Naming the Unnameable God

In Book 13 of the Analects, Tsze-lu asks Confucius, what is the first thing to be done in the administration of government. The master replies, “What is necessary is to rectify names.” A curious answer, I would think, and so apparently thought Tsze-lu. Confucius then goes to to explain: “If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” To rule wisely, a ruler must be able to name reality rightly.

Two millennia later, Juliet Capulet would ask, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Her lover Romeo immediately replies, “I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized; Henceforth I never will be Romeo.”

Three centuries later, Alice would step through a mirror into Looking-Glass Land. She eventually wanders into the Nameless Forest and finds she cannot remember the names of anything, including her own. She no longer knows herself. Alice comes across a fawn, who asks her, “What do you call yourself?” “I wish I knew,” Alice replies. She then asks the fawn its name. But it too does not remember. Both nameless, Alice and the fawn meander through the forest, her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they come out into another open field. Here the Fawn gives a sudden bound into the air, and shakes itself free from Alice’s arms. “I’m a Fawn!” it cries out in a voice of delight, “and, dear me! you’re a human child!” A sudden look of alarm comes into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it darts away. Remembering both who and what it is and what Alice is, the fawn knows that the human being is a possible predator. They can no longer be companions.

Names, both nominal and proper, give us the power to grasp and understand the world as it is and to respond accordingly. Yet as Juliet and Romeo discovered, names can also be dangerous. A name both discloses and delimits identity.

But what of God?

The Nameless God

The transcendent Creator, declares the Areopagite, is beyond our apprehension, beyond our comprehension, beyond our naming. How can we name the “beyond-beingly being,” who transcends all boundaries and categories, even thought itself?

It is cause of all;
but itself: nothing
as beyond-beingly apart from all. (DN I.5)

God is nothing—no thing—and therefore no name can comprehend him. Dionysius continues:

To none of those who are lovers of the truth beyond every truth is it permissible to celebrate the thearchic-beyond-beingness, whatever is the beyond-source beyond goodness, as logos, power, intellect, life, or being. For it is preeminently removed from everything whatsoever that is be-ing: from every habit, motion, life, imagination, opinion, name, logos, thinking, intellection, being, rest, foundation, unity, limit, and non-limit. (DN I.5)

And so, Dionysius asks, “For is not this truly the most wondrous name: the nameless beyond all names, which is placed beyond every name which is named ‘either in this age or in the future’?” (DN I.6). Christian Schäfer captures this paradox of the Nameless and Polynymous God:

Since we are unable to state anything about God’s essence…, He is the Nameless, ἀνώνυμος (anōnymos). Yet, since all reality is His manifold theophany, He is the Polynymous (πολυώνυμος, polyōnymos). Paul, whose disciple Dionysius claims to be, says in 1 Cor 15:28 that the Creator is all things in all, τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσι (cf. DN 596A and 596C). He is everything and nothing (πάντα τὰ ὄντα καὶ οὐδὲν τῶν ὄντων: 596C). He should be named simultaneously as nameless and polynymous (DN 596D), with a ‘nameless name’ (DN 596A) …, or with a ‘Name beyond any name’ (DN 596A). As far as the ontology is concerned we could say that God is hidden beyond being (DN 588A), yet reveals Himself through being, which is also an unmistakable sign of His ‘gnoseological’ Goodness. ( The Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite, p. 68)

Yet how can we worship and invoke the God who surpasses every name? How do we name the Nameless?

The Providential Processions

Dionysius is a Neoplatonist, which means that he teaches a metaphysics of participation. As David Schindler puts it, “To speak of metaphysical participation is to say that one thing has what it is with and indeed after and in pursuit of, another: it has its reality, in other words, by virtue of something other than itself” (“What’s the Difference?,” The Saint Anselm Journal 3 [2005]: 1). This well describes the basic logic of Dionysian participation. A creature possesses its being and its characteristic perfections genuinely, yet derivatively: it participates in the causal gifts that proceed from the One. Participation thus expresses both the creature’s real possession of its perfection and its radical dependence upon the divine source from which that perfection proceeds. For the Areopagite, created beings participate in God and thus receive their reality, yet God does not participate in finite beings and therefore remains unchanged. Divinity is “unparticipatedly participated” (DN II. 5)—between Creator and created there exists a relationship of asymmetrical dependence.

Dionysius is also a Christian, which means that he rejects subordinate divine causal principles—hence the challenge of the Dionysian project. Missing from his writings are the Plotinian hypostases of Intellect and Soul. Missing also are the henads of Proclus, intermediate divinities that mediate between absolute unity and the multiplicities of the cosmos. To invoke the immortal words of the Highlander, there can be only One—one source, one cause, one transcendent ground. Dionysius decisively separates himself from polytheistic henology:

The absolute being underlying individual manifestations of being as their cause is not a divine or an angelic being, for only transcendent being itself can be the source, the being, and the cause of the being of beings. Nor have we to do with some other life-producing divinity distinct from that supra-divine life which is the originating Cause of all living beings and of life itself… What I am trying to express is something quite different. “Being itself,” “life itself,” “divinity itself,” are names signifying source, divinity, and cause, and these are applied to the one transcendent cause and source beyond source of all things. But we use the same terms in a derivative fashion and we apply them to the provident acts of power which come forth from that God in whom nothing at all participates. I am talking here of being itself, of life itself, of divinity itself which shapes things in a way that each creature, according to capacity, has his share of these. From the fact of such sharing come the qualities and the names “existing,” “living,” “possessed by divinity,” and suchlike. (DN XI.6)

In his “good-formed processions [πρόοδοι] and manifestations of the godhead” (DN II.4), the One “goes forth to all things while yet remaining within himself” (DN XII.1). “It overflows in one unceasing, identical, over-flowing, and undiminished supply, thereby perfecting the perfect and filling all things with its own perfection” (DN XIII.1). The processions are therefore more than created effects and more than human descriptions of God. They are the differentiated ways in which the indivisible One gives himself as the cause of the perfections of creatures. The divine names designate God according to these emanations of his goodness. Creatures participate in them according to their capacities, thereby receiving their own finite perfections.

John Jones expatiates upon the dialectic of procession and differentiation:

The genesis of what is caused from its causes is the procession of what is caused out of its causes. This procession is a multiplication or differentiation of the cause. In proceeding out of its causes, what is caused is let be, both as distinct from the cause and as other than it. Or, more accurately, the cause proceeds out of itself and multiplies itself in what it causes; that is, the cause is let be or manifests itself as other than itself. Nonetheless, what causes abides apart from what it causes. For although it is wholly differenced in what it causes, it abides as the unity which it is. Moreover, what is caused abides in what causes it and, as such, is not other than it. (Introduction to The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, 43.)

Dionysius speaks of the “divine difference” (DN II.5), the differentiation of the one Holy Trinity through its ecstatic extroversion toward creation. The Trinity remains perfect and ineffable unity in its “thearchic beyond-beingness” (DN II.5), yet in its “good-showing processions” (DN II.11) the One “makes itself many and multiplies itself, beyond every way of unity, by its goodness” (DN II.5). The world thus becomes theophany. Its perfections image the manifold self-communications of the One, yet no image can exhaust the divine cause it manifests. As Dionysius comments: “What is caused has achieved an image of its causes, and the causes themselves are both apart from and founded beyond what they cause according to the logos of their own proper source” (DN II.8).¹

In the act of creation, the infinite, simple, and immutable Deity communicates himself in the modality of finitude. From soup to nuts, all of creation is theophany, icon, manifestation, presentation, appearance, revelation, and sacrament of the one eternal Creator. This is what it means to be a creature in the Dionysian vision. “In Dionysios,” writes Perl, “to be is to be a symbol” (“Symbol, Sacrament, and Hierarchy,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 39 (1994): 320).² Schafer explicitly ties together theophany and the divine names:

For, as God’s theophany, reality reflects the dynamics of the threefold One of which it is its extroversion. Strangely enough, Dionysius inverts this picture completely in his presentation of the Divine Names; God is the unknowable, and whatever we know of Him comes from talking about His Creation, which is not God Himself, but rather His theophany. Yet, Creation is only explainable by turning to God and by combining ontology and theology. (Schafer, 60)

The Divine Names

We name and hymn God from his processions as witnessed in Holy Scripture and manifested in creation. Out with the gods and in with the divine names—or more specifically, in with the intelligible divine names. The names denote Deity in its active determination of created beings. They are not, as Timothy Knepper remarks, “arbitrary signifiers that arbitrarily denote some arbitrary signified” (Negating Negation, p. 1). They are given in Scripture and constitute the metaphysical structure of the created order; they apply primarily to God as transcendent cause and secondarily to creatures:

They are divine processions that source and sustain the basic properties of the cosmos… Thus it is only because divine names are firstly and primarily causes of properties that those properties can be attributed to or denied of those beings that do or do not participate in them. (Knepper, p. 1)

God is being for he creates being and beings; God is life for he bestows life on specific classes of beings; God is powerfor he gives the capacity to act; and so on. The created properties which the intelligible names source are precontained within God in his inexpressible simplicity:

Thus, both nameless and all the names of beings befit the cause of all, be-ing beyond all, precisely so that it would be king of all and all would be about it—being raised to it as cause, source, and limit—and so that it would be”all in all” as the writings say. Thus, we truly celebrate it to be the support, source of guidance, connection, completion, protection and hearth of all, and as reverting [all] to itself. [It accomplishes] these in a unified, immeasurable, and excellent way. For it is not only the cause of connection, of life, or of completion such that the goodness beyond name would be named from one or another of its providences. Rather, it has anticipated the all simply and infinitely in itself: the all complete goodness of its one and all causing providence. Thus, it is to he harmoniously celebrated and named in terms of all things. (DN I.7)

The divine names must ultimately be negated because what they signify is precontained in God by way of ineffable excess and undifferentiated concentration. The finite perfections signified by these theonyms properly characterize creatures; in God they subsist according to their transcendent causal mode. The transcendent Deity exists beyond finitude, beyond goods and perfections, and therefore beyond intelligibility and nomination. Yet he is intelligibly and properly named by his self-revelation in divine creation. The divine names signify powers, but powers of the One; processions and activities, but always of the One.

For the truth is that everything divine and even everything revealed to us is known only by way of whatever share of them is granted. Their actual nature, what they are ultimately in their own source and ground, is beyond all intellect and all being and all knowledge. When, for instance, we give the name of “God” to that transcendent hiddenness, when we call it “life” or “being” or “light” or “Word,” what our minds lay hold of is in fact nothing other than certain activities apparent to us, activities which deify, cause being, bear life, and give wisdom. (DN II.7)

The divine names identify the metaphysical principles that inform the cosmos yet preexist in the triadic Deity who is “beyond be-ing beyond-beingly before all” (DN V.8). They designate the One in a pluralized form. We might think of the intelligible names as verbs rather than proper nouns, for they name God according to his movement out of himself into the world. “Both the divine names and the properties they source,” Knepper explains, “are pre-contained in god in a hyper-unifed and hyper-existent manner; thus there are important respects in which the divine names are true even of the transcendent god” (Knepper, p. 4).

The foundational theonym for Dionysius is the Good, for all the other divine names proceed from and express it. In his treatise Dionysius then presents a hierarchical triad of the divine names: the first comprises those divine perfections that define basic types of beings, the second those that empower the proper hierarchical ordering and functioning of those beings, and the third those that enable the enactment of unificatory ends by those beings.

Why then is the Good absent from the category of the “Divine Names of Ontological Procession”? Because the Good stands before and encompasses the ontological series as the name of God’s universal providence. Dionysius tells us that the name Good “manifests the whole processions of the cause of all,” extending even to “all that is and all that is not” (DN V.1). Being, Life, and Wisdom name increasingly determinate ways in which God diffuses his Goodness into creation. Being extends to everything that exists; Life to everything that lives; Wisdom to beings capable of intellect, reason, and sensation. The movement is therefore one of progressive differentiation: every being participates in Being, and every intelligent being participates in both Life and Being, while the converse does not hold. Being, Life, and Wisdom thus articulate the ontological structure assumed by the procession of the Good as creatures receive the divine gifts according to their capacities. The Good names God’s unbounded generosity that comprehends his processions; Being, Life, and Wisdom name the fundamental modes in which his generosity constitutes the ordered multiplicity of creation.

Conclusion

We return to the question with which we began. How can we name the God who lives in the Nameless Forest? We may do so because he has given himself to be known. Every creature bears the impress of the divine goodness from which it proceeds. The world is theophany, a manifestation of the hidden God, and its many perfections become names by which we praise their transcendent source. Yet every name finally points beyond itself. Goodness, Being, Life, Wisdom, Beauty—each opens upon the inexhaustible mystery of the One who gives himself without ceasing to transcend every gift. Here lies the wonder of Dionysius’s vision: the nameless God has filled creation with his names.

I close with Alexander Golitzin’s summary: “The intelligible names are not things, no longer have reference to objectively and independently existing entities, but are instead windows opening onto the sense—and reality—of God present in his powers or energies… They direct us to, and participate in, the greater sacrament, μυστήριον [mystery], of God’s self-giving love” (Mystagogy, p. 100).

 

Footnotes

1 “In the procession of things from God, differentiation must be considered along with union; differentiation because God seems to distribute Himself, that is, His likeness, into many images, just as the sun disperses its light into a multitude of rays, and one face close to a mirror renders its likeness into many images.” Marsilio Ficino, De divinis nominibus XLIV, in On Dionysius the Areopagite, I:207. Ficino was a Catholic philosopher and priest who lived in the 15th century.

2 “When, through a certain ineffable descent into the things that are, it [i.e., the transcendent Good] is perceived by the sight of the mind in those things that are, it alone is found to be in all things… Indeed, beginning to appear in its theophanies, it is said to proceed as though from nothing into something. What is properly judged [to be] above all essence is also known properly in every essence, and for this reason every visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany, that is, a divine appearance.” John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon 681A.

The Problem of Evil is a Trap: A Discussion of Robert Fortuin’s Apophatic Non-theodicy

Puddleglum Faith: On Converts and Their Reasons

Until a week or two ago, I had never heard of Ethan Muse. But suddenly my activity thread on Substack is getting bombarded by folks talking about him and his conversion to Christianity and Catholicism. This is apparently a big deal because Muse is reputed to be a very smart philosopher; therefore … therefore what? Are we supposed to believe that because an intelligent man with a Ph.D. has found compelling reasons (miracles, really?) for believing that the Catholic Church is the one true Church, that his conversion proves anything whatsoever?

Look, I’ve been down this road. I converted from atheism to theism and Christianity in the late ’70s and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. I had my reasons, including what I thought at the time was a knock-down philosophical argument for the existence of God. It took me years to come to understand that my real reasons were deeper and more mysterious than the ones my intellect was telling me. As far as my knock-down argument for God, it has long been irrelevant to my faith. Maybe it’s sound, maybe it’s not. Heck if I know. It doesn’t matter.

In the mid-2000s, I had an ecclesial crisis of faith and conscience. I fell into a deep clinical depression. After 25 years of priestly ministry in the Episcopal Church, I began seriously asking myself whether I could remain in Anglicanism. A friend encouraged me to read John Henry Newman, a truly brilliant theologian. I read a goodly number of his writings, and he got into my head. As everyone knows, Newman left his Anglican home and was received and eventually priested in the Catholic Church. Newman’s conviction became my own, and so in 2005 I entered into the communion of the Catholic Church and was eventually ordained a priest through the Pastoral Provision. I had my reasons and presented them to others with the strident enthusiasm of a convert, I published them online on my old blog Pontifications. After several years, however, I realized that I had made a terrible blunder. All my “reasons” vanished into thin air. Once again I fell into deep depression. I even began to question whether God existed. One evening I stepped outside and yelled at God. “I don’t believe in you,” I cried. And then I heard myself thinking, “If you don’t believe in him, why are you yelling at him?” I then realized I was stuck with God whether I liked it or not. Puddleglum’s desperate exclamation became my own: “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” As Pascal astutely observed, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” 

In 2011, I was chrismated in the Orthodox Church and re-ordained (my third ordination—does that make me a “real” priest‽). Thoroughly chastened by this point, my conversion lacked all the zealous qualities of a new convert. I became Orthodox because it is an apostolic and eucharistic Church. My only other option was to return to Anglicanism, and that was not a possible option for me. And so here I am. 

So why am I sharing all of this? Because convert Muse has shared on the internet his opinion on the doctrine of everlasting perdition. Apparently he does not find it troubling in the least. He has his reasons, the primary one, I suspect, being ecclesial authority: it’s true because the true Church says it’s infallibly so. Muse is, of course, entitled to his opinion, but the appeal to authority is a weak straw on which to hang one’s hat. His equanimity about everlasting perdition suggests that he has not yet reckoned with what the gospel means for the final destiny of those whom Christ loves and for whom he died.

Anyway, what prompted this article is a Substack piece written by Eric van Evans. Know that I cannot agree with the author’s affirmation, expressed near the end of his piece, of a non-institutional Christianity. The gospel is intrinsically embodied in the Church—in its witness and sacramental life. There would be no gospel of Jesus Christ apart from the Church. Like it or not. 

My counsel to new converts, which I have shared before: keep quiet! You have no business publishing your arguments in defense of your conversion. You do not know your true reasons for your conversion, nor do you know whether your arguments are true. That you presently find them compelling is immaterial. Your true reasons for being a Christian—whether of the Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant variety—may be revealed to you in the future by the grace of the Spirit through the furnace of historical life and suffering.

In the meantime, attend the liturgies of your parish church, say your prayers, repent of your sins, and cultivate your spiritual life and communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Perhaps in a few years you will be ready to be an evangelist of the gospel. Perhaps.

And remember, your heart has its reasons that your reason does not know.

The Ecstatic and Theophanic God

I vividly remember when I first read The Divine Names by Dionysius the Areopagite. I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit with Alice hole into a strange world in which words no longer made sense and the logic of theological discourse had been turned upside-down. Who is this God who is “beyond-beingly be-ing” and what is its relationship to the world? I found the Dionysian vision bewildering, baffling, disorienting … yet at the same time mesmerizing. I didn’t know if I had landed in a story alien to the gospel I had long preached, or whether this is how the gospel looks when presented through a Neoplatonic philosophical lens. All I know is that I was intrigued. And so I decided to remain in Wonderland for a while.

The God Who Emanates

Of the many questions I had, the ones that stood out concerned Dionysius’ doctrine of emanation. The super-essential God does not so much create the world from out of nothing; rather, he brings it forth from out of himself: “For this cause brings forth being in the going out of being” (DN V.8), and in so doing “both makes itself many and multiplies itself by goodness” (DN II.5). And again:

It is differenced in a unified way: being given to all beings overflowing the participations of the totality of those that are good, singly made many, non-wanderingly multiplied out of the one. Since God is beyond-beingly be-ing, and as being is given to beings and brings forth the totality of beings, that one be-ing is said to be multiplied by the bringing forth of all beings out of itself. (DN II.11)

Dionysius uses a variety of diffusive and effusive images to express divine creation:

All of these show that the providence and goodness which are participated in by beings proceed and flow forth out of the unparticipated God in an ungrudging stream precisely so that the cause of all would be beyond all and the beyond being and beyond nature would be wholly beyond-having all being and nature whatever. (DN XI.6)

Indeed, the divine good eros is good through the good. This good working eros of beings—before be-ing: thrown beyond into the good—does not permit it to abide in itself but has moved it to a fitness for doing through the generative thrusting forth of all beings. (DN IV.10)

The cause of all—through a thrusting forth of erotic goodness—comes to be outside of itself and into all through the providences of all beings. (DN IV.13)

To speak of perfection is to proclaim that it cannot be increased or diminished, for it is eternally perfect, that it contains all things beforehand in itself, that it overflows in one unceasing, identical, over- flowing, and undiminished supply, thereby perfecting the perfect and filling all things with its own perfection. (DN XIII.1)

Scholars debate the extent of the Areopagite’s transformation of Neoplatonic procession, but surely a difference is entailed by his elimination of the mediating Proclean henads and, more decisively, by his identification of the transcendent One with the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—from whom all beings receive their being. Andrew Louth argues that Dionysius has modified the Neoplatonic construal in two decisive ways:

First, he qualifies the notion of emanation by insisting that being is derived from God alone; and secondly, he turns the doctrine of divine names into a doctrine of divine attributes (that is, attributes of God, the one God). Emanation, in a Neoplatonic sense, is a doctrine about the derivation of being: being derives from the One, but in the stream of emanated beings, each being receives from the one above it (actually for Proclus, beings that are capable of self-presence, that is, self-conscious beings, are identical with that from which they proceed, and so are in a way self-created)—creation is not restricted to the One, the whole realm of being that flows from the One is creative. Denys takes over the Neoplatonic idea of a scale of being, and also the idea that lower beings are dependent on higher beings, but he rejects any idea that being is (as it were) passed down this scale of being: all beings are created immediately by God. The scale of being and the sense of dependence only has significance in the matter of illumination: light and knowledge flow from God down through the scale of being—each being becomes radiant with light and thus passes on light to beings lower down. (Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite, pp. 84-85)¹

Dionysius has thus radically compressed the Neoplatonic hierarchy of causation. Every being receives its being immediately from the one God, even as illumination descends through the ordered ranks of creation. The transcendent One is therefore immediately present to every creature as its creative cause. What kind of God creates in this way? For Dionysius, the answer is simple: the Holy Trinity who flows out of himself in love.

The Ecstatic God

The God of Dionysius is, in Eric Perl’s phrase, intrinsically ecstatic, “not a self-contained self but always already ‘out of himself’ and ‘in all things’ as their constitutive differences” (Perl, Theophany, 46). This dynamic movement Dionysius names eros and agape. “The divine eros is ecstatic,” he writes… “In an ecstatic power beyond being, it is brought down out of a separation from all and beyond all, to what is in all, yet does not wander out of itself” (DNIV.13). Daniel Heide provocatively describes God as othering himself through his creative processions:

Dionysius … states that the Good “by the fact of its existence (τῷ εῖναι τὸ ἀγαθὸν), extends goodness into all things” (DN IV.1 693B). It belongs to the very nature of the Good to bestow goodness—that is simply what the Good is. For the Good to cease to radiate goodness would mean a diminishment of its nature by which it would cease to be identical to itself as Good and become different (ἕτερόν). Because the Good is not providential, but Providence itself, its procession by which it constitutes all things is the activity by which it remains what it is; namely, the Good-as-Providence. Thus, while the “being-making procession” (οὐσιοποιόν πρόοδον; DN V.1 816B) of the Good in a sense constitutes itself as other (ἕτερόν), this very “self-othering” is, paradoxically, the key to its own timeless self-identity. As intrinsically ecstatic, God’s remaining is his proceeding, and his proceeding is his remaining. (Daniel Heide, “Divine Eros,” Dionysius XXXVII [2019]: 54.)

There is nothing static about this God. He is always in motion, an eternal outpouring of being and goodness, a going forth from himself in love and a returning in love:

The divine eros is like an everlasting circle—moving around in unerring convolution through the good, out of the good, in the good, into the good, always abiding, proceeding, and returning, in the same, and according to the same. (DN IV.14)

Creation is the ecstasy of divine eros!

The God Who Makes Himself Many

Dionysius speaks of a divine movement or procession from the indescribable and indivisible Trinitarian unity to the multiplicity of creation. Through the names, symbols, and images of Scripture and Liturgy, we are given to contemplate the God beyond being who clothes himself “in the terms of being.” Throughout The Divine Names we are presented with a subtle interplay between divine transcendence and divine immanence. We need to be careful not to interpret God’s otherness from creation as distance and difference, in the way two finite beings are distant and different. “Just as the form Fire, as that which is common to all fires, whereby they are fires, is not itself one of the fires,” writes Eric Perl, “so the One, as that which is common to all beings, whereby they are beings, is not itself one of the beings” (Theophany, p. 22). As the form is present in each of its instantiations, so God in his supra-beingness is present within beings, for he is all in all. God is immanent in his transcendence, transcendent in his immanence:

But now let me speak about the good, about that which truly is and which gives being to everything else. The God who is transcends everything by virtue of his power. He is the substantive cause and maker of being, of subsistence, of existence, of substance, and of nature. He is the source and the measure of the ages. He is the reality beneath time and the eternity beyond being. He is the time within which things happen. He is being for whatever is. He is coming-to-be amid whatever happens. From him who is come eternity, essence and being, come time, genesis, and becoming. He is the being immanent in and underlying the things which are, however they are. For God is not some kind of being. No. But in a way that is simple and indefinable he gathers into himself and anticipates every existence. So he is called “King of the ages,” for in him and around him all being is and subsists. He was not. He will not be. He did not come to be. He is not in the midst of becoming. He will not come to be. No. He is not. Rather, he is the essence of the things which have being. Not only things that are but also the essence of what they are come from him who precedes the ages. For he is the age of ages, the “predecessor of the ages.” (DN V.4)

The negations and antinomies of Dionysius’s rhetoric break open the veil between being and the beyond being. But he is not just speaking hyperbolically. This language flows from his Neoplatonic, yet now Christianized, metaphysics. God is the undetermined determination of every thing (“the essence of the things which have being”)—that which makes it to be and to be what it is. Perl elaborates:

We are now in a position to see what Dionysius means when he describes God as not any thing but the cause of all things and hence subject to no name and to all names. The operative principle is the Neoplatonic law that “the things that belong to the effects pre-exist in the causes” (DN II.8, 645D). Since determination is the cause of being to that which it determines, God is the cause of all things in that he is present to all things as the constitutive determinations by which each is itself and so is. God is the “illumination of the illumined and principle of perfection of the perfected and principle of deification of the deified and simplicity of the simplified and unity of the unified … and, to speak simply, the life of living things and being of beings” (DN I.3, 589C). He is present to all beings as being, the universal character common to all beings such that they are beings: God “neither was nor will be nor came to be nor comes to be nor will come to be; rather, he is not. But he is being to beings” (DN V.4, 817D). Likewise he is present to all living things as life, the universal determination by which they are living things as distinct from non-living things. But the determining, constitutive divine presence is not limited to such exalted attributes as being and life, but includes all the features of each thing, which constitute it as that distinct thing, as itself, and hence as a being. “In the cause of all things the paradigms of all beings pre-exist… Paradigms … are the being-making determinations, pre-existing unitarily in God, of beings, which theology calls pre-determinations, and good wills, determinative and creative of beings, according to which the beyond-being both predetermined and produced all beings” (DN V.8, 824C). Hence these “paradigms” or λόγοι contained without distinction in God, are explicitly identified as the defining or determining principles which make beings to be. God is thus present in each being as its determining or defining λόγος, by which it is itself and so is. All the features of all things, therefore, are God-in-them, making them to be by making them what they are, so that God is not only being in beings and life in living things but “all things in all things” (DN I.7 597C). (Perl, pp. 28-29)

Readers of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas will immediately think of the divine ideas; readers of St Maximus the Confessor, the divine logoi. What is important for us to see is the presence of the One in beings as their uncreated cause. Even difference, says Dionysius, may be attributed to God, “since he is providentially available to all things and becomes all things in all for the salvation of them all” (DN 9.5).

We may describe Dionysius’s view as creatio ex Deo, but only if we immediately qualify the God from whom all things proceed as nothing. “It is cause of all; but itself: nothing as beyond-beingly apart from all” (DN I.5). Creatio ex Deo thus becomes equivalent to creatio ex nihilo, which then becomes ex nihilo creatio procedit. In the act of creation the eternal Nothing unfolds itself as that which it is not. The Parmenidean dictum ex nihilo nihil fit (“nothing comes from nothing”) is turned upside down. I thought I was being particularly brilliant when I thought of this, but then I was informed that John Scotus Eriugena stole this from me over a millennium ago:

We believe that he made all things out of nothing, unless perhaps this nothing is he himself, who—since he is extolled as super-essential above all things and is glorified above everything that is said of what is understood—is not unreasonably said to be ‘nothing’ through excellence, since he can in no way be placed among the number of all things that are. For if he himself is at once all things that are and that are not, who would say that he is or is not something, since he is the being and more than being of all things? Or, if he is not something, by excellence and not by privation, it follows that he is nothing, by infinity. (Expos. ICH. 4.73-82)

And Eriugena was commenting on Dionysius! Surely this is compelling evidence for chronesthesia.

Creation as Theophany

Dionysius presents us with a remarkable vision: the ineffable, indescribable, illimited being-beyond-being manifesting, presenting, expressing himself in the mode of finite multiplicity. Although he does not use the word to name his understanding of divine creation, Perl proposes theophany as an appropriate descriptive term:

For Dionysius, then, as for Plotinus and Proclus, the whole of reality, all that is, is theophany, the manifestation or appearance of God. For the entire content of any being is God present in it in a distinct, finite way, and in virtue of this distinction, knowable in that being as its intelligible content. It is just as distinct, or finite, that God is present in the being, or that the being is a presentation of God. For to be “present” means to be given or available to thought, i.e. to be intelligible. And as intelligible, as given to thought, God is apparent, or manifest, in and as the being. To be present, to be manifest, to be finite, to be distinct, to be intelligible, are ultimately all the same, and all are elaborations of the only possible meaning of “to be.” The understanding of being as theophany is thus a strict consequence, developed in the Neoplatonic tradition, of the original principle that to be is to be intelligible.

To say that reality is the appearance of God, however, may be misleading, if it is taken to mean that God is, so to speak, “there,” behind or inside all the appearance, an object prior to and apart from them. If God is not any being, then what is reality the appearance of? Such a question again attempts to reduce God to a “what,” a being, an object of thought, violating all that has been said about divine transcendence and about all being as appearance. When we speak of reality as the appearance of God, we must remember that since all reality is theophany, God, as “that which appears,” is not another being, another member of reality. The doctrine of being as theophany means not that God is and is himself, and also appears, but rather that God is nothing but what is differently present, or appears, in and as all things. To pass from appearance to what is appearing, from being to God, is not to pass from one thing to another thing. Rather, since God is not another thing but the enfolding of all things, to go from beings to God is to gather the whole diverse content of reality together, and in so doing, since being necessarily involves multiplicity and distinction, to pass beyond being. (Perl, pp. 32-33)

Recall Dionysius’s bold words quoted earlier: “[God] both makes itself many and multiplies itself by goodness” (DN II.5). As John Jones puts it: “The cause proceeds out of itself and multiplies itself in what it causes; that is, the cause is let be or manifests itself as other than itself” (Introduction to The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, p. 42).

Critics of the Areopagite often raise the objection that he is presenting a pantheistic construal of divinity. Perl rebuts the objection:

It may be felt that such doctrines make Dionysius into a mere “monist” or “pantheist.” God, he insists, is not something other than the world but is “all things in all things.” Again, if being is nothing but theophany, does this not imply that the world is not real at all, but only appearance? Such objections, however, represent a failure to understand the Neoplatonic metaphysics of manifestation and intelligibility. Dionysius’ metaphysics is not a form of “pantheism,” if by this we mean the doctrine that all things are God. On the contrary: every being, precisely in that it is a being, i.e. something distinct, finite, and intelligible, ipso facto is not God. Indeed, since to be is to be intelligible and therefore to be finite, to be means to be not God. This, again, is precisely why God is beyond being. Every being, then, absolutely is not God. Nor are all things, taken as a totality, God, for “all things” is plural, a multiplicity of distinct intelligible beings. The God of Dionysius is “all beings and none of beings,” “all things in all things and nothing in any,” and in these formulas the “all” can never be separated from the “none.” As all things without distinction, God is neither any one thing nor all things in their plurality. All things, qua all things, the whole of reality, are absolutely other than God. (Perl, 33)

But neither is Dionysius a dualist. The Triune God is beyond being and therefore not another being standing alongside the beings of his creation.

Louth amplifies Dionysius’ theophanic vision in a more traditional Christian idiom:

The world is a theophany, a manifestation of God, in which beings closer to God manifest God to those further away. The world is God’s glory made manifest: it exists to display his glory and draw everything into contemplation of his beauty. The doctrine of creation is necessary to such an understanding of the world as theophany: God is immediately present to his whole creation as its creator; created reality is not, as created, an obstacle to his glory, neither because it owes its being to something other than (or even alien to) God, nor because it is an increasingly remote echo of God’s original creative urge. But if God is to manifest himself outside himself, that implies multiplicity, which in turn implies difference, which must be either ordered or disordered: and for Denys, only an ordered, hierarchical creation could manifest the glory of the One. (Louth, 85-86)

Theophany, the manifestation of divinity, the appearance of God—as I sit outside on my deck, watching the trees gently moving in the wind, listening to the birds, how can it not be that here is the sacramental presentation of the living God, not as some entity hiding beneath the physical but as the divine symbolizing himself in his creatures?2 And if here in my backyard, then also anywhere and everywhere. God is no thing and therefore not any thing that we perceive or intellectually apprehend, yet we see him and know him in everything:

God is therefore known in all things and as distinct from all things. He is known through knowledge and through unknowing. Of him there is conception, reason, understanding, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name, and many other things. On the other hand he cannot be understood, words cannot contain him, and no name can lay hold of him. He is not one of the things that are and he cannot be known in any of them. He is all things in all things and he is no thing among things. He is known to all from all things and he is known to no one from anything. (DN 7.3)

The antinomies are almost unbearable: known and unknown, perceived and yet invisible, available for intellectual cognition but beyond thought. The “all” and the “none” must be kept together if we are to catch the Dionysian vision. “Because God is all things in all things,” Perl comments, “to see anything is to see God in that thing. All knowledge is knowledge of God because all being, all that is given to consciousness in any mode, is nothing but the finite, differentiated presentation of God. Since all things are nothing but God-in-them, there is nothing to be known in anything but God-in-it.” For this reason Dionysius “revels in the contemplation of colors, shapes, sounds, scents, tastes: in all that we perceive, in our every sense-experience, we are encountering God, and the same content, the same glorious theophany, is found not less but more intensely as we ascend to higher modes of cognition” (Perl, p. 93). Our apprehension of the world necessarily entails apprehension of the divine.

In the act of creation, the infinite, simple, and beyond beingly Deity communicates himself in the modality of finitude. The cosmos is theophany, icon, manifestation, presentation of the one eternal Creator. This is what it means to be a creature in the Dionysian vision. “In Dionysios,” remarks Perl, “to be is to be a symbol” (Perl, “Symbol, Sacrament, and Hierarchy,” GOTR 39 [1994]: 320).

On the Areopagus, the Apostle Paul declared that he had come to declare the unknown Creator the Greeks had long sought (Acts 17:28).

“In him we live and move and have our being.”

To be is to be encompassed by God.

To be is to participate in God.

To be is to manifest God.

God is theophany.

 

Footnotes

[1] On the orthodoxy of Dionysius’s Trinitarian theology, see Alexander Golitzin, Mystagogy, chap. 2; and John D. Jones, “The Status of the Trinity in Dionysian Thought,” The Journal of Religion 80 (2000): 645-657.

[2] Centuries after Denys, George MacDonald would later promulgate the theophanic vision in his poetry and fiction. See “Cosmos as Theophany.”

* * *

Eight years ago I published a multi-article series on Dionysius the Areopagite under the series title “Dionysian Ponderings.” Perhaps some of you remember it. Several weeks ago I decided to republish them on Substack over a period of a month or two (or three). I quickly realized that they needed extensive revision. It seems only right and proper, therefore, to share some of my revised pieces with my Eclectic Orthodoxy brethren. If you want to read the entire series over at Substack, here’s the link to the first article. 

When Theology Becomes Hell

— Photo credit: © Benjamincoppens | Dreamstime.com

Job’s friends are often remembered as the people who came to comfort him and then made everything worse.

That is true enough. But what makes them dangerous is not merely that they are tactless.

They have theology. And they are determined to use it.

Eliphaz begins by trying to fit Job’s suffering into a moral system. Suffering must mean something. It must correspond to guilt, discipline, correction, or divine order. The world cannot simply be allowed to remain inexplicable.

Bildad is worse. Far worse. He tells Job, in effect, that if his children died, then their deaths must somehow have been the consequence of their own sin:

“If your children sinned against him, he delivered them into the power of their transgression.”

That is what bad theology looks like when it becomes pastoral speech.

My friend Dr. Rob MacSwain, in his introduction to the anthology Wisdom, Knowledge, and Faith (eds. Rob MacSwain and Kelly Joyce; Seabury Books, 2026), writes:

“We simply cannot do without theology, so the only question is whether we will perform our theology well or poorly, conscientiously or cluelessly.”

And then, more sharply:

“Bad theology is oppressive and harmful.”

Bildad proves the point. He wants to protect the justice of God, and in order to do so he is willing to sacrifice Job’s dead children to an explanation.

They must have deserved it. The system must remain intact.

Job refuses that bargain. But he shares one of Bildad’s assumptions: if something happens, then God must finally be the one who did it.

So in chapters 9 and 10 Job is driven into a terrifying theological corner.

He says to God:

“Thy hands fashioned and made me; and now thou dost turn about and destroy me.”

The hands that created him have, in Job’s understanding, become the hands dismantling him. And this is where Job’s theology becomes almost cosmological in its despair. If the Creator has become the destroyer, then the problem is not merely that Job is suffering.

Creation itself has begun to run backward. If God has turned against me, then creation itself has reversed direction.

That is the real horror of Job 10.

Job looks toward death and sees no resurrection, no Easter, no harrowing of hell, no Christ who has passed through death and returned.

He sees only:

“the land of gloom and deep darkness,
the land of gloom and chaos,
where light is as darkness.”

The language is startling. This is not merely a gloomy underworld. It sounds like de-creation.

Genesis begins with darkness, the deep, the formless void, and then God speaks differentiation into being: light from darkness, waters separated, land appearing, life proliferating.

Job imagines death as the reverse. Order dissolves into chaos. Light collapses back into darkness.

The creature fashioned by God’s hands is unfashioned. The person disappears into a country “whence I shall not return.”

Job’s despair is therefore not merely emotional. It is metaphysical.

He does not yet possess a grammar, even a glimmer, in which resurrection is thinkable. That matters.

One of the temptations in reading Job is to correct him too quickly.

We know the prologue. Job does not.

We know that the Satan is the immediate agent of destruction. Job does not.

We know Easter. Job does not.

So Job blames God for what the Satan has done.

His theology is incomplete. But his honesty is indispensable.

Because the alternative is Bildad. The alternative is to preserve a tidy doctrine by blaming the sufferer.

And that is where this ancient book becomes painfully contemporary.

Theology matters because somebody eventually has to live inside it.

If we preach a God whose primary relationship to suffering is punishment, then suffering people will eventually ask what crime they committed.

If we preach a God who is always searching for grounds to condemn, then anxious people will begin to search themselves endlessly for evidence against themselves.

If we preach divine sovereignty as control, then tragedy will be interpreted as divine intention.

If we preach hell badly enough, people may begin living in it long before they die.

Bad theology does not merely describe hell.

It can rehearse people into it.

Job, in a sense, is being rehearsed into hell by the theology available to him.

Bildad says: the system is right, therefore the dead must be guilty.

Job answers: if the system is right and I am not guilty, then God must be my enemy.

Both conclusions are monstrous.

And that is precisely why Job must go on speaking.

The book has not yet given us its answer.

But it has already given us one indispensable warning:

Any theology that requires us to explain suffering by condemning the sufferer has already betrayed both theology and compassion.

And perhaps that is one reason Easter matters so much. Easter does not explain suffering. It refuses to let suffering, accusation, chaos, or death have the last word.

Job sees a land from which no one returns.

Christian faith answers not with an argument, but with a Person who actually did.

And that changes the grammar of everything.

This is a note to preachers of every Christian tradition—conservative or liberal, Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant, inerrantist or not, evangelical, fundamentalist, woke or anti-woke:

You are a theologian whether you know it or not, and whether you like theology or not.

What you preach is theology.

And your people have to live inside it.

It is up to you whether that theology becomes a place of life—or a place of hell.

Rehearsal: Prayer-Reading the Gospel of John

By John Stamps

We miss the point of St John’s accounts of the resurrection of Jesus if we do not foretaste his resurrected life. Jesus Christ does not just want to be with us. He wants to “in-home” himself within us.¹ The very love with which the Father loves the Son, Jesus wants to share with us.

And I made known your name to them, and I will make it known, so that the love which you loved me may be in them, and I in them. (John 17:26)²

We fall victim to one of the classic theological blunders if we only read John’s Gospel out of historical curiosity. To be sure, we can begin there. We all need to start somewhere. But sooner or later, Jesus Christ will ask us to make an existential commitment. He will call us by name and ask us to follow him as our shepherd. 

Alan Ecclestone suggests the following practices to “pray-read” the Gospel of John, much like we would pray the Psalter:

One purpose has shaped this book. It is a plea for learning to read the Gospel according to St John with the kind of attention that can best be described as praying it. In doing that, I believe, we come nearest to the mind and intention of its author. In that way we latch on to what he himself did. He wrote that others might join him. I hope to suggest some ways of setting about it. Here I simply remind myself that it calls for selfless attention, unwearying patience, passionate commitment, honesty of purpose, hunger for truth. Reading in this way is not foreign to Jewish and Christian traditions of prayer. In just such deliberate fashion Torah was studied and Psalms were recited from time immemorial. They will go on being used in that way for generations to come. My plea is for doing that kind of prayer-reading of the Fourth Gospel. It would be like turning it into a Christian Psalter. Such use of it is greatly needed and long overdue.³

I want to call this kind of prayer-reading rehearsal. If the Fourfold Gospel is something like an opera, we are not merely members of the audience.⁴ We are being drawn into the performance. And no one learns an opera by glancing once at the score. We rehearse it. We repeat its words until we begin to hear its recurring themes. We learn when one voice answers another. Eventually, the music gets inside us. Prayer-reading John is rehearsal for inhabiting the Gospel.

I like Ecclestone’s prayer suggestions. Shame on me, but it never occurred to me to pray through the Gospel of John. But other than “hunger for truth,” I’m not sure I’d derive them from John’s Gospel itself. In the light of the coming of the Spirit-Paraclete who is with us and in us, what would prayer-reading the Gospel of John itself look like?⁵

If the Spirit-Paraclete abides with us and will be in us (14:17), teaches us (14:26), reminds us of Jesus’ words (14:26), testifies to Jesus (15:26), guides us into all truth (16:13), and glorifies Jesus (16:14), then prayer-reading John should involve deliberately allowing the Spirit to do precisely those things.

How, then, do we rehearse John until his Gospel becomes somewhere we live? A choir learns a score by singing it again and again. We learn John in much the same way. As we prayer-read and rehearse the Gospel, John’s language becomes second nature to us. His questions become our questions. What is important to Jesus becomes important to us. We start to see ourselves and our world through the eyes of Jesus.

1. Hunger and thirst for truth.
   John repeatedly begins with our deepest desires: “What are you seeking?” (1:38); “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (7:37). Prayer-reading begins not with mastery of the text but with wanting what Jesus promises.⁶
2. Invoke the Holy Spirit.
   Come, Holy Spirit, come! This isn’t merely a perfunctory prayer before the “real” reading begins. We read in the presence of the Spirit-Paraclete who “abides with you and will be in you” (14:17). We are not reading John by ourselves. William James defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Sorry, Professor James, solitude isn’t what we’re doing. Prayer-reading occurs within the κοινωνία created by Father, Son, Spirit-Paraclete, disciples, and witnesses. We don’t rehearse this opera alone.
3. Listen for what the Spirit-Paraclete brings to remembrance.
   Jesus promises that the Spirit-Paraclete “will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said to you” (14:26). That suggests reading slowly enough for one Johannine word to summon another: water, bread, light, life, glory, hour, abiding, seeing, believing, Father, Spirit. Don’t immediately suppress those echoes to get back to the passage at hand.
   John’s Gospel sometimes sounds like a Bach fugue. Jesus introduces a theme, and then we hear it again in another voice, another setting, another key. Water, for example, flows throughout the Gospel. Living water appears beside a Samaritan well (John 4) and returns as Jesus’ great invitation at the Feast of Tabernacles (John 7). The theme remains recognizable even as John develops it in new ways. Rehearsal trains our ears to hear one Johannine theme sounding within another.
4. Abide with Jesus.
   This is indispensable. “Abide in me, and I in you” (15:4). Don’t merely extract the meaning and move on. Remain with a word, image, saying, or scene. Read it again. Sit with it. Let it become uncomfortable if necessary. Johannine prayer isn’t simply lectio but μένειν. Remaining, dwelling, abiding. As Jesus in-homes himself in us, we make our home in him. We rehearse the Gospel until the Gospel becomes somewhere we live.
5. Ask to be shown Jesus.
   The Spirit-Paraclete “will bear witness about me” (15:26) and “will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and proclaim it to you” (16:14). That gives you a remarkably concrete criterion for Johannine prayer: Where is the Spirit directing my attention to Jesus? What am I being shown about him that I had not seen before?
6. Expect misunderstanding and conversion of perception.
   Nicodemus misunderstands the new birth. The Samaritan woman misunderstands the living water. The crowds misunderstand the living bread. Mary Magdalene sees Jesus and thinks he is the gardener. Again and again, people hear correctly and understand wrongly. So a Johannine prayer-reading should include: What am I failing to see? What assumption am I bringing to Jesus that prevents me from recognizing what he is saying? The Spirit-Paraclete’s guidance “into all truth” (16:13) implies that our present understanding is incomplete.
7. Do the truth.
   This may be even better than “hunger and thirst for truth” as a distinct practice. John doesn’t conceive truth merely as something we possess intellectually: “The one who does the truth comes to the light” (3:21). And in 7:17, willingness to do God’s will precedes knowing whether Jesus’ teaching is from God. So after prayer-reading: What truth have I been given to do?
8. Let the word become love.
   “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (14:15); “Abide in my love” (15:9); “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (15:12). The test of Johannine contemplation isn’t the intensity of one’s religious experience. It is whether abiding in Jesus becomes love enacted toward another person.
9. Become a witness.
   “The Spirit of truth … will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness” (15:26–27). Prayer-reading doesn’t terminate in private illumination. The movement is Spirit → disciple → world. Ask: What have I seen? What have I heard? What am I now called to bear witness to?
10. Read until you hear Jesus call your name.
    Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus through accumulating evidence. Recognition comes when Jesus says, “Mary!” (20:16). John ultimately moves from eyewitness testimony to the reader: “These things have been written so that you may come to believe and trust” (20:31). At some point, prayer-reading has to cease being exclusively about Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Thomas, or Mary. Where does the Gospel address me? The point of rehearsal is participation. Eventually we discover that we are no longer merely reading John’s Gospel. John’s Gospel is reading us. We hear Jesus call our own name and ask us to sing our part.

We need to read John’s Gospel the way that John teaches us to read him: thirsting, listening, remembering, abiding, doing the truth, and trusting the Spirit-Paraclete to show us Jesus. We need to turn John’s Gospel into a Christian psalter.

I have one last piece of practical advice. Actually, I stole it from David F. Ford. Rehearsal requires repetition. He suggests reading the entire Gospel of John every 90 days, similar to traditional cycles of lectio divina through the Book of Psalms, to let its themes sink into our daily life and transform familiarity into an ongoing encounter with Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and now sitting at the right hand of God his Father.⁷

St John did not write his Gospel to be mastered but to be inhabited. John intends that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit come to make their home with us and be in us. We repeatedly read ourselves into meeting Jesus, trusting Jesus, and maturing in our relationship with Jesus and with each other.

Footnotes

1. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz write that in John, those who belong to God have “un-homed themselves” and “made themselves an unfitting dwelling place for God.” Their formulation prompted me to coin the obvious neologism “in-home” for the reverse movement: Christ making his home in us. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022), 78, 161. ↩︎
2. All translations from St John’s Gospel are my own, unless otherwise indicated. If you’re curious about my translation choices, I always defer to Bauer-Danker-Ardnt-Gingrich (BDAG). When I don’t, it turns out to be a mistake. ↩︎
3. Alan Ecclestone, The Scaffolding of Spirit: Reflections on the Gospel of St John (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1987), 2. ↩︎
4. For my development of the Fourfold Gospel as an opera, see John Stamps, “Prelude — Hearing the Fourfold Gospel: Why the Bible Sounds Like An Opera,” Eclectic Orthodoxy, July 4, 2026. ↩︎
5. Marianne Meye Thompson usefully refers to the Paraclete as the “Spirit-Paraclete,” a formulation that keeps the Paraclete’s identity as the Holy Spirit clearly before us. Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 319. ↩︎
6. David F. Ford, “The Gospel of John and Contemporary Society: Three Major Theological Contributions,” Religions 14, no. 11 (2023): 1357, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111357. ↩︎
7. For David F. Ford’s practice of sustained, prayerful rereading of the Fourth Gospel, including his proposal to read the entire Gospel every ninety days, see David F. Ford, Meeting God in John: Inspiration and Encouragement from the Fourth Gospel (London: SPCK, 2019), esp. Appendix B, “John Every Ninety Days”; and Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Ford’s plan for pray-reading the Gospel of John covers roughly 5-10 verses per day. ↩︎

Peace Behind Locked Doors: The Risen Christ and the Breath of New Creation (John 20:19–23)

By John Stamps

And on the eighth day, the Son of God made all things new. The darkness has passed away, and the light of the resurrection shines upon the world. The old creation still bears the scars of death, yet a new creation has dawned. The Sabbath rest has given way to a new beginning. The Father is working, and the Son continues his work.

The Divine Gardener walks once more in the garden. He plants the first seeds of the new creation and breathes the Holy Spirit upon his disciples. Adam and Eve no longer hide among the trees. The tree of shame has become the tree of life. Mary hears her name upon the lips of the risen Lord. Exile is ended. The gates of Eden stand open. The crucified and risen Christ comes to his fearful disciples and speaks words of grace over his renewed creation: “Peace to you.”

John wants us to hear these resurrection stories against the backdrop of creation itself. From its opening words, “In the beginning was the Word,” John invites readers to understand Jesus through the imagery of creation. Light shines in the darkness. Water and Spirit bring new birth. A garden becomes the setting for divine encounter. When Jesus rises on the first day of the week and breathes the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, Easter is not merely the reversal of a death. It is the dawn of a new creation.

Over a century ago—1925, to be exact—G. K. Chesterton had already captured the same Johannine vision:

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.¹

Jesus does something extraordinary. He breathes. John uses a word that takes us all the way back to the creation of Adam. The one who has passed through death now breathes the Holy Spirit and sends his disciples into the world. Easter is not finished with the raising of Jesus from the dead. The risen Lord now begins to breathe his new creation into the world.

We should not be surprised that John borrows Genesis’s language to describe the resurrection. The only comparable analogy to life from death is creation from nothing. Easter is vita ex morte victa—life out of death conquered—as radical and unprecedented as creatio ex nihilo itself.

Peace Behind Locked Doors

So when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors had been shut where the disciples were because of fear of the Judeans,² Jesus came and stood in the middle and says to them, “Peace to you.” And having said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. (John 20:19-20)³

By anybody’s reckoning, this first day of the week had been filled with shocking news. The disciples had passed through the darkness of Good Friday and the bewilderment of the empty tomb. Then Mary Magdalene appeared with the astonishing report that she had seen the risen Lord. These events were too much for any normal person to take in.

Why, then, does John emphasize “that day“?⁴ He is doing more than supplying a date on a calendar. Earlier in the Gospel, Jesus had prepared his disciples for the sorrow that lay ahead. The crucifixion of their teacher would shatter their world. Yet Jesus also made them a solemn promise, one they could not possibly understand until Easter:

In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. (John 14:20)

That promised day has dawned. But the disciples are utterly unprepared for it. They hunker down behind locked doors. They imagine they are safe from the Judeans. They are not safe from Jesus. Without warning, he stands in their midst. The experience is terrifying. His first words are simple, yet both necessary and comforting: “Peace to you.” We hear echoes of God’s fearful encounter with Gideon:⁵

And the Lord said to him, “Peace to you! Do not be afraid. You will not die.” (Judges 6:23)

The one standing before them is both familiar and utterly unexpected. Jesus appears where no one expected him. The crucified Jesus is alive, yet alive in a way that transcends ordinary categories of presence and absence.

“Peace” was a familiar Jewish blessing, but on the lips of the risen Lord, it becomes something more. Jesus had already promised this peace on the night before his death: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you” (14:27). He had also promised, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take courage; I have overcome the world” (16:33). The disciples had heard those words before. Now they hear them again from the lips of the one who has passed through death and emerged victorious.

Yet his greeting alone does not produce instant recognition. Jesus, therefore, shows them his hands and his side. He shows them his wounds because our incredulity runs so deep. The disciples now recognize him because he still bears the scars of his crucifixion. Resurrection did not erase the stigmata; it transfigured them. This is the same Jesus they saw crucified. It is no other. No ghost stands before them, though walls and locked doors are no barrier to him. The crucified Jesus stands alive in their midst. Resurrection is no escape from death but a new creation that includes and transforms death itself.

The wounds remain, yet they no longer signify defeat. Death no longer holds him. The risen Lord remains embodied, yet his life can no longer be measured by ordinary categories of space and mortality. The crucified Jesus is alive, but alive in a new way.⁶

Finally, the disciples recognize Jesus. Terror gives way to joy. Their rejoicing fulfills a promise Jesus had already made during the Farewell Discourse:

Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be grieved, but your grief will turn into joy. A woman, when she gives birth, experiences grief because her hour has come. But when she has delivered the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of her joy, because a human being has been born into the world. And so you now experience grief, but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. (John 16:20-22)

The disciples now discover what Jesus meant. Their grief has not merely ended. It has been transformed. The horror of Good Friday has given way to the joy of Easter. The hour of sorrow has become the hour of rejoicing. No, not irrational exuberance (per Alan Greenspan). Their joy runs much deeper. What they are seeing is almost too good to be true. None of the disciples seems actually to have expected to see Jesus again. Yet there he is, the risen Lord standing right there in front of them, just as he promised, just as he said. No one can take their joy away. Note to self: whenever Jesus says something, always trust him, no matter how counter-intuitive it sounds.

The Breath of New Creation

So Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you! Just as the Father has sent me, I also send you.” And after he said this, he breathed and says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Of whomever you forgive the sins, they are forgiven to them; whomever you hold are held fast.” (John 20:21-23)

Jesus repeats the blessing of peace. Yet peace immediately gives way to mission. On the cross, Jesus declared, “It is finished” (John 19:30), but God’s mission in the world is not finished. As the Father sent Jesus into the world, so Jesus now sends us into the world. We do not begin with our own plans, programs, or ambitions. We begin with the breath of Jesus. He sends us, and then he breathes his Spirit into us. The mission of the Church is Jesus continuing his mission in the world through his Spirit-breathed disciples.

Jesus uses two seemingly innocuous words that a careless reader might pass over: “just as” and “also” (καθώς … κἀγώ). Yet they carry some of the most daring ethical freight in the entire Gospel. There are no cookie-cutter ethics in John. If we come looking mainly for prescriptions, rules, or moral commands, we will not find many. That does not mean John has little to say about how Christians should live. Quite the opposite. John’s ethics are not primarily prescriptions but analogies. “Just as I have done to you, you also should do” (13:15). “Just as I have loved you, you also love one another” (13:34). And now: “Just as the Father has sent me, I also send you.”⁷

The pattern is Jesus himself. We are to serve as he serves, love as he loves, and now go into the world as he was sent into the world. Yet this hardly makes Christian ethics easier. The analogy is as wide-open and demanding as the Father’s sending of the Son. Jesus does not hand his disciples a comprehensive rulebook for every circumstance they will encounter. He gives them himself as the pattern, and breathes into them the Spirit who will enable them to improvise faithfully upon that pattern.

And what sort of pattern has Jesus given us? David Ford repeatedly draws attention to the extravagant abundance that characterizes Jesus’ ministry.⁸ At Cana, Jesus does not merely save the wedding feast from embarrassment; he turns an enormous quantity of water into the best wine that anyone has ever tasted. When he feeds the multitude, he does not carefully ration the bread and fish. Everyone eats as much as they want, and twelve baskets of fragments remain. “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:16). God is no cheapskate. The kingdom of God is not a soup kitchen. God spreads a feast before us, more lavish than anything we could have imagined. If Jesus sends us “just as” the Father sent him, then this divine superabundance must somehow characterize our own mission as well.

In effect, Jesus issues the Church a blank check and tells us to fill in the amount. “We can act in unprecedented, daring ways.”⁹ Will we be brazen or reluctant? Fearful or faithful? Yet one condition is attached to the check: “Just as the Father has sent me, I also send you.” Our mission must therefore bear the same shape as the mission of Jesus. Yes, there will be glory. But we dare not confuse glory with spiritual thrills, religious success, or excitement. In John’s Gospel, glory has nail marks.

Then Jesus breathes (ἐνεφύσησεν/enephysēsen) the Holy Spirit. John’s allusions are unmistakable. Any attentive reader hears the echoes of Genesis and Ezekiel:

And God formed the human from the dust of the earth, and he breathed (enephysēsen/ἐνεφύσησεν) into his face the breath of life, and the human became a living soul. (Genesis 2:7 LXX)

And he said to me, “Prophesy, son of man! Prophesy to the Spirit and say to the Spirit, ‘Thus says the Lord: Come from the four winds and breathe (ἐμφύσησον/emphysēson) into these corpses, and let them live!’” (Ezekiel 37:9 LXX)¹⁰

The risen Lord now performs the Creator’s work. This is not merely the return of a crucified man to life. This is God’s new creation. The same God who once breathed life into Adam now breathes the Holy Spirit through the risen Christ.¹¹

In Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, God does what only God can do. The one who once created out of nothing now creates out of death conquered. God does not replace the life that died but raises and transforms it. Resurrection does not reverse death; it conquers death and transforms the life that has passed through it. Creatio ex morte victa. Creation out of death conquered. From the ruins of the old, God brings forth a new creation: a life beyond death, a world beyond decay.

The gift of the Spirit immediately takes concrete form in a ministry of reconciliation:

If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven to them; if you hold anyone, they are held fast.¹²

This difficult saying is often read as John’s version of Matthew’s language of binding and loosing. Yet John phrases the commission differently. The object “sins” appears explicitly in the first clause but disappears in the second. Whether this omission is deliberate ambiguity or grammatical ellipsis remains debated. Sandra Schneiders argues that John shifts the focus from retaining sins to holding on to persons.

Whether or not one accepts her interpretation in full, the Johannine context is striking. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus does not abandon people. He seeks them, summons them, confronts them, and restores them. Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, and even Peter after his denial, all bear witness to this pattern.

The commission of the Spirit-breathed disciples is not merely to pronounce verdicts but to continue Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation. Loosen the sins, but hold on to the people. Refuse to abandon them. The mission handed on by the risen Christ is his own mission.

This essay begins a four-part series on the first climax of John’s Gospel. And yes, there is a second climax in John 21. We have followed the evangelist’s movement from the risen Jesus standing among his frightened disciples to his breathing the Holy Spirit upon them and sending them into the world (20:19–23). Next, Thomas will encounter the wounded God (20:24–29). Finally, John will make a remarkable turn from the eyewitnesses to us, his readers: “But these things have been written so that you may come to believe and trust” (20:30–31).

But before we move on to Thomas, we need to linger over Jesus’ startling command: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” John has been preparing us for this moment throughout his Gospel. The Spirit who was once “not yet” is now breathed upon the disciples by the crucified and risen Jesus. How did we get from living water to Paraclete, from promise to glorification, from “not yet” to “receive”?

Intermezzo — The “Not Yet” Spirit: Living Water, Paraclete, Glorification

Footnotes

1. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 213. ↩︎
2. I translated οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι as “Judeans” rather than “Jews.” The Greek term can refer to inhabitants of Judea, the Jerusalem authorities, or particular opponents of Jesus rather than to the Jewish people as a whole. Jesus and his disciples are, of course, themselves Jews; readers should therefore not hear John’s language as a blanket condemnation of the Jewish people. You don’t believe me? Ask N.T. Wright! “Another linguistic point: like some other recent historians, when speaking of the ethnic people from which Jesus came, I have referred to them as “Judaeans” rather than “Jews.” People from Athens were Athenians; from Rome, Romans. As the gospel went out into the world, Jesus and his earliest followers were thought of as being from Judaea. Our modern word “Jew” has many connotations, some of them unhelpful to historical study.” N. T. Wright, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (New York: HarperOne, 2025), xv. ↩︎
3. 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. ↩︎
4. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII–XXI, vol. 2 (Anchor Bible 29A; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 1019. ↩︎
5. Brown, 1021. ↩︎
6. David F. Ford, Meeting God in John: Wisdom for the World according to the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 100. ↩︎
7. David F. Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Baker Academic, 2021), 94, 404. ↩︎
8. Ford, Meeting God in John, 60. ↩︎
9. Ford, The Gospel of John, 269. ↩︎
10. The Greek word πνεῦμα can be translated as spirit, Spirit, breath, or wind, depending on the context. The underlying Hebrew word (רוּחַ / rûaḥ) has the same semantic range. English forces us to choose among meanings that both Hebrew and Greek can hold together. Here the LXX moves from πνεῦμα (“Spirit/breath”) to the four πνεύματα (“winds”) and then commands the πνεῦμα to ἐμφύσησον (emphysēson), “breathe,” into the dead. ↩︎
11. Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz nicely capture the continuity between creation and new creation: “Jesus gives the disciples the life-giving Spirit of both the original and the new creation, affirming the first and giving them a foretaste of the second.” The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022), 129. ↩︎
12. Sandra M. Schneiders translates John 20:23: “Of whomever you forgive the sins, they are forgiven to them; whomever you hold are held fast.” The Greek reads: ἄν τινων ἀφῆτε τὰς ἁμαρτίας, ἀφέωνται αὐτοῖς· ἄν τινων κρατῆτε, κεκράτηνται. Notice that while the first clause explicitly supplies the object τὰς ἁμαρτίας (“the sins”), the second supplies no corresponding object for κρατῆτε (“hold,” “hold fast”). On the significance of this omission and its implications for understanding the Johannine ministry of reconciliation, see Sandra M. Schneiders, Jesus Risen in Our Midst: Essays on the Resurrection of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013), 91–92. ↩︎

“She is received with rejoicing and unspeakable delight in the house of God the Father, herself the house which God built for his Son, who dwelt in her without being circumscribed and was flesh from her by the Holy Spirit”

How amazing, my brothers and sisters in the love of Christ! Today she who gave birth to the life of all people has moved on to be a sharer in that life. The life which was begotten before the ages from the Father, which is God and the Word of God, which she bore in the flesh and nursed from her own breasts, the life that built all things from nothing and generated life in them—this life she has inherited, and has come as its mother to share in it above all the holy ranks of heaven and earth. The life that is the fountainhead of the universe she received from God and made a spring for this world, the light of mortal beings; for it is written, “The life was the light of men and women” (Jn 1:3f.). She has gone to dwell with this light, the true and substantial light, “the shining-forth of the glory of God the Father” (Heb 1:3), which lightens the world, which has become flesh through her by the Holy Spirit, “enlightening every man and woman who comes into the world” (Jn 1:9). And when Christ our God, co-eternal with his Father and the Spirit, chose by decree to take her to himself, to share in his glory—his most-blessed mother, who is, after him, the greatest of all beings—all the angels and archangels rushed through the air to gather in a joyful visit to this world, sent from heaven by God to be the celebrants of her holy falling-asleep…

The radiant cloud that bore the Lord of glory has been lifted up—lifted up to him: she who flashed forth his perfect divinity in her body like lightning, who rained down holy gifts from him on everything under heaven. There the orbit of that spiritual moon above our world, which the prophet spoke of (Hab 3:11), comes to completion: the moon which gave birth to the sun who is one of those three suns that share a single substance—the Trinity, as revealed by the tradition of the Fathers. “And the moon stood still in the tracks” of her virginity (Hab 3:11); she is truly the Mother of God, revealing his radiance that all of this creation might come to know its God. She is received with rejoicing and unspeakable delight in the house of God the Father, herself the house which God built for his Son, who dwelt in her without being circumscribed and was flesh from her by the Holy Spirit; who remained in her nine months and became an infant; yet who was God, inseparable from his Father and the Spirit. She who was made the dwelling-place of the consubstantial Trinity has come to a better dwelling—she who is forever his home, having heard from the archangel Gabriel, “The Holy Spirit will come down upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the one born of you will be called holy, the Son of God” (Lk 1:35). So she is glorified above the holy ranks of heaven; she is transplanted from here, as “from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3:18)—the mortal bush that bore the fire of divinity—to the land of the living” (Ps 116:9), where she shall join in radiating the light of the face of Christ our God, who was truly and wholly contained in her womb; preserved unburnt by him, as the one who, above all women, is blessed with the name of Virgin Mother.

Saint Modestus of Jerusalem