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August 24, 2006
Hello everyone,
In private conversation with a friend recently, we spoke of salvation and what that word actually means. He admitted that he often grappled with that idea, at least as it is seen in the context of much of mainstream Christianity, which in his case would have consisted of the more Pentecostal and evangelical sides of Protestant Christianity. It did not seem to him that, in these traditions at least, our understanding was at all adequate and while he had difficulty articulating what his own understanding of the concept might entail, he felt that what we see representative in these branches of the Christian faith was surely an inadequate and impoverished view. In the end, the idea that he had of salvation seemed to be much more moment-by-moment centered and process oriented, perhaps culling from the idea that eternal life means not only the length of life but even much more so the quality. Traditionally Christianity has no shortage of concepts pertaining to eternal regret that necessarily involves existence, but to be truly set free must involve more than it is often presented as involving. Not only is that sound reasoning, it is also built into the very words of the Greek language; the word olam (translated as “eternal”) and its derivations in the New Testament, for example, carries both the sense of “time without end” and “quality of life”: see Supernatural Irrigation Systems of Eternal Life.
The distinction in Greek thought runs deep and is also reflected in two types of time: chronos and kairos. Father Patrick Reardon, pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and a senior editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, has remarked on the subject and I would like to extend special thanks to Sara (whom you may have met on the forum) for calling my attention to the piece. Father Reardon suggests that the Greeks had two words for time with different connotations whereas we only have one and thus the distinction in the Greek gets lost. The first word is chronos and it refers to the measurement of time, or time as a quantified concept. Yet what is time in this sense? He suggests that such time is an “icon of death” or non-existence because it is measured by a “past that has passed,” if you will, and an as-of-yet non-existence future: it is always escaping away from nothing into nothing and becomes a sort of death. Such time cannot be held; it is always fleeting.
The second conception for time, however, is kairos and it has to do with the quality of the moment: it has to do with presence. It is, as Father Reardon suggests, “qualis, not quantum.” He likes to conceptualize kairos as the “now,” a moment that cannot be divided or measured at all. And he suggests, as do other authors, that God exists in eternity, in the “eternal now,” and that there is a constant and unending point of contact between the fleeting chronos and the intersection of the now, of the kairos. For these reasons—because the now is eternally present—Father Reardon suggests that the concept of kairos:
. . . is an icon of eternal life. To experience the now, after all, one must be alive. The dead know nothing of now. Therefore, the now, the kairos, is an icon of the life of heaven. Indeed, eternal life is an everlasting now, in which there is no sequence, no before and after. . . . Eternity is not a long time. Strictly speaking, there is simply no length to it. Nothing elapses. The infinite is not measurable. Thus, “when we’ve been there ten thousand years/ bright shining as the sun/ we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise/ than when we’ve first begun.”
Here on earth, kairos is time as significant and decisive. This is the time of which St. Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians 6:1—“In a favorable time (kairo dekto) I heard you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you. Behold, now is the most favorable time (nun kairos euprósdektos); behold, now (nun) is the day of salvation.” The only time we can ever really seize is the now. Now is the present instant, the marked pulsing of the heart, the moment to lay hold on eternity. (OrthodoxyToday.org)
We may ask, if now is the present instant, and if kairos is an icon of eternal life, does that not make laying hold on eternity a laying hold on the now? Is not my friend correct when he views salvation as a moment-by-moment process? The day of—the time of—salvation is now. And the life that is offered is eternal, everlasting: a presence or quality much more so than “time never ending.” As suggested above, we have done a word study of sorts on the word “eternal” in Supernatural Irrigation Systems of Eternal Life that should help to underscore the matter somewhat.
But there may be more to this idea of salvation over and beyond “nowness” and the quality of being in that indefinable sense that only God can effect. Not long ago I came across a blog entry that generated some truly thought-provoking conversation. The commentator in particular whose views caught my attention was Father Freeman, a man otherwise unknown to me. I do not recall if I had read Father Freeman’s comments or not at the time the conversation with my friend about salvation took place, but my own thoughts had been taking a turn in this direction regardless. Let us go there before we pick up again with Father Freeman and his posts. Karen (whom you may also have met on the forum or else know as Breath_of_Dawn) proofreads most of these newsletters before they get sent. (My entire reason, of course, is that if they have typographical errors, I have somebody to blame it on—heh heh heh.) In White Gemstones, Perfect in Their Kind two weeks ago in which we looked at George MacDonald’s thoughts on the white stone with a new name written upon it, the corrected copy came back with some of her characteristic purple commentary, which we shall simply render here in boring black. She writes in part:
. . . I was thinking of the idea of all things coming together in one, and how the Bible talks about all things coming together in Jesus. I’m sure I’m thinking of these things in my typically mystical way, but it also reminds me of the phrase that they without us cannot be “saved.” It is as though we need to finish something they did not finish, and then it trickles down. As though those who did not overcome wait and hope for us to overcome. And Jesus did that for us all, so that all might overcome.
She then responds to MacDonald’s suggestion that “it follows that there is a chamber also—(O God, humble and accept my speech)—a chamber in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man,—out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made—to reveal the secret things of the Father”:
Yes....each of us who has been drawn into God’s presence goes not only so God can touch those who are in that one’s heart (“for these and all the petitions we hold in our hearts, Lord hear our prayer”) but when the heart is once emptied, to so fill it with Himself that others are touched by His presence in us.
In my response to her, I suggested that her thoughts all speak of the interconnectedness of the communion of saints, which is not confined to time or space (for God, being the God of the living and not of the dead, exists even now with the saints long since passed and not yet born) and which consists of one body but many members. The redemption of the world is not the redemption of the world only, but all the parts of it, including human creatures. Thus, for the whole to be redeemed, all parts must also be redeemed, each playing his or her own part because we all interconnect. In fact, it reminded me a great deal of Eternal Portraits in Everlasting Fellowship, the April 23, 2003, issue of Le Penseur Réfléchit:
We were not created in a vacuum. We were created to bring one another pleasure even as we share, creature to creature before Creator, in God’s pleasure. . . . There is something beautiful about being in a creature-to-creature relationship sharing the joint pleasure of fellowship with our Creator. C.S. Lewis liked to think of heaven as a stringed symphony: each of us is uniquely equipped to respond to the precise combinations of His attributes: no two are exactly alike. This produces a mutually complementary harmony instead of a monotone drone, the swelling strains of the saxophone and clarinet complementing the violin and the bass drum: the tuba and the trombone trading off with the trumpet and flute. We lose the full picture when we assume that since God alone can fill the vacuum, we were meant to go the road alone here on earth. There are times, to be sure, we will be disappointed and lonely, but it will all make the sweet fellowship we share one day be all the much sweeter.
God is a God of order, not of disorder: God is a God of unity. Discord and strife do not come from the Father. . . . A Triune God, perfect amongst all His members, knew what it was to live in an eternal love relationship: Father loves Son, Son loves Father, and the Spirit flows between the two, taking His own delight in the transaction. So too, a Triune God is meant to be enjoyed by us, creature to creature, linked hand in hand in the meadow of creation before the Creator—the songbirds and the doe with fawn, the stringed symphonies of the crickets, the brook murmuring softly as it trickles down the mountainside—all of creation in worship and praise of the Creator. This composite picture is intended to fill the vacuum, the Capstone locking the puzzle solidly into place: there is no greater giver than God.
How about you, sister, brother? Do you see the beauty in all of this? Do you see why the temporal can only be understood by a recognition of the eternal? Why our deepest longings will not forever give way to our greatest fears? On earth as it is in heaven: the temporal frames will be transformed into perfected vessels to house the eternal portrait—the imago Dei—that will forever enjoy, as creature to creature in all of creation, fellowship with the Creator for all eternity. Can you think of anything more beautiful than that? (Eternal Portraits in Everlasting Fellowship)
These thoughts, then, started me thinking about the idea of a more communal element to our faith than I had typically envisioned. But they did not stop there, for it seems that many things in my world as of late have been evocative of this element. Because parts of the discussion on the Pontifications blog were so insightful, we will excerpt them here leaving the more controversial parts of the conversation for dedicated readers to comb through on their own. There were actually several conversations and sub-threads going on at once, but I have taken parts of the most interesting one here and reconstructed them into one stream-lined dialogue. Also note that I have not edited for grammar though I did take the liberty of correcting the spelling errors as that is a pet peeve of mine especially in this age of spellcheckers; otherwise, my editing has consisted entirely of excerpting, trimming, and assembling together for easier readability:
Father Freeman’s observations that “person” is a relational term and should be seen in this larger context of human relationships, just as Father and Son are relational designations of the Godhead is really quite poignant. Likewise, in Thomas Weinandy’s book Does God Suffer?, the author suggests that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are much more verbs than nouns: “Father” defines the ceaseless activity of the Father in relationship to the Son, “Son” the ceaseless activity of the Son in relation to the Father, the “Holy Spirit” the ceaseless personality flowing between the two. He speaks of the classic conception within Christianity of ipsum esse (being itself) and actus purus (pure act) as attempts to define the undefinable nature of God; actus purus in particular conjures the concept of “verbs not nouns.” It is interesting as well that this description of the Trinity as actus purus accords startlingly well with what I have read of physics and those disciplines which intersect with it as to the empirical realities that seem to feed the universe: hidden streams of inrushing energy. What they describe in the abstract with complex equations and symbols seems very much like the Church Fathers’s attempts to unfurl the mysteries of the Divine. In both instances, it appears this mysterious essence is what “fuels” reality; startling that conceiving it as the Holy Trinity also explains the physically unexplainable mystery of love to say nothing of life itself: that is, how is it that we are alive at all? I think especially of J.T. Fraser’s book Time, Conflict, and Human Values and the parallels I see between its description of chaos and the various levels of temporality into which the latter allegedly arose and those classic descriptions of actus purus, not perhaps because Fraser’s book is any more telling than any other book on the subject but because it happens to be one I have read. :)
But returning to Father Freeman’s thoughts, when one considers the actual meaning of the words, the idea of “person” does seem to capture the essence of human reality far more so than “individual,” which, with a moment’s reflection on the implications of what it would mean to be truly individual—solitary, not unique as one of many but unique as one alone—it really does reveal a modern (or Modern) fiction into which most of us have solidly bought. Yet the chair in which you are sitting, the screen at which you are staring or the paper at which you are peering are only the beginnings of those things you did not engineer yet nonetheless enjoy: they certainly did not happen in the vacuum of a solitary individual consciousness.
I have continued to read MacDonald’s “Unspoken Sermons” series and was impressed how well these ideas flowed into his Love Thy Neighbour sermon. The summary sentence would surely be this one: “The whole constitution of human society exists for the express end, I say, of teaching the two truths by which man lives, Love to God and Love to Man.” MacDonald cares to unpack what this picture actually looks like and if we can get past his somewhat antiquated prose, what emerges is breathtaking.
We mentioned J.T. Fraser’s book, the physicist and philosopher who is considered a leading expert on time; his viewpoints, while naturalistic to their core, nevertheless underscore a lot of what Father Weinandy has written in Does God Suffer? about the Godhead. Fraser describes systems that he characterizes as evolving outward and increasing in complexity. He borrowed an example from mathematics in which in order to explain a given level of theory, one must travel a level higher, each one predicated on the one beneath. Set theory, for example, was shown by Betrard Russell to generate paradoxes when pushed to its logical limits. But the famous Russell’s Paradox could be eliminated by appealing to a higher level of mathematics that would supply it justification. This same insight can be seen reflected in maxims of all sorts. How many times have people smugly tried to turn such expressions around on themselves? For example, Nietzsche held that we must lose our convictions. But upon what did he base his conviction? Or what of the claim, famous amongst the logical positivists, that all truth claims must be empirically verifiable? Does that include the claim that all truth claims must be empirically verifiable? Or, as a professor of philosophy said, normative statements are always (a particularly strong word for a philosopher to use) unsubstantiated by themselves: they are what set standards but are not themselves set by standards—unless those standards be higher normative claims that are themselves unsupported. Do you see where this observation is going?
MacDonald suggests that it is a fundamental law of the universe that the only way to climb higher is by climbing higher, if one may be allowed the circular expression. That is, he says that love cannot be explained. It can only be known. It explains itself, but cannot be explained until it is known. The idea that we must love our neighbor as ourselves is of this sort of claim: it cannot be fully explained except by itself. But invariably when we try to love our neighbor as ourselves, we fail. So then comes MacDonald’s law:
“But how,” says a man, who is willing to recognize the universal neighbourhead, but finds himself unable to fulfil the bare law towards the woman even whom he loves best,—“How am I then to rise into that higher region, that empyrean of love?” And, beginning straightway to try to love his neighbour, he finds that the empyrean of which he spoke is no more to be reached in itself than the law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot keep the law without first rising into the love of his neighbour, so he cannot love his neighbour without first rising higher still. The whole system of the universe works upon this law—the driving of things upward towards the centre. (emphasis mine)
He continues:
The man who will love his neighbour can do so by no immediately operative exercise of the will. It is the man fulfilled of God from whom he came and by whom he is, who alone can as himself love his neighbour who came from God too and is by God too. The mystery of individuality and consequent relation is deep as the beginnings of humanity, and the questions thence arising can be solved only by him who has, practically, at least, solved the holy necessities resulting from his origin. In God alone can man meet man. In him alone the converging lines of existence touch and cross not. When the mind of Christ, the life of the Head, courses through that atom which the man is of the slowly revivifying body, when he is alive too, then the love of the brothers is there as conscious life. From Christ through the neighbours comes the life that makes him a part of the body. (Love Thy Neighbour)
MacDonald’s ultimate point? Only by loving God perfectly can we love our fellows perfectly. God is the highest, because only God is infinite, the system that which no greater system can conceive. And that was exactly how I thought of Fraser’s system: it offered a look from the bottom up, but it was incomplete. His book—as we intimated, a sophisticated work of philosophy and physics crossing multiple academic disciplines—would be like a play-by-play description of the building of a sand castle while ignoring the child doing that building. Of such possibilities, Fraser says nothing. It does not necessarily make his book untrue, but it does appear to make it incomplete. I strongly suspect that while his writing does not totally preclude the possibility of emanation from the invisible (or at least unspoken) hand at the top, he nevertheless sees the process as arising from less into more rather than deriving from an infinite apex from which all else flows. To his mind, in other words, the hand of the child would appear to be the culmination of the castle rather than the source of its origination as though the sand had somehow shaped the tendons and nerves. Yet his description of the originating level that he dubs “absolute chaos” or “proto-temporality” nonetheless is not out of keeping with the concept of actus purus as the latter might look to an observer without reference or context. But enough of Fraser!
By the end of Love Thy Neighbour, MacDonald has impressively shown that at the heart of the universe resonates but two important laws, and these laws can be summarized singularly as love: the love of God and of man. So then, Father Freeman, drawing on this same rich, classic tradition of Christianity from which MacDonald, Weinandy, and countless others before have drawn suggests that at the heart of the universe is the Trinity and in its depth we see the pattern for all other aspects of our world including our own personhood. It has been said that for any difficult problem we face, its solution may be found in the contemplation of the Trinity, the model from which all else arises. In the Trinity, all members mutually flow into one other without loss of identity. Their relationship is circular—self-sustaining, self-regulating, self-perpetuating—a bit like love, actually. Odd how the more that we love the more that we love. It would almost lead one to believe that the whole system of the universe works upon this law—the driving of things upward towards the centre.
God bless,
Eric
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