Introducing St Britta

We thought it was time to make an icon of our beautiful Blue Merle Collie. Her name is Britta. She really is an infinitely sweet dog. And Jesus loves her! 😎

Heaven or Hell?

There Is Plenty Enough to Go Around for All: John Steinbeck and the Betrayal of God’s Promised Land

By John Stamps

“If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it ’cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he’s poor in hisself, there ain’t no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an’ maybe he’s disappointed that nothin’ he can do ‘ll make him feel rich.” (Jim Casy)

John Steinbeck is a stunning biblical theologian. Yes, yes, yes, he was a lapsed Episcopalian, agnostic at best. But nobody understands the American psyche better than he does. And he is one of the best readers of the Bible I know.

I recently reread The Grapes of Wrath. It is the perfect bookend to Steinbeck’s other great biblical opus, East of Eden. Once again California becomes the setting for a biblical drama. But this time California is not simply Eden. It is the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

The Joads leave Oklahoma and begin their grueling pilgrimage westward across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. They finally reach the Colorado River at Needles. A man swimming in the river warns them, but the bewildered Joads ignore him:

“Sure, nice to look at, but you can’t have none of it. They’s a grove of yella oranges–an’ a guy with a gun that got the right to kill you if you touch one.”

The Mojave Desert still has to be crossed. Unlike the children of Israel, the terrifying desert turns out to be no problem. The real danger is not the wilderness but the Promised Land.

Then they climb the Tehachapis. And behold! Eden!

They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow, and the sun came up behind them, and then—suddenly they saw the great valley below them. Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, and, “Jesus Christ! Look!” he said. The vineyards, the orchards, the great. flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in rows, and the farm houses.
Pa sighed, “I never knowed they was anything like her.” The peach trees and the walnut groves, and the dark green patches of oranges. And red roofs among the trees, and barns—rich barns. Ruthie whispered, “It’s California.”

It is a miracle. An epiphany. The Joads have reached the Promised Land. And they have no idea that their tragedy is about to reach epic proportions.

The Promised Land Betrayed

Because Steinbeck’s California—indeed, my own California—really does flow with milk and honey. That is the horror of it. There is plenty. The Promised Land produces an obscene superabundance. And people starve in the midst of it.

The Joads have been betrayed, but not by the land. California is everything they had been promised. The orchards really are heavy with fruit. The fields really do produce abundantly. The valleys really do flow with milk and honey. The Joads arrive in the Promised Land only to discover that the promise has been enclosed, fenced, owned, guarded, and monetized.

That is what makes their betrayal so terrible. They do not starve in a desert. They starve within sight of abundance.

And here Steinbeck becomes profoundly biblical. In the Torah, possessing the Promised Land never means simply owning fertile real estate. The gift carries obligations. Israel must not harvest to the very edges of the field; something must remain for the poor and the stranger. The landowner must not forget the landless. The stranger must be loved. The hungry must eat. The land itself must be allowed to rest. Israel receives the land as a gift and therefore cannot treat either the land or its abundance as though they existed solely for possession and profit. (Lev 19:9-10, 23:22; 25; Deut 24:19-22.)

Steinbeck gives us a California in which Torah logic has been reversed. The land produces more than enough, yet the hungry are forbidden to eat. Fruit is destroyed because feeding starving people would lower its price. Human beings become expendable for the sake of an economic system that everyone serves but that seemingly no one controls.

Steinbeck eventually drops the Promised Land storyline altogether and speaks with something approaching the voice of an Old Testament prophet:

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

The Joads have reached the Promised Land. But the Promised Land has been betrayed. Not because it has ceased to flow with milk and honey, but because those who control its abundance have forgotten what abundance is for.

Before Wendell Berry, There Was John Steinbeck

Before Wendell Berry, there was John Steinbeck. Both understood that how we treat the land and how we treat the people who live upon it are ultimately the same question. Early in The Grapes of Wrath, before the Joads ever set out for California, Steinbeck shows us what has happened to Oklahoma:

“You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.”

The tenant farmers know what the land needs:

“If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.”

The metaphor is telling. The land is alive. It can be wounded. It can be exhausted. Its blood can be sucked out of it. And the economic system that does this to the soil eventually does the same thing to the people who depend upon it.

Then comes Steinbeck’s monster: the banks, the tractors, the economic machinery that nobody seems to control and everybody claims merely to serve. St Paul and I would call them “the principalities and the powers” (Ephesians 6:12, Colossians 1:16). The land becomes a commodity, the farmer becomes expendable, and the tractor driver can destroy his neighbors’ homes while insisting that he, too, has no choice. Soil and people are consumed by the same logic.

Wendell Berry spent a lifetime making essentially the same argument. There is no separate agricultural question and human question: they are one question. How we treat the land cannot finally be separated from how we treat the people who live upon it. Or, as Berry memorably put it:

“No use talking about getting enlightened or saving your soul if you can’t keep the topsoil from washing away.”

Steinbeck understood that long before Berry began saying it. You cannot save the people while destroying the land, and you cannot destroy the land without eventually destroying the people.

Jim Casy Loses His Religion—But Maybe Finds God

And then there is Jim Casy, Steinbeck’s lapsed preacher and unmistakably Christ-haunted figure. Even his initials—J.C.—invite the comparison. Yet Casy’s path toward something resembling Christ begins with losing the Christianity he once knew.

Jim Casy used to be a preacher. By the time we meet him, however, he has lost his faith, or at least the Holiness religion he preached. Yet he has not lost his religious questions. If anything, the questions have become larger.

Sin. Holiness. Human solidarity. Poverty. Power. Why decent people get crushed. Why the people doing the crushing are not necessarily individually evil. What could salvation possibly mean when the problem is not simply what is wrong with me, but what is wrong with us.

Casy’s old-time religion has no vocabulary adequate to what he sees around him. The “Jesus-lovers” know all too well how to talk about sexual sin, “clutch-an’-hug dancin’,” and other sins of the flesh. Jim Casy knows that vocabulary by heart.

But what do you call it when nobody intends the evil and yet the evil happens anyway? What do you call a bank that dispossesses families even though the men working for the bank insist that they have no choice? What do you call an economic order in which growers destroy food while children go hungry? The owner-men have an answer. They call it “the monster.”

The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.

Twentieth-century theologians, philosophers, and activists contemporary with Steinbeck had other names for it. Walter Rauschenbusch would have taught Casy to speak of social sin and the Kingdom of God. Reinhold Niebuhr would have warned him that discovering our common humanity does not make the growers put down their guns: love must reckon with power. John Dewey was dismantling the mythology of a self-sufficient American individual precisely when Steinbeck’s migrants were discovering how powerless isolated individuals could be before institutions they could neither see nor control.

And Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were already trying to live out the answer. They founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933, combining the works of mercy—feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless—with a radical Christian critique of the economic order that produced hunger and homelessness in the first place. Casy was hardly alone in searching for a Christianity big enough for the world he was actually living in.

And the nineteenth-century Anglican F. D. Maurice might have helped Casy recognize that his strange new intuition—“maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of”—is not quite as far from Christianity as Casy imagines. His language is hardly orthodox, but the intuition behind it is deeply Christian: we belong to one another. No salvation is purely private because no human being is purely private.

But before putting any of those books into Casy’s hands, I would give him the Hebrew prophet Amos. And then I would implore him to read the Sermon on the Mount just one more time.

For what Casy is discovering on the road to California is something Israel’s prophets already knew. Sin can inhabit more than an individual human heart. It can become embodied in customary practices, institutions, arrangements of wealth and power—in entire ways of organizing a society. Amos does not merely ask whether the wealthy Israelites of his day are personally nice people. He asks what happens to the poor when the powerful sell “the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” (Amos 2:6) 

Jim Casy did not need to abandon Christianity. Certainly he did not need to abandon Jesus. What he needed was a Christianity big enough for the world he was actually living in.

Saints Are Allowed to Be Grumpy

For all its righteous anger, The Grapes of Wrath is not, finally, a cynical book. Steinbeck sees what human beings do to one another at our worst. But he also sees the small, almost invisible acts by which we refuse to let the monster have the last word.

My favorite comes early in the novel. At a roadside diner in one of Steinbeck’s interludes, a poor man enters with his two young sons. He asks Mae, the waitress, whether she will sell him a loaf of bread. Grumpy Mae does not want to. This is a restaurant, not a grocery store. The bread is for making sandwiches.

The man explains that he has very little money and needs bread for his family. Mae grudgingly gives in. Then the boys notice the candy. They stare at the striped peppermint sticks in the display case. Their father asks what they cost.

“Oh—them. Well, no—them’s two for a penny,” the otherwise stingy Mae tells him. The father pulls a penny out of his greasy wallet, pays for the candy, and they leave. The two truck drivers witnessing grumpy Mae’s sudden generosity are incredulous.

Big Bill wheeled back. “Them wasn’t two-for-a-cent candy,” he said.
“What’s that to you?” Mae said fiercely.
“Them was nickel apiece candy,” said Bill.
“We got to get goin’,” said the other man. “We’re droppin’ time.”
They reached in their pockets. Bill put a coin on the counter and the other man looked at it and reached again and put down a coin. They swung around and walked to the door. “So long,” said Bill
Mae called, “Hey! Wait a minute. You got change.”
“You go to hell,” said Bill, and the screen door slammed.
Mae watched them get into the great truck, watched it lumber off in low gear, and heard the shift up the whining gears to cruising ratio.
“Al ” she said softly. He looked up from the hamburger he was patting thin and stacking between waxed papers.
“What ya want?
“Look there.” She pointed at the coins beside the cups—two half-dollars.

It is such a small thing. No manifesto. No revolution. No grand theory of justice. Mae simply sees two children who want candy and decides, for one moment, that the price of a piece of candy will not determine whether they get to taste something sweet.

And then something happens. Mercy becomes contagious. The truck drivers have seen what Mae has done, and they answer her gift with another gift, grace on top of grace. Nobody announces what is happening. Nobody needs to. For a few minutes in a roadside diner, the iron logic of exchange—you get what you can pay for—simply breaks down.

That is why I love the scene so much. Steinbeck has given us a world governed by calculation. What is the land worth? What is the crop worth? What is a day’s labor worth? How little can a desperate family be paid? When does fruit become worth more destroyed than eaten?

Mae interrupts the calculation. Ten cents’ worth of candy becomes one penny. Not because she has misunderstood the market price. She understands it perfectly well. She simply decides that, this once, the market will not have the final word. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

And that takes us back to the Promised Land. The tragedy of Steinbeck’s California is not that the land fails to flow with milk and honey. It does. The tragedy is that human beings can stand in the midst of astonishing superabundance and still refuse to let their neighbors eat.

But not always. Sometimes somebody gives you the bread. Sometimes two little boys get the candy. Sometimes, even in the country of the monster, grace slips through. And yes, saints are allowed to be grumpy.

Roberto De La Noval Takes on the Non-world

Dr Roberto De La Noval, who has contributed four articles to Eclectic Orthodoxy over the years, has recently published two journal articles which may be of interest to some of our readers. Both articles address, each in its own way, the claim that God might not have created the world.

1) “‘God Could Have Not Created’: Critiquing (a) Divine Counterfactual Predication,” Scottish Journal of Theology (2026).

That God could have not created the world is a commonplace of Christian theology, often invoked to articulate the meaning of divine freedom. This essay argues that this counterfactual predication cannot be made consistent with the classical doctrine of God and so cannot be an adequate way of characterising God’s freedom. Drawing on a critical realist account of coherent counterfactual predications, it is shown that every cogent counterfactual attribution implies that the subject of the attribution is located in time, possessed of potential, and knowable in its essence. These entailments of counterfactual predications render them formally incompatible with a classical theist doctrine of God, in which God is not temporally located, purely actual and unknowable in essence by humans in the status viatoris. If the counterfactual on divine predicating compromises the divine simplicity, divine perfection and divine pure actuality, it should be understood to be a metaphorical, not substantial divine predication.

2) “Free Willing in God: A Metaphor, Not Analogy, for Divine Creating,” Religious Studies (2026); coauthor: Matthew Vale.

Contemporary classical theists routinely argue that God’s creative act is a kind of divine free willing or free choosing. This article argues that ‘free willing’ or ‘free choosing’ (liberumarbitrium) cannot be a proper divine act on the terms of classical theism. To advance this claim about classical theism at large, we take as our test case Thomas Aquinas’ argument that God freely wills this world, since it is so conceptually comprehensive and representative of much Christian thinking on these matters. We deploy Thomas’ accounts of divine predication, divine attributes, and the nature of free willing to show that when we correctly apply Thomas’ classical theist doctrine of divine perfection to analogically purify the concept of finite free willing—and so render it capable of being properly attributed to God—none of the defining characteristics of free willing remain to be predicated substantially of God; the attribution becomes equivocal. But such equivocations, in Aquinas’ account of divine predication, can still function as religiously useful metaphors, which is what we argue ‘God freely wills creatures’ must be on classical theist terms. Thus, our argument invites classical theists to re-examine the ‘divine-creating-as-free-choosing’ analogy, and to search for other, more adequate ways of analogically conceiving divine creating.

Rob is Assistant Professor of the Practice at Boston College.

Giving is the Whole of Our Story

Why Evil Did Not Have to Be

I have written previously (see Returning the Ticket and The Unnecessary Child) that theodicy fails at its foundations because the question it asks presupposes an assessable commensurability between divine and creaturely goodness that the Christian analogical tradition denies. Ivan Karamazov returns his ticket to a God the tradition never confessed. I argued that the horror did not have to be: that the world’s existence is unentailed gift, that both Hart and Wood, for all their seriousness, empty evil of being and then give it back a purpose, and that only a world that need not have been at all gives Ivan what he is owed — a child’s suffering that answers to nothing.

I deferred two things in that second essay. The first was the full proof: I asserted that “the world might not have been” does not smuggle back a deliberating God. I did not, however, show in detail how that is possible or what the claim contains once the creaturely deliberative picture has been stripped away. The second was the eschatological question: a dear friend I respect pressed me on whether evil can be genuinely past if all created history is eternally present to God’s apprehension. The answer to that question deserves careful unpacking.

So, in this essay I will address both concerns.

It’s not all that complicated as you will see, but it does have to be presented in a particular order and none of the pieces can be skipped. The conclusion otherwise will not make any sense.

I. Three things that look like one

Let’s start with a confusion that is so natural that it is almost invisible. Hiding in plain sight, so to speak

Take the example of the existence of a chair. When we say a chair might not have existed, we mean a furniture maker chose to create it and might have chosen not to. The chair’s contingency and the carpenter’s choice are so reliably linked in our experience that they seem like a single fact. Everything we call contingent got that way because some agent decided, and might have decided differently. And everything that follows necessarily from something is, by the same logic, unchosen — emitted by nature without choice and deliberation the way light is emitted by the sun.

This is the hidden assumption that drives people toward necessity when they think about God. If the only alternative to choice is necessitation, and if attributing deliberation to God is a category mistake (as it is), then the world must follow from God’s nature as light follows from the sun. Now mind you, the argument is almost never stated this plainly, but it is almost always operating underneath the theology that arrives at necessity.

The assumption holds for us creatures, where it is very nearly true. Creatures have only two modes of acting: deliberating among options, or emitting by nature. And what this means is that whatever a creature does not choose follows from it necessarily. So for creatures, “not chosen” means “necessitated,” and thus contingency really does require election.

The mistake is to transpose that creaturely constraint onto God. As though God’s options were limited to the same two. They are not, and understanding why this is so requires keeping apart three things that collapse into one only when creatures are the subject.

The first is dependence: does the world constitute or complete God? No. The world adds nothing to God, needs nothing from creation to be who he eternally is. The dependence runs one direction only. This was David Bentley Hart’s great insistence, and it is right.

The second is election: is the world chosen from a list of alternatives by a deliberating will? No. The God who surveys possible worlds and selects one is a creaturely picture writ large. This too must go.

The third is modality: could the world not have been at all? This is the real question, and it does not follow from either of the first two. Dependence and contingency are not the same axis. Election and contingency are not the same axis.

II. God’s act, and what it produces

Before asking where creaturely contingency comes from, there is a prior question: why does God’s act fall outside the creaturely binary of deliberation and necessitation altogether?

The answer lies not in anything about what creation terminates in (we will examine that in a moment) but in what God already is before creation enters the picture at all.

The Christian tradition, following the Cappadocian fathers and developed through Aquinas, holds that God’s act is identical with God’s being. God does not perform acts that are distinct from what he is….

Continue reading the essay on Substack at https://robertffortuin.substack.com/p/giving-is-the-whole-of-our-story

Lift High the Cross

Thirty-one years ago, I gave a way-too-long sermon on the Feast of the Holy Cross. I reveled in the Troparion of the Cross sounding through Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, and I became positively sentimental about the cross-bearing insignia of a lost Christendom.

I recant that sermon.

And today I replace it with this one.

Today the Church lifts up the Cross.

That sentence should make Christians nervous.

Not because the Cross is shameful, but because we have become so practiced at decorating it that we can forget what it actually is.

The Cross was an instrument of imperial execution. It belonged to the machinery of domination. Rome did not erect crosses because it loved sacrifice, humility, reconciliation, or redemption. Rome erected them because crosses worked. They frightened populations. They humiliated bodies. They announced who ruled.

And Christianity makes the almost unbearable claim that God chose precisely this place to reveal his glory.

Not afterward.

Not despite it.

There.

In John’s Gospel, the Cross is not merely the dark passage Jesus must endure before arriving at glory. The Cross itself is his glorification.

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

And what follows?

A grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies.

And then:

“When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”

John is doing something extraordinary with the language of exaltation. Jesus is “lifted up” on the Cross, and this lifting up is at once crucifixion, enthronement, revelation, and glory.

The Cross is Christ’s throne—the throne revealed at the right hand of the Father.

That is not because suffering is inherently holy.

It is because the Cross reveals what divine sovereignty actually is.

God does not conquer by becoming more violent than the violent. God does not defeat domination by constructing a larger domination. God does not save creation by learning Caesar’s methods and using them more efficiently.

The reign of God is revealed in the self-giving divine-human love of Christ.

The thorn-crowned man reigning from the tree is not God temporarily disguised as weakness.

This is what divine glory looks like.

Human beings close their fists.

Christ opens his hands.

And when we nail those hands open, they remain open still.

That may be one of the most terrible and beautiful truths Christianity has ever dared to say.

The primordial human temptation is enclosure.

We want life as possession rather than communion.

We defend ourselves against vulnerability. We turn neighbor into rival, creation into property, difference into threat, God into guarantor of our borders. We build little fortresses around the self and then call the fortresses identity, righteousness, security, even religion.

The Cross destroys this enclosure.

Christ gives himself without remainder.

He does not answer violence with retaliatory violence. He does not allow hatred to determine the shape of his love. He refuses to let the closed world make him closed.

The Cross is therefore not merely something Christ endured.

It is the opening of the human being into communion.

And this is why taking up the Cross cannot mean cultivating misery, romanticizing abuse, remaining beneath the boot of an oppressor, or imagining that God enjoys suffering.

To take up the Cross is to undergo the death of the enclosed self.

It is to become capable of communion.

It is to relinquish the terrible little ledger by which we calculate who deserves love, mercy, dignity, forgiveness, food, safety, welcome, or belonging.

The Cross is the end of the ledger because the Crucified gives himself even to those who crucify him.

And that is precisely how he reigns.

“When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”

Notice the direction.

Christ does not climb upward and summon the worthy.

He is lifted onto the instrument by which civilization throws people away.

And from there he draws the world toward himself.

We cast him outside.

He makes the place of exclusion the center.

We intend the Cross to say, “You have no place among us.”

Christ makes it say, “And from here I will gather everyone.”

This is the true footstool of the King.

The language of kingship is overturned at Golgotha. Christ’s enemies are not piled beneath his feet as trophies. They are among those for whom his arms remain extended.

His kingdom advances not through humiliation but reconciliation; not coercion but invitation; not conquest but service.

Its royal insignia is not Caesar’s eagle.

It is a towel and a basin.

Its throne is a Cross.

Which is why Christians should be considerably more scandalized than we usually are when the Cross is turned back into precisely the sort of thing Christ transformed.

A cross emblazoned upon the banner of domination is not thereby sanctified.

A war flag does not become Christlike because someone stitches a cross onto it.

A nationalist movement does not become Christian because it marches beneath Christian symbols.

And forgive the impiety, but there is something almost comically blasphemous about taking the sign by which God exposed the bankruptcy of imperial violence and converting it into the logo of imperial violence.

One might as well embroider the Beatitudes on a battering ram.

Or paint “Blessed are the peacemakers” down the side of a missile.

Or bless machine guns with holy water.

Which, God save us, has been done.

The contradiction would at least be easier to see.

The Cross has often been dragged behind armies, planted upon conquered lands, attached to racial mythologies, enlisted into fantasies of national innocence, and raised above political programs whose deepest instinct is exclusion.

Every time this happens, the Cross is humiliated.

Not defeated.

Humiliated.

The symbol of divine self-emptying is dressed in armor and ordered to salute.

The tree upon which Christ embraced the enemy becomes the boundary marker declaring which enemies may be hated.

If Dante were looking for additional furnishings for the vestibule of Hell—the region inhabited by the morally evasive, the spiritually noncommittal, those who would not finally give themselves to either love or rebellion—I suspect there might be room there for a few martial standards bearing badly misappropriated crosses, hanging in tatters and flapping forever in a fly-infested wind generated by their own contradiction.

The Cross does not bless our tribes.

It judges them.

It does not confirm our righteousness against our enemies.

It places us beside our enemies beneath the same outstretched arms.

And those arms remain open.

It does not make Christianity the religious department of the nation-state.

It reveals the Shepherd King, who washes feet and leads us toward the green holy hill where wolf and lamb lie down together.

That is why the Feast of the Holy Cross is not finally a celebration of an ancient instrument of torture.

It is the feast of the overthrow of the world that needs instruments of torture.

The wood planted on Golgotha marks the limit of the enclosed world.

Violence goes there.

Empire goes there, with every Caesar and would-be Caesar, all their standards, slogans, and cults.

Religious self-certainty goes there. So does frightened ego. That ledger of remembered trespasses against us.

Everything in us that says, “I will preserve myself by closing myself against you” goes there.

And Christ opens his arms.

The Cross is the absolute opening of the self in love.

To bear the Cross is therefore to follow Christ out of self-enclosure and into communion.

And perhaps this is why the Cross can truly be called the glory of God.

Because glory is not raw power displayed.

Glory is God being completely himself—revealing himself without disguise.

And God is love.

So there, on the hill outside the city, divine glory shines without disguise.

The King is enthroned.

The kingdom has been planted.

The grain of wheat has fallen into the earth.

And from his strange royal seat Christ says to the whole human race:

I will draw you to myself.

Not some.

Not the impressive.

Not the ideologically reliable.

Not merely those who already know the password.

All.

The Cross stands at the center of creation because self-giving love stands at the center of reality.

Love is the gravity of the universe.

And the Cross is where we see it.

Avicenna and Aquinas: Ruminating on Divine Freedom and Necessity

In 2022, I emailed Dr. Rahim Acar with several questions about the eleventh-century philosopher Avicenna’s understanding of divine freedom and creation. For purposes of publication, I have revised and extensively(!) expanded the letter. In other words, it’s no longer a real letter at all and only barely resembles the email Dr Acar received.

Dear Dr Acar,

We have never corresponded, but I have been reading your book on Avicenna: Talking About God and Talking About Creation. I am finding it fascinating and challenging. Until I began reading it, my understanding of Avicenna was largely confined to the familiar claim that he believed God was necessitated to create the world. I now see how misleading that characterization is, particularly given how closely he and St Thomas Aquinas agree on the voluntary character of divine creation. You note four shared characteristics of their respective positions:

1. God creates by will;
2. God primarily and essentially wills himself, and his volition concerning the universe is subsumed in his self-volition;
3. the universe is not the end of God’s will;
4. God does not need to create in order to be what he is; his being and goodness do not depend on the existence of other things.¹

This last point is crucial. God does not create out of any need or insufficiency. As you write: “For Avicenna, God creates out of his generosity, since he neither expects nor attains anything in return… God is truly generous, since God’s giving being to things can neither be compelled by something external nor required by something internal to God.”²

Avicenna and the Necessity of Creation

Despite the above commonalities, scholars have typically  identified Avicenna as teaching necessitated creation:

Avicenna usually is considered to have held that God’s creative action is similar to the actions of natural things acting through their natures. This interpretation of Avicenna’s position is supported by his denial of intention to God in creation and by his claim that the universe is necessary. Despite this, for Avicenna creation is a voluntary action. When he argues that God cannot have an intention in creation, he simply wants to state that other things do not constitute a final cause for God. Furthermore, the necessity of the universe does not make the act of creation like the actions of natural beings. Nor does it take God’s freedom away, since for Avicenna the necessity of the universe is neither imposed on God from outside, nor is it required by something internal to God. The existence of the universe, as well as the form the universe takes, is necessary because God is necessary in all respects.³

God creates voluntarily and freely. He does not need a world to be himself, nor does he gain anything from the world. Yet the creation of the world is nonetheless necessary because of the mode of divine existence—simple and necessary. Why? Because, as you observe, “Avicenna takes divine perfection properties only insofar as they are modified by divine formal features. For him, when talking about God divine perfection properties must be considered in the manner they are found in God.”⁴ That is to say, God’s knowledge, goodness, and will must be understood according to the mode of his simple and necessary existence. It’s not a matter of what God is but how God is.⁵

According to Avicenna, divine creation is simultaneously free and necessary. Free—because no external constraint or internal deficiency compels God to create. He has nothing to gain by creating and nothing to lose by not creating. Necessary—because in his divine simplicity God is his perfections. Everything that God is, everything that he has, and everything that he does is necessary because he is necessary in his self-existence. “The First is the willer (murìd) of his essence (li dhàtihi),” writes Avicenna. “This kind of pure intellectual (‘aqliyya) volition (iràda) and this life of his, similarly, are identical to him (bi ‘aynihi).”⁶ God is both the subject and object of his willing. He wills his essence, and his willing of the cosmos is comprehended therein. The Muslim philosopher refuses to explicate God’s freedom in creation without thinking together the formalities of divinity (simplicity, eternity, immutability, infinity, necessity):

Since the divine will is simple, God has one act of will. God primarily wills and loves himself, and God’s willing of other things must be subsumed under his self-willing. Besides being simple, God’s will is eternal and immutable, following from his eternity and his being pure act without any potency. Avicenna touches on the eternity and immutability of the divine will in various contexts, albeit indirectly, but notably to support the contention that God creates eternally. Since creation can be traced back to the divine will, if God’s will were not eternal and immutable, then God would be subject to change, or, in other words, receptive and in need of something external in order to be an efficient cause. Since God is eternal and since there is no change in God, God’s action must also be eternal. If God did not will eternally to create, nothing would be created because this implies a change both in God’s will and in God’s knowledge, due to the identity of will and knowledge in God.⁷

As you explain, Avicenna insists that God is free in his creation of the cosmos, while also denying God’s possession of free choice:

For Avicenna, nothing else constitutes an end for God, and God does not pursue an end distinct from himself in creating the universe. He gives two basic reasons for arguing this: (1) that only God exists by himself and everything else depends on him, and (2) that God is simple. Avicenna explains the first by arguing that there is nothing to be intended. Only God exists without a cause, and there can be no reason (sabab) unless it be because of God, in God or by God, or belongs to God. If we assume that God has an end distinct from himself, we propose a voluntary action similar to human voluntary actions, with possibilities independent of the agent. A voluntary agent may seek to realize one of these possibilities. However, with regard to God, since there can be nothing outside and independent of God to be intended, God does not act for the sake of something else. Hence, God creates other things even though other things do not constitute an end for God.

Avicenna’s second reason concerns God’s simplicity and perfection. If God is supposed to have an intention for the existence of other things, three things follow from this supposition: (1) In God there is something distinct from God’s self-knowledge which is the ground for whatever God intends. This thing is God’s knowledge of the necessity or lovability or goodness necessitating this act of intention; (2) God intends, and (3) there is a benefit to which the intention is directed. This is impossible for Avicenna, given that God is simple. God’s simplicity for Avicenna requires that God have one knowledge and one will, which are in turn identical to each other. Since God primarily knows, wills and loves himself, God’s will cannot be directed to an end other than God.⁸

I confess that I found the above paragraphs difficult. Let me briefly unpack them, and you can tell me if I have caught the gist. God can only will himself as the ultimate end of his willing, for nothing exists independently of God that could constitute an end for him. Everything other than God depends upon him for its existence. Hence God cannot create the universe for the sake of some good outside himself, as though his will were directed toward an independently existing possibility to be realized. God wills creation, but creation does not constitute the telos of his willing.

Yet this necessity of divine creation must not be confused with a natural, and therefore involuntary, emanation. I suspect this is where many of us have misunderstood Avicenna. This passage from The Healing seems clear enough:

The coming to be of the whole from Him is not by way of nature in that the existence of the whole comes to be from Him with neither knowledge nor satisfaction on His part… Hence, He must intellectually apprehend that the existence from Him of the whole is a necessary consequence of Himself… His essence knows that His perfection and loftiness are such that the good proceeds from Him and that this is one of the necessary concomitants of His majesty that in itself is the object of His love… Hence, the First is satisfied with the emanation of the whole from Him.⁹

We need, however, to be more precise about what kind of necessity Avicenna is denying and what kind he is affirming. An agent performs an action by natural necessity when its nature serves as the principle of its action. Avicenna identifies two features of natural necessitation:

• It does not involve the knowledge of the agent.
• It does not involve the approbation and consent of the agent.

The agent naturally produces its action akin to the way a fire begets fire. Given the right physical conditions, fire simply spreads. It has no knowledge of what it is doing, nor does it consent to its combustion. The agent’s nature determines its activity. Fire does what fire is. It’s all quite natural, involuntary, inevitable.¹⁰

Clearly God’s creation of the cosmos fails to meet Avicenna’s criteria for natural necessitation, as Julie Swanstrom explains:

God does not emanate by nature. Since an action performed by nature is an action occuring without the agent’s knowledge and without the agent’s consent, God would have to emanate without knowledge of the emanation and without consenting to the emanation. God intellectually apprehends Godself, which includes the apprehension of God as the principle of everything else that might exist. God knows Godself, and in knowing Godself, God knows God to be the cause of the existence of anything which might exist. In knowing Godself, God knows everything that is a concomitant of God’s existence. Because God has this knowledge, God fails to meet the first criterion of an act by nature.

God also fails to meet the second criterion of an act by nature, for God consents to the emanation. God is free from any impediment to emanating, and thus God consents to the emanation. Avicenna notes that God, knowing God’s own perfection and goodness, knows and loves Godself. Because knowing God’s own essence entails knowing the necessary concomitants of God’s essence, God also loves the necessary concomitants of God’s essence by extension. God’s object of knowledge and love is God, but God is aware of and approves of those things which follow from God’s essence. Accordingly, God consents to and approves of God’s emanation.¹¹

God is an intellectual, volitional, self-moving being. He always acts with full knowledge and consent in the perfect freedom of divine simplicity:

An action stemming from a being’s nature depends only on that being’s nature, not on its intellect or will. An action that involves an agent’s will (and, accordingly, its intellect) is a voluntary action. The involvement of the will, even though it is identical to God’s essence, means that God’s action is voluntary rather than natural. What it takes for an action to be voluntary is for God to have knowledge of the action and to consent to the action, which means that God’s faculty of will is involved in any voluntary action. The identity of God’s will, knowledge, and essence does not negate that God’s will is involved in God performing the action in question.¹²

That God creates because he is the Good does not mean that his act of creation is necessitated by nature, as both his self-knowledge and volition are involved, thus qualifying it as voluntary. Might God have chosen not to create? Avicenna thinks not and points us to the existence of the world as eternally and immutably willed by God. How do we think “ahead” of God’s eternal and immutable willing? Should we even try? The divine knowledge is identical to the divine volition is identical to the divine essence. Avicenna will not entertain the counterfactual of the world’s non-existence, and I think he is right not to do so. This does not mean that creatures are necessary existents in themselves. The world is necessary only because God is necessary in his transcendent simplicity. Avicenna will not entertain the counterfactual of the world’s non-existence, and I think he is right not to do so. This does not mean that creatures are necessary existents in themselves. They remain possible beings in themselves. As Avicenna explains, “whatever is possible in its existence does not exist unless rendered necessary with respect to its cause.”¹³ 

Aquinas and the Freedom of Creation

Aquinas, on the other hand, takes a different line on divine freedom of choice and elaborates it under the notion of suppositional, or hypothetical, necessity. He distinguishes what is necessary absolutely from what becomes necessary on a supposition. God necessarily wills his own goodness, since divine goodness is the proper object of the divine will. Yet God does not will creatures with the same necessity, for “the goodness of God is perfect, and can exist without other things inasmuch as no perfection can accrue to Him from them.”¹⁴ He wills creatures as ordered to himself. His willing of creatures is therefore voluntary rather than absolutely necessary. Yet once he creates, his willing is necessary: “supposing that He wills a thing, then He is unable not to will it, as His will cannot change.”¹⁵ God’s eternal decision to create is thus immutable and necessary by supposition, while creation itself adds nothing required for the perfection of divine goodness.

My question: Do you think Thomas is cheating (perhaps just a little bit) in his employment of hypothetical necessity? You note that on the matter of divine freedom, he separates free choice (God might not have created the world) from the formal features of divinity, allows God to make his choice, and then recombines his choice with the formal features and calls it suppositional necessity. It’s as if Thomas had said to himself: “Let’s pretend that the infinite, simple, eternal pre-creation-God—who in reality is identical to his essence and lacks all potentiality (actus purus)—is a finite being confronted with two alternative courses of action between which he has to choose, despite the mess this makes of our metaphysics of divinity.¹⁶ All we have to do is wave our wand, speak the magic word—”suppositio!“—and … voilà! God immutably wills the world in the mode of free choice, without violating divine simplicity. A brilliant metaphysical insight or impressive feat of prestidigitation?

That God creates freely and voluntarily is clear-cut, for all the reasons mentioned above (and below). But the assertion that he might have chosen otherwise seems at least debatable. In what sense is the pre-eternal decision to create a choice? Is he presented with alternatives? On what basis does he choose? Do we know what we are talking about? Avicenna does not think so:

For Avicenna God’s having free will does not mean that God has free choice. For Avicenna, the idea that God does not have free choice follows from the assertion that other things are not God’s end. If other things could be ends for God, then God would have free choice because one end could be distinguished from alternatives (naqìḍ) in a free choice (ikhtiyàr). Since the one with free choice (ikhtiyàr) chooses one end as better than its alternative, then in order for God to have free choice there must be alternatives placed in front of God. Then God would be required to choose the better alternative. However, there can be no set of independent “possible universes” facing God so that he may choose one. Since there is nothing for God to intend, there is nothing for God to choose over others.¹⁷

Hence the critical difference between Avicenna and Thomas on necessitated creation. Despite their fundamental agreements regarding the divine attributes, Avicenna will not isolate divine freedom from the formal features of transcendent existence:

For Avicenna, one may not even consider the possibility that God could not have created, because God is necessary in all respects. Such a possibility is applicable only to agents that are not fully in act. While Aquinas considers the divine perfections separately from the manner in which they exist with respect to human vantage point, Avicenna modifies his concept of the divine perfections in the light of the divine formal features. Consequently, he limits human speech to what actually is. By limiting himself with what actually is, he argues that the universe is necessary and that God does not choose from alternatives…

The difference between Avicenna and Aquinas concerning the necessity of the universe and God’s free choice can be traced back to their consideration of divine perfection properties. Since Aquinas was able to consider God’s will with regard to the existence of the universe in isolation from God’s formal features, i.e., immutability and eternity, he could make a distinction between absolute and hypothetical necessity. If God’s will concerning the universe is taken together with God’s formal features, Aquinas argues, the universe is necessary and God creates only this universe. This is what he means by the hypothetical necessity of the universe. Avicenna does not make a distinction between absolute and hypothetical necessity, since he does not consider God’s will with regard to the existence of the universe in isolation from God’s formal features. He takes, God’s perfections together with how God is, i.e., necessary, immutable, eternal. As a result, he simply argues that the universe is necessary. Given the fact that the premises on which Aquinas establishes his position are maintained by Avicenna as well, the necessity of the universe as argued by Avicenna corresponds to the hypothetical necessity of the universe in the theological language of Aquinas.¹⁸

Am I being unfair to Thomas? No doubt. But I am not persuaded that his assertion of suppositional necessity resolves the problems raised by the attribution of free choice to the transcendent Creator. Thomas should at least have posted a warning: “Caution! Pushing apophatic limits!”

At this point, Dr Acar, I find Norman Kretzmann particularly helpful, especially since you agree with him that Aquinas’s conception of divine Goodness and his account of the divine will toward creation are “not quite compatible.” Kretzmann identifies what he calls “libertarian and necessitarian strains” within Thomas himself. On the one hand, Aquinas insists that God freely chooses whether to create; on the other hand, Aquinas also holds that God necessarily wills his own Goodness. Kretzmann calls this freedom without freedom of choice “willingness.” “In God’s case, then,” Kretzmann comments, “willingness, not freedom of choice, characterizes the divine will  ‘in respect of its principal object, which is its own goodness.’”¹⁹

But why, on Aquinas’s account of the simple and fully actualized divinity, does God create the world? Aquinas rejects the suggestion that God creates by a necessity of nature. Kretzmann agrees that Thomas is unmistakably a “non-necessitarian regarding God’s volition to create.”²⁰ Yet he thinks that Aquinas’s own metaphysics points in another direction. God is not simply good; he is perfect Goodness itself. And Aquinas repeatedly appeals to the Dionysian principle that “goodness is by its very nature diffusive of itself and [thereby] of being” (bonum est diffusivum sui). Kretzmann asks whether Aquinas has fully reckoned with the implications of his own doctrine of divine Goodness. 

Kretzmann criticizes Aquinas for not adopting a necessitarian construal of divine creation based on the Dionysian principle of the diffusiveness of being:

For, according to the Dionysian principle, which Aquinas often appeals to in other contexts, goodness is by its very nature diffusive of itself and (thereby) of being. The principle expresses an important truth about goodness, most obviously about the goodness of agents—goodness essentially associated with volitional action informed by intellect—which is the only kind at issue here. There is no obvious inconsistency in the notion of knowledge that is for ever unexpressed, never shared by the agent who has it, even if the agent is omnipotent; but there is inconsistency in the notion of goodness that is for ever unmanifested, never shared by the perfectly good, omnipotent agent.²¹

Here is the heart of Kretzmann’s argument. If Goodness is essentially self-diffusive, then productivity belongs to perfect Goodness as such. Indeed, Kretzmann goes so far as to say that “it is owed to God’s perfect goodness that it have productivity and the other things that pertain to the nature of goodness.”²² Since perfect Goodness belongs to the divine essence, and self-diffusiveness belongs to Goodness, God’s bringing creatures into existence appears to follow with metaphysical necessity. 

This does not mean that God needs creation in order to become perfect. Kretzmann expressly rejects that inference. Creatures add nothing to the life of the Holy Trinity. The direction of dependence runs entirely the other way: created things depend upon divine Goodness for their being. His point is that the manifestation of Goodness follows from what perfect Goodness is:

If … the perpetually unmanifested goodness of an omnipotent agent is inconceivable, then such goodness is, a fortiori, also incomplete. No attribute of an absolutely perfect being could need the acquisition of anything external to it for its completeness; but creating as the metaphysically necessitated manifestation of perfect goodness is not the acquiring of created things for the completion of goodness that would otherwise be imperfect. And, of course, the Dionysian line is that goodness entails its own manifestation in bringing about goodness and, consequently, being. A being that is good (and not relevantly powerless) simply is a being productive of good things external to it. The external things it produces in manifesting its goodness are dependent on it, not vice versa.²³

Creation is the finite expression of a transcendent plenitude eternally overflowing within the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

Kretzmann thus thinks Aquinas has drawn the boundary between necessity and freedom in the wrong place. Aquinas already allows that God necessarily wills his own Goodness without thereby willing it involuntarily. Why should the self-communication of that Goodness be treated differently? Thus Kretzmann’s proposed revision of Thomas: God’s willing of creatures follows from the necessity of his nature precisely considered as perfect goodness. His conclusion could hardly be more explicit: “As I see it, God does (freely) create through the necessity of his nature.”²⁴

Kretzmann’s correction of Thomas has therefore moved him closer to Avicenna, while improving both. For Avicenna, too, the necessary procession of creatures is rooted in the divine Goodness. As we have already heard him say, God “knows that His perfection and loftiness are such that the good proceeds from Him and that this is one of the necessary concomitants of His majesty that in itself is the object of His love.” Kretzmann presses the Dionysian principle in a remarkably similar direction: if God is Goodness itself, and Goodness is essentially self-diffusive, then the communication of divine Goodness in creation belongs to what God freely and necessarily wills.

Beyond Choice and Necessity

Because of the divine aseity and plenitude, we may, I believe, affirm that God’s creation of the universe is voluntarily and freely willed.²⁵ If God is infinite Goodness, and Goodness is self-diffusive, the communication of his Goodness belongs to what he eternally is. God creates the world because in his goodness and love he wants—and thus freely wills—to communicate himself in a finite mode. He does not need the world; creation adds nothing to his perfection. Nor is his willing imposed upon him from without. He creates because he wants to create, and his wanting is neither accidental nor subsequent to who he is. His desire is his will, and his will is his essence (again, divine simplicity). There is no other God before the God who creates, no pre-creation Deity who first confronts the alternatives of creating and not creating. There is only the One who eternally and freely wills into existence the world in which we live.

I call this amatory necessity. I append the word “necessity” simply to highlight our need for a new category to speak of God’s free ex nihilo emanation. Perhaps freedom and necessity cease to be contraries when we are speaking of transcendent divinity. Perhaps God’s willing may be inevitable precisely because it is wholly his own—an expression of the Goodness that he eternally is. The fact that God would never do otherwise in no way compromises his freedom. Does this mean that God is necessitated by his nature? I am tempted to say yes and shoot back the terse rejoinder, so what? All amatory necessity means is that God always acts according to his overflowing Goodness and self-communicating Love. Why is it wrong to suggest that God creates because he is the Goodness and Love that he is? The necessity is neither imposed upon him nor occasioned by some deficiency within him. It is simply the necessity of God being God. Are we really required to imagine another Deity who is infinite, self-diffusive Goodness who eternally might have decided not to create? As common as it may be among theologians to define divine freedom in terms of alternative possibilities—God might have created or might not have created—are necessity and possibility truly proper categories for speaking of the One who utterly transcends them?

Aquinas describes divine creation as “fitting” (conveniens). Given the fact of creation and given what we know of God’s character as revealed in Jesus Christ, may we not also contrafactually ask: If God had decided not to create the world, would not the decision be fittingly described as unfitting, a denial of who he is as Goodness and Love? The Father’s generation of the Son and Spirit is itself the transcendent expression of diffusive Goodness,²⁶ yet will he not also seek to share his Goodness outside his Trinitarian life, not because he is compelled to but simply because he is Goodness and Love? Perhaps the question is not quite kosher, but I ask anyway. To suggest that God is free not to make the universe is to declare that divine creation is purely arbitrary and random. Toss a coin. If it’s heads, I emanate a world; if tails, I don’t. But the transcendent God and Father of Jesus Christ never acts haphazardly. He is the reason he acts.

Avicenna shares the classic theistic commitments with Aquinas, but he does not analyze divine creation through the lens of suppositional necessity. The two metaphysicians diverge on the question whether God might have chosen not to create the universe. Avicenna will not entertain the counterfactual. The existence of the world settles the matter.

Am I off-base? All the Christian classical  theists tell me that I am—with two exceptions: Norman Kretzmann and David Bentley Hart.²⁷ And so I seek out the wisdom of an Islamic philosopher who is not bound to the Christian theological tradition. I would very much appreciate your opinion on this perplexing question. And please forgive this long email.

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,
Fr Aidan Kimel

 

Footnotes

[1] Rahim Acar, Talking About God and Talking About Creation (2005), p. 131. For a succinct summary, see Rahim Acar, “Avicenna’s Position Concerning the Basis for the Divine Creative Action,” The Muslim World, 94 (2004): 65-79.

[2] Ibid., pp. 141-142..

[3] Ibid., pp. 132-133.

[4] Ibid., pp. 145-146. “We may further ask: if creation is not constitutive of God, why must the universe be a necessary concomitant? The answer to this question concerns not what God is, but rather how God is. That is, it does not concern the divine perfections, specifically the divine will, per se, but divine formal features like simplicity and necessity. Avicenna does not consider this question separately, hence he does not state in detail that the necessary concomitance of the universe is due to God’s being necessary, immutable, or fully actual. Nevertheless … Avicenna takes divine perfection properties only insofar as they are modified by divine formal features. For him, when talking about God divine perfection properties must be considered in the manner they are found in God” (ibid., p. 145).

[5] Following David Burrell, Acar describes the formal features of divinity as those properties that “modify the mode in which God has the perfection properties he has. While non-formal properties tell something about what their subject is, formal properties do not directly tell us what their subject is… Formal features concern the ontological constitution, or the mode of existence, of the subject” (ibid., p. 80). In more familiar theological language, the distinction roughly parallels that between God’s negative and positive attributes.

[6] Quoted by Acar, p. 137.

[7] Ibid., pp. 136-137.

[8] Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, trans. Michael E. Marmura (2005), IX.4.3.

[9] Ibid., pp. 138-139.

[10] Julie Swanstrom, “Avicenna’s Account of Creation by Divine Voluntary Emanation,” Otrosiglo 1 (2017): 115-116.

[11] Ibid., p. 118.

[12] Ibid., p. 122.

[13] Avicenna, I.6.6. “Since Avicenna [unlike Aquinas] considers divine perfection properties only insofar as they are modified by the divine formal features, God’s will to create and to create this universe is necessary and eternal” (Acar, p. 132).

[14] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.19.

[15] Ibid.

[16] “Philosophically speaking, the notion of a God who ‘might-or-might-not-create,’ and who ‘chooses’ to create in the sense of choosing between alternatives, is anthropomorphic nonsense.” Perl then goes on to say that he seriously doubts that Aquinas is guilty of such a blunder: “If God ‘might not create,’ or ‘might-or-might-not-create,’ then (a) God-creating is different from God-not-creating, (b) there is a real distinction in God between the divine essence and the act-of-creating, (c) that act is an accident in God, and (d) that accident is a real relation of God to the world. Aquinas expressly repudiates (a), (b), (c), and (d). So unless he’s totally inconsistent, he can’t mean that God ‘might-or-might-not-create.’” Eric Perl, email to author, 31 October 2022.

[17] Acar, .p. 143.

[18] Ibid., pp. 167-168. Roberto De La Noval and Matthew Vale also believe that Aquinas’s contrafactual predications about divine creation are improper: “Free Willing in God,” Religious Studies (2026). Also see Noval’s article “God Could Not Have Created,” Scottish Journal of Theology 79 (2025).

[19] Norman Kretzmann, “A General Problem of Creation: Why Would God Create Anything at All,” in Being and Goodness (1990), p. 216.

[20] Norman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Creation (1999), p. 126.

[21] Ibid., p. 134. “The inconsistency or ambivalence in Aquinas’s account stems … from his decided commitment to Aristotelian self-sufficiency in his conception of God combined with his hesitant appreciation of the insight and explanatory power of the Dionysian Principle, or Platonist self-diffusion as a basic characterization of God.” Kretzmann, “General Problem,” p. 224.

[22] Kretzmann, Metaphysics, p. 134.

[23] Ibid., p. 136.

[24] Ibid., p. 126.

[25] My reflections in this section are informed by my reading of The Divine Names by Dionysius the Areopagite. See my Substack article “To Let Be or Not to Let Be?” (5 September 2026), as well as the other articles in the series.

[26] Addressing the Trinitarian processions, St Bonaventure writes: “Good is said to be self-diffusive; therefore, the highest good is that which diffuses itself the most. Now, diffusion cannot stand as the highest unless it is intrinsic yet active, substantial yet personal, essential yet voluntary, necessary yet free, perfect yet unceasing.” Quoted by Kretzmann, Metaphysics, p. 225.

[27] “All too often, this is obscured in theological discourse by such questions as whether we are obliged to think of creation either as a free act of God’s sovereign will or as a product of some necessity incumbent on his will. But this is a false dilemma. God is not a finite being in whom the distinction of freedom from necessity has any meaning. Perfect freedom is the unhindered realization of a nature in its proper end; and God’s infinite freedom is the eternal fulfillment of the divine nature in the divine life. Needless to say, for any finite rational being, since its essence is not identical with its existence, any movement toward the realization of its nature is attended by the shadows of unrealized possibilities, and entails deliberative liberty with regard to proximate ends. This, though, is a condition not of freedom as such, but only of finitude. Every decision of the finite will is a collapse of indeterminate potentiality into determinate actuality, and therefore the reduction of limitless possibilities to the bare singularity of one reality. Yet that prior realm of possibility exists only because there is an inexhaustible wellspring of more original and transcendent actuality sustaining it. God, by contrast, simply is that actuality, in all its supereminent fullness: infinite Being, the source of every act of being. As such, he is infinitely free precisely because nothing can inhibit or limit the perfect realization of his nature, and thus, as Maximus says, he possesses no gnomic will; for God, deliberative liberty—any ‘could have been otherwise,’ any arbitrary decision among opposed possibilities—would be an impossible defect of his freedom. God does not require the indeterminacy of the possible in order to be free because he is not some particular determination of Being, some finite reduction of potency to act; he is instead that infinite actuality upon which all ontic possibility depends.” David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods (2022), pp. 115-116. Note the striking similarity of Hart’s judgment with that of Eric Perl’s.

Intermezzo—From the Other Side of Easter: Seeing Jesus As He Really Is

By John Stamps

“This is what Jesus was really like; we did not realise it then, but now we know it.” (T. E. Pollard)¹

This is the finest one-sentence description of the Gospel of John that I have ever read. I wish I had encountered it forty-six years ago. It encapsulates the Fourth Gospel in a sentence.

If you are even slightly familiar with the Quest of the Historical Jesus, Pollard’s claim is startling. Years ago, I mentioned to one of Shelly’s uncles that I was interested in the historical Jesus. “Oh,” he replied, “you mean the real Jesus?” I still wince when I remember it. His innocent remark captured an assumption that has shaped much modern study of Jesus. Historical criticism has taught us to peel away the theological interpretations of the evangelists to uncover “the real Jesus.”² To adapt Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum, we want to know wie er eigentlich gewesen—Jesus as he actually was. But St John turns von Ranke on his head. For John, we cannot see Jesus as he really was until we see him in the light of who he really is. Easter does not obscure the historical Jesus. Easter discloses him.

Claiming that John’s Gospel tells us “what Jesus was really like” is a bold conclusion indeed. John himself knows that people who saw the same deeds and heard the same words came to radically different conclusions about Jesus. Some called him prophet and Messiah; others called him deceiver, sinner, Samaritan, demon-possessed, even blasphemer. There is no “naked history” from which we can simply read off Jesus’ true identity. The question is not merely what happened, but how we learn to see what happened. We learn to see Jesus as he really is within the community of those who believe and trust in him, guided by the Spirit-Paraclete, remembering his words and deeds, and reading the Scriptures as witness to him.

John remembers Jesus from the other side of Easter, “from back to front.”³ The resurrection and the gift of the Spirit-Paraclete have taught the disciples to recognize what they had been seeing all along. John himself tells us so. When Jesus speaks of raising the temple of his body, the disciples do not understand: only “when he was raised from the dead” do they remember and believe (2:22). When Jesus enters Jerusalem, again “his disciples did not understand these things at first”; only after Jesus was glorified do they remember (12:16). And Jesus promises that this is precisely what the Spirit-Paraclete will do: “He will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said to you” (14:26).

This retrospective vision is not unique to John. All four Gospels remember Jesus in the light of Easter. But John makes what is implicit in them unusually explicit: he makes retrospective understanding itself a major theme of his Gospel. 

Clement of Alexandria famously called John the “spiritual Gospel.” Quite right. Provided that “spiritual” does not exile Jesus to some cloud-cuckoo land of pious sentimentality. For John, the Spirit-Paraclete does not spirit Jesus away from history. The Spirit-Paraclete teaches the disciples to understand the history they have inhabited.

Again and again, the disciples encounter a Jesus whom they do not yet understand. Only afterward, in the light of resurrection and through the illumination of the Spirit, do they begin to comprehend whom they had encountered. 

Pollard’s point is crucial: “It is not that John is reading back into the earthly life [of Jesus] something that was not there.” Easter does not turn Jesus into someone he was not. Easter reveals who Jesus had been all along. The Logos-made-flesh had been standing before them all along.

The Fourth Gospel is therefore retrospective without being merely backward-looking. John looks backward from an eschatological event that has changed the meaning of past, present, and future. The resurrection disrupts ordinary chrono-logy and bends time back upon itself. As Harold Attridge puts it: 

“Time can be bent… when the eternal enters its realm.”⁴

The future has broken into the present and illuminated the past. This is more than retrospective reinterpretation. Easter is an ontological disclosure: in raising the crucified Jesus from the dead, God reveals who Jesus is and vindicates who he had been all along. What the disciples could not comprehend as events unfolded before them becomes intelligible from the other side of Easter. Jesus had spoken of his body as the temple. He had called himself the bread of life, the light of the world, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life. He had told Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Only afterward could the disciples begin to grasp the astonishing coherence of what they had heard and seen.⁵

This helps account for the contemplative character of John’s Gospel. John is not simply chronicling what happened next. He is pondering what happened then in the light of what God has revealed now.⁶ The Gospel therefore asks something similar of its readers. We must linger over its words, return to them, allow one episode to illuminate another, and learn to see Jesus retrospectively with the disciples. John’s repetitions, misunderstandings, double meanings, signs, symbols, and long discourses are not ornamental. They train us how to see.

And what do we finally see? The claim could hardly be more audacious. “Nobody has ever seen God.” Yet the only Son, the one who is closest to the Father’s heart, “has made him known” (1:18). The Logos who was with God and was God has become flesh. To see Jesus is, somehow, to see the Father. Easter does not replace the earthly Jesus with a divine Christ. It discloses the depth of the identity that had been present in him from the beginning.

And John promises that this retrospective vision is not reserved for those who were there. Indeed, it is precisely for us that he has written his Gospel:

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)

Easter does not give us a second Jesus. It gives us eyes for the first.

Footnotes

1. T. E. Pollard, “St John’s Contribution to the Picture of the Historical Jesus,” inaugural lecture, Knox Theological Hall, Dunedin, 1964, published in Forum 16, no. 6 (August 1964): 2–9; quoted in John A. T. Robinson, The Priority of John, ed. J. F. Coakley (London: SCM Press, 1985), 362. I encountered Pollard’s remark through Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 11 n. 32. ↩︎
2. Luke Timothy Johnson famously challenged a related assumption of the historical quest in The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). Johnson argues that the “real Jesus” cannot be identified with the hypothetical figure historians reconstruct from the Gospel narratives. The real Jesus is the living and risen Lord to whom the New Testament and the worshiping Church bear witness. ↩︎
3. Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 9. Thompson writes: “In John, the dilemma of understanding Jesus is framed both theologically and chronologically: during his lifetime, Jesus’ identity was not grasped, or not grasped completely, because he could not be understood fully through the experiential faculties of sight and hearing. It was only after and in the light of his death and resurrection, the events and realities triggered by them, and the Spirit’s instruction, that the disciples would be able to fully articulate what Jesus had intended and accomplished, and who he was and is. Of all the Gospels, John most explicitly articulates the necessity of the postresurrection perspective for understanding Jesus, interpreting Jesus’ life retrospectively (see 2:22; 12:16). In John, Jesus is known ‘from back to front’; that is, beginning with the resurrection and reading the significance of his mission and identity from that vantage point.” ↩︎
4. Harold W. Attridge, “Bending Time: Time and Eternity in the Fourth Gospel,” in Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and Rhetoric: A Festschrift for David P. Moessner, ed. Robert Matthew Calhoun, Margaret M. Mitchell, Tobias Nicklas, and Janet E. Spittler, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 194 (Leiden: Brill, 2024), 9–25, at 16. ↩︎
5. Marianne Meye Thompson, “Jesus and the Victory of God Meets the Gospel of John,” in Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright, ed. Nicholas Perrin and Richard B. Hays (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 21-38: “If in the Synoptic Gospels Jesus’ identity is slowly unfolded throughout the narrative, to be known cumulatively and vindicated in the resurrection, so that the whole becomes the sum of its parts and more than the sum of those parts, then in John the whole of Jesus’ identity already appears in nearly every part of the narrative. In John, Jesus is known from the end. John might well find the project of JVG (JS: Jesus and the Victory of God)—to know ‘Jesus’ mind set, aims and beliefs prior to the crucifixion’—to be an odd project. It is not, as Sanders puts it, that the resurrection is the aftermath of Jesus’ life, but that what happened through the resurrection, and in the aftermath of the resurrection, is simply part of who Jesus is and what his life was all about. To a large extent, this conviction makes the Gospel of John what it is, and Jesus who he is in the Gospel of John. The Jesus who laid down his life is also the Jesus who took it up again, the one who is resurrection and life. If he is not living, then this statement cannot be true. Because there is no Jesus without the resurrection, there is no historical Jesus without the resurrection.” ↩︎
6. N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1–10 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), x: “[John] gives the appearance of being written by someone who was a very close friend of Jesus, and who spent the rest of his life mulling over, more and more deeply, what Jesus had done and said and achieved, praying it through from every angle, and helping others to understand it.” ↩︎