectability, political usefulness, or institutional survival. He asks us to trust the testimony concerning Jesus of Nazareth—the Logos made flesh, the Galilean carpenter and itinerant rabbi, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.
After all the deconstruction, then, perhaps one question remains: Is Jesus still worth trusting?
And what does John promise those who entrust themselves to Jesus? Nothing less than life—ζωή. That word has echoed through the Gospel from its opening lines: “In him was life.” Jesus gives living water. He is the bread of life. He comes that his sheep “may have life, and have it abundantly.” He tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.” As the Gospel draws to a close, John tells us why he wrote: “that by believing and trusting you may have life in his name.”
This ζωή is not merely βίος—the continuation of biological existence. Perpetually extended bios is not what John means by ζωὴ αἰώνιος. Resurrection is not simply more of the life we already possess, stretched indefinitely into the future. As my old philosophy professor Diogenes Allen put it:
Eternal life is the holy life of God that is shared by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.10
That is why John’s invitation to believe and trust matters. Institutional Christianity might disappoint us. Churches might betray their witness. Our inherited constructions of faith might need to come apart. But John does not ask us to believe in Christianity. He bears witness to Jesus Christ and asks whether we will entrust ourselves to him.
Jesus does not offer us βίος restored, but ζωή given. As it was in the beginning, so it is now: God breathes, and life comes into being. In the locked room, the risen Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit upon his disciples. In the written Gospel, their testimony is handed on to those who have not seen. And through that testimony John invites us into the ζωή of the new creation.
After all our deconstruction, the question remains: Do we still want life?
Footnotes
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 32 (“Diapsalmata”). ↩︎
All translations from the Greek New Testament, the Greek Old Testament (LXX), and the Hebrew Bible are my own, unless otherwise indicated. If you’re curious about my translation choices, I always defer to Bauer-Danker-Ardnt-Gingrich (BDAG), Lust’s Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, and HALOT. When I don’t, it turns out to be a mistake. ↩︎
R. H. Lightfoot, quoted in David F. Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021), 379. Ford himself comments, “Jesus crucified is the supreme sign.” I agree, although, as I suggest above, with an important Johannine qualification. ↩︎
René Girard, When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer, trans. Trevor Cribben Merrill (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 134. ↩︎
Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986; repr., 1989). Nagel uses the phrase “the view from nowhere” for the aspiration toward an objective standpoint increasingly detached from the contingencies of one’s particular perspective. My contrast with John’s “view from the road” deliberately plays on Nagel’s metaphor. ↩︎
David F. Ford, Meeting God in John: Wisdom for the World according to the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 15. ↩︎
Writing under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard argues that contemporaneity with the historical Jesus confers no decisive epistemic advantage. Those who stood face-to-face with Jesus often misunderstood, rejected, or abandoned him. Faith is possible only because God gives both the condition and the truth for believing. Consequently, later generations of Christians are not disadvantaged by living after the apostolic age. They are as capable of encountering the risen Christ as his first disciples because faith is God’s gift rather than the product of historical proximity. John’s Gospel makes the same point. Even eyewitnesses required revelation before they recognized Jesus (20:16, 28), while Jesus pronounces a special blessing upon those “who have not seen and yet have believed” (20:29). See Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 7 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). ↩︎
Diogenes Allen, Between Two Worlds: A Guide for Those Beginning to Be Religious (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1978), 150–54. Allen describes the resurrection narratives as directing pilgrims toward the risen Christ rather than furnishing historical proof that compels assent. Faith receives the apostolic witness because the intellect has been formed through the pilgrimage of love and trust in God’s vindication of Jesus. ↩︎
Despite the name, contemporary Christian “deconstruction” may owe more imaginatively to Descartes’s project of demolishing inherited opinions and rebuilding from secure foundations than to Derrida’s déconstruction. ↩︎
Diogenes Allen, Theology for a Troubled Believer (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 131. ↩︎
By the end of the first millennium, deification had become the principal way the Eastern Church would speak of God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. The gospel promises many blessings—forgiveness of sins, deliverance from bondage, victory over death, baptism in the Spirit, eternal life in the Kingdom—but all these blessings would eventually be comprehended under one primary theme—theosis. To be saved is to be reborn into the life of the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. In Christ, we are given to participate in the one God and so made “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). As St Athanasius the Apostolic would famously declare in the fourth century: “For God was made man that we might be made God” (On the Incarnation 54).
Yet it would take years of prayerful reflection upon the Scriptures and the Eucharist for preachers to reach such boldness. Given the Church’s struggle to speak the gospel in a pagan world filled with deities, such language would have been easily misunderstood. But the groundwork was laid in the late second century by the great theologian St Irenaeus of Lyons. In his writings we encounter the foundational Trinitarian grammar of theosis.1 Irenaeus did not, of course, use the word, but the reality it names permeates his theology. His vision unfolds within the divine economy (οἰκονομία)—the “single, unified purpose or plan which God has for the whole of his creation.”2 This economy begins with God’s creation of the cosmos and his fashioning of the human being in the divine image, continues with the embodiment of the divine Word in the womb of Mary, and culminates in the glorification of the flesh and the eschatological renewal of all things. Irenaeus thus provides a narrative of deification centered in the Incarnation: “The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, through his immeasurable love, became what we are, that he might bring us to be even what he is himself” (Against Heresies V pref.).
The End Reveals the Beginning
When we read a story, we start on the first page and continue until we reach the last. But when we read the biblical story, Irenaeus tells us, we must first jump to its conclusion. Only then can we understand what God intended when he created Adam. The creation of humanity and its eschatological consummation belong to a single divine economy whose meaning is disclosed in the glorification of Jesus Christ. The cosmos is created from the eschaton, and the eschaton is inaugurated on the cross. The end reveals the beginning. Or as Irenaeus puts it: “the beginning appeared at the end” (AH 1.10.3). The crucified and risen Lord is the Alpha and the Omega. John Behr incisively observes:
Irenaeus is clear that the only perspective from which one can contemplate the economy of God, from its beginning to its conclusion, is from the end point, the apocalyptic opening of the Scriptures at the end of the ages in the light of the Cross of Christ.3
For Irenaeus, protology and eschatology are thoroughly, from beginning to end, Christocentric.4
This eschatological perspective governs Irenaeus’s understanding of God’s creation of humanity as presented in Gen 1:27 and Gen 2:7 (when read together, as did Irenaeus). Scripture teaches us that the first human being, Adam, is made in the divine image; yet it is Jesus, the Second Adam, who is the archetypal image. Although Adam precedes Jesus in the historical sequence, Jesus is prior in the economy. In his Incarnation, the true image becomes visible in the flesh originally fashioned in the Garden. Christ is the first true human being:
In former times it was said that man had been made according to the image of God, but it was not yet shown; for the Word was as yet invisible, according to whose image man had been made. Wherefore also he easily lost the similitude. When, however, the Word of God became flesh, he confirmed both these: for he both showed forth the image truly, since he became himself what his image was, and he re-established the similitude after a sure manner, by assimilating man to the invisible Father through means of the visible Word. (AH V.16.2)
Here we find the theological foundation for the economy of salvation. The Word through whom the Father created the world becomes human himself, thereby revealing both the perfection of the human being and the final destiny of mankind. Adam is the “type of the one to come” (Rom. 5:14); Jesus is the prototype. Irenaeus provocatively describes the necessity of the Incarnation in these words:
Because the Word, the Fashioner of all things, prefigured in him [Adam] the future economy relating to the Son of God on behalf of the human race, God having predetermined the first, the animated human that is, so that he should be saved by the spiritual one; for, since the Saviour pre-exists, it was necessary that the one to be saved should also exist, so that the Saviour should not be without purpose. (AH III.22.3)
You might want to re-read the above passage, as it’s one of the most surprising in patristic literature. Scholars have long debated its meaning. Yet when we have grasped that Irenaeus is reflecting upon the single divine economy from the eschatological end to the protological beginning, it begins to make an odd kind of sense. Creation and salvation together belong to the one divine economy. Given that the crucified, risen, and returning Jesus Christ is the Savior of humanity, the divine Word has always been the Savior; therefore it was necessary for God to create human beings for him to save, “so that the Saviour should not be without purpose.” As Behr elaborates:
In Adam, the Word sketched out in advance what would be revealed and established in the Son of God, Christ himself. The description of Adam as a ‘type’ implies the prior existence of the one of whom he is a type. As such, the one who was to come exists before Adam; it was by him and for him that Adam came into existence, and, furthermore, as he exists as the Saviour, Adam came into existence to be saved by him. Thus, though only appearing at the end, this one is, nevertheless, the true beginning. 5
God’s salvific intention, therefore, reaches beyond the recovery of a lost paradise. Adam’s disobedience subjected humanity to the dominion of sin, corruption, and death: “As our race went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one” (AH V.21.1). This victory is accomplished through the cross: “By his passion the Lord has destroyed death, nullified error, destroyed corruption, overcome ignorance; he has manifested life, displayed the truth and given incorruption” (AH II.20.3). The telos of the divine economy is nothing less than the eschatological perfection of humanity, joyously lived in communion with the Father through the Son in the Spirit. Christ restores what was lost in Adam and accomplishes what Adam did not attain. Salvation is both restoration and fulfillment.
The Human Being: Created for Glory
“So from this earth, while it was still virgin,” Irenaeus reports, “God ‘took mud from the earth and fashioned man,’ the beginning of humankind” (Demonstration 32). The human being is the handiwork of the divine Artist, molded by his two hands, the Word and the Spirit. The work of salvation is continuous with the work of creation. At every step along the way, he remains intimately involved in the formation of humanity, patiently bringing it toward its intended perfection.
But what exactly was the mud creature’s original condition? Christian theology typically thinks of Adam as possessing a state of perfection that he subsequently lost through disobedience. Irenaeus tells a different story. Adam was created good yet immature. He had only begun his journey toward the fullness of human existence. He was, as Irenaeus describes him, a child who needed to grow:
It was necessary for man to be first created; and having been created, to grow; and having grown, to become mature; and having become mature, to multiply; and having multiplied, to grow strong; and having grown strong, to be glorified; and having been glorified, to see his Lord. (AH IV.38.3)
Irenaeus addresses the question of why God did not create humanity perfect from the beginning. His answer turns upon the distinction between the uncreated God and his creatures. God is eternally perfect; creatures receive their existence from him and must grow into the perfection for which they have been created. Irenaeus elaborates in this long passage:
If, then, anyone say, “What then? Was not God able to have made man perfect from the beginning?” let him know that, as far as God is concerned, inasmuch as He is always the same and ingenerate, all things are possible to Him. But those things made by Him, because they have a later beginning of creation, must for this reason be inferior to Him who created them. For it was not possible for things recently created to be uncreated; and since they are not uncreated, on this account do they fall short of the perfect. And since these things are of a more recent origin, so are they infantile; and since they are infantile, so are they unaccustomed to and unexercised in perfect discipline. For certainly it is in the power of a mother to give strong food to her infant, yet she does not do so, since the child is not yet able to receive stronger nourishment. So too, it was in the power of God Himself to grant perfection to man from the beginning; but the man, on the contrary, was unable to receive it, since he was still an infant. And for this reason our Lord, recapitulating all things in Himself, came unto us in these last times, not in such a manner as He Himself was able to come, but in such a manner as we were able to behold Him. He could have come to us in His ineffable glory, but we were not able to receive the greatness of that glory. Therefore, as if to infants, He who was the perfect bread of the Father offered Himself to us as milk, since His coming was in keeping with a man. This He did so that we, being nourished, as it were, from the breast of His flesh, and from such a course of nourishment becoming accustomed to eat and drink the Word of God, might be able to contain in ourselves Him who is the bread of immortality: the Spirit of the Father. (AH IV.38.1)
“Infant” here is a literal translation of the Latin word infans, but scholars suggest that the underlying Greek word is νήπιος (nēpios), i.e., infant or child. We need not, however, think that Irenaeus imagined Adam and Eve as literal infants. He never specifies an age for them, though there are indications he may have thought of them as prepubescent. Whatever their physical age, Irenaeus clearly regards them as immature in their spiritual and emotional condition. They lacked the capacity to receive the glory of God. The human being must learn to receive the divine gifts. Growth requires time, experience, obedience. But humanity’s perfection ultimately awaited the coming of Christ himself. M. C. Steenberg offers this interpretation of the immaturity of Adam and Eve:
The state of infancy of which Irenaeus is speaking seems, above all else, to be a state of want: the first man is a child because he “falls short of the perfect,” because he cannot receive perfection, because he cannot endure God’s greatness… This monumental gulf between Adam and God, a gulf founded here in Adam’s own being as newly created man, is not one of physical distance nor deprivation of grace, but the natural difference of being that exists between Creator and created. One is infinite, the other finite; the distinction between the two is of the highest order. It is this concept which grounds the notion of radical incompleteness that stands as a driving theme behind Irenaeus’ larger conception of humankind. There is almost no section of his corpus that does not resound with the idea that humanity, commencing in Adam, stands at the base of an ascent into the perfection for which it is destined, perilously far from its goal yet offered full guidance and support for the duration of the journey… This full humanity, the whole and complete man, is for Irenaeus unequivocally the person of Jesus Christ. It is He who is the true image of God into which humanity was created and in whom all other human persons may come to their own full maturity.6
Irenaeus therefore understands creation dynamically. The creature fashioned from mud is called to become a participant in divine life. Adam’s infancy is fitting because the human being was created for a perfection that lay ahead. The incarnate Christ reveals the fulfillment of the divine plan. In him we behold what it means to be fully human.
Recapitulation in Christ
The heart of Irenaeus’s soteriology is his doctrine of recapitulation. The Greek word anakephalaiōsis means summing up or gathering together under a head. Irenaeus draws upon St Paul’s declaration that God intends to sum up all things in Christ (Eph. 1:10). In becoming human, the eternal Word enters the history of humanity and gathers that history into himself. He retraces the path of Adam, confronting the temptations and disobedience that brought humanity into bondage. “God recapitulated in himself,” Irenaeus writes, “the ancient formation of man, that he might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify the human being” (AH III.18.7). Herein lies our redemption—the healing and perfecting of the image in which we were originally made:
When he became incarnate, and was made human, he recapitulated in himself the long unfolding of human beings, furnishing us with salvation by way of a compendium, so that what we lost in Adam—to be according to the image and likeness of God—that we might recover in Christ Jesus. (AH III.18.1)
Recapitulation embraces the whole of Adamic existence. The eternal Son of God is born of a woman, grows from infancy to adulthood, experiences hunger in the wilderness, confronts the Devil and overcomes temptation, weeps at the death of Lazarus, struggles with the fear of death, and freely subjects himself to the agony of the cross, embracing the fate that all human beings must suffer.
By living a genuinely human life in obedience to the Father, Jesus heals the long history of disobedience that began with Adam. The contrast between Adam and Christ is especially apparent in the accounts of temptation. In his immaturity, Adam succumbs in the Garden of Eden to Satan’s deception and eats from the tree of knowledge. Jesus, confronted by the same adversary in the wilderness, answers Satan with the words of Scripture, the voice of his Father. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, he freely submits to the inevitable conclusion of his mission, “not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt 26:39). His obedience to the Father finds its supreme expression in his sacrificial death upon the cross, “redeeming us by his own blood” (AH V.14.3). As Irenaeus declares: “So, by means of the obedience by which he obeyed unto death, hanging upon the tree, he undid the old disobedience occasioned by the tree” (Dem. 34). The disobedience of the tree of Eden is redeemed through the obedience of the tree of glory.
Irenaeus also speaks of the recapitulation of Eve in the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose obedience reverses Eve’s disobedience:
And just as through a disobedient virgin man was struck and, falling, died, so also by means of a virgin, who obeyed the word of God, man, being revivified, received life. For the Lord came to seek back the lost sheep, and it was man who was lost; and, therefore, He did not become any other formation, but being born from her who was of the race of Adam, He maintained the likeness of the formation. For it was necessary for Adam to be recapitulated in Christ, that “mortality might be swallowed up in immortality”; and Eve in Mary, that a virgin, become an advocate for a virgin, might undo and destroy the virginal disobedience by virginal obedience. (Dem. 33)
Note Irenaeus’s strong wording: “For it was necessary for Adam to be recapitulated in Christ … and Eve in Mary.” Given the Father’s predetermination to save humanity through divine recapitulation, it was economically fitting and proper that Christ be born of the Virgin Mary, whose faithful assent at the Annunciation would undo the disobedience of the virgin Eve. Thus the Theotokos is included in her Son’s redeeming work.
Adoption as Sons by the Holy Spirit
The salvific goal of the Incarnate Son’s work of recapitulation is the elevation of human beings as adopted sons. “For it was for this end,” declares Irenaeus, “that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God” (AH III.18.1). It is precisely here that we see in Irenaeus the gospel taking on the form of theosis. In recapitulating fallen humanity in his sanctified life, Jesus establishes himself as the head of a new human race. By baptismal union with him, we are reborn in the Spirit and incorporated into his filial communion with his Father:
For it was incumbent upon the Mediator between God and humans, by his kinship to both, to bring both to friendship and concord, and to bring it about that God would take the human to himself and that the human would give itself to God. For in what way could we be partakers of the adoption of sons, unless we had received through the Son participation in himself, unless his Word had not entered into communion with us by becoming flesh? Therefore he also passed through every stage of life, restoring all to communion with God. (AH III.18.7)
In recapitulating humanity, the eternal Son brings Adam and his descendants into participation in his own Sonship and communion with his Father. Irenaeus quotes Psalm 82.1, “God stood in the congregation of the gods, He judges among the gods,” and then remarks: “He refers to the Father and the Son, and those who have received the adoption; but these are the Church” (AH 3.6.2).
Consider also what our adoptive sonship ultimately entails: participation in the uncreated attributes of incorruptibility and immortality:
For this the Word of God became man, and the Son of God [became] Son of man, that man, mingled with the Word and thus receiving adoption, might become a son of God. We could not receive imperishability and immortality unless we had been united to imperishability and immortality. And how could we have been united with imperishability and immortality unless imperishability and immortality had first been made what we are, so that what was perishable might be absorbed by imperishability and what was mortal by immortality “that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:5)? (AH III.19.1)
Here, my friends, is deification! Because of the Incarnation of the eternal Son, humanity is now given to share in the divine life of the one God. “Deification moves from the image and likeness,” explains Eric Osborn, “by means of the trinitarian economy, to the vision of God which gives incorruptibility.”7
We have yet to consider the critical role of the Holy Spirit in our adoption as sons. In this passage Irenaeus describes the work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the deification of humanity:
For this reason the baptism of our regeneration takes place through these three articles, granting us regeneration unto God the Father through His Son by the Holy Spirit: for those who bear the Spirit of God are led to the Word, that is to the Son, while the Son presents them to the Father, and the Father furnishes incorruptibility. Thus, without the Spirit it is not possible to see the Word of God, and without the Son one is not able to approach the Father; for the knowledge of the Father is the Son, and knowledge of the Son of God is through the Holy Spirit. (Dem. 7)
The Spirit leads us to the Son; the Son presents us to the Father; and the Father crowns our adoption as sons with the gift of life everlasting. Irenaeus directly connects rebirth in the Spirit to our adoption as children of the Father:
Therefore Isaiah says,… “For the Spirit will come forth from me and it is I who made every breath” [Isa 57:16], properly setting the Spirit in God, who in the last days has spread it forth on the human race by adoption. (AH V.12.2)
Irenaeus draws a crucial distinction between the life bestowed in creation and the new life bestowed through adoption:
For the Father bears the creation and His own Word simultaneously, and the Word borne by the Father grants the Spirit to all as the Father wills. To some He gives after the manner of creation what is made; but to others [He gives] after the manner of adoption, that is, what is from God, namely generation. And thus one God the Father is declared, who is above all, and through all, and in all. The Father is indeed above all, and He is the Head of Christ; but the Word is through all things, and is Himself the Head of the Church; while the Spirit is in us all, and He is the living water, which the Lord grants to those who rightly believe in Him, and love Him, and who know that “there is one Father, who is above all, and through all, and in us all” [Eph. 4:6]. (AH V.18.2)
Our adoption is thus a new generation, a birth into the divine life that transcends our original creation. As Behr comments: “Those … who receive the adoption of sons in Christ receive life as the life-creating Spirit himself, vivifying them permanently ‘inside and out.’”8
Hence we must think dialectically. To be baptized by the Spirit into the ecclesial body of the risen Christ is to be adopted as children of the Father; to be united to the Son is to be reborn in the Spirit. The logic must be run both ways if we are to grasp Irenaeus’s Trinitarian grammar.
Conclusion
Osborn invites us to think of the single divine economy of humanity’s deification as unfolding in three seasons:9
The first season is creation and God’s fashioning of the first human beings and their historical movement through the successive dispensations of Adam, Noah, and Abraham. This is a time of pedagogy as God accustoms human beings to his grace and presence, harmonizes them “to the symphony of salvation” (AH IV.14.2), and prepares them to receive his incarnate Son and the gift of the Spirit.
The second season is the new covenant of God’s enfleshment as the Second Adam and his recapitulation of human history through death and resurrection. “The cosmic cross implanted (infixus) in creation becomes visible,” comments Osborn. “In his incarnation and death Christ has gathered up (in compendio) the whole history of salvation and restored the image and likeness of God in man.”10 This is the season of the Church, which “has been planted as a garden [paradisus] in this world” (AH V.20.2). In this garden, the faithful eat the words of Scripture and feast upon the Body and Blood of Christ, as they look forward to their final deification in the Kingdom.
The third season will begin with the return of Christ in glory, when he shall raise the dead, judge the living and the dead, and consummate his work of recapitulation. The divine economy that began with the creation of Adam will reach its fulfillment in the resurrection of humanity and the gift of imperishable life. The children of God will enter into their promised inheritance, beholding forever the glory of their Father shining forth in his Son. “When we come to the end of all our pilgrimage,” Osborn declares, “our final vision shall be the face of him who was born of Mary.”11
St Irenaeus’s narrative of salvation would be appropriated and adapted by later theologians. Origen, St Athanasius, St Gregory of Nyssa, St Cyril of Alexandria—each developed elements of his narrative as they sought to proclaim the gospel of theosis. Yet its truth is already anticipated in the bishop of Lyons’s celebrated words:
For the glory of God is a living man, and the life of man is the vision of God. If the revelation of God by the creation already gives life to all the beings living on earth, how much more does the manifestation of the Father by the Word give life to those who see God! (AH IV.20.7)
“Although he never employed the language of theopoiesis or theosis, already present in the theology of Irenaeus are all the essential elements of what would come to be regarded as the characteristically patristic understanding of sanctification as divinization: restoration of prelapsarian likeness to God and incorruptibility, initiated by the union of human nature with divine nature through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of the Eternal Son, appropriated existentially as adoption by God and infusion by the Holy Spirit, and finally perfected eternally through the face to face vision of God.” Jeffrey Finch, “Irenaeus on the Christological Basis of Human Divinization,” in Theosis (2006), 86-87. ↩︎
Ibid., 146. Irenaeus is not engaging in the kind of speculation that would be raised in medieval theology: Would God have become man if Adam had never sinned. He is exegeting Scripture and therefore only thinking only in terms of the biblical story. ↩︎
M. C. Steenberg, “Children in Paradise,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12 (2004), 15-16. ↩︎
In Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, the opera’s climax arrives when Count Almaviva, who has been trying to seduce Figaro’s bride, Susanna, discovers that the woman he thought he was seducing is actually his own wife in disguise. He falls to his knees and begs her forgiveness, singing the words the audience has been longing to hear: “Contessa, perdono!” (“Countess, forgive me!”)
John’s Gospel has its own climactic recognition scene, and Thomas finally gives voice to what perceptive readers have known all along. The Fourth Gospel is traditionally symbolized by an eagle soaring into the theological heights, but its characters spend much of the story stumbling around on the ground. Thomas stands at the end of a slew of Johannine misunderstandings. Nicodemus misunderstands new birth. The Samaritan woman can’t make heads or tails out of living water. The crowds grossly misunderstand the bread of life. Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener. Repeatedly, eyewitnesses see and hear Jesus without grasping who stands before them. The problem is never merely the absence of evidence. It’s the mystery of recognition!
But Thomas, one of the Twelve, who was called “Twin,” was not with them when Jesus came. Therefore, the other disciples kept saying to him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and thrust my finger into the mark of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will never believe and trust.” (John 20:24-25)
Thomas is often portrayed as the disciple obsessed with empirical evidence. But Thomas has a more basic question: Can the man who was crucified really be alive? It’s startling to realize that Thomas does not demand to see the risen Jesus. He demands to see the crucified Jesus. The issue is continuity. He wants to know whether the Jesus who appeared was the same Jesus who was nailed to the cross. Thomas’s demand is grotesque. He does not merely request to see the wounds. He insists on thrusting his finger into the nail marks and his hand into Jesus’ pierced side. Only then, he says, will he believe and trust.1 Only when Thomas encounters the risen-indeed-but-still-nail-scarred Lord does he finally utter the confession toward which the entire Gospel has been moving: “My Lord and my God!“
At the same time, Thomas refuses the other disciples’ testimony. They repeatedly tell him, “We have seen the Lord.” Yet he stubbornly refuses to believe them. Their witness is not enough. Unless he pokes and prods for himself, he will not believe and trust.2 Marianne Meye Thompson provocatively suggests that Thomas’s error may lie “not in his empiricist refusal to believe what he could not see, but in his historicist refusal to trust the apostolic witness to the resurrection.”3 Thomas demands something that will soon become impossible: he insists upon occupying the historical position of the eyewitness.
Thomas’s situation is uncomfortably familiar. We occupy pretty much the same epistemic position as Thomas. We were not present in the upper room. We did not stand beside the empty tomb. We did not place our hands in the wounds of the risen Christ. Like Thomas, we encounter the resurrection through others’ testimony.
Our instinct is to solve this problem with certainty. We seek a form of knowledge stronger than somebody else’s witness. We want our own direct access. We want proof. We want to upgrade martyria—witness—to epistēmē, a form of knowledge that feels more respectable, more secure, and less vulnerable than second-hand testimony. Thomas voices precisely that temptation we feel.
Yet John’s Gospel consistently places witness at the center of its understanding of faith. John the Baptist bears witness. The works of Jesus bear witness. The Scriptures bear witness. The Father bears witness. The Spirit bears witness. Mary Magdalene bears witness. Now the disciples bear witness: “We have seen the Lord.“
This helps explain why I have translated πιστεύσω (pisteusō) as “believe and trust.”4 Throughout John’s Gospel, believing is never merely accepting a proposition. It involves entrusting oneself to the one who is believed. It includes confidence, fidelity, reliance, and commitment. When Thomas declares, “I will never believe and trust,” he is not merely withholding intellectual assent. He is refusing to entrust himself to the testimony he has received.
Thomas seeks certainty above and beyond mere witness. Yet John’s Gospel refuses to abandon the category of witness. The risen Christ does not replace testimony with certainty. He creates yet more witnesses. Thomas refuses to trust them. The irony is lovely. Despite himself, Thomas will soon become one of them.
Put Your Hand Into My Side
And after eight days, again his disciples were inside, and Thomas was with them. Jesus comes while the doors were shut and stands in their midst and says, “Peace to you!” Then he says to Thomas, “Bring your finger here and see my hands. Bring your hand and thrust5 it into my side. And do not become faithless, but faithful.” (John 20:26-27)
It is again the eighth day. Jesus continues his work of new creation. On this eighth day, his particular piece of handiwork is Thomas. After demanding assurance that the risen Lord is the very one who was crucified, Jesus issues an astonishing point-blank command to Thomas. Jesus honors Thomas’s presumptuous request. Eight days earlier, Jesus had redirected and deflected Mary’s attempt to cling to him. Now he commands Thomas to come even closer: “Bring your finger here and see my hands. Bring your hand and thrust it into my side.“
Thomas gets the answer he sought. The cruciform wounds remain. The glory of the resurrection has not erased the shame of the crucifixion. The risen Lord still bears the history of his suffering. The stigmata are not discarded; they are glorified.
But there is one more surprise. Jesus already knew Thomas’s brazen demand. Thomas had made it when Jesus was absent, yet Jesus repeats it almost verbatim. Nobody had reported the conversation to him. Nobody explained anything. But before Thomas reaches for Jesus’ wounds, Jesus has already dug deep into Thomas’s doubts. We might think the story is about Thomas recognizing Jesus. Nope. Jesus recognizes Thomas first.6
Then Jesus addresses Thomas directly: “Do not become faithless, but faithful.” Jesus is not asking Thomas to acknowledge yet another fact or rearrange his mental furniture. Faith is thicker than that. He summons him into the posture of faithfulness itself—a life of trust and fidelity. In short, Jesus wants Thomas to become what he has refused to trust: a dependable witness. Thomas must move beyond skepticism and entrust himself to the risen Lord standing before him and to the testimony already given by his fellow disciples.
For Those Who Have Not Seen: Thomas and the Faith of the Church
Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus says to him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed and trusted. Blessed are those who have not seen and yethave come to believe and trust.”
The best (and the most outrageous) commentary I know on this passage comes from the Easter Orthodox Vespers service for St Thomas Sunday:
O strange wonder, that grass should touch fire and be safe! For Thomas thrust his hand into the fiery side of Jesus Christ our God, and was not burned by touching.
St Romanos the Melodist suffered no doubt that Thomas thrust his hand into Christ’s fiery wounds. The image is shocking, but it captures the scene’s wonder. Thomas encounters not merely a resuscitated corpse but the living God. The wounds remain, yet they blaze with divine glory.7
And then Thomas utters the high-water mark of Christology in John’s Gospel: “My Lord and my God!” The confession answers the Gospel’s opening words. John began his Gospel by declaring that “the Word was God.” We readers have known from page one who Jesus is: the divine Logos made flesh. But now, at the story’s apex, one disciple finally catches up with us. “My Lord and my God!” The eagle has landed.
Thomas’s confession resonates deeply with Israel’s Scriptures. Thomas’s confession is not invented on Easter morning. Its language belongs to Israel’s worship. The psalmist prays:
Arise, O Lord, and give heed to my cause, O my God and my Lord, to my case. (Ps. 34:23 LXX [35:23 MT])
Thomas now directs that same language to the risen Jesus. The confession is therefore more than an acknowledgment that Jesus has returned from the dead. It is an act of worship. The crucified and risen Jesus now receives the worship that Israel offered to the God of Israel.
First-century readers would also have sensed the confession’s strident anti-imperial overtones. Calling Jesus “my Lord and my God” stood in striking contrast to the acclamations offered to the emperor. Suetonius reports that Domitian delighted in being addressed as Dominus et Deus noster (“our Lord and God”). Whether or not John consciously intended this contrast, Thomas’s confession leaves no room for rival claims to ultimate lordship. The crucified Jesus, and not Caesar, is “my Lord and my God.“8
Thomas’s confession changes not only how we speak about Jesus but how we speak about God. The resurrection has not simply vindicated Jesus. It has revealed God’s identity in the crucified and risen Christ.
There is no way to describe Jesus’ resurrection except as “a God-sized event.” Jesus is not a resuscitated corpse. He is not a ghost. He is not a zombie or Frankenstein’s monster. The risen Jesus challenges the very categories we use to understand reality. If he is indeed Lord and God, then Easter also challenges our assumptions about what it means for God to be God. As David F. Ford observes, the Jesus who stands before Thomas is “incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended to his Father, and breathing his Spirit.” Resurrection does not return Jesus to the old creation. It manifests the life of the new creation, a life that only God could create.9
Yet the God whom Thomas confesses has conquered death without ceasing to be the Crucified One. The risen Jesus still bears the wounds of his crucifixion. What are we to make of them? St Gregory Palamas asks this question precisely. How can the risen Christ display wounds when his body is no longer subject to suffering or death?
So how then did he have the scars? On the one hand, a body that is mortal and capable of suffering could not display scars and perforations and remain sound and healthy. But a body free from suffering and death can display the scars and perforations it previously suffered to whomever it wishes, and yet remain no less free from suffering and death.10
The risen Christ can display the wounds of his suffering without becoming subject to suffering or death again. Resurrection does not erase the history of suffering and death. The wounds remain. But their power does not.11
When we describe the resurrection as “a God-sized event,” we do not mean that it is merely spectacular, overwhelming, or even obvious. We are not describing Zeus hurling thunderbolts or Odin leading the warriors of Valhalla into battle. We expect God to look like Zeus. The Gospel insists that God looks like Jesus. In Jesus, God becomes exceedingly inconspicuous, if not teeny-tiny indeed: concealed within a virgin’s womb, laid in a manger, washing the feet of his disciples, and finally hanging dead upon a Roman cross. From womb to tomb, divine power takes the form of self-giving love. Divine glory appears under the form of humility.
Even the resurrection itself hides God as much as it reveals him. The risen Christ is mistaken for a gardener. He appears quietly behind locked doors. Mary recognizes him when he calls her by name, and the disciples recognize him when he shows them his wounded hands and side. A God-sized event does not overwhelm the world by force. It challenges what we mean by God. The resurrection is a God-sized event precisely because the God who acts is the crucified God.
Thomas’s confession takes us beyond abstract speculation about divine attributes. It forces us to ask who God truly is. Meeting Jesus is meeting God. Meeting Jesus is our burning bush. How do we know who God is? Look at his wounds.
But what about us? We will never see those wounds. Jesus accepts Thomas’s confession, then immediately turns his attention beyond Thomas.
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe and trust.
With this beatitude, the Gospel turns outward. The story is no longer about Thomas alone. John addresses every subsequent generation of Christians who must rely upon apostolic testimony rather than direct sight. The blessing falls not upon the eyewitness but upon us, the Church.
Thomas believed and trusted because he saw. We believe and trust through the witness of those who saw. The risen Christ reserves a special blessing for those who receive that witness and entrust themselves to him. The final word of the Thomas story is therefore not doubt but testimony, not sight but faith, not Thomas alone but the countless generations of Christians who confess with him: “My Lord and my God.”
But how are those who have not seen to believe and trust? John does not leave the question unanswered. After pronouncing the blessing, Jesus disappears from the scene, and the evangelist steps forward. The fourth wall comes down. John turns from telling us what Mary, the disciples, and Thomas saw and speaks directly to those of us who saw none of it. We have not been given Thomas’s eyes or his hands. We have been given something else: a written Gospel. “These things have been written.”
Epilogue: These Things Have Been Written—Faith, Witness, and Life for Those Who Have Not Seen (John 20:30–31)
Footnotes
Theophylact observes that Thomas does not reject the other disciples’ testimony because he thinks they are liars, but because he judges their report impossible. His skepticism stems from the resurrection’s unprecedented nature rather than suspicion of the witnesses. Theophylact adds, with characteristic wit, “Gullibility is a sign of light-mindedness, but stubborn resistance to truth is a sure indication of thick-headedness.” Blessed Theophylact, The Explanation of the Holy Gospel According to John, trans. Fr. Christopher Stade (House Springs, MO: Chrysostom Press, 2007), 301. ↩︎
Careful readers of John’s Gospel cannot help but remember Jesus’ earlier rebuke to the royal official: “Unless you see signs and wonders, you will never believe” (4:48). Thomas’s demand for sight echoes the attitude Jesus had earlier criticized. Ironically, in both cases, Jesus graciously grants the request. His purpose is never to reward unbelief but to lead unbelievers beyond signs to faith. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII–XXI, vol. 2 (Anchor Bible 29A; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 1045. ↩︎
Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 13. ↩︎
BDAG: πιστεύω – 1. to consider something to be true and therefore worthy of one’s trust, believe. 2. to entrust oneself to an entity in complete confidence, believe (in), trust. 3. entrust. 4. be confident about. 5. think/consider (possible). ↩︎
Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek: trans. to throw, hurl, to throw down, overthrow, to place, toss, put (often fig. ), to drop, to set aside, drive back ↩︎
John offers no explanation for Jesus’ knowledge, nor does he seem interested in supplying one. Throughout the Fourth Gospel, Jesus repeatedly knows what others have not yet revealed (1:47–48; 2:24–25; 4:17–19; 6:64; 11:11–15; 13:11). Thomas’s hidden conversation belongs to this recurring Johannine motif. ↩︎
Raymond E. Brown argues that John deliberately omits any statement that Thomas actually touched Jesus, suggesting that the invitation itself elicited Thomas’s confession. Brown, 1046. John is certainly silent on the point. Yet Jesus’ imperatives (“Bring your finger… bring your hand…“) read more naturally as genuine commands than as mere suggestions. ↩︎
Hartwig Thyen, commenting on John 20:27, cites Calvin’s dismissal of the inference that “Christ’s side is still pierced, his hands are still perforated” as ridiculous. Against Calvin, Klaus Wengst insists that the issue is not our “childish” conceptions but “what constitutes Jesus’ identity. He is not an unscathed victor figure, but permanently characterized as one who is wounded.” Thyen adds that the great painters seem to have understood this better than many great theologians when they depict even the judge of the world as the pierced one. Hartwig Thyen, Das Johannesevangelium, 2nd corrected edition, Handbuch zum Neuen Testament 6 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 765. ↩︎
My beautiful wife Christine is a quiet mystic. She would not describe herself that way, yet on occasion she has been given visions—a vision of Christ/Aslan after the loss of our daughter through miscarriage and a vision of angels during the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Two years ago she shared her story at a Hoot & Holler gathering here in Roanoke and more recently she was interviewed by Lee Hunsacker in which she shared her glorious vision of angels. That interview, as well as the recording of her H&H talk, is now available for your edification. I invite you to give it a prayerful listening. It begins at 24.10.
Jonathan McCormack, David Bentley Hart, and Whether Anyone Remains
Mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, 1st–3rd century. Painted from life, buried with the dead. Each one someone.
Everything turns on a simple question: when we lose ourselves, in prayer or in love or finally in death, is anyone still there? If not, then love was only ever God loving himself through masks, and the dead are not given back as themselves.
In The I That Is Not Mine published here on Eclectic Orthodoxy earlier this week, Jonathan McCormack has put the question with unusual nerve: when the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who is saying “I”? He walks a long way with the Advaitin, granting that the possessive ego may vanish and the wall between knower and known grow porous. Then, at the last step, McCormack holds back. “Separation is unreal,” he writes, “but distinction is not.” And he ends on a single word: what remains, when the ego is gone, is gift.
I agree with McCormack’s conclusion and I have no quarrel with his phenomenology. McCormack himself puts the point well: “the phenomenology underdetermines the ontology.” An experience in which only “I AM” seems to remain does not, by itself, tell us how many subjects there are. The question is not what we feel but what we are. Answering readers in the comments, McCormack has given his answer: the creature enjoys “non-exteriority without numerical identity.” It has no being outside God, yet it is not God.
He then asks, candidly, the question on which everything turns: “How far can ‘participation’ be intensified before the distinction between participation in divine actuality and being a mode of divine actuality becomes difficult to state?” In plain terms: how close to God can we come before we stop being ourselves? It is the right question, and I will argue three things about it: McCormack’s formula cannot answer it, Hart’s metaphysics cannot answer it either, and the answer is the word McCormack saves for last.
⁂
A figure in a dream can say “I am not the dreamer,” and it would be right. It thinks, it speaks, it is this figure and no other, with its own face and its own part in the story. It has no exterior to the dreamer’s mind; there is nowhere for it to stand outside the dream. It depends on him completely, having no being of its own for a single instant. It is not numerically identical with him. And the dreamer is in no way constituted by it; he would be himself without this dream. Every condition McCormack sets (non-exteriority, complete dependence, the absence of numerical identity, the asymmetry he rightly calls essential) the dream figure satisfies, and it can even ask, as he does, who is saying “I.” And still it is nothing but the dreamer’s dreaming.
I agree with every one of these conditions. They are true of every creature, and the classical Christian tradition taught them long before Hart. My point is only that they are not enough: they are true of the dream figure as well. Mind you, I do not suggest that Hart thinks we are dreamt. I mean only that his conditions do not exclude it. Add a real activity of its own and nothing changes: souls in the Hindu tradition act and bear their karma, and Spinoza’s modes strive to persevere in being.
Why does this matter? Because no one can love a figure in his own dream. He can only enjoy his own dreaming; there is no one there to love him back, and no one to lose. A self that meets every one of these conditions and is still a dream figure is no one to love, and no one to be given back.
Nor is this merely a thought experiment. The Hindu theologian Rāmānuja taught exactly “non-exteriority without identity.” Souls, for him, are real, many, distinct from Brahman and wholly dependent on him, and they are still Brahman’s prakāra, his modes, the body of which Brahman is the self. McCormack’s formula describes a Hindu monism almost word for word, so it cannot be what separates Christian theology from monism. The line between a creature and a mode has to be drawn somewhere else.
Phenomenology will not draw that line either. A dream figure that fell silent and searched itself for a self would find only the dreamer, and an Advaitin would say the search had succeeded. Experience alone cannot tell us what we are; the stillness feels the same whether anyone is in it or not. Theosis may one day bring experience and truth into perfect transparency, so that we know as we are known. But transparency only shows us what we already are; it cannot decide it. The Advaitin expects it to disclose Brahman, the Christian a creature held in love, and the way there looks the same to both. The question has to be settled on other ground.
⁂
That line was drawn at Nicaea, and it requires no special training to grasp. The Church confessed two ways in which something comes from God, and Christians still say it every Sunday: the Son is “begotten, not made.” The Son is begotten: he receives the Father’s own nature, whole God from whole God, distinct as person and identical in what he is. The world is made: it receives from God a being that God is not, by will and from nothing. Will and nature are one in God, so the difference cannot lie in two faculties within him. It lies in what comes forth. The Son is what God is. The world is what God is not. The Son, being what God is, cannot not be; the world, being what God is not, need not have been. How God gives a being that is not himself, with nothing outside him to make it from, the Church has never explained. It confessed it, and refused every account that would make the world a part of God. The whole Arian controversy turned on keeping these apart, because only the first relation yields God, and only the second yields a creature.
McCormack has a word for the way the world comes from God, the word his essay ends on: gift. Note that a gift has two sides, someone who gives it and someone who receives it. A gift that turned out to be the giver would not have been given at all. When God creates, he gives an existence that becomes the recipient’s own in the very act of being received; the dreamer, by contrast, only lends his mind to the figure he dreams. Before the gift there is nothing there to receive it; the creature exists as the one being given to. Hence it cannot be dissolved back into its source. The Son receives the Father’s own nature and so is God; the creature receives a being that is not God’s nature, and so is wholly its own. Here lies the difference between participation and mode, a difference in kind that no change of degree can reach. Intensify participation as far as you like; a gift will never become a mode, because a mode is never given a being of its own.
McCormack offers an image for the creature: a “living mirror” that “contains nothing of its own” and becomes most fully itself “in receiving what it cannot produce.” The image gets half of the gift right, the half a monist would also accept: everything the creature has comes from God. What it leaves out is the other side. A mirror receives light only by reflecting it; the light plays across its surface, and nothing in it sees. A person is someone to whom the light is given and in whom it becomes his own seeing.
And what is given is never a bare self. McCormack puts it beautifully in the comments: theosis “doesn’t save us from our particularity; it saves particularity from possession.” What is given is this life, these relations, this history, received over time. The possessive ego may die; what it tried to own does not die with it, because it was never its own to lose. It was given, and what God gives he does not take back.
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Can Hart supply this? McCormack insists that he can. Hart’s monism, he explains, is not “identity monism,” in which “finite beings are appearances, modifications, or temporary differentiations of the one divine substance.” It holds that there is “only one infinite and underived actuality of Being,” which can “give rise gratuitously to genuinely finite created actualities.” Here I must be fair. Hart affirms real natures, real creaturely acts and secondary causes, and he has no wish to make the creature a mask; against Hegel, he insists that God gains nothing from the world. If his monism were only what McCormack describes, the question would be the one already asked: what makes the distinction real? Nor does Hart want the person lost. To his credit Hart has insisted for years that we are saved with our histories and our loves. The question is only whether his metaphysics can give him what he wants.
But the texts say more. Creation from nothing does not settle the matter, since Hart himself calls it “the most radical and rigorous formulation of the metaphysics of emanation imaginable.” In The Light of Tabor, God is “the one Nature of all natures, of which human nature exists entirely and solely as a mode,” and Hart repeats the point in his Substack essay Expression and Being: all created natures are “modes of the infinite expressiveness of God in the Logos.” The same essay answers McCormack’s question about the “who” directly. Finite subjectivity, Hart writes, is “a unique expression and contraction of that original actus,” “always a unique personal instance” of the one identity of mind and being, “nothing but the impartation of being in an instance of the here and now.” In plain terms, each of us is a single, finite instance of God’s one act of being. Notice what is missing. The finite subject is the impartation; nowhere is it the one to whom being is imparted. And the essay closes by calling all that exists “the expression of personhood—or, rather, of the Person of all personhood.” The irreducible “who” McCormack hopes for is, on Hart’s account, an instance of the one Person.
Hart does now say something welcome. “A truly expressionist ontology,” he writes, “requires a wholly unnecessary creation,” not because God might have chosen otherwise but as “an entirely modal assertion about the total ontological contingency of the created.” Put plainly: the world need not exist, though not because God could have done otherwise. I welcome the first half. If it means that the world truly need not have been, without picturing God choosing among options, I agree. But contingency is not otherness. A dream figure is wholly contingent, since the dreamer need never have dreamed it, and it is still nothing but his dreaming. A contingent mode is still a mode.
Nor does Hart distinguish creation from the generation of the Son by kind. Christ, Hart writes, is the one in whom “the eternal utterance of the Father in the Logos by the Spirit” and “the created repetition or reverberation of that utterance in the finite” are one. If creation is the reverberation of the Word, its difference from the Word is the difference of an echo from a voice, a difference of degree; and the line between creature and mode that Nicaea drew was a difference of kind. A world like that is not given. It is expressed.
Why does the difference matter? Because there are only two ways to come from God and be truly someone. One is to receive God’s own nature, as the Son does, and then one is God. The other is to receive a being of one’s own, and then one is a creature, a gift. An expression of God that is neither is only God appearing in a particular form, no one in its own right. If we are expressions, there is in the end no one but God. If we are gifts, there is someone to love, and someone to be given back.
So when McCormack wagers that perfect participation will disclose created persons “precisely as irreducible modes of address and communion,” I can take his wager only with a distinction. If by “mode” he means what Maximus calls tropos, the manner in which a created nature exists, there is nothing to correct. But the mode in Hart is a mode of the divine nature, and a mode of God is God in a particular form; it can never be fully someone other than God. What McCormack is reaching for, the irreducible “who” that can say “you,” is a gift.
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The question becomes sharpest in Christ. McCormack writes that for Hart, Christ’s humanity “is most perfectly and completely human precisely because it is wholly transparent to the divine Logos.” I agree entirely. But it leaves a plain question standing, one any Christian can answer. A mode of a nature is that selfsame nature in a particular form. So: is Christ’s human nature a mode of his divine nature? If it is, then Christ has one nature appearing in two ways, and that is exactly what the Council of Chalcedon ruled out when it confessed two natures “without confusion, without change.” If it is not, then Christ’s humanity is truly other than his divinity: created, received, and wholly his own, and his perfect transparency to the Father is a creature’s openness to God, held perfectly as a gift. That is the Christ McCormack wants. He is also the prototype of theosis, of which every deified life is an icon: a union in which the creature becomes most fully itself, because the closer it comes to God, the more completely it is given to itself.
One nature or two? Everything McCormack hopes to keep depends on the answer, and the Church gave it long ago.
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Return, then, to his question. When the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who is saying “I”? Not the possessive ego, the self that imagined it owned its life; that was always a fiction. Nor God speaking through a mask, which would make the person a disguise. The one saying “I” is the one being given to: a self that never owned its existence and therefore cannot lose it, because it has always held its being as received. That is why the one we have lost can be given back as herself. She was a gift from the beginning.
McCormack ends: “What remains is gift.” He is right. It was the answer to his own question from the beginning, the only way to state the difference between participation and mode, and the only ground on which a Christian nonduality can remain Christian: not a theology of modes, in which the many return to the one, but a theology of gift, in which the many are given, and given, and given, and never taken back.
** Note (Oct 14, 2026): Quotations from “Expression and Being” are from the version published Oct 7, 2026. Hart has since revised the essay; among other changes, the phrases “always a unique personal instance” and “nothing but the impartation of being in an instance of the here and now” no longer appear.
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