Is God the Author of Sin?

Is God the author of sin? The question assumes paramount importance when evaluating the construal of divine and human agency advanced by Hugh J. McCann. Christian theologians have long insisted that the God of the gospel does not create or cause evil—yet it exists. Given that the Church also confesses the divine Creator to be omnipotent and omniscient, how can he be absolved of responsibility for evil? Theologians have wrestled with this question for centuries. We call their efforts theodicy. That’s the upshot of the free-will defense as popularized by C. S. Lewis. God has bestowed upon humanity the gifts of rationality and free will, thereby opening possibilities for wonderful goods unavailable to other forms of sentient life. But here’s the rub: these very gifts also make moral evil possible. As Lewis remarks, “If a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad.”‍¹ Hence the force of the free-will defense: because God has created us free, he cannot be justly blamed for the violence and horrors we perpetrate. The divine Creator is therefore off the hook … yet perhaps not totally. “To be sure,” comments McCann, “this is not the end of the matter. God is still responsible for creating a world that contains beings with free will, and thus for risking moral evil. And he also creates and sustains the natural order that allows our acts of will to have deleterious consequences.”‍² But in the end we trust that the terrible costs will prove ultimately worthwhile.

Matters become trickier, however, with theories of double agency. McCann recognizes that if God is the transcendent cause and sustainer of absolutely everything that exists, including our free choices, then his causal involvement extends even to the sinful actions of human beings. What kind of responsibility does he bear for those actions? McCann tackles the question head-on:

For while the present view [of double agency] offers help with traditional problems regarding human freedom and responsibility, it only makes the problem of evil, especially moral evil, more pressing. No longer may we claim that those acts in which we sin escape God’s creative power, so that his responsibility for them is alleviated. Rather, we have to face the fact that as creator, God is just as involved in our wrongful decisions and actions as he is in all else that goes on in the world—that is, fully, as the source of their being. Is he, then, to be charged with moral evil in their occurrence?³

But the stakes can be raised even higher. In 1955 J. L. Mackie famously argued that an omnipotent God could have brought about a world in which human beings always freely obey the will of God. McCann agrees with Mackie, given the premises of his account of double agency. There is a possible world where Adam never ate the apple.

We have no choice, therefore, but to put Dr. McCann into the dock and interrogate him further. Will we end up concluding that God should join him there too?

Two propositions now stand before the court. First, God is good and has “ordered everything to our good … and to the true fulfillment of our destinies.”⁴ Second, he is the omnipotent Creator, and his universal causality embraces all happenings, including our free actions. How can these two premises be reconciled? How and why would the good God cause our acts of wickedness?

McCann in the Dock

McCann begins his defense of the Almighty Creator with a concession: “There is no denying that the relation in question makes God the author of sin in one sense: namely, that he is the First Cause of those acts of will in which we sin. All of our willings owe their existence directly to God, just as we do, and could never take place but for his active parti­cipation, in the form of willing that they occur.”⁵  McCann thus cuts off any retreat into deism or limited divine omnipotence. God is God. The ontological buck stops with him.

McCann acknowledges that his presentation of double agency appears to make God culpable for human immorality. In the following analogy, he formulates the objection in its strongest form:

Consider the relation between God’s will as creator and Smith’s will to kill Jones. If the position defended in the last chapter is correct, this relation is even closer than that of an event-cause to an immediate effect. God creates Smith in his willing to kill Jones, in such a way that the actual process of Smith’s deciding and voliting counts as the content and embodi­ment of God’s will as creator. But then, someone will surely argue, God too must be held to perform acts of will that are intrinsically morally evil. Smith’s murder seems on this account to be equally an expression both of Smith’s will and of God’s, and so should equally be imputed to both. How, then, can God not be guilty of the injustice? Indeed, why is he not even more guilty than Smith, since it is God’s will alone that directly and finally accounts for the existence of Smith’s deeds? In short, according to this argument, even if the account in chapter 5 of the relation between God’s will and ours succeeds in preserving both his sovereignty and our freedom, it does so at the cost of making that relation too intimate—to the extent that God becomes guilty, even paradigmatically guilty, of all the moral wrongdoing that ever occurs.⁶

In response, McCann argues that if we understand the double-agency position rightly, God cannot be justly accused of culpability for human acts of wickedness. God creatively wills our particular decisions, including those in which we sin, yet he does not act upon us to produce them. Rather, he creates us in our very acts of deciding and willing. God wills our actions in their freedom. Our decisions constitute the content and embodiment of his creative willing, while remaining genuinely our own. The divine Creator is the subject of our being the subjects of our decisions and actions. Let’s return to the example of Smith who decides to kill Jones (poor Jones is always getting murdered in McCann’s writings):

Why might someone think that God’s creatively willing the occurrence of this event makes him guilty of anything? Perhaps the worry is that God might actually participate in Smith’s decision, that when Smith decides to kill Jones there actually occurs a joint exercise of agency, in which Smith and God together settle on doing Jones in. If this were so, it might seem that God must share in the malice of the decision, just as he shares in the deci­sion itself, in which case Smith’s sin is also God’s. This view of things is, however, mis­taken. When Smith decides to kill Jones, the decision is predicated of Smith alone, and belongs entirely to him. He alone forms the intention to kill Jones, hence he alone can incur the guilt of doing so. God does not and cannot participate in Smith’s decision, for he belongs to an entirely different order of being. To predicate the decision of him would be the equivalent of saying that when a mystery writer has one character decide to do away with another, she herself is guilty of deciding to commit murder. Nor does God, in provi­ding for the existence of Smith’s decision, decide in his own right to kill Jones. The content of God’s will is not that Jones should die … but rather Smith’s act of deciding. In propositional terms, God wills that Smith decide to murder Jones. And of course, as in all things, his will is efficacious. So if God incurs any blame in the transaction, it has to be for that—for willing Smith’s act of deciding.⁷

For every human act, we may specify two sets of predicates. While it is certainly true that God wills Smith’s willing the murder of Jones—if he didn’t, it wouldn’t occur—only Smith intends the crime. Perhaps Smith is having an affair with the lovely but deceitful wife of Jones. Overcome by jealousy and desire, he plans and executes the perfect murder. Smith alone forms the intention to kill Jones; he alone decides to disobey the sixth commandment; he alone chooses to pull the trigger. Smith does not collaborate with God in the murder nor God with him. Smith’s reasons to murder Jones are different from God’s reasons to will Smith’s willing. God makes himself the ontological source and ground of Smith’s sinful act, but the sin belongs to Smith alone.

God, we might say, has his own reasons to will Smith’s decision to murder Jones. Perhaps he believes that the dignity of human freedom requires that our evil decisions be permitted to achieve their intended consequences. “Freedom would be a sham,” comments McCann, “if an evil will could never have its way.”⁠⁸ Perhaps God knows that he can redeem this evil and thus bring into the world a greater good. Perhaps he intends to bring Smith to a deep repen­tance and transform him into a powerful evangelist or generous philanthropist. Perhaps the killing will set into motion a series of events that will bear good fruit decades or even generations later. The most famous example of providential working is told in the Book of Genesis. Filled with jealousy and anger, the sons of Jacob plan the murder of their brother Joseph, but at the last moment change their minds and sell him to slavers. Joseph eventually becomes the viceroy of Egypt, thereby achieving a position of power that would enable him to assist his family during the great famine. As Joseph later told his brothers: “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Gen 50:20).

McCann summarizes his strong assertion of divine providence and how it relates to the reality of sin and evil:

Our destinies are entirely subordinate to God’s creative will; he exercises full control in all that we do, notwithstanding the fact that our deeds are fully voluntary, and we have every reason to expect that all that takes place in the world will reflect the providence of a perfectly loving father… God is as much the cause of our sinful actions as of our virtuous ones, or of any other event. Yet, Augustine and Aquinas would both insist, he remains perfectly good and absolutely holy, a being deserving of our complete reverence and absolute devotion. How might such a thing be possible?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that even if my act of deciding to go to the concert tonight has its existence grounded in God’s creatively willing that I so decide, it is still I who act, still I who decide. God’s willing that I decide as I do does not make my decision God’s. Indeed, if it did, if my decision were predicated of God rather than me, his will would fail to achieve its object. But it is not possible for God’s will to be frustrated, as long as what he wills is consistent. So regardless of what we may think of the traditional view’s contention that divine sovereignty and creaturely freedom are fully compatible, that view does not take the operations of our will, or the actions founded upon them, away from us. They remain our own. Consequently, any sin they involve remains ours also. Thus, if I decide sinfully to go to the concert tonight—if, say, I am neglecting duties I know should take priority—the sin is mine, not God’s. If he is to be faulted, it must be for some other reason.⁹

So far so good. I see some members of the jury nodding their heads in agreement, others in disagreement, and still others are shrugging their shoulders in perplexity and indecision. If the trial were to end now, we would have a hung jury. Yet there is more testimony to be heard, and it is here that our philosopher makes a fateful turn. He decides to engage in theodicy and offer a justification for moral evil.

God ordains human disobedience, McCann avers, because only those who have alienated themselves from the divine presence can appreciate the good of communion and thus make an informed decision to live in friendship with God:

Here, I think, is where the analogy to the author and her characters fails. The writer does not have the power to elevate her characters to a position where they can truly interact with her; she may be “friends” with them in a metaphorical sense, but that is all. With God and us it is different: according to traditional belief, at least some of us are destined for a relationship of fellowship with God, who so loves all men that he wishes to share his life with us in a state of eternal union. Ultimately, then, God aims to be not only our creator but our friend. True friendship, however, is a matter of mutual commitment. And this commitment has to be voluntary: it cannot be imposed, or wrested from the other by force. If God only exacts devotion from us, we are reduced to being his subjects. To be friends with him requires something quite different: it takes a meaningful and responsible decision on our part to accept the offer of friendship he presents to us. But (and here’s finally the rub) a responsible choice in God’s favor requires that we understand the alternative—which is to be at enmity with him. Guilt, remorse, a sense of defilement, and the hopeless desolation of being cut off from God cannot be understood in the abstract, because if they are only understood abstractly they are not ours. Only through experience can we understand what it means to be in rebellion against God—and we gain that experience by sinning. By turning away from him we come to know what it means to be alone, and we learn that however successful they may be, our own projects cannot satisfy us. Only then are we in a position to choose responsibly to accept or to reject God’s offer of fellowship. In short, it is only from a stance of sinfulness that we are able to settle our destinies in an informed, responsible, and morally authentic way.

If this is correct, then the foundational good of our existence, and the basis for our entire destiny—namely, our moral autonomy—is something God can will for us in complete love, but that we cannot exercise in a way commensurate with our eternal destiny without becoming blameworthy. Our freedom, which makes us most like God, and fits us for friendship with him, can be responsibly exercised to enter or shun that friendship only if first employed in a conceit of rebellion, through which we may come to appreciate the emptiness of our feigned independence. There is every reason, therefore, for a God who desires our friendship to will as creator the very acts of our own wills in which we rebel against him.¹⁰

This is a provocative, if not shocking, statement. Admittedly, McCann is speaking of fallen mankind. He never explicitly states, for example, that God willed the sinless Adam and Eve to disobey his command not to eat of the forbidden fruit so that humanity might be saved through the redemptive work of Christ. McCann then goes on to explain that God must not be understood as positively willing evil. He is only willing our moral autonomy, which he rightly deems to be a precondition for friendship with God.

Nonetheless, he is advancing a reason to justify evil beyond God’s willing of our freedom. Evil now serves a greater good: the formation of moral identity and the generation of repentance and conversion. Perhaps this may be judged acceptable—God bringing good out of evil—but McCann seems to be saying something stronger—namely, that experiencing a state of enmity is necessary for our eternal communion with our Father:

It is important to realize, moreover, that in this process, sin is not a mere causal means or stepping stone to a happy outcome. It is an indispensable part of the process—something without which a legitimate choice to accept God’s friendship becomes not just causally but conceptually impossible.¹¹

McCann is here asserting that the experience of sin is indispensable to our freely choosing friendship with God. But why should this be so? Why must we first rebel against our heavenly Father in order, by grace, to turn toward him in love? Consider the possibility of a fallen person who, from the beginning of his or her existence, freely and joyfully embraces the divine love in which he or she was created. Think of St Thérèse of Lisieux. Her confessors were convinced that she had never committed a mortal sin, had never turned away from God in that radical act of rebellion which destroys charity in the soul. Mortal sin may be inevitable in our fallen world, but by the grace of God it is not necessary.

McCann presses the argument further. When we repent and return to God, evil is vanquished. Indeed, its defeat constitutes a distinctive good, one in which the evil we have committed “is a necessary part of the overall good state of affairs in which it is defeated.”

Thus, the initial phase of the sinner’s progress, in which God’s edicts are rejected, is essential to the entire process of his reaching a responsible choice to accept God’s lordship over his life. To take it away would be to trivialize anything we might wish to term conversion, as well as to make light of the depth and sublimity believers have always attached to that experience.¹²

Is this not close to saying that God makes us sinners in order to save us? The happy fault of Adam has become a salvific necessity. Note that McCann does not avail himself of the traditional appeal that God permits sin, which is a concessory form of divine willing. He asserts that sin is necessary to bring sinners into communion with God. The good God, McCann agrees, does not will sin for the sake of sin, but he does will our sinful acts as indispensable constituents of the good he intends to accomplish. Here, it seems to me, McCann has crossed a theological boundary that the assertion of divine permission was intended to preserve.

Katherin Rogers raises a further objection to McCann’s theodicy from within his own account of divine agency: “One might suggest that creatures need to undergo the experience of sin in order to have the understanding. But why? If God can make the belief in us, the secondary causes involved in our actually having sinned are not necessary.”¹³ I am not convinced that Rogers has adequately represented McCann’s argument. His concern extends beyond the acquisition of a true belief about the consequences of sin. He maintains that we must personally experience alienation from God if we are to make an informed and responsible decision to accept his friendship. God could certainly create in us a true belief about the misery of estrangement, but could he give us the experience of having rebelled against him without our actually having done so? Nevertheless, Rogers raises an important question about McCann’s account of double agency. If God is the immediate creator of our choices, beliefs, and experiences, what role do secondary causes play in bringing us into communion with him? Could he not, by his grace, create a burning love for himself in the heart of a sinner through other experiences—through the contemplation of beauty, for example, or the experience of being loved? There are many roads to the love of God.

But what of the damned? Every novel is ultimately judged by its conclusion. A bad ending can ruin a good story, while a great ending can redeem a mediocre plot. According to Mc­Cann’s understanding of divine and creaturely agency, God could, if he so willed, save all human beings—yet he doesn’t. Although expressing a measure of sympathy for the uni­ver­salist hope and acknowledging that God could in fact save all, McCann takes his stand with the longstanding tradition of the Church and defends irremediable separation from God as a just consequence for freely chosen rebellion:

Nothing could be worse than to be cut off from the love and friendship of a Father whose power extends to every detail of the universe, and who invites us to a share in his very life. But if this is the greatest evil of damnation, then no one who ends that way is treated unfairly, for this separation is precisely what one chooses by insisting on a life of rebellion rather than seeking reconciliation with God. Indeed, having once created beings destined to be lost, it is hard to see how a loving God could do anything but honor their choice in the matter. The alternative, after all, would be to undercut the capacity of would-be reprobates to frame their own destinies—perhaps by simply refusing to take No for an answer, and waiting out the millennia it might take for them to change their minds; or, should that fail, by simply overriding their freedom, and placing them in some motivational situation where there is no legitimate alternative but to accept his rule over their lives. Either of these courses would amount to God diminishing his own project of creation, by effectively nullifying the dignity not just of those headed for perdition but of all free agents: those who would reject his friendship would find their capacity for effective decision making destroyed, and those who would join with him would find their choice trivialized. If God were reduced to dealing in this way with those who try to refuse him, then evil would indeed have scored a major victory. Humans may begin as God’s children, but if any are truly to become his friends as well, then he must finally treat all as adults and potential partners—which means honoring their decisions.¹⁴

McCann’s phrase “destined to be lost” jumps out. McCann never explicitly identifies his position with the doctrine of double predestination, yet that is precisely what his account of divine sovereignty entails. As he acknowledges elsewhere, “the fate of the lost is as much a matter of God’s will as that of the saved.”¹⁵ God creates the elect in their free acceptance of salvation and the reprobate in their free rejection of it. Both destinies are comprehended within his sovereign creative will.

McCann’s theodicy of hell, as well as his defense of God willing sin, must therefore be interpreted in this light. Throughout his book, McCann has distanced himself from the standard free-will defense of evil, insisting that the relationship between divine and creaturely agency cannot be understood as a zero-sum game. God creates our free decisions without compromising their freedom. But at the last moment he tells us that the omnipotent author of the cosmic novel “must” allow, in the name of justice, those who freely choose perdition over the transcendent Good to suffer the eternal consequences of their decisions. But why? How can the infinitely loving God justify creating the rebellious choices of those whose rebellion will never be overcome? If God can creatively will our free decisions, including our sinful decisions, why does he not creatively will the free repentance of every sinner? Yet McCann insists that God must finally honor the sinner’s definitive rejection of divine friendship, as though God could not bring the sinner to free repentance without coercing him. But McCann’s own account of double agency calls this objection into question: God can create the sinner’s free repentance without violating his freedom. Even so, God condemns the wicked to their doom. His dogmatic affirmation of eternal damnation trumps the divine goodness. Thus is the justice of God revealed: “Terrible though the end of the lost may be, therefore, this manifestation of the good that is justice could not exist but for the creation of those destined for unrepen­tance.”¹⁶ We have no choice but to conclude that for McCann, God positively wills everlasting perdition.

Nor am I the only one to perceive this problem. Rogers takes McCann to task for defending hell when his account of double agency makes possible the salvation of all:

Were McCann a universalist, then the charge of painting a picture of an unloving God could be somewhat mitigated. Then we might say that God wishes a temporary ill to some of His created agents, but in the final analysis He wishes all to be saved… McCann is not a universalist. He asks, “Could a loving God possibly will not only the existence of [the rep­robate], but also the very decisions on their part in which they continually turn aside from him, as well as the final reprobation to which they are condemned?” He believes it is possible. He sets out the traditional view that the greatest evil suffered by the damned is being separated from God. “But if this is the greatest evil of damnation, then no one who ends that way is treated unfairly, for this separation is precisely what one chooses by insisting on a life of rebellion rather than seeking reconciliation with God.” But if this is a defense of divine love, I do not understand the argument. God prefers that these sinners be damned rather than not. He could will them to choose well and be saved, without, in McCann’s view, any infringement on their free will, and He does not. He produces their act of rebellion. Perhaps there is some definition of “fair” by which it is fair to create a vessel fit for wrath complete with its sinful choices and then visit wrath upon it, but “loving” seems the wrong word to use here.¹⁷

But Rogers is not a universalist, and her criticism arises from the implications of McCann’s own account of divine agency. She happens to believe that the proto-libertarianism of St Anselm escapes the problems she discerns in McCann’s account of double agency; but on the question of eternal damnation, her criticism strikes home. If double agency secures God’s providential control of history, then the divine feet must be held to the fire for an eschatological conclusion that he could have written otherwise.

McCann’s theodical proposal purports to solve the problem of moral evil, but consider the cost. As we have seen, he insists upon the good God’s maximal providential control over creation, including the free choices of his rational creatures. Yet he posits both the necessity of sin and the self-imposed impotence of God before humanity’s voluntary rebellion, as though the Creator who brings every free decision into existence were powerless to bring about the free repentance of every sinner.

Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict?

The foreman stands and shakes his head. “There are some of us who are still confused regarding divine causality and free will. We would hear from another double-agency theologian. We therefore summon …”

Kathryn Tanner Takes the Witness Stand

As we saw in “Breaking the Cords of Fate,” Kathryn Tanner affirms a noncompetitive understanding of divine/human agency, which in turn makes possi­ble a strong assertion of divine sovereignty. Be­cause God is the transcendent origin and source of all that exists, his “creative intention for the world cannot be hindered, diverted or otherwise redi­rect­ed by creatures. What God wills for the world as its creator must happen just the way God wills.”¹⁸ Nor should we think that our exercise of freedom requires a God-free space within creation, as if divine determination would violate our autonomy and turn us into mere puppets.¹⁹ God’s causing of human willing does not subvert or destroy our liberty, for his creative agency is the very source of our capacity to will and act. Tanner approvingly quotes Piet Fransen:

God then does not work in us from the outside, violently imposing Himself on us, binding and determining us to do what is good. As Creator, He stands at the wellspring of our existence, at the point where it flows uninterruptedly from His creative hand. He alone can reach our freedom at its source and yet do it no violence.²⁰

Divine determination and creaturely freedom are thus perfectly compatible, each operative in its own way within the same human act. Tanner does not hesitate to say what must be said if double agency is true: “Given God’s infallible work­ing, human beings must choose when and what God wills.”²¹

But what about sin? If God is su­premely good and only wills the good, then by definition he does not and cannot will that which contradicts his moral identity. Tanner begins her discussion of sin by adopting the traditional Christian account of evil as a privation of being, a parasite that lives upon the goodness of creation:

Sin is essentially a defect, a lack, something missing. Sin does not exist per se but as a defect “exists,” parasitic upon what does exist, an absence with a horrible enough sort of presence insofar as what is missing is essential or proper to what does exist. Because sin is not an “existing” aspect of created being, God’s creative will should not extend to it on our premises: it is not therefore an exception to them. As a lack parasitic upon what is, sin does, however, remain in a sense absolutely dependent upon God, for without the created being that a defect affects, a defect would not be a defect but absolutely nothing, and that created being is in the usual absolute relation of dependence upon God.²²

The God who is transcendent Goodness, therefore, does not will the existence of evil qua evil, yet he does will the existence of the actions through which evil and the damage it causes parasitically gain their actuality. Herein lies the conundrum. God does not cause evil, yet evil exists. After reviewing several accounts of the origin of sin, Tanner concedes that we are confronted with an aporia and surd. “The origination of sin,” she writes, “is properly a mystery, properly inexplicable in a scheme of thought where God is the ultimate principle of explanation.”²³ Sin should not exist, must not exist, has no right to exist in God’s good creation. She is there­fore unwilling to offer an explanation for the ability of creatures to choose contrary to the divine Goodness.

But Tanner is willing to speculate on how it is possible for God to know, and therefore account for, that which he does not bring into being:

God’s intention for the world, the creative intention that holds up into being the whole of the world, includes sets of pseudo­subjunctive propositions; propositions, that is, about what else will happen in the world should the creature sin, and what will happen within the world should the creature not. These are pseudo­subjunctive propositions in that God knows from all eternity whether or not the creature does sin. Let us say God intends the salvation of all persons, then with infinite detail what God intends includes the saving of x in such a way y if x does not sin and the saving of x in such and such a way z if x does sin, with the knowledge of whether or not and, if so, when, x sins. If the creature sins, that is contrary to God’s will in that God’s will does not extend to the bringing to be of sin. If the creature sins, what happens in the world will be different (subsequent events will be different), but God’s will for the world will not be.

How does God know whether and when sin occurs? The only crucial point to make here (if the premises we have given above are not to be violated) is that this knowledge of the existence of sin is not a condition of God’s form­ing God’s very complicated intentions with respect to the world. God’s knowledge of sin is dependent upon, and is logically subsequent to, God’s creative inten­tion for the world. It is therefore part of what could be called God’s practical knowledge, or knowledge of what the created world is like in God’s will for it. God does not directly will sin but sin (insofar as it is a defect) presupposes God’s will for the world in which it occurs.²⁴

If you’re like me, you’ll probably need to reread the above passage a few times to grasp its gist. Given that God does not will moral evil, how is it possible for God to know the dis­obediences of his creatures without introducing passivity into the divine nature? Tanner’s answer: God knows all possibilities and eventualities, including the possibility of sin. His knowledge of sin is logically subsequent to his creative intention for the world. God does not will evil, but he is not surprised by it. Its possible emergence in the world is taken into account in his providential intention and governance: “the world happens just the way God intends it to, even should sin exist.”²⁵ McCann, as far as I can tell, does not explicitly address this question, perhaps because he does not believe that he needs to, given his conviction that God wills equally the well- and ill-chosen acts of human beings: “God knows about our decisions and actions simply by knowing his own intentions, for he wills that they occur.”²⁶ Is God the author of sin? For Tanner and McCann, the answer is no. For Tanner, sin is a surd that inexplicably exists in God’s good creation; for McCann, while the sinner intends his or her sinful act, God never does, even while bringing it into being.

Both Tanner and McCann strongly affirm the freedom and power of the Creator to accomplish his salvific intentions for the world. His sovereign will is infrustrable; his providential plans cannot be ultimately defeated. Indeed, Tanner argues that God can prevent creatures from sinning without abolishing their freedom: “The bottom line here on the question of sin’s interference with a claim of God’s necessary efficacy is that God can prevent a lapse into sin by bringing forth at the crucial moment human choices that are not sinful.”²⁷ He can even bring about the free conversion of an unrepentant sinner at the very moment of death. What, then, could prevent God from accomplishing the salvation of all? Unlike McCann, Tanner does not appear to be committed to the doctrine of hell. Though she does not explicitly affirm either eternal damnation or universal salvation in her writings, her presentation of God as the unconditional giver of good gifts, her understanding of the universal salvific reach of the Incarnation, and her eschatological vision of a world healed of its wounds and made alive by incorporation into the risen body of Christ can be read as implying the latter.²⁸ In any case, if God does in fact will apokatastasis, so it will be:

We can affirm therefore that the existence of sin cannot frustrate God’s intention for the world. At most the existence of sin brings about a different way of getting to the ends God wills, without altering God’s intention about what is to happen on that supposition. With or without sin, or whatever the particular sinful choices made, the same end that God wants will happen. The sinners’ intentions are taken up within the intention of God for the world and are inevitably redirected to the end God wills, in virtue of the fact that God’s will is directly efficacious of everything else in the world besides sin and the fact that God can always will with the same necessary efficacy that a sinner’s heart be transformed. The will of God for the world remains infallible, therefore, in a form much like the fate of the classical Greek tragedies—in whichever way one strikes out one will be brought back to the same point. But, now, what is fated, if one believes in the benevolence and mercy of God, is the good.²⁹

And that is very good news. God is not the author of evil. If God is absolute Love, his good will for the world will be infallibly actualized. “The whole world will be victorious over sin and death as Christ was before us.”³⁰

Dear readers, what is your verdict?

Footnotes

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, book III, chap. 2.

[2] Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, 77.

[3] Ibid., 112.

[4] Ibid., 152.

[5] Ibid., 116.

[6] Ibid., 114-115.

[7] Ibid., 116-117.

[8] Hugh J. McCann, “Divine Providence” (2012) in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[9] Ibid.

[10] McCann, Creation, 123-124; emphasis mine. Also see Hugh McCann, “The Author of Sin?,” Faith and Philosophy (2005): 144-159.

[11] Ibid., 124.

[12] Ibid., 125.

[13] Katherin Rogers, “God is Not the Author of Sin,” Faith and Philosophy 24 (2007): 306. Cf. Hugh J. McCann, “God, Sin, and Rogers on Anselm,” Faith and Philosophy 26 (October 2009): 420-431.

[14] McCann, Creation, 129.

[15] Hugh J. McCann, “On Grace and Free Will,” in Calvinism and the Problem of Evil (2016), 184-185.

[16] McCann, Creation, 131.

[17] Katherin Rogers, “Anselm Against McCann on God and Sin,” Faith and Philosophy 28 (October 2011): 205.

[18] Kathryn Tanner, “Human Freedom, Human Sin, and God the Creator,” in The God Who Acts, 114. Also see W. Mathews Grant’s discussion of moral evil and double agency: Free Will and God’s Universal Causality (2019), chap. 7.

[19] See David B. Burrell’s defense of Tanner’s formulation of double agency: “Divine Action and Human Freedom in the Context of Creation,” in The God Who Acts, 103-109. He expressly rejects the libertarian contention “that free human actions must be carried out in a space ‘independent’ of the creator’s activity, so that their ‘autonomy’ can be assured” as metaphysically incoherent (107).

[20] Quoted by Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (1988), 96.

[21] Tanner, “Human Freedom,” 127.

[22] Ibid., 129. Cf. W. Mathews Grant, “Aquinas on How God Causes the Act of Sin Without Causing Sin Itself,” The Thomist 73 (2009): 455-496.

[23] Ibid., 112. “God is the ultimate explanation for all that is. To say that sin is an exception to the premise of God as creator is therefore to say that sin is ultimately without explanation; it is what, by all rights, should not exist in a world that God creates. If a good God is the ultimate explanatory principle according to our picture, is not this inexplicable character of the coming to be of sin what one should expect?” (ibid., 133).

[24] Ibid., 133-134.

[25] Ibid., 131.

[26] McCann, “Divine Providence.”

[27] Tanner, 135.

[28] See Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity (2001).

[29] Tanner, “Human Freedom,” 135.

[30] Tanner, Jesus, 59.

The Bridegroom Is Late

Judgment, the Mercy of Delay, and the Becoming of Love

I. I Do Not Like This Parable

I do not like the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids.

There. I’ve said it.

I sympathize with the five foolish young women. I am irritated with the five supposedly wise ones, who refuse to share their oil. And I am particularly annoyed with the Bridegroom, who arrives at an outrageously late hour and then refuses admission to those who were insufficiently prepared for his tardiness.

Really, sir. A little consideration for the wedding party would not have gone amiss.

And apparently these were not ten young women carrying charming little terracotta lamps, each with a small reservoir of olive oil. They were probably carrying torches—proper wedding-procession torches, requiring considerably more than a small container of fuel.

Imagine preparing for an evening’s festivities, waiting for the arrival of the bridegroom, only to discover that he has adopted a quite elastic understanding of punctuality. Midnight comes. The young women have fallen asleep. Suddenly someone announces that the bridegroom has arrived, and five of the women discover that they have brought no additional oil for their torches.

Their companions refuse to share. They send them off to purchase more oil, presumably from some enterprising first-century merchant with remarkably accommodating business hours.

And when the five women finally return, the door has been shut.

They plead for admission.

The Bridegroom replies, “I do not know you.”

I protest.

Not because I wish to make light of Jesus’ warning, but precisely because I take it seriously. Something about this story ought to disturb us, and I am unwilling to make its disturbing features disappear by identifying the oil with a convenient symbolic virtue.

I’ve heard plenty of interpretations over the decades. Faith. Hope. Charity. Good works. The Holy Spirit. Perseverance. Sexual purity. The catalogue of proposed meanings is nearly inexhaustible. Almost like the widow of Zarephath’s unfailing jug of oil.

The oil in this parable has carried more theological freight than any substance ought reasonably to bear.

But perhaps our very determination to discover what the oil—and every other element—symbolizes has prevented us from noticing what the story is actually about.

The Bridegroom is delayed. For a long time.

And during that delay, things happen.

People make choices. Relationships grow or disintegrate. Gifts are cultivated or buried. Servants care for their companions or begin to abuse them. The hungry are fed or neglected. The stranger is welcomed or turned away.

In other words, life happens.

And when the Bridegroom finally arrives, his coming reveals what has been happening during his apparent absence.

The delay has not created the truth of the human heart.

It has disclosed it.

II. A Wedding in a World Not Our Own

Before pressing the theological question, however, we should examine something about the wedding itself.

The Greek word commonly translated “lamps” is lampades, which may refer to torches. Recent scholarship, particularly Michael Peppard’s examination of the language and ancient wedding iconography, offers a strong case that torches are exactly what Matthew has in mind.¹

This makes considerable historical sense.

Ancient Mediterranean weddings could involve nighttime processions, accompanied by songs, lights, family members, and friends. The procession might include the bridegroom approaching the bride’s household and the participants subsequently accompanying the couple to the place of celebration.

The young women in Matthew’s story may have been members of a party that went out to receive the approaching bridegroom and join the procession.

The precise details are uncertain. Wedding customs differed across communities, and we should be especially wary of treating customs documented centuries later as though they supplied a photographic record of weddings in first-century Galilee.

Nevertheless, we can imagine the broad setting.

The young women are participants in the ceremony, and their task requires illumination. Without functioning torches, they cannot fulfill their role.

Matthew calls them parthenoi, commonly translated “virgins.” In this social setting, the word likely identifies young unmarried women, ordinarily presumed to be sexually inexperienced. It does not imply that they have undertaken a religious vocation of perpetual virginity.

More importantly, all ten are parthenoi.

Nothing distinguishes the wise from the foolish in matters of sexual morality.

The distinction concerns preparedness for the procession, not virginity.

And then, there is the bride.

Where is she?

Matthew never tells us.

This is inconvenient for interpreters who want to identify the bridegroom, the nymphios, with Christ, the bride with the Church, and the ten young women with some other identifiable ecclesiastical body. Good Christians, perhaps, and not-so-good Christians.

But a parable is not a theological crossword puzzle in which every character must correspond to an independently identifiable doctrine.

This is a perennial temptation in biblical interpretation: allegory becomes so elaborate that the interpreter’s ingenuity displaces the narrative’s own governing concern. Every object must signify something. Every character must represent someone. Eventually, the story itself disappears beneath the weight of its supposed meanings.

In this narrative, the main story concerns ten young women preparing to welcome a bridegroom.

The bride’s absence from the narrated action should not be repaired by an elaborate allegory that really isn’t there.

Indeed, this is a fundamental interpretive discipline: the significance of a parable ordinarily emerges from the movement of the story, not from assigning a separate spiritual meaning to every object and character.

Which brings us back to the oil.

The text never explains what the oil symbolizes.

Matthew tells us that the foolish women brought their torches but took no oil with them, while the prudent women brought oil in containers along with their torches. The distinction concerns their provision for an unexpectedly lengthy wait.

The presence or absence of that additional oil is central to the story—not necessarily what the oil is supposed to symbolize.

The lack of oil exposes a failure of preparedness.

That does not make the oil unimportant. It makes its narrative function more important than our determination to identify its supposed spiritual meaning.

And what about the five prudent women who refuse to share?

The story tells us clearly why they refuse: they fear that there will not be enough for everyone.

But reporting their refusal does not necessarily commend it as an exemplary act of Christian charity.

Parables often employ characters whose behaviour cannot be taken as straightforward prescriptions for discipleship.

The prudent women are prepared for the procession. That is their main role in the story. It does not follow that every action they take is exemplary.

There is, moreover, an arresting detail.

All ten women fall asleep.

The wise sleep.

The foolish sleep.

Yet the parable concludes with Jesus’ command to keep awake.

Obviously, then, the distinction cannot be between those who remain literally conscious and those who succumb to fatigue. Whatever watchfulness means, it must involve something other than the avoidance of physical sleep.

And that observation takes us from the smaller details of the wedding to Matthew’s larger theological concern.

III. The Delay Reveals the Heart

To appreciate this larger issue, we must look at the context of the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids.

It does not stand alone.

It occurs within Matthew’s larger discourse concerning the coming of the Son of Man, the unexpected arrival of judgment, and the accountability of those who have lived during the period of apparent absence.

The sequence deserves to be read as a whole.

In Matthew 24, Jesus describes the unexpected coming of judgment by comparing it to the days of Noah. People go about their ordinary activities. They eat, drink, and marry. Suddenly, the familiar world is interrupted—and not necessarily by the “Rapture” of popular dispensational imagination.²

Two people are working in a field. One is taken, the other left.

Two women are grinding grain. One is taken, the other left.

The imagery is unsettling, not least because it describes the disruption of ordinary human companionship.

Then comes the story of the faithful and unfaithful household slave.

The master is absent.

The faithful servant continues attending to the needs of the household.

But another servant concludes that the master has been delayed and begins beating his fellow servants and indulging himself.

The master’s unexpected return reveals the servant’s conduct.

And the punishment is shockingly violent. Matthew employs a verb whose literal sense is to cut in two, followed by an assignment to the company of hypocrites, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

This may be rhetorical hyperbole, but we cannot make the violence harmless simply by calling it an idiom.

Matthew’s language of judgment is genuinely severe.

Nevertheless, the servant’s offence is something understandable, all too familiar, and painfully contemporary.

During the master’s absence, he has turned against his fellow servants.

He has used his entrusted position to dominate rather than serve.

He has transformed stewardship into violence.

Might the terrible violence of the master’s judgment also disclose the truth of what the servant has already done to his fellows—fracturing and darkening the very communion he was entrusted to preserve?

The punishment remains disturbing. But the possibility that it reveals the character of the servant’s own conduct deserves our attention.

Then comes the parable of the ten young women.

Another delay.

Another unexpected arrival.

Another disclosure of what has occurred during the interval.

And another exclusion.

Next comes the parable of the entrusted talents. The master departs, leaving considerable resources with three servants. Two put what they have received to work. The third buries his talent.

Again, an absence.

Again, a return.

Again, a reckoning.

Finally, Matthew brings the discourse to its breathtaking climax in the judgment of the nations.

The Son of Man comes in glory and separates the sheep from the goats.

And what distinguishes them? What is the criterion of judgment?

The hungry were fed or neglected.

The thirsty received water or were ignored.

The stranger was welcomed or turned away.

The naked were clothed or left exposed.

The sick and imprisoned were visited or abandoned.

The Son of Man identifies himself with the vulnerable neighbour, who should have been loved as oneself, out of love for God with all one’s heart, soul, and mind.

Here Matthew gives us something considerably more substantial than a catalogue of religious qualifications.

He gives us the revelation of the life of the Kingdom.

Yet we should not flatten all these stories into a simplistic allegory of charity. The failures are different. The violent steward and the unprepared bridesmaids have not committed identical offences.

What unites the scenes is not a uniform catalogue of sins but a recurring narrative movement.

The time of apparent absence reveals the character of participation in the Kingdom—or refusal—already taking shape within human life.

Judgment brings that hidden history into the light.

IV. The Line Through Every Human Heart

There is a danger in reading these stories as though Matthew were dividing humanity into two permanently identifiable populations.

The good people and the bad people.

The saved and the damned.

The wise and the foolish.

But is human existence ever so neatly arranged?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously observed that the line separating good and evil passes through every human heart.³

This is a more adequate anthropology than imagining that some people are altogether wise while others are essentially and irredeemably foolish.

We know something of the world in which these divisions occur.

It is the world of the Tower of Babel.

A world of fractured relationships, competing languages, distorted desires, rival purposes, and broken communion.

Humanity has become divided against itself.

And each human person experiences something of that division within.

When we are honest with ourselves, we see in the light of truth even now that we are generous and selfish, courageous and afraid, capable of genuine love and susceptible to terrible indifference.

Sometimes catastrophe reveals unexpected goodness. Sometimes it exposes cruelty in those we supposed respectable.

And sometimes we discover both possibilities within ourselves.

Catastrophe does not necessarily manufacture the distinctions it reveals. It brings into visibility what ordinary circumstances have concealed.

There is something analogous in Matthew’s eschatological discourse.

The coming of the Son of Man reveals the truth of human participation in the coming Kingdom, the Kingdom of God that Jesus announced as “at hand.”

But we must distinguish the disclosure of division from the divine purpose for creation.

Babel is not the final word of biblical history.

Pentecost does not abolish the plurality, the magnificent array of differences, of human languages. It makes communion possible through them.

Sameness and uniformity comprise identification, not communion.

Communion requires difference.

After all, the communion of the Holy Trinity is not the abolition of the distinction between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Nor does the redemption of humanity require the dissolution of personal particularity into some vast, undifferentiated spiritual substance.

And in the New Jerusalem, the nations bring their glory into the city, while the leaves of the tree of life are for their healing.

The movement is not from human particularity into undifferentiated sameness.

The movement, rather, is from estrangement into communion.

The fractures are real.

The wounds require healing.

But neither the fractures nor the wounds constitute humanity’s ultimate identity.

Nor should we confuse the wounds of division with the particularities that make communion possible in the first place.

Judgment reveals the divisions of Babel; redemption heals those divisions without abolishing the persons who bear their history.

Here we may understand justification as something considerably more expansive than the judicial acquittal of individual sinners.

Justification is God’s making right of what has gone wrong: the healing of every wound, the overcoming of injustice, the removal of every sting, and the cleansing of every stain of sin and death.

Jesus is the Justifier.⁴

This does not make judgment unnecessary.

Quite the opposite.

One cannot heal what one refuses to acknowledge.

The judgment of love must be truthful, for love that refuses truth cannot heal.

But the purpose of truthfulness is not necessarily the everlasting preservation of everything it exposes.

The disclosure of a wound is not the same as the refusal to heal it.

And the revelation of one’s unreadiness need not mean that one has become forever incapable of readiness.

V. The Kingdom Is Not a Merit Badge

What, then, constitutes preparedness?

Matthew himself offers an indispensable starting point.

When Jesus is asked concerning the greatest commandment, he identifies love of God and love of neighbour as the foundation upon which hang the Law and the Prophets.

This is not a secondary religious obligation.

It is the governing reality of faithful human life.

And in the judgment of the nations, the two commandments converge.

Love of the neighbour becomes the occasion of an encounter with Christ himself.

The sheep didn’t even know that they were actually serving the Son of Man.

They simply fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, and visited the imprisoned.

Their participation preceded their recognition.

Here we approach a central insight.

The Kingdom is not a static possession.

It is not a ticket one purchases through appropriate religious conduct or the possession of an ecclesiastical pedigree.

It is not a merit badge attached to an otherwise unchanged human personality.

It is a living, growing reality.

A mustard seed becomes a tree.

Leaven works invisibly through the dough. In Jesus’ parable, it permeates an astonishing quantity of flour, enough to produce bread for a whole village. Robert Farrar Capon delighted in pointing out the extravagance of this image.⁵

An entrusted gift, like a talent, becomes fruitful through being put to work. It was not meant to be buried.

And love becomes manifest through the giving of oneself to another.

Love that is never given away is simply not love in its fullness.

The parable of the talents deserves particular care here.

The third servant declares that he knew his master to be a hard man, reaping where he had not sown.

We cannot simply assume that this characterization is applicable to God the Father.

Indeed, this is another reminder that the actions and descriptions of characters within parables do not necessarily establish the moral attributes of God.

Nevertheless, we should attend to the servant’s perception.

He is afraid.

Because he fears the master, he buries what he has received.

His understanding of the master shapes his response to the gift.

And this raises a profound theological question.

What if a distorted understanding of God becomes an obstacle to participation in God’s life?

What if bad theology—whether or not anyone recognizes it as “theology”—affects, or infects, prayer, and service, and love?

If God is imagined principally as an acquisitive, punitive, domineering master, fear may become the governing principle of religious existence.

The gift is no longer received as an invitation into fruitful communion.

It becomes something dangerous, to be protected against loss.

The talent is buried.

Of course, the parable itself includes the master’s harsh judgment, which prevents us from dissolving the difficulty merely by questioning the servant’s perception.

The imagery deserves continued critical study, including the real concern that economic accumulation and domination may be too readily baptized as divine virtues.⁶

But Matthew’s wider Gospel gives us good reason to distinguish the character of God revealed in Christ from every cruel characteristic of a parabolic master.

Christ, the incarnate Logos, does not reveal divine sovereignty as acquisitive domination.

He reveals it through self-giving.

And thus he reveals the character of God the Father without reserve.

Self-giving, then, is the life into which creatures are invited.

The gift is not meant to remain buried.

It is meant to become fruitful.

The Kingdom grows because divine self-donation awakens creaturely self-donation.

Not because human beings independently manufacture salvation, but because God invites them to participate freely in the life already disclosed in Christ.

VI. The Work of God

This brings us to a remarkable passage in the Gospel of John.

In John 6:28, the crowd asks Jesus what they must do to perform the works of God.

His answer is striking:

“This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (John 6:29).

The Greek verb pisteuein means believing or trusting. We ought not simply replace its meaning with an elaborate metaphysics of participation.

But the Gospel of John does not leave believing as mere intellectual assent.

To believe in Christ is to receive life through him.

It is to abide in him.

It is to become fruitful through communion with him, as branches abide in the vine.

It is to enter the relationship of divine and creaturely love that the incarnate Son has opened.

Here the economy of salvation discloses what divine life eternally is.

God gives himself.

The creature receives that gift.

And the creature, awakened into freedom by divine love, becomes capable of answering love with love.

Christ is not merely announcing humanity’s destiny from a distance.

He is the realization of that destiny within humanity itself.

In his Incarnation, death, and resurrection, he traverses the condition of fallen humanity and inaugurates the transfigured human life toward which creation is called.

He is the firstfruits of resurrection.

He is the beginning of fulfilled Godmanhood.

Our becoming is therefore not an uncertain movement toward a merely imagined ideal.

It is participation in a reality already inaugurated in him.

This is why preparedness for the Kingdom cannot ultimately be reduced to the possession of something called virtue, faith, or sufficient quantities of spiritual oil.

Preparedness is relational.

It is the growing receptivity of creaturely freedom to the communion disclosed in Jesus Christ.

And because that communion is living, preparedness cannot be conceived as static.

The Kingdom does not merely wait for us at the end of history.

It is already coming.

We are invited to participate in its arrival.

VII. The Mercy of the Delay

We can now return to the problem that started our investigation.

The Bridegroom is late.

The earliest Christian communities knew something of the difficulty this created.

Jesus had proclaimed the coming Kingdom. His disciples expected the consummation of God’s purposes. Yet history continued.

Believers grew old.

Some died.

New generations entered the Church.

The apparent delay of the Parousia demanded theological reflection.

But the New Testament does not offer only one way of understanding that delay.

In Matthew, the delay exposes the nature of discipleship.

In Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, the expected coming of Christ raises the pastoral question of what will become of believers who have died.

In the Second Epistle of Peter, the apparent postponement receives an extraordinarily positive interpretation.

The Lord is not slow concerning his promise.

God is patient, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9).

Here the delay is not merely a difficulty to be endured.

It is mercy.

It makes room for repentance.

And repentance is not simply the experience of remorse. Metanoia is a turning, a transformation of one’s understanding and direction, a reorientation of life.

In the theological language we have been developing, it is an invitation to renewed participation.

The creature who has refused may turn.

The person who has buried the gift may begin to use it.

The fearful may learn to trust.

The indifferent may learn to love.

The fractured may enter communion.

The delay is the time in which such becoming takes place.

Indeed, 2 Peter 3:12 speaks of believers waiting for and, on a natural reading of the Greek, hastening the coming of the day of God.

That is an astonishing expression.

It suggests that Christian existence is not merely passive anticipation.

Our lives are implicated in the coming of what we await. We participate in the Kingdom already at hand and in its movement toward definitive arrival.

Of course, divine consummation is not something we manufacture. The new creation is God’s gift, not the successful conclusion of humanity’s collective religious improvement project.

But the divine purpose does not render creaturely freedom irrelevant.

On the contrary, it awakens and fulfills that freedom.

Matthew’s Bridegroom arrives to disclose what has grown during the waiting.

Peter’s Lord is patient because God desires that repentance and transformation should occur during that interval.

These are distinct theological perspectives, not interchangeable explanations. But brought into conversation, they disclose the twofold character of eschatological existence.

Our participation matters.

And divine patience makes that participation possible.

The Bridegroom’s delay is not the absence of the Kingdom, but the mercy by which the Kingdom makes room for our becoming. Our free participation.

The first purpose of time was not to measure how much life remained, but to make room for communion.

VIII. Bulgakov and the Fulfillment of Pentecost

Sergius Bulgakov gives us a particularly rich theological framework for understanding this process.

In The Bride of the Lamb, he refuses to treat the Parousia merely as an isolated supernatural event that interrupts an otherwise unrelated history.⁷

The consummation must be understood in relation to the Incarnation and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit.

Christ has inaugurated a new humanity.

The Spirit works within creation, sanctifying and transfiguring the world.

Pentecost is not merely a past event whose significance has been exhausted.

It is an ongoing divine activity moving toward eschatological fullness.

In Bulgakov’s account, the Parousia reveals the fullness of Pentecost. The Spirit’s work of sanctification and deification reaches its consummation, and creation is transfigured into the glory for which it was intended.

This vision is indispensable to our understanding of divine-human communion.

The economy of salvation is not a succession of disconnected divine interventions.

It is the historical revelation and realization, within creaturely life, of the communion that eternally belongs to God.

Creation’s freedom is not annihilated by divine fulfillment.

It is brought to maturity.

Nor does history become insignificant because its end belongs to God.

History is the arena in which creaturely persons receive, respond, refuse, repent, love, and become.

Its particularities matter.

Its relationships matter.

Its gifts matter.

Its wounds matter.

And the fulfillment of history cannot be the simple cancellation of everything that history has made possible.

The God who creates persons for communion does not achieve that communion by erasing their personal histories.

Rather, the fulfillment of divine life in creation must include the healing and transfiguration of those histories.

The eschaton is therefore neither the indefinite continuation of fallen history nor the abolition of creaturely becoming.

It is the consummation of creaturely becoming in communion.

And since the divine life into which creatures are welcomed is inexhaustible, fulfillment need not imply a static condition in which nothing remains to be received or discovered.

The end of alienation may be precisely the liberation of becoming into inexhaustible participation in divine love.

IX. A Cosmic Palm Sunday

There is another biblical image that helps illuminate the mystery.

In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul assures his readers that those who have died in Christ will not be disadvantaged at his coming.

The dead will rise.

And the living will be caught up together with them to meet the Lord.

The Greek verb harpagēsometha means that we shall be caught up. The noun apantēsis describes the meeting.

The latter word can evoke the ceremonial reception of an arriving person of importance, and scholars have reasonably compared Paul’s language to the custom of going out to welcome an arriving ruler and accompanying that ruler in procession.⁸

Interestingly, the same noun appears in Matthew 25:6, when the young women are summoned to go out and meet the arriving Bridegroom.

The connection is more than a poetic coincidence, though the shared vocabulary does not by itself establish that both passages describe an identical ritual.

Nor should the analogy be pressed into a complete itinerary of the Second Coming. Paul does not supply one.

But the image is suggestive.

On Palm Sunday, the crowds welcome the arriving Messiah.

In Matthew’s parable, the young women go out to meet the Bridegroom.

In Paul’s vision, the resurrected dead and the living meet the coming Lord together.

And in Revelation, the New Jerusalem descends from heaven, prepared as a bride.

What if the Parousia is the great eschatological procession in which creation goes forth to welcome the One whose coming transfigures it?

A cosmic Palm Sunday.

Not the evacuation of humanity from an abandoned world, but the consummation of heaven and earth in Christ.

This is particularly important because Paul’s immediate concern is not the separation of the saved from the damned.

It is the reunion of those whom death has separated.

The living and the dead meet Christ together.

The Parousia is an event of communion.

And this provides a striking counterpoint to Matthew’s imagery of separation.

The same Christian hope that insists upon the seriousness of judgment also proclaims the overcoming of death’s estrangement.

Here the biblical images must be allowed to speak to one another.

The separation is real.

But so is the reunion.

And the deepest promise of the resurrection is that death shall not have the final word over the communion for which humanity was created.

X. When Eternity Comes to Time

Perhaps our greatest conceptual difficulty concerns the nature of the Parousia itself.

We ordinarily imagine the Second Coming as an event scheduled for some future point along the timeline of history.

Yesterday, today, tomorrow—and eventually, at some unknown date, the return of Christ.

The biblical writers frequently employ temporal language of this kind, and we should not pretend that their expectation was simply a philosophical doctrine of timeless consummation.

Nevertheless, the theological meaning of the Parousia may require us to think beyond the notion of one more event occurring within ordinary chronological succession.

The eternal Logos enters history in the Incarnation without ceasing to be eternal.

Might the Parousia be understood, analogously, as the consummation of history in the eternal life of God?

Not simply the eternal entering history, but history itself being received into its eternal fulfillment.

This does not mean that time was unreal.

Nor does it imply that the concrete events of history are ultimately insignificant.

Quite the contrary.

If the eschaton fulfills history, then history matters precisely because it is capable of fulfillment.

Every genuine act of love, every freely given gift, every reconciliation, every discovery of truth, every particular relationship belongs to the creaturely history that God calls toward consummation.

The Parousia, understood in this sense, is not merely the final dot on a chronological line.

It is the coming of the One in whom the entire line receives its meaning.

Eternity does not simply interrupt time.

It transfigures it.

And perhaps this is why the language of delay is finally inadequate to the mystery.

We experience the promised consummation as future because we inhabit succession.

We wait.

We change.

We become.

Yet the eternal life into which we are being drawn is not merely a later period of chronological existence.

It is the fullness of communion in which time’s gifts are liberated from final loss.

The redemption of time is not the abolition of passing, but the liberation of passing from loss.

What love receives in time, love may carry forward into ever-deepening communion.

And what we call delay may be the very arena in which the historical reality of that communion is taking shape.

XI. Judgment Is Not Abandonment

We must now return to the most troubling feature of Matthew’s parable.

The door is shut.

The five foolish women are excluded.

And the Bridegroom refuses to acknowledge them.

We cannot pretend that the story says otherwise.

Neither can we assume that the narrative’s dramatic ending supplies a complete metaphysical account of the everlasting destiny of the excluded.

A parable ends where its narrated action ends.

That ending may carry the force of a severe eschatological warning. It may be intended to awaken a community from complacency. But whether it establishes an absolutely irreversible condition beyond the reach of divine redemption is another question.

And one that must be argued rather than presumed.

Matthew does not tell us that the five women eventually enter.

But neither does this particular parable describe their eternal conscious torment.

It does not explain that they have become permanently incapable of repentance.

It does not declare that their exclusion constitutes the eternal purpose of God for them.

The story reveals a failure of preparedness and portrays its consequences with uncompromising severity.

But here, I think, we should attend more carefully to the character of that failure.

The five foolish young women are not strangers to the wedding.

They have not rejected the invitation.

They have not repudiated the Bridegroom.

They have not declared themselves enemies of the celebration.

They have come.

They have brought their torches.

They have waited.

They have slept, just as the prudent women slept.

And when the cry announces the Bridegroom’s arrival, they rise and attempt to join the procession.

Their participation is real, but incomplete.

They have entered the preparation without adequately anticipating the demands that the delay would place upon them.

Their failure is therefore not the absolute absence of participation, but its insufficiency.

And this makes the closed door all the more troubling.

For the women who stand outside are not people who never wished to enter.

They are people whose participation has failed to reach fulfillment.

Our theological proposal is that the external exclusion dramatizes this already existing condition of incomplete participation.

The young women were unready.

Their exclusion reveals that condition.

But unreadiness is not necessarily an eternal identity.

Nor is incomplete participation the same thing as an everlasting refusal of communion.

To acknowledge that someone has not participated fully is not to establish that fuller participation can never begin.

To disclose the truth of a person’s becoming is not necessarily to pronounce that becoming forever concluded.

This does not abolish judgment.

It asks what judgment is for.

And perhaps it asks something more.

Might the disclosure of unreadiness itself become the beginning of a new response?

When a person encounters the truth of a failure, that encounter need not leave the person unchanged.

Indeed, repentance frequently begins precisely where an illusion about oneself becomes impossible to sustain.

The light exposes what darkness has concealed.

And exposure may be painful.

But the exposure of what is false can become the beginning of a freer participation in what is true.

If God is the inexhaustible communion of self-giving love, if the economy of salvation reveals that divine life within creation, and if God’s purpose is the reconciliation of all things in Christ, then we must ask whether divine judgment ultimately serves that communion or establishes an everlasting realm beyond its reach.

One possible answer is that exclusion is the final confirmation of creaturely refusal.

That interpretation deserves serious consideration, particularly given the severity of Matthew’s language elsewhere.

But another possibility is that judgment exposes and condemns precisely what prevents communion, so that what is false, violent, fearful, and loveless may be overcome.

The judgment of love need not be gentle.

Indeed, it may be more exacting than any merely retributive judgment, because it refuses to make peace with the distortions that prevent a person from becoming fully alive.

But its severity need not entail abandonment.

The revelation of what must be healed is not the refusal to heal it.

The disclosure of what has been buried is not the decree that it must remain buried forever.

And the exposure of our incomplete participation does not necessarily mean that God’s invitation to communion has been exhausted.

A universalist hope cannot be established merely by wishing the closed door away.

It must arise from the identity of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the purpose of creation, and the character of salvation as the fulfillment of divine-human communion.

But neither may an everlasting exclusion be established merely by treating the end of a parable as the end of God’s redemptive purpose.

The two claims require different arguments.

And the burden of Christian theology is to attend to the whole revelation of God rather than allowing any single image to silence the others.

XII. And Still They Knock

And so we return to the five foolish young women.

They have missed the procession. Their torches have failed them. The Bridegroom has arrived, the wedding feast has begun, and the door has been shut.

I still sympathize with them.

I cannot bring myself to regard their failure of preparation as sufficient evidence that they deserve everlasting exclusion from the joy of the Kingdom.

They were foolish, certainly.

Their preparation was incomplete.

And the Bridegroom’s arrival disclosed that failure.

But foolishness is not an immutable identity.

Nor is unreadiness an eternal essence.

It need not become stasis. Indeed, so long as becoming remains possible, no condition of unreadiness can be regarded as irrevocable.

The Kingdom is the living communion of divine and creaturely love. Its coming is not merely an event for which we wait, but a reality in whose coming we are already invited to participate.

The time of apparent delay is the time of becoming: the time in which love grows, repentance becomes possible, and the divine life disclosed in Christ takes historical form in those who receive him.

And judgment?

Judgment reveals the truth of that becoming.

It shines the light upon our refusals, our failures, our buried gifts, and the divisions we have permitted to grow within ourselves and between ourselves and our neighbours.

As Jesus says in John 3:19–21, the coming of the light reveals what has been done in darkness, while those who do what is true come toward the light.

It reveals the world of Babel, fractured by fear and estrangement.

But revelation is not abandonment by God.

And the disclosure of our unreadiness is not the same as the termination of God’s work to make us ready.

The Second Epistle of Peter goes so far as to interpret the Lord’s apparent delay as patience, the divine desire that none should perish but that all should come to repentance.

What if the Bridegroom’s delay is not an embarrassing postponement of salvation, but the mercy of salvation itself, making room for our free participation in the Kingdom’s arrival?

And what if the Parousia, rather than simply terminating the history of our becoming, brings that becoming into the inexhaustible fullness of communion?

We must not pretend that Matthew’s parable answers these questions.

The door closes.

The story ends.

The warning retains its terrifying seriousness.

But Matthew has told us something else.

Earlier in his Gospel, Jesus spoke of another door.

“Knock,” he said, “and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7).

And then, as though determined to prevent us from narrowing his invitation prematurely, he added that everyone who asks receives, everyone who searches finds, and everyone who knocks will have the door opened (Matthew 7:8).

Everyone.

Now I do not propose that we cancel the warning of Matthew 25 by appealing to the promise of Matthew 7. The two sayings arise in different circumstances and serve different purposes.

But neither do I propose that we allow the closed door of Matthew 25 to silence the promise of Matthew 7.

The Gospel gives us both.

And perhaps Christian hope begins precisely where we refuse to silence either one.

For the five foolish young women are still standing outside the door when their story ends.

They are not cursing the Bridegroom. They are not fleeing the wedding feast. They are not declaring themselves enemies of the Kingdom.

They are asking to enter.

And that is no small thing.

Their knocking is itself an act directed toward communion. Their desire to enter remains alive, even when their previous preparation has proved inadequate.

Might the very recognition of their failure already contain the possibility of renewed participation?

The parable does not say.

But if we have learned anything from the Gospel of Matthew, surely it is that we must be exceedingly careful about declaring that the mercy of God has come to an end.

So I leave the five young women there, not because I believe their exclusion is final, but because the parable has given me no authority to rewrite its ending.

Yet I cannot forget the other words of Jesus.

Knock, and the door will be opened to you.

And I find myself hoping that the five young women have not stopped knocking.

More than that, I find myself hoping that the Bridegroom has not stopped listening.

For the Kingdom of God is a wedding feast, not a board meeting.

And the deepest hope of the Gospel is not that the wise will have secured their places while the foolish remain forever in darkness.

It is that the One who came seeking the lost will not cease to seek until the joy of the wedding feast is complete.

---

Notes

1. Michael Peppard, “Torches, Not Lamps, in the Wedding Parable of Matthew 25,” Journal of Biblical Literature 143, no. 4 (2024), doi:10.15699/JBL.1434.2024.6. Peppard examines the ancient terminology and visual evidence for the use of torches in wedding processions.

2. It is a pity that this passage, as well as others, has so often been incarcerated within dispensational and other eschatological systems constructed without sufficient attention to its immediate narrative setting. The identification of those “taken” in Matthew 24 with believers removed in a secret rapture is not established by the text. The analogy with Noah’s flood is particularly important, since those swept away by the flood are overtaken by judgment. The passage emphasizes unexpected separation, not a detailed timetable for the evacuation of believers.

3. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, describes the boundary between good and evil as passing through every human heart rather than simply dividing classes, nations, or political parties. He further observes that this boundary moves within us over the years, and that even hearts overwhelmed by evil retain the possibility of good.

4. Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 21–22; see also The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 136–145. Rutledge develops the biblical understanding of righteousness and justice as God’s active rectification of what has gone wrong in creation. Divine judgment must therefore be understood in relation to God’s purpose of making things right. This account of rectification does not, by itself, settle the question of universal reconciliation.

5. Robert Farrar Capon explores the extravagant abundance of the Kingdom parables in The Parables of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985). The three measures of flour in Matthew 13:33 represent an enormous quantity of dough, considerably beyond the requirements of an ordinary household.

6. An unfortunate example of reducing the Parable of the Talents to an exercise in economic multiplication was the practice of clergy handing out dollar bills to congregants and challenging them to “make more dollars” for the offering the following Sunday. Whatever one’s interpretation of the parable, the economy of God’s Kingdom should not be confused with the maximization of financial returns.

7. Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 399–400, in the discussion of “Parousia, Resurrection, and the City of God.” Bulgakov relates the Parousia to the fulfillment of the Holy Spirit’s work in creation, providing a theological account in which the consummation of history cannot be separated from the ongoing divine-human process of sanctification and transfiguration.

8. The Greek noun apantēsis (ἀπάντησις, “meeting”) occurs in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, Matthew 25:6, and Acts 28:15. In antiquity, the term could describe the ceremonial reception of an arriving dignitary, in which citizens went out to greet the visitor and accompanied him in procession. Whether Paul’s language necessarily implies a return to earth remains debated. See Darrell D. Hannah, “The Parousia of the Lord in 1 Thessalonians 4.13–18 as an Adventus,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 48, no. 2 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1177/0142064X251367474; and Michael R. Cosby, “Hellenistic Formal Receptions and Paul’s Use of ΑΠΑΝΤΗΣΙΣ in 1 Thessalonians 4:17,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 4 (1994): 15–34.

Breaking the Cords of Fate

“We seem almost compelled,” remarks Hugh McCann, “to think there is some competition here: that when it comes to free will there is no way that both we and God can both have legitimate prerogatives, no way that one can be free without the other being reduced to subservience.”¹ If God wills my decisions and actions, how can they be genuinely mine? If I freely will my decisions and actions, how can divinity be causally involved? The either/or seems intuitively obvious: either we are responsible for our decisions and actions, or God is. We can’t have it both ways. Yet McCann insists we can have it both ways. His solution is, to say the least, provocative: “[God] does not make us act; he makes us acting, so that the freedom that goes with genuine action can still be present.”²

God makes us acting. McCann repeats this clause multiple times. It’s easy to see why one might read it in a deterministic fashion. If the world and its inhabitants simply pop out of God’s imagination as a finished product, like a celluloid movie spooled onto a projector reel, then historical existence would be nothing more than script, each character performing his or her preordained part. We would be no more free than those living under the fatalistic decisions of the Moirai or Norns. How can we do otherwise if God has already written the story? Or to give the analogy a science-fiction twist, perhaps our world is a simulation running within the divine mind, and we are virtual avatars living on The Thirteenth Floor. We may think we are real persons possessing genuine libertarian freedom, but we really aren’t. McCann, of course, knows that the world-as-a-novel analogy can only be pushed so far. He might have made matters a bit clearer, though, if he had added one word to his thesis statement: God makes us freely acting. The point is: God creates us in our liberty.

J. R. R. Tolkien illustrates the problem beautifully in The Silmarillion. When Aulë, the smith of the Valar, secretly fashions the Dwarves out of his desire for children to whom he might impart his lore and craft, he discovers that despite his extraordinary power and skill, he cannot endow them with independent life and wills of their own. Eru Ilúvatar explains to him that the power to make such beings belongs to him alone:

For thou hast from me as a gift thy own being only, and no more; and therefore the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being, moving when thou thinkest to move them, and if thy thought be elsewhere, standing idle.³

Only Ilúvatar can bestow the gift of rational freedom, thereby enabling the Dwarves to think, will, and act as persons in their own right.

Tolkien’s story raises a profound metaphysical question: How can the Creator be the source of our very existence and agency while we remain genuine agents, freely determining our own thoughts and actions? It is this question that McCann’s formulation of double agency seeks to address. Underlying his proposal are four interconnected claims:

(1) God does not exist on the same metaphysical plane as his creatures. He is the transcendent source and cause of all beings and all happenings:

God belongs to an order of being entirely his own, one that transcends completely the order of secondary causes.⁴

His creative causality, therefore, embraces the totality of creaturely existence and activity, including the free choices and actions of rational agents.

(2) God bestows existence directly, without the mediation of any causal mechanism:

There can be no event-causal means—not even the operation of his own will—which God employs as creator. Rather, his will is, in itself, immediately effi­cacious in the task of creation, so that all that is, including rational creatures and all that they do, find their being in the very act through which they are created.⁵

McCann thus denies that natural causation confers existence. Creatures exercise genuine causal powers, yet the effects they produce owe their being to God’s creative activity. The same holds for human willing. Our decisions and actions are truly ours, even as their existence derives immediately from God. For this reason, the relation between uncreated will and creaturely will cannot be understood mechanistically. God and human beings are not bound together by cords of fate:

God’s creative activity is not a determining condition of the being of the world, but an endeavor in which he himself serves as the foundation of reality, the source in which we live, and move, and have our being.⁶

(3) In his eternal act of creation, God brings into being the universe and its unfolding history as a whole, not in temporal piecemeal:

God is timelessly eternal and is engaged in a single creative act in which the world in all its history is produced… Since it is never anything but the being of the world that is the product of creation, the world need not pass away at each instant in order to be ‘created’ thereafter. The existence of the world at any given instant is continuous with its existence at all others, and is owing to the same activity of God.⁷

This in no way suggests that temporal becoming is unreal or ephemeral. It only highlights the radical difference between divine and creaturely modes of being. Every historical event is an ex nihilo making within the one eternal act of making.

(4) God brings the world into being from the infinite depths of his spontaneity and creativ­ity. He does not need to deliberate. He does not need to think things through. He does not act according to a blueprint:

If God truly creates the universe, then there is no plan from which it is created. If there were, his activity in producing the world would be reduced to rote, plodding execution, lacking both the spontaneity and the instinctive grasp of how things should go that characterizes true creation. Notice that it does not follow from this that creation is a matter of an otherwise sterile God simply pulling the universe, as it were, out of thin air. Like all artisans, God brings the resources of his own being to the task of creation, and it is perfectly acceptable to think of him seeing in the world a reflection or unfolding of the fullness of being that constitutes his own nature. But that unfolding involves no prior blueprint. Rather, the plan of the universe emerges just as the plan of a work of art does: in the creation of the thing itself.⁸

If we think these four points together, perhaps we can begin to see the plausibility of the double-agency position.

The question remains: How can God be the immediate creator of our decisions and actions without compromising our freedom? McCann’s answer begins with his understanding of libertarian freedom. He maintains that our willing and acting exhibit three essential characteristics:

1. absence of nomic necessity,
2. spontaneity,
3. intentionality.⁹

These three characteristics belong to our willing and acting precisely as God creates them. Our actions are the immediate expression of God’s creative activity, without being produced through an intervening causal mechanism. The uncreated Artist bestows the gift of freedom as a participation in his freedom. His sui generis agency does not compete or interfere with the agency of his creatures. We may not be able to explain how this can be true, but we can at least see that McCann is not speaking nonsense:

To put the question in classical form, how can I do otherwise if God wills that I decide as I do? The trouble with this argument is that it fails to understand what causal determinism in the nomic sense consists in. It is true that from premises about God’s will and its efficacy we may deduce a description of everything I will ever decide or will. So far, however, this bespeaks only a logical relation between premises and conclusions, and logical relations do not obtain among events. They exist only in the realm of propositions. The mere availability of this sort of inference does not, therefore, destroy my freedom. After all, from the premise that I decide to vacation in Italy, together with a traditional belief—namely, that we can do nothing apart from God’s will—we may also infer validly that God wills as creator that I decide to go to Italy. But we would not want to conclude on that basis that I causally determine God’s will, and still less that he and I determine each other’s wills. What is needed for causal or nomic determination is not just the availability of an inference from laws and causes to the effect, but the relevant sort of ontological relation as well: a situation in which my decision occurs as the outcome of a natural—or in this case, quasi-natural—processthat begins with ontologically independent states and events that act upon me, rendering me a passive player in creation’s history rather than an active one. But that is precisely what does not go on in the relationship between God and his creatures. The operation of his will is not an event independent of my willing; there is nothing “left over” if we subtract my act of deciding from God’s act of creating it.¹⁰

If in a single eternal act God creates me and the world from nothing, then at no point in my temporal existence is there an independent me for God to manipulate, determine, or compel. There is simply contingent me, deciding, acting, and blundering along in all of my libertarian glory. Hence the mere reiteration of the either/or—either we are causally responsible for our actions or God is—hardly constitutes a compelling objection to McCann’s presentation; it is this either/or that he rejects. When God creates the world ex nihilo, his making, as Herbert McCabe liked to say, does not make a difference to anything. The divine act is of a radically different order. He brings into being beings that, considered apart from their Creator, are absolutely nothing at all—such is their radical ontological dependence. In the words of Robert Barron: “Creatures do not so much have a relationship to God; they are a relationship to God.”¹¹

In the popular imagination, the world is pictured as a stage upon which human beings live out the drama of their lives, free from divine interference or control. This picture is intrinsically deistic. What we need to understand is that everything, including our thoughts, intentions, and actions, owes its existence to God’s eternal act of creation:

So divine sovereignty requires that God be in full control of my decisions. A sound understanding of creation seems to lead to the same outcome. The important thing to realize here is that God’s creative activity is as fully involved in the continued existence of the universe as with its beginning, if it had one. That is, God’s sustaining the universe is of a piece with His producing it. There is no power of things to sustain themselves in existence. Such a power would have to be a pure disposition, lacking any supervenience base and any mechanism, active or passive, by which it operated. There is no difference, definable or observable, between this sort of power and no power at all. It is the eternal creative act of God which alone is responsible for the existence of things, and the world’s surviving another second will be as much owing to God’s creative activity as its being here to begin with. It is hard to see, however, how God can be responsible for my existence at every moment without being responsible also for my characteristics. As Malebranche observed, God cannot create a physical object that is in no particular place, that is neither at rest nor in motion, etc. All of these things need to be settled in the production of the object. And in the same way, it would seem, God cannot create me with an indeterminate will—that is, a will that is neither deciding to A nor not deciding to A, that is neither committed to a given intention nor not so committed, etc. So if my existence at the moment I decide to visit Colorado is directly owing to God as creator, then so is my decision.¹²

The point needs to be stressed. God cannot create an inde­ter­minate volitional being who then mysteriously finds within itself the wherewithal to begin willing and acting. Created beings are not self-movers in that sense; only God is. He creates humanity freely acting, right from the start and at every moment.

McCann’s reflections on divine creation may be profitably read alongside the thought of Kathryn Tanner, which is heavily informed by the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. Tanner too asserts the radical ontological difference between Creator and creatures, thereby excluding competition between divine and creaturely agency:

God acts in the mode of creator whatever the aspect of created existence at issue: existing, acting, relating to others, finding a new life in Christ. From the most general to the most specific features of existence, all that the creature is it owes to God as the creator of the world… The relation must be said to be all inclusive or universally extensive: everything nondivine, in every respect that it is, is dependent upon God’s creative activity, which brings it forth… Nondivine existence maintained by God’s creative power constitutes, therefore, a whole plane or level of nondivine existence, inclusive of every item or order that is or happens or becomes in the world as we know it.¹³

Like McCann, Tanner insists that the divine act of creation results in a direct and immediate relation of dependence upon God:

Picture the plane of nondivine existence (which is the whole of the world as we know it) suspended in existence at each and every one of its points, and therefore in its entirety, by God’s creative action. In such a picture every nondivine being in every respect owes all that it is directly to God whatever its rela­tions with other nondivine beings, the specific natures of those relations, their presence or absence, etc.¹⁴

And also like McCann, Tanner asserts that God’s providential plan for the world must always succeed. It cannot be thwarted by the free actions of rational beings:

Because all that is nondivine is the consequence and not the condition of God’s creative calling forth or holding up, one should say, finally, that God’s creative intention for the world cannot be hindered, diverted or otherwise redirected by creatures. Lacking any defect or internal principle of corruption, moreover, God’s creative calling forth is indeed unconditionally and necessarily efficacious. Expressing the idea in the oft-used terms of “willing” and “intending,” a theologian of our ilk asserts that what God wills for the world as its creator must happen in just the way God wills… God creates immediately, without any process in which creatures might figure, so there is nothing to get in the way; God creates without any exception so there is nothing besides the effects of God’s own creative calling forth to complicate it.¹⁵

In this Thomistic metaphysical vision, competition between divine and creaturely causality is excluded. God is not one actor among others within a single plane of cooperating or competing causes. Creator and creature do not stand alongside each other, nor do they interact in the way that finite beings do. To think otherwise is to make a category mistake:

According to our picture, if a creature exercises any power at all, it does so on a different plane or axis, so to speak, from that along which God’s creative agency is exercised. God works to hold the whole of that created plane in existence and does not work within it. If a nondivine cause works to produce an effect, it does so only insofar as it is held up into existence in those respects by God. No matter how genuine the creature’s power, that does not render superfluous, therefore, God’s own working.¹⁶

Created causes are part of the world that God has called into existence and are thus enveloped within his providence.

Tanner identifies three common objections to the compatibility of divine creative agency with human freedom:

(1) If God causes me to choose, the choice is no longer a matter of my own choosing.

She answers: “If God creatively calls forth someone’s choosing, God’s creative action is not replacing that human being’s choosing. Indeed, the human agent itself choosing is what God holds up into being. God’s calling forth of the human being’s choosing does not alienate the human being’s power to choose. On the contrary, according to our picture it brings it about as something that is the human being’s own.”¹⁷

McCann concurs.

(2) If God causes me to choose, he may well be making me to choose a course of action against my will.

She answers: “Since according to our premises God’s creative calling forth extends to the whole of what happens, it is a mistake to isolate a human being’s choice as what God brings about so as to suggest that God is not also bringing about the human agent in its very moving of itself to choose. When God brings about a human being in its choosing, the choice remains, therefore, a matter of the human being’s own inclinations so to choose.”¹⁸

McCann concurs.

(3) If God brings me to make a choice, then I’m not the one doing the choosing but God is choosing for me.

She answers: “If human choosing is always dependent in this way upon God’s will for it, it no longer makes sense to talk about God forcing someone to choose what he or she would otherwise not choose. The creature has no inclinations to choose except for the ones God gives. The human being may have had inclinations to the contrary a moment before, but given God’s calling forth of a change in them, the creature has just those inclinations, which God intends, in the next moment, and no others.”¹⁹

McCann concurs, with one qualification. Given his libertarian commitments, he insists that inclinations and motives do not necessitate human choices.

So far so good. McCann and Tanner appear to be on the same page. Both are faithfully working out the logic of divine transcendence. There is, however, an important difference between them. McCann explicitly affirms libertarian freedom, whereas Tanner maintains that her account of divine creative agency is compatible with both libertarian and compatibilist construals of human freedom. She leaves the philosophical question open. “A theologian holding our picture,” she remarks, “cannot deny that, given God’s infallible working, human beings must choose when and what God wills.”²⁰ But what does the must mean in this context? Does it compromise the libertarian freedom that Tanner believes her account can accommodate?

What then does the inability of a human agent to do otherwise than God wills mean if the human agent’s choice is not necessitated by any created conditions? A theologian who holds to our picture of God as creator might claim that this is an inability like that whereby I say that insofar as I am choosing to do something I cannot choose not to so choose. This inability to do otherwise would be like the creature’s inability to do other than what God wills in that it would hold even under the most libertarian of circum­stances. All it means is that I cannot choose and not choose to do the same thing at the same time. If I am choosing to do it at T, I cannot choose not to at T. But this sort of inability does not indicate any real inability not to choose at T what I do choose. If the analogy holds, I am not free to choose to do anything at T other than what God wills that I choose to do at T, but this also says nothing about any real inability of mine at T to do something else.²¹

Even if, at the creaturely and existential level, I possess the liberty to do otherwise, the fact remains that “my choosing as God wills me to choose follows with the same necessity as my choosing as I do when I am so choosing.”⁠²² We freely choose what God wills us to choose, and what God wills us to freely choose we choose. This is the paradoxical necessity intrinsic to our condition as beings ontologically dependent upon the Holy Transcendence—not the necessity of fate but the freedom of double agency. There is no God-free zone within God’s good creation.²³

One burning question yet remains to be addressed: Given the double agency construal of the Creator–creature relation, is God the author of sin?

(cont)

 

Footnotes

[1] Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, 110.

[2] Ibid., 108.

[3] J. R. R. Tolkien, “Of Aulë and Yavanna,” The Silmarillion, chap. 2.

[4] McCann, 103.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 103.

[7] Ibid., 28. See “The Eternal Now That Is Not Now,” Eclectic Orthodoxy (30 November 2016).

[8] McCann, 173.

[9] McCann, Creation, 101-103.

[10] Ibid., 105.

[11] Robert Barron, Catholicism, 76.

[12] Hugh J. McCann, “Divine Sovereignty and the Freedom of the Will,” Faith and Philosophy, 12 (October 1995): 586-587.

[13] Kathryn Tanner, “Human Freedom, Human Sin, and God the Creator,” in The God Who Acts (1994), 112-113. Tanner’s formulation of double agency flows from her exposition of God’s noncontrastive transcendence: God and Creation in Christian Theology (2004).

[14] Ibid., 113-114. Also see “The Grammar of Transcendence,” Eclectic Orthodoxy (15 April 2015).

[15] Tanner, 114.

[16] Ibid., 118.

[17] Ibid., 124.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid., 127.

[21] Ibid., 128.

[22] Ibid.

[23] For an extended treatment of double agency, see W. Matthews Grant, Free Will and God’s Universal Causality: The Dual Sources Account (2019).

The World is a Novel in the Mind of God

Can God determine our actions? One need not think more than a second or two. Of course he can. If CIA brainwashers and television advertising can cause us to act in specific ways, then the Creator of the universe certainly can. Let’s rephrase the question: Can God determine our actions without violating our freedom and autonomy? Here the spirits divide between libertarians and compatibilists. The former believe that divine agency and human agency are mutually exclusive. Our actions are free only if we might have done otherwise. To the extent that they can be sufficiently explained by a set of nomic conditions that temporally or logically precede them, I live in a state of thralldom and do not enjoy genuine autonomy. If God causes my actions, then they are not my actions and I am reduced to the status of puppet. In the words of Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.” Compatibilists, on the other hand, claim that free agency is compatible with divine determination. What is crucial is that I am the source of my determinations. Libertarian freedom or determinism—they seem to be the only options. Or are they?

In Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Hugh McCann asserts a version of double agency that seeks to split the difference. Contemplate the relationship between an author of a novel and the characters he or she creates:

The author does not belong to the world she creates, nor do her characters and their actions exist as an event-causal consequence of anything she does. Rather, their first existence is in her creative imagination, and they are born and sustained in and through the very thoughts in which she conceives them, and of which they are the content. The interesting thing about this relation­ship is that it is too close to permit the author’s creative activity to damage her characters’ freedom. On the contrary, it is perfectly legitimate for her to present them as free and responsible beings. Indeed, it is not even possible for the author to enter into the world and interact with her characters in such a way as to undermine or pervert their integrity as agents. Only other char­acters in the novel can do that—subject, of course, to the will of the author.¹

A good story draws us into its world, and once we are in that world, we do not experience the characters as playing out a script—unlike, say, the robots in Westworld. The fictional charac­ters enjoy an integrity of their own. They live out their lives in credible, consistent, and convincing fashion. Even when a character surprises us, it is the character, not the author, who surprises. Only poorly written stories shock us out of the narrative and return us to the “real” world. Some novelists, such as J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, go to remarkable lengths to create imaginative universes that are compelling and utterly convincing.

I draw your attention to this sentence from the above quotation: “The interesting thing about this relationship is that it is too close to permit the author’s creative activity to damage her characters’ freedom.” McCann seems to be suggesting that fictional characters enjoy a genuine measure of freedom because they live within the imagination of the novelist. They are not external objects that can be manipulated or meddled with. The relationship is too intimate, too immediate for interfer­ence. Dorothy Sayers might disagree with McCann here: his proposal underesti­mates the “element of pure craftsmanship” that is necessary to the creation of a good story. “Neverthe­less,” she con­cedes, “the free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril.”² A fictional world is not the real world, of course, but McCann still finds the analogy illuminating:

As I see it, our relation to our creator is much the same. We, of course, have more than a mental existence; we are real. But we too are brought to be and sustained in being entirely in and through our creator’s will. We are not self-creating in any way, and we can no more engage in decision and action apart from our creator’s will than can the creatures of fiction. Here, too, however, the relationship is too close to undermine our freedom. God does not, in creating us, act upon us, or produce any intervening cause, even an act of will on his part, that somehow makes us do what we do. There is indeed an exercise of his creative power, but in it he simply becomes the ground of our being, holding us in existence as the content of his creative act. God does not, that is to say, alter our nature or that of our actions merely by providing for our existence. This, I claim, permits all that legitimately belongs to responsible freedom to characterize our actions, just as it does those of fictional creatures. The author of the novel never makes her crea­tures do something; she only makes them doing it. It is the same with us and God. He does not make us act; he makes us acting, so that the free­dom that goes with genuine action can still be present. To think otherwise is to confuse providing for the existence of something and tam­per­ing with its nature. Nor should God’s action as creator lead us to worry about our integrity as agents—about whether we will turn out to have a substantive and genuine moral character, or will come across as contrived and manipu­lated, as somehow lacking a true and unified self. There is no reason to expect the latter outcome, especially when an all-wise and powerful God is produc­ing the work. Bad authors may sometimes have to manipulate their charac­ters; a perfect one never does.³

God does not cause our acts, as in deterministic models, nor does he place us on a deistic stage upon which we autonomously live out our choices. God makes us acting. He is as intimately related to his creatures as the storyteller to his tale or the singer to her song. As James F. Ross has so beautifully worded it: “The being of the cosmos is like a song on the breath of a singer.”⁴ The eternal Creator is an artist, not an engineer. Just as he does not create entities without their properties and powers, so he does not create human beings apart from their free agency. God’s creative “Let there be …” simply is our historical existing. McCann thus seeks to move philosophical reflection beyond the “causal joint” that binds divine and human agency.⁵ He takes us to a deeper metaphysical or transcendental level. Perhaps we should not even employ the notion of causality when speculating on divine creation—hence McCann’s suggestion that we think of the relation between God and creatures as analogous to the relation between intention and content:

The existence of creatures belongs to God’s act of creating them, rather than being a consequence of it. One good model for this is the relation between acts of will and their content. Consider, for example, the case of deciding. When I decide to do something—say, to go to Europe next summer—the intention thereby formed does not appear as a consequence of my act of decision making. It is, rather, the content of my decision, so that by the time the decision is over, I already hold the intention to go to Europe. The intention, which can be expressed as, “I shall go to Europe next summer,” is intrinsic to my act of deciding to go there. It belongs to it, in the peculiar way that con­tent always belongs to acts of thinking. What I want to suggest is that the relation between God’s activity as creator and the entities he creates is analo­gous to this. It is not, of course, the same: the content of mental acts has only mental existence, whereas the things God creates are quite real. Nevertheless, I want to say, creatures belong to God’s act of creation in much the same way. We are not products of God’s creative willing, but the very expression of it.

If something like this is correct, the gap between creation and creature is closed. There is no distance whatever between us and God, hence we need not invent a causative process or nexus to fill the imagined void. Yet we are not made parts of God, or descriptive modifica­tions of him—any more than the content of a thought would be a part of a predicate of a thinker. Rather, the relation is analogous to that between a story and its author or a song and its composer. The world has its existence in God, but God is in no way composed or constituted by the world. A second upshot of this view is that any remain­ing vestiges of conflict between God’s activity as creator and the operation of secondary causes is wiped away. They are not even the same sort of process. God’s creative activity is not a determining condition of the being of the world, but an endeavor in which he himself serves as the foundation of reality, the source in which we live, and move, and have our being. That, of course, is as it should be, and it is in keeping with the idea that God is completely involved with his creatures, that his providential care extends immediately and comprehensively to all that exists.⁶

God is closer to us than any cause. He creates the world ex nihilo, and this creating is a causing unlike any that we know, not a nomic determination of events and states of affairs but the conferral of being itself, thus making possible both creaturely freedom and divine providence. One certainly can’t fault McCann for lack of ambition and daring.

Compare McCann’s construal of artistic double agency from what he calls the model of command and causation. In Genesis 1 God speaks the world into being: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” One might interpret the divine word as a com­mand, followed by the intended effect. If divine and human agency is construed along these lines, then outright determinism is the result. God thinks the mental command “Let there be Al Kimel typing these lines on his computer,” and voila! here I am typing. The divine decree is followed by the consequence. God has commanded and so I type. My typing is no more free than the billiard ball that falls into the corner pocket.

We are prone to represent creation in terms of a model of command and causation: thus, in the present case, to believe that if God is indeed creatively responsible for our decisions and volition, these must occur through a mechanistic relation. He must first engage in some activity specifically directed to creation, some sort of command or concurrence, which in turn has the event-causal consequence that we will the things we do. If such were the case, it would indeed be plausible to think that involving God as creator in our decisions must destroy creaturely freedom, for then the relation between the operation of God’s will and ours would be perfectly analogous to what would obtain if our decisions were caused by our strongest desire. The apparent active quality of deciding would be destroyed, and we would be just as passive in deciding as we are in experiencing the onset of desire.⁷

McCann’s proposal of double agency needs to be carefully distinguished from determinis­tic views that envision Deity as causing volitional acts in the same way that creaturely beings cause events. Let’s return to Genesis 1. Instead of reading the text as a display of cause and effect, we might instead read it as an intellectual, even imagina­tive, fait accom­pli. Its wording, McCann suggests, “implies that in the very command itself, the appear­ance of light was achieved, that in the very exercise of God’s creative will, dry ground finds its existence.”⁸ The world in its actuality is the content of God’s eternal decision to create, analogous to the way intention is intrinsic to human decision:

There can be no event-causal means—not even the operation of his own will—which God employs as creator. Rather, his will is, in itself, immediately efficacious in the task of creation, so that all that is, including rational creatures and all that they do, find their being in the very act through which they are created. A fortiori, there is no nexus that binds God’s will to ours, nor is there any causal distance whatever between God and us or any of our willings. Indeed, there is not even causal contiguity. Rather, we and all that we do have our being in God, and the first manifestation of God’s creative will regarding our decisions and actions is not a command that causes those acts, but nothing short of the acts themselves.⁹

McCann does not discuss historical elaborations of the command and causation model (though he does mention the Neo-Thomist Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange as a possible representative). Whatever their differences, the advocates of the command model share one feature in common—they deny libertarian freedom:

Applied to human willing, command and causation models would certainly re­store God to full knowledge and gover­nance of the world, but only at the ex­pense of making his will as governor an independent determining condition of creaturely willing—the very thing any definition of libertarian freedom must rule out. If the relationship between God’s will and ours took this form, the spontaneity of free will would be gone; we would have every right to feel we were mere puppets, and God the puppe­teer. The problem is substantially similar for views that provide God a role in crea­turely action, but treat it as a concurrent or assisting one, in which his action is both independent of ours, and necessarily efficacious with respect to it. Here too it is possible to guarantee God full sovereignty and omniscience; but as long as his action is conceived as independent of ours, the situation regarding freedom ends up no better.¹⁰

These problems are avoided, McCann assures us, if we think together cosmos and divine act. The world is not an artifact of God’s making, abiding outside of him as manipulable object, but the artistic expression and content of his eternal willing: “So God does not create us or our works by means of commanding our existence, where this is conceived as a kind of causal device. Rather, His commanding our existence is our production, and we have our being in His very act of creating us.”¹¹ In him we live and move and have our being.

Yet surely divine determinism remains hidden somewhere in McCann’s proposal. The nagging feeling won’t go away. Watch Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s interviews with McCann. It’s clear that Kuhn thinks that his theology of creation is deterministic. The Texas A&M phi­los­opher vigorously objects:

Even though, as primary cause, God provides for the existence of my decisions and actions, the minimal requirement for libertarian freedom is preserved: there is no independent condition or state of affairs by which my exercises of will are deterministi­cally caused—none on earth, and none in heaven either.¹²

God neither acts upon us as a cue stick acts upon a billiard ball, nor forces us to behave against our will. “That is precisely what does not go on in the relationship between God and his creatures,” McCann insists. “The operation of his will is not an event independent of my willing; there is nothing ‘left over’ if we subtract my act of deciding from God’s act of creating it.”¹³ I am created in my willing and acting, and apart from this willing and acting, there is no me for God to manipulate, coerce, or control. Hence the divine act that puts my decidings and actings in place cannot do violence to me: “God’s creative determination of my decisions does not rule out their being free, for in fact the determination and the decision are one and the same.”¹⁴ If we find ourselves straining at McCann’s logic, perhaps it’s because we still keep thinking of God as a being alongside ourselves rather than as the transcendent source of being. Creator and creatures do not exist on the same metaphysical plane and therefore cannot be coordinated in an ordinary way.

In God’s activity as creator we encounter no event or state that is ontologically independent of our will, and determinative with respect to it. He does not operate upon us, or from without; he operates in our very willing, so that his will is done through ours, but without any kind of forcing. There is no standing condition that is out of our control, no fait accompli prior to the very act that is our decision or volition.¹⁵

When God summons me into existence—and he’s willing me into existence at every moment—he simultaneously wills my decisions and actions. He creates me in my freedom; he creates me freely acting. The divine author does not make us do things; he makes us doing them. His decision that I shall go to the theater to see Dune just is my freely-enacted decision to see Dune. Nothing is forced upon me. I am not compelled and can always do otherwise.

God is responsible for the being of all that is, but He does not produce it by operating to change something else, and He does not produce our decisions by operating on us… And the true manifestation of that is not some descriptive condition determining the nature of things, but rather their very existence. So far as my decision is concerned, God’s creative activity does not, even on the eternal level, stand as a determining condition which settles what I shall decide. It is fully manifested simply in my deciding as I do.¹⁶

The above is a key paragraph for comprehending McCann’s metaphysical vision. Note the unity of divine and creaturely agency. This unity is only possible if we grasp the noncom­petitive relationship between the transcendent God and the finite beings he has made from out of nothing. Here’s another long paragraph that I hope will further clarify:

A useful analogy that may be drawn here is to the relationship between the author of a story, and the characters within it. The author does not enter into the story herself, nor does she act upon the characters in such a way as to force them to do the things they do. Rather, she creates them in their doings, so that they are able to behave freely in the world of the novel. On the traditional account, God’s relation to his creatures is similar. As creator, he is the “first cause” of us and of our actions, but his causality works in such a way that we are not acted upon, and so are able to exercise our wills freely in deciding and acting. If this is correct, then as Aquinas at least seems to suggest, God’s creative activity does not violate libertarian freedom, for it does not count as an independent determining condition of creaturely decision and action. On the contrary: assuming God’s own will is free, there is no event in heaven or earth that is independent of my deciding to attend the concert tonight, and which causes my decision. God’s creative activity does not act upon me or render me passive in any way, for it consists solely in God’s freely giving himself over to being the ground of being for me and all that I do. Accordingly, I can still display libertarian freedom. My decision is a spontaneous display of creaturely agency, free in the libertarian sense because it does not occur through event causality, and because in it I am fully and intentionally committed both to deciding and to deciding exactly as I do. There are no further legitimate requirements for libertarian freedom. There is, of course, something that cannot happen on this view: it is not possible for God’s activity as creator to be devoted to my deciding to attend the concert, and yet that I should forebear to decide at all, or decide to do something else. But that is not because if I were to try it, I would find myself in a losing battle with God’s efficacious will. It is because there is no manifestation of that will regarding my decision short of the decision itself. The impossibility that God’s will as creator and mine as creature should diverge suggests trouble because we can view what goes on either from God’s perspective or from mine. That suggests two events, and a potential conflict between them. Properly interpreted, however, the traditional view appears to call for only one event, and as far as it is concerned, all the impossibility comes to is that I cannot at once both make a decision and not make it. To be incapable of the logically impossible is not a failure of freedom, libertarian or otherwise.¹⁷

It sounds all quite schizophrenic, yet if we stay with McCann’s reasoning long enough, it does begin to make sense, the way things sometimes do when we turn them upside down. At least I think it makes sense. How can God and I both be the subject of my willing? Think about it along these lines:

I alone am the subject of my decision. It is predicated of me, and its defects are mine. What God does is create the event of my deciding as I do. He is, as it were, the subject of my being the subject of my decision—which is really just an expression of the point that we have our being in him.¹⁸

Double agency—think back to the analogy of the novelist and her characters.

But could I have done otherwise? the libertarian asks. Yes, of course. But if you had done otherwise, God would have willed otherwise. But can I do otherwise? Again yes. Just go ahead and do otherwise. What’s stopping you? Certainly God isn’t. You are free to pursue whatever goods you wish to pursue, free to prioritize your motives as you choose, free to follow your desires or not follow them—everything an incompatibilist could ask. “God’s activity as creator,” notes McCann, “operates in such a way that my integrity as an agent is exactly what it would have been if the subject of creation had never come up, and we had concluded that, as many libertarians believe, my decisions and actions have no determin­ing cause of any kind, primary or secondary.”¹⁹ God is too close to us to damage our interior freedom. But given that God creates the volitionary event, this necessarily means that I cannot decide other than what God eternally decides. I cannot simultaneously decide and not decide to go to the theatre to see Dune. “But since the only manifestation of His will in this regard is my deciding,” explains McCann,

all that this limitation comes to is that I cannot decide anything else while at the same time deciding as I do. That, of course, is not a limitation at all… Paradoxical though it may appear at first, therefore, even though our decisions are set in place by the creative power of God, we could, even on the eternal stage, have done otherwise.²⁰

But if I am free to do otherwise, how does that not mean that I am determining God‽ It sure sounds like I have a hook in the divine nose. On a mere whim, I can make God do whatever I want, will whatever I will, like the young John Connor commanding the T-800 Terminator to stand on one foot. What a conundrum, yet it really isn’t. It only looks that way because we keep separating the divine and creaturely side of things; but there is only one event of decision and action, analyzed from two perspectives: God freely wills as Creator and we freely will as creaturely agents.

If this seems obscure, consider again the relationship between the author and her characters. Their first existence is, of course, in her thoughts. But there is no independent mental act of the author that gives rise to her characters; they are born with the very thoughts themselves in which she first conceives them. The same holds of us in our dependence on God for our existence, and it holds of our decisions also. Thus, the first manifestation of God’s will in creating me the person who decides to vacation in Colorado is not an event independent of my decision, but simply my deciding to go there…

True, I cannot decide in opposition to God’s will—and since he is the foundation of my being, not I of his, his will is in that sense determining. But if, in all of my decisions, the first manifestation of God’s will is simply my deciding as I do, then as far as the actual events go all the determina­tion comes to is that neither God nor I can will as we do and yet be willing something else. My freedom is in no way curtailed.²¹

God does not have a hook in our noses, nor do we have a hook in his. There aren’t any hooks, just as there aren’t any causal joints or nexuses.

But this makes divine grace irresistible, we object. What is this but an expression of Augustinian determinism? The objection, though, reveals that we are still thinking of Creator and creature in dualistic opposition:

It is true that God’s will cannot be resisted, but that is not because in the operations of our own will he has us cornered, or in any way overpowered. It is because God’s will is not the kind of thing that can be resisted, in that it does not operate by force. Indeed, where God’s action as creator is concerned, we do not even “follow” his will, in the true sense of the term. There is no point in our lives as decision makers where we are presented with a decision God has ordained for us and then are driven to accept it. Rather, we are presented with specific moral choices to make and to act upon. In making and carrying out those choices we decide and act for reasons—that is, for the sake of certain ends—and in so doing we select our own destiny every bit as much as God does. That we and our doings are known and ordained to be from eternity changes none of that, for the knowing and ordaining is nothing apart from God’s act of creating us as the beings we are.²²

The only difference between his construal of human freedom and the typical libertarian construal, McCann tells us, is that his account presents our decisions and actions as grounded in God as primary cause, “whereas on the standard libertarian view their existence is grounded in nothing whatever.”²³ The divine Creator not only respects our freedom; he is its ground and source. “It is true that our destinies are written,” he remarks; “but the handwriting is ours.”²⁴

Yet we remain uneasy and unpersuaded. Another objection comes to mind: if God creates me willing and acting, then that would seem to imply that my agential purposes are subordinated to God’s purposes, thus destroying my autonomy. We may think we are acting in accordance with our own reasons and motives, but in reality we are being constrained by God to advance his own covert agenda. Our belief in free agency is illusory. We are mere dupes and puppets, no more free than the androids in Westworld, who have no idea that an outside world exists or that they were made for the sole purpose of fulfilling the desires of the guests. McCann concedes the possibility of subordination but denies the negative consequences:

Subordination occurs only when yours or my ends are selected only because they are congruent with the other, so that if they did not suit, one or the other would have to give way. And we may grant that since God wills our decisions for the good he sees accomplished in and through them, it is possible that our ends are subordinate to his in this way. But it does not follow that they are. That conclusion would be in order only if we could be sure that God’s purposes finally conflict with our good as morally responsible agents—so that they can be achieved only at the expense of our exercising our wills in just those ways that yield for us a robust and consistent moral character, uniquely appropriate to each individual. And there is no reason whatever to think such a thing is the case. On the contrary: it may well be that as creator God has no more paramount objective than that we should exercise full autonomy in forming and executing our intentions, and come to display precisely the moral character to which they give rise. Or, if he does have higher objectives it may be that they cannot be achieved except through this expedient. Indeed, it is not implausible to think that nothing less than this is in keeping with the complete and loving involvement with each creature’s destiny that is so often claimed by believers to characterize divine providence.²⁵

I keep pondering upon this objection. It seems to me that McCann might have given a stronger response. If “God’s act of willing that I choose as I do is related to my action not as nomic cause to effect, but as will to content,”²⁶ then my reasons for my action are part of that content. Is not the possi­bil­ity of inappropriate subordination thereby excluded, given that God wills the reasons that lead to my decisions? Or am I thinking about this in the wrong way?

As fascinating and compelling as I find McCann’s reflections on divine and human agency, I believe that his position should be supplemented—or perhaps corrected—by the assertion of humanity’s teleological orientation to the Good.²⁷ We are creatures who are ordered toward God for our happiness and fulfillment, and it is out intrinsic desire for God as our final end that prompts our willing, even when we choose lesser or apparent goods, even when we sin. Our Creator wills for us the very good that we ultimately will for ourselves. It is precisely this truth we do not believe, and because we do not believe, we fear his beneficent sovereignty and construct our fortresses of personal autonomy. Here is our sin and the root of sin. If we had faith, we would not fear God’s control of history nor resent our onto­log­ical dependence as creatures—and so would not worry ourselves about the impossible possi­bil­ity of God sacrificing us on the altar of providence. One way or another, the divine Novelist who is absolute Love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, will bring the cosmic narrative to glorious consummation in his Kingdom.

Part 2

 

Footnotes

[1] Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God (2012), p. 107; emphasis mine. McKann cites Katherin Rogers as an inspiration for his reflections on God as novelist: “How a Perfect Being Creates: Anselm’s Theistic Idealism,” The Anselmian Approach to God and Creation (1997), 223-261.

[2] Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (1941), 54.

[3] McCann, 108; emphasis mine.

[4] James F. Ross, “Creation II,” in The Existence and Nature of God (1984), 128.

[5] The great Anglican philosophical theologian Austin Farrer coined the term “causal joint” in his metaphysical writings. For an excellent introduction to Farrer’s construal of double agency, see Jeffrey A. Vogel, “A Self-effacing Gardener,” Eclectic Orthodoxy (30 December 2019).

[6] McCann, 44-45.

[7] Ibid., 103.

[8] Ibid., 43.

[9] Ibid., 103.

[10] Ibid., 106.

[11] Hugh J. McCann, “Divine Sovereignty and the Freedom of the Will,” Faith and Philosophy 12 (October 1994): 592.

[12] McCann, Creation, 104.

[13] Ibid., 105.

[14] Hugh J. McCann, “Divine Sovereignty,” 594.

[15] McCann, Creation, 106.

[16] McCann, “Divine Sovereignty,” 595; emphasis mine.

[17] Hugh J. McCann, “Divine Providence” (2012), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[18] McCann, “Divine Sovereignty,” 595.

[19] McCann, Creation, p. 105.

[20] McCann, “Divine Sovereignty,” 595-596.

[21] Hugh J. McCann, “Sovereignty and Freedom,” Faith and Philosophy 18 (January 2001): 114-115.

[22] McCann, Creation, 109.

[23] Ibid., 109.

[24] Ibid., 111.

[25] Ibid., 110.

[26] Ibid., 155.

[27] See David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (2019), meditation #4.

 

Hope Springs Eternal

— The cypresses of Edenton Bay, in the azure and argent sky and water of October 23. Edenton, North Carolina.

I’m writing this a few days before Election Day, although you’ll be reading it in print in the Chowan Herald afterward. So I’m writing from a curious little time warp. What is still possibility for me has become fact for you. Whatever was desired or dreaded has passed from uncertainty into history.

But I’m also looking forward to Sunday, All Saints’ Day (November 1st), when I’ll be reading Revelation 7:9–17 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

In my youth, which seems to have been ages ago, I used to be scared as hell of the book of Revelation. Now, I cherish it. I used to read it as a sequence of horrors. Now, I read it as someone in occupied Europe might have heard the BBC announcing the D-Day landings: liberation had begun, even though the war was far from over.

Because liberation is what Revelation is about.

John wrote his book of hope for people already living through tribulation. And tribulation is not merely some future catastrophe waiting around the corner. It is the cold, hard leitmotif of the entire history of a fallen world. Not of Creation itself, mind you, but of its fallenness.

And yet the promise of Revelation embraces the whole Creation: ourselves and everyone else, our animals and gardens, the forests, the sky, and the sea. It is a hope for the healing of everything God has made and loves.

Here is what John tells us:

“Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night within his temple; and he who sits upon the throne will shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water; and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Everything is gained. Nothing is lost.

All that is removed in the final liberation is what wounds and diminishes life: corruption, disease, cruelty, hatred, injustice, violence, and death. Nothing good is discarded. No beloved person is erased. Creation is not abolished but healed, brought forward into everything it was always meant to become.

This is hope. Not a shot in the dark, not wishful thinking, but something substantial enough to hang your hat on.

Hope is more than optimism.

Optimism depends upon favorable outcomes. Hope does not. Hope survives even when historical and political outcomes disappoint us, as they eventually tend to do. “Put not your trust in princes,” says the Bible. And it has good reason to say so.

Injustice still flourishes upon the earth, and we are not permitted to look away.

So here is an additional Beatitude I would like to append to those in the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are those who refuse to despair.

In Sunday’s reading, John sees “a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues,” standing before the throne and the Lamb, crying out that salvation belongs to God and to the Lamb.

Every nation. Every people. Every language. No one has a monopoly upon that multitude.

There have been temporary victories and defeats, triumphs and disasters, governments and empires rising and falling. Sometimes the politics of the world have gone reasonably well. Sometimes they have gone terribly wrong.

But all the while, the calling of Jesus has remained: justice, mercy, compassion, and the solidarity of neighbors. Love of God and love of neighbor have never been suspended while we wait for better political circumstances.

And in the final analysis, salvation belongs to the Lamb.

Not to mortal princes.

There is a remarkable moment earlier in Revelation when John hears the announcement of the Lion of Judah, the one who has conquered. But when he turns to look, he sees a Lamb, standing as though it had been slain.

Perhaps we have been looking for victory in all the wrong places.

No electoral victory constitutes the arrival of the Kingdom of God. And no electoral defeat can prevent its coming.

Now, I don’t mean that hope is simply jumping off a ledge and trusting that someone will catch me. My hope is grounded in everything I’ve learned from my better angels, my family and friends, the beauty of my Father’s world, my Bible, and my church.

Above all, it is grounded in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The New Jerusalem, with its open gates, living waters, and healing of the nations, is not merely a pleasant picture of a distant future. It is the future by whose light I have learned to read the past and live in the present.

And as a silver-haired fellow, considerably older than I once imagined I’d ever be, I’ve come to understand something about the passing of time.

The redemption of time is not the abolition of passing, but the liberation of passing from loss.

The kindness we have given, the beauty we have cherished, the courage we have found, and the love we have shared are not rendered meaningless because the moments in which they occurred have passed. What love receives in time, love may carry forward into ever-deepening communion.

Nothing is lost. All is gain.

So let me send this little message forward through my election-week time warp.

Optimism watches election returns and asks whether tomorrow will be better. Hope looks upon the same uncertain world and asks what love requires of us tomorrow, whatever the returns may be.

Optimism needs favorable circumstances. Hope gives us courage to make unfavorable circumstances more humane.

Hope is not the conviction that history will go our way. It is the freedom to love, act, and give ourselves away even when it doesn’t.

And even when history does go our way, I want to remember that the Prince in whom I may place my trust did not ride into Jerusalem upon a warhorse. He came humbly, riding on a donkey.

And in the New Jerusalem, where the gates are never shut and the sun will never set, he reigns not as a conquering tyrant, but as the Lamb.

He is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Appendix Ω: The Last Laugh

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.

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.

Q: Who gets the last laugh?
A: Everybody.

Epilogue: We Want Proof; John Gives Us Witnesses (John 20:30-31)

By John Stamps

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

1. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 32 (“Diapsalmata”). ↩︎
2. 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.  ↩︎
3. 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. ↩︎
4. René Girard, When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer, trans. Trevor Cribben Merrill (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 134. ↩︎
5. 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. ↩︎
6. David F. Ford, Meeting God in John: Wisdom for the World according to the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 15.  ↩︎
7. 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).  ↩︎
8. 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. ↩︎
9. 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. ↩︎
10. Diogenes Allen, Theology for a Troubled Believer (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 131. ↩︎

From Mud to Glory: St Irenaeus and Deification

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)

1. “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. ↩︎
2. Denis Minns, Irenaeus (2010), 69. ↩︎
3. John Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons (2013), 145. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 185. ↩︎
5. 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. ↩︎
6. M. C. Steenberg, “Children in Paradise,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12 (2004), 15-16. ↩︎
7. Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons (2003), 132. ↩︎
8. Behr, 155. ↩︎
9. Osborn, 115-116. ↩︎
10. Ibid., 115-116. ↩︎
11. Ibid., 210. ↩︎