‘Very God’

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Karl Barth develops what he calls, The Three Forms of the Doctrine of Reconciliation, in Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58. The first form is with reference to the ground of Christ’s person; i.e., the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Logos, the Son of God. As many of the early church fathers understood without the ground of Jesus’ person being the triune God in the eternal Logos, there could be no salvation for the weary wayfarers of a fallen humanity. Justification before and with God required that the “bridge” between the Holy God and the fallen humanity be God Himself; for He alone could bear the wages of sin in His own assumed humanity in the flesh and blood of the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. If Christ was not God’s pleroma (fullness) for us all he would have  been was some type of exemplar to ostensibly show a way to God; a way of works-righteousness, with the hope that fallen humanity, like the Christ consciousness, could elevate itself to God’s throne room based on their own merits; albeit, infused with an abstract power (or created grace) provided for by God—of the type that Jesus as the exemplar modeled for us in his own humanity. This might be one expression of attempting to develop a soteriology outwith Jesus being fully God. Genuine Christian salvation required that God reach down to us, become us, and then ascend with us in the garb of his full humanity whereby we might be participants in the triune holiness forevermore; indeed, as the Son has always already constituted that in His inner life with the Father by the Holy Spirit.

Barth writes:

The first is that in Jesus Christ we have to do with very God. The reconciliation of man with God takes place as God Himself actively intervenes, Himself taking in hand His cause with and against and for man, the cause of the covenant, and in such a way (this is what distinguishes the even of reconciliation from the general sway of providence and universal rule of God) that He Himself becomes man. God became man. That is what is, i.e., what has taken place, in Jesus Christ. He is very God acting for us men, God Himself become man. He is the authentic Revealer of God as Himself God. Again, He is the effective proof of the power of God as Himself God. Yet again. He is the fulfiller of the covenant as Himself God. He is nothing less or other than God Himself, but God as man. When we say God we say honour and glory and eternity and power, in short, a regnant freedom as it is proper to Him who is distinct from and superior to everything else that is. When we say God we say the Creator and Lord of all things. And we can say all that without reservation or diminution of Jesus Christ—but in a way in which it can be said in relation to Him, i.e., in which it corresponds to the Godhead of God active and revealed in Him. No general idea of “Godhead” developed abstractly from such concepts must be allowed to intrude at this point. How the freedom of God is constituted, in what character He is the Creator and Lord of all things, distinct from and superior to them, in short, what is to be understood by “Godhead,” is something which—watchful against all imported ideas, ready to correct them and perhaps to let them be reversed and renewed in the most astonishing way—we must always learn from Jesus Christ. He defines those concepts: they do not define Him. When we start with the fact that He is very God we are forced to keep strictly to Him in relation to what we mean by true “Godhead.”[1]

Significantly, for Barth, it is because Jesus is truly God, that He can genuinely reveal God to humanity; indeed, to the very humanity He assumes in the womb of Mary. This is the only way, as Barth rightly presses, that salvation might actually obtain for a fallen humanity. That is, for God to be brought into humanity, in Christ, and for humanity to be brought into God, by the grace of Christ’s life for us.

In synopsis: The above passage from Barth could be taken as the guiding premise of his whole theological offering. Without salvation, without reconciliation being fully God and fully man, in the hu[man]ity of Jesus Christ, for Barth, and more importantly, for Holy Scripture, there is no eternal life to be had; there is no salvation to be enjoyed; and there is no vision of God to be experienced. This is the all or nothing reality that fortifies not just Barth’s Gospel, but the Gospel of Christ itself as revealed by Himself in the Father by the Holy Spirit.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [129] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 124–25.

The Tomb of Christian Revelation Juxtaposed with the Vapors of Metaphysics

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There is no abstract conceptual apparatus by which we can know the Christian God. Knowledge of God is absolutely contingent on God’s free Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This is the only way as Christians that we know God; as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He has descended to us in the real garb of a flesh and blood human; as a Jew from Nazareth. And His reception in Mary’s womb was made fertile by the millennia of preparation for His first coming as the Holy Spirit hovered over the Hebrews.

None of the above requires augmentation by way of appeal to and appropriation of foreign and abstract metaphysics. The Christ child came in the wood of the manger; died on the wood of the cross; and rose again from the rock of the tomb. These are all concrete and particular materials that have no correspondence with the ethereal of the philosophers, per se.

The Instrumentalization of the Christ//God’s Being Predicated

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I have left some context out of the following, but based on what you have read from me thus far (on the blog in general and over the years etc.), how would you translate my rather technical phraseology? Maybe you don’t think it makes sense. If so, where does it fail in regard to its theological premises and mutually implicating ideas? (I wrote this as a quick off the top thought on X and Facebook)

What folks don’t realize it seems, even at higher levels, is that when considering the decretal system and God, when it comes to the incarnation, Christ is understood in purely instrumentalist terms; thus making Him the organon of salvation, but not the person (the Theanthropos) of salvation. In other words, the person of Christ (who is the eternal Logos) is so wrested from the work of Christ, in the decretal schemata, that the Christ merely becomes a token and conduit of God’s work; thus, making God a predicate of creation (if in fact the attempt is made to still see Jesus’ person as eternally Divine).

On Being Churchless in the 21st Century: A Personal Tale

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It is not easy to find a sound, healthy Bible teaching evangelical church in the 21st century. For example, we (my wife and I) have been without a stable church for quite some time. We have “church-shopped,” and that gets almost defeatist after a while. It isn’t that we’re looking for the “perfect church,” not at all. We are simply looking for a church where the Word of God is opened and exposited in a way where Christ is central; where the Gospel is central; where genuine Christian proclamation is taking place. Unfortunately, the MANY churches we have visited over these last many years are still more concerned with being “relevant,” and user-friendly than they are with being biblically faithful. But then you’ll visit a church that is ostensibly biblically and doctrinally focused, and all your generally left with are John MacArthur-like churches. Or you’ll visit a church that is either, in fact, a mega church, or aspires to be one. Or maybe, you’ll visit a church that has a bunch of satellite campuses, with one mothership campus that keeps the franchise steady. But in the main, most so-called evangelical churches out there in the 21st century, are indeed peddling what has been called a moralistic therapeutic deism; so not really even the Christian religion, but a folk religion. They literally have a Ted Talk for the sermon and a tryout for American Idol as “worship.” And this is pervasive.

On top of all of that, and at a personal level, my job doesn’t make things very easy either. I work on-call which in and of itself makes it prohibitive towards looking for a solid church. And then when it works out to try and do that, we end up wasting our time at the types of churches described previously. So, we are in a hard spot; and I don’t think we are alone. What we have been doing in lieu of being able to find a worthwhile church is live viewing a church online that used to be my parents church, and that we attended back in the day in Lakewood (Bellflower), CA. I am friends with the senior pastor, and they have something very unique going as far as churches go in the 21st century. But ultimately, while it is good to still get the Word taught, doing online church isn’t sustainable; as far as meeting bodily needs, such as fellowship, friendship, and an immediacy to one-another that Christians ideally ought to have; indeed, as the body of Christ meeting physically around the Word taught, and the Bread and Welch’s Grape Juice consumed (i.e., communion, “Lord’s supper” etc.)

So, as you think about it, please pray that we will finally be able to find a healthy sound Bible teaching church that we can settle into. Thank you.

The Goliath god of the Philosophers Versus the Father God of the Son

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. . . It is not a loud and stern and foreign thing, but the quiet and gentle and intimate awakening of children in the Father’s house to life in that house. That is how God exercises authority. All divine authority has ultimately and basically this character. At its heart all God’s ruling and ordering and demanding is like this. But it is in the direction given and revealed in Jesus Christ that the character of divine authority and lordship is unmistakably perceived.[1]

This follows from knowing God first as Father of the Son mediated through the Son by the Holy Spirit. And this is to the point and heart of an Evangelical Calvinism Athanasian Reformed mode of theological and Christian existence. The Son, the eternal Logos conditions the way we approach the Father, just as the Son has eternally indwelt the bosom of the Father. There is no discursive routing here and there on a way up to God to be taken. There is only the Son descended (exitus) to the point of death the death of the cross, and new humanity ascended (reditus) on the healing wings of the Holy Spirit as He in Christ takes us to the glory the Son has always already shared eternally with the Father. Indeed, it is in this oikonomia (economy) that God has freely chosen to make Himself known to and for the world, in the face of Jesus Christ. God’s exousia (authority) is not an authority of an abstract monad back yonder in the ethereal gases of the philosophers; such that He is some type of Goliath God. Nein. God’s authority, His sovereignty, His power is that of a gentle father with his children; it is a filial familial authority.

This is the interminable perduring seemingly unquenchable battle of the God of Jerusalem versus the God of Athens. God is Father of the Son, as Athanasius has intoned, or he is simply an abstraction plastered onto the God of the Bible; as if some type of graffiti that would seek to draw attention to its own self-projected beauty rather than the beauty of God’s manger and cross in Christ. Choose you this day who you will serve.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §58 [100] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.

TF Torrance and Augustine in Discussion on a Knowledge of God vis-à-vis the Imago Dei

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I find Thomas Torrance’s stratified knowledge of God and St. Augustine’s exercitatio mentis (spiritual exercises), and their relative correspondence to be quite intriguing, and yet in this intrigue there is also recognition of a fundamental difference. Here is how Ben Myers describes Torrance’s ‘stratified knowledge’ (if you want to read Torrance on this see his Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons):

Thomas F. Torrance’s model of the stratification of knowledge is one of his most striking and original contributions to theological method. Torrance’s model offers an account of the way formal theological knowledge emerges from our intuitive and pre-conceptual grasp of God’s reality as it is manifest in Jesus Christ. It presents a vision of theological progression, in which our knowledge moves towards an ever more refined and more unified conceptualisation of the reality of God, while remaining closely coordinated with the concrete level of personal and experiential knowledge of Jesus Christ. According to this model, our thought rises to higher levels of theological conceptualisation only as we penetrate more deeply into the reality of Jesus Christ. From the ground level of personal experience to the highest level of theological reflection, Jesus Christ thus remains central. Through a sustained concentration on him and on his homoousial union with God, we are able to achieve a formal account of the underlying trinitarian relations immanent in God’s own eternal being, which constitute the ultimate grammar of all theological discourse. [Benjamin Myers, “The Stratification of knowledge in the thought of T. F. Torrance,” SJT 61 (1): 1-15 (2008) Printed in the United Kingdom © 2008 Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd]

And here is how Gilles Emery, O. P. describes Augustine’s exercitatio mentis:

Augustine emphasizes in particular that in order to glimpse God, the spirit must purify itself of corporeal representations and “phantasmata.” The spirit must not stop at created images but must rise to what the created realities “insinuate.” This is precisely the usefulness of the study of creatures and the goal of the exercise. The exercitatio proposed by Augustine is an ascension … toward God from the image that is inferior and unequal to him, and it is at the same time a gradual movement toward the interior (introrsus tendre). From these corporeal realities and sensible perceptions, Augustine invites his reader to turn toward the spiritual nature of man, toward the soul itself and its grasp of incorporeal realities, in a manner ever more interior (modo interiore), in order to rise toward the divine Trinity. The exercise of the spirit is “a gradual ascension toward the interior,” in other words, an elevation from inferior realities toward interior realities. One enters, and one rises in a gradual manner by degrees (gradatim). Such is the way characteristic of Augustine: “pull back into yourself [in teipsum redi]…, and transcend yourself.” [Gilles Emery, O. P., Trinitarian Theology as Spiritual Exercise in Augustine and Aquinas, in Aquinas the Augustinian edited by Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering, p. 14.]

[For further reading on a Reformed version of ascension theology check out Julie Canlis’ sweet book Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension.]

One fundamental and important difference—even given some apparent similarity between Torrance and Augustine, like on stratification or graded movement towards Triune knowledge of God—becomes an issue of theological anthropology and the difference between Augustine’s a priori versus Torrance’s a posterori approaches in relation to the imago Dei/Christi. 

For Augustine, knowledge of God is already present (even if soteriologically and christologically construed) by way of analogical reflection upon the image of God (which is opened up soteriologically by Christ). For Torrance, knowledge of God is not a result of turning inward, but looking outward to Christ. So we don’t know what it is to really be in the image of God, there is not resonant knowledge of God available in the human being, per se. It is only as we are recreated in Christ in the resurrection by the Spirit that genuine knowledge of God can be acquired by observing and spiritually participating in the knowledge of God through Him. So the analogy for both of the these theologians—by which we come to knowledge of the Triune God—is grounded in reflection upon the image of God. But the difference is that for Augustine, the image of God is grounded in each individual person (which would help to explain his view of election/reprobation as well); for Torrance the image of God is grounded in Christ (Col. 1.15), and thus the supposition is that God’s image has a ground external to creation in Christ, which allows us to think of knowledge of God as something external to us, and not something resonant within us (even if like Augustine we try to explain this in his kind of soteriological way).

My Reduction

I don’t like doing this, but for sake of blogginess and reception let me do so: For Augustine knowledge of God happens by turning inward to the self (by Christ to be sure) and attending to personal piety; For Torrance knowledge of God happens by turning outward to Christ, and attending to personal intimacy therein.

This kind of movement (inward a priori and outward a posterori) has some other interesting implications that get fleshed out in subsequent centuries and theologies that continue to affect us to this day. We will have to talk about this later.

*Originally posted in 2019 at another site of mine.

On A Critique of the Pactum Salutis and its Inherent Social [subordinationist] Trinitarianism

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Karl Barth operated with his own reformulated Christologically conditioned Covenantal theology. For Him there is one covenant (of grace), just as sure as there are two covenants, if not three (covenant of works, covenant of grace, pactum salutis i.e., covenant of redemption) that the Federal or classically covenantal theologians such as Cocceius, Ursinus, Olevianus, Bullinger et al. articulated. Barth was a strident critic of Federal or classical Covenantal theology, insofar that he detected a primacy of the Law as the antecedent ground upon which the conditions of the covenant of grace are ultimately fulfilled in the coming of Christ for the elect. That is to say, when Christ comes, as the decree of God prescribes, according to Federal theology, Jesus actively obeys all of the commands of the covenant of works (Law) thereby fulfilling the conditions required for a full justification, again, for the elect, to obtain. This fulfillment, per the federal structure, as decretally determined by God before the foundations of the world (e.g., decretum absolutum), is what the “Feds” identify as the covenant of grace. And within this schema, many of the federalists, also place what is often referred to as the pactum salutis (pact or contract of salvation), into the mix of the economic outworking of the covenant of works/grace within the type of Heilsgeschichte (‘salvation history’) they envision.

Conversely, we have a theological incoherency; or so I will suggest, and Barth will identify in the passage I share from him shortly. Ultimately, the incoherency present within the schema presented by Federal theology affects a proper doctrine of God. What I will suggest, after Barth’s passage is shared, and in concert with his critique of the pactum salutis, is that Federal theology, inadvertently, suffers from a subordinationist, even an eternal functional subordination of the Son (EFS), insofar that the Son is understood to be a distinct center of conscious, indeed, organ of God in obediently carrying out the decree of God (and a decree that is abstract and decoupled from the triune personage of the Monarchia [‘Godhead’]. Here is what Barth has to communicate with reference to the errancy of the Pactum:

[5] The riddle posed by the older Federal theology at this its strongest point appears to be insoluble. But perhaps we shall find the solution if we examine rather more closely how it understood the eternal basis of the covenant of grace. As we have seen, it was taken to consist in an intertrinitarian decision, in a freely accepted but legally binding mutual obligation between God the Father and God the Son. Now there are three doubtful features in this conception.

For God to be gracious to sinful man, was there any need of a special decree to establish the unity of the righteousness and mercy of God in relation to man, of a special intertrinitarian arrangement and contract which can be distinguished from the being of God? If there was need of such a decree, then the question arises at once of a form of the will of God in which this arrangement has not yet been made and is not yet valid. We have to reckon with the existence of a God who is righteous in abstracto and not free to be gracious from the very first, who has to bind to the fulfilment of His promise the fulfilment of certain conditions by man, and punish their non-fulfilment. It is only with the conclusion of this contract with Himself that He ceases to be a righteous God in abstracto and becomes the God who in His righteousness is also merciful and therefore able to exercise grace. In this case it is not impossible or illegitimate to believe that properly, in some inner depth of His being behind the covenant of grace, He might not be able to do this. It is only on the historical level that the theologoumena of the foedus naturae or operum [covenant of nature or works] can be explained by the compact of the Federal theology with contemporary humanism. In fact it derives from anxiety lest there might be an essence in God in which, in spite of that contract, His righteousness and His mercy are secretly and at bottom two separate things. And this anxiety derives from the fact that the thought of that intertrinitarian contract obviously cannot have any binding and therefore consoling and assuring force. This anxiety and therefore this proposition of a covenant of works could obviously never have arisen if there had been a loyal hearing of the Gospel and a strict looking to Jesus Christ as the full and final revelation of the being of God. In the eternal decree of God revealed in Jesus Christ the being of God would have been seen as righteous mercy and merciful righteousness from the very first. It would have been quite impossible therefore to conceive of any special plan of a God who is righteous in abstracto, and the whole idea of an original covenant of works would have fallen to the ground.[1]

Briefly, points of response. Firstly, Barth argues: there is no point in constructing a covenant of works to begin with. He argues that this ultimately is really a matter of adding a hermeneutical exemplum where God’s Self-revelation, attested to in Holy Scripture, never prescribed the need for one; at least not beyond what the text of Scripture itself is premised upon in regard to its reality in Jesus Christ. If our first encounter with God in Christ is Genesis 1:1, “in the beginning God created,” then it becomes artificial to construct a latterly construed beginning point with God that is based upon an ad hoc construct wherein God first relates to us on some aspect of Law (e.g., covenant of works). Secondly, for Barth, to posit this type of negative or abstract starting point for a God-human relationship, ends up relying on the speculative machinations of the philosophers and theologians rather than the positive affections provided for by God first encountering us in the face of Jesus Christ (in the grace of creation by God’s Word cf. John 1:1). Thirdly, for Barth, when this type of competitive relationship between God and humanity, based on an abstract notion of Law, is introduced into the eternal life of God, we end up with two distinct concepts of righteousness within the Godhead; i.e., wherein the Son, subordinately, submits whatever His sense of righteousness might be to that of the Father’s sense of righteousness. This is where I would argue the pactum salutis inherently lends itself to a social trinitarianism of the type where the Son can be understood as eternally subordinate to the Father. Fourthly, as inferred from Barth’s reasoning, we end up with a ’God behind the back of the covenantal schema’ in Federal theology, which entails the notion that we can never be quite sure if His ostensible revealed will is eternally in correspondence with His eternal or hidden will insofar there is no necessary relationship between His eternal and triune person and His work in salvation in the lineaments of a historical history.

Alternatively, and rightly, Barth simply scrubs the whole framework posited by a federal theology in favor of building his covenantal schema on the direct and immediate Self-revelation of God; indeed, without additions. Barth’s approach, I would argue, fits Occam’s Razor much better than Federal theology does, insofar that Barth doesn’t need to add unnecessary accretions to what God has already and intelligibly revealed in regard to the Gospel. That is, that rather than constructing a salvation-framework that adds more to the Gospel understanding, ostensibly, that Barth is biblically comfortable with working from the person and work of God in Christ as if the whole revelation of God without adumbration. When accretions are added, we end up with the heterodox and heretical liminalities that Barth has correctly highlighted for us in his critique of the pactum salutis in particular, and Federal theology in general. In other words, for Barth (and TFT and John the theologian): ‘when we see Jesus we see the Father’ without hesitation.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §57 [065] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 61–2.

The Father-Son God by the Holy Spirit: Repudiating Social Trinitarianisms

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Torrance is discussing the impact that dualistic Hellenism has had upon Western-thought-forms; namely the precedence that classical thought has given to the optical mode of thinking and verification (so the obsession with empiricism, etc.). TFT is highlighting the impact that this methodology and epistemology can have upon our construal of God’s “Father-hood” and “Son-hood,” and how Christian/Patristic theology, primarily through Athanasius’ influence, eschewed this “Hellenizing” effect by reifying it through Christian ontology.

The contrast between Christianity and Hellenism could hardly be greater than at this fundamental level, where biblical patterns of thought governed by the Word of God and the obedient hearing of faith (υπακοη της πιτεως) conflict sharply with those of Greek religion and philosophy. The issue came to its head in the Arian controversy over the Father – Son relation at the heart of the Christian Gospel. Are the terms ‘father’ and ‘son’ to be understood as visual, sensual images taken from our human relations and then projected mythologically into God? In that event how can we avoid projecting creaturely gender into God, and thinking of him as grandfather as well as father, for the only kind of father we know is one who is son of another father? To think of God like that, in terms of the creaturely content of images projected out of ourselves, inevitably gives rise to anthropomorphic and polymorphic notions of deity and in fact to polytheism and idolatry. However, if we think from a centre in God as he reveals himself to us through his Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, then we know him as Father in himself in an utterly unique and incomparable way which then becomes the controlling standard by reference to which all notions of creaturely fatherhood and sonship are to be understood. ‘God does not make man his pattern, but rather, since God alone is properly and truly Father, we men are called fathers of our own children, for of him every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named.’ Unique Fatherhood and unique Sonship in God mutually define one another in an absolute and singular way. As Athanasius pithily expressed it in rejection of Arian anthropocentric mythologising: ‘Just as we cannot ascribe a father to the Father, so we cannot ascribe a brother to the Son’.[1]

[1] T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 69-70.

Maximus and the Damascene Against Dualisms and the New Age

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Au contraire! John of Damascus, Maximus the Confessor et al. countered the persistence of the dualists into their own time; indeed, as they stood as Christian theologians of the East in the 7th and 8th centuries. For Augustine, in his pagan days, he partook of an early dualistic religion, known as Manicheanism. This type of dualism, indeed, as it was imbibed by the Gnostics, and even some so-called Christian Gnostics, gained a foothold into the life of the Church, the world, that would perdure even into our present in the 21st century. For the Confessor and the Damascene, they were fighting some heir-apparents of the earlier formed Manicheanism and Gnosticism simpliciter. In their day, respectively, these folks were identified as the Paulicians, and latterly (after Maximus and John), the Bogomils. In nuce, these dualistic systems attempted to identify two competing principles within the world, within the principle of all reality; such that, when applied to God, they saw Light versus Darkness as two equidistant primordial combatants. As a result, they posited two principles largess, rather than just the one that Christian trinitarian monotheism thought from. Even so, these heretical dualistic groups had enough purchase among the people, that people like Maximus, in his respective time, and John of Damascus in his, felt the need to counter them through Christian and biblical theological reasoning (which also entailed some metaphysics).

Jaroslav Pelikan describes the competition this way:

While maintaining against Judaism that the Shema did not preclude the doctrine of the Trinity, but rather, when correctly understood, included it, orthodox Christian monotheism simultaneously opposed any effort to modify the singleness of the divine nature through the introduction of a double principle [ἀρχή]. The Trinity did not imply any compromise in the fundamental axiom that the divine principle was one, and in opposition to the Filioque this axiom was reinforced. To the dualists the orthodox declared: “For our part, we do not follow your godless ways, nor do we say that there are two principles which are to be separated according to location. But, declaring that there is one Creator of all things and a single principle of all things, we affirm the dogma . . . of the Father and the Son.” “The confession of two principles, an evil god and a good one” was understood by the orthodox to be the “first article” of the Paulician creed, taken over from the Manicheans. From the Manicheans and Paulicians the notion of a multiple principle had in turn been taken over by later dualist groups, particularly the Bogomils. Biblical justification for it was found in such passages as Matthew 7:18, which said that there were two different sources for the two different kinds of deeds, or 2 Corinthians 4:3–4, which spoke of “the god of this world.” Replying to such exegesis, the orthodox produced biblical evidence that the very rejection of the authority of God by the world was evidence for one principle rather than two; for Christ “came to his own home, and his own people received him not.”

                Although in later theologians the proof from Scripture took a more prominent role, in the polemics of John of Damascus such proof was heavily reinforced by logic and metaphysics. When the Manicheans contended that the two principles “have absolutely nothing in common,” he replied that if they both existed, they had to have at least existence in common. By their very use of the term “principle,” the Manicheans contradicted their own dualism, for a principle had to be single. As in mathematics the unit was the principle of every number, so it was in metaphysics. If there was an individual principle for each existing thing, then these many principles had in turn to have a single principle behind them. Otherwise there would not be only the two principles of God and matter, as the dualists taught, but a plurality of them throughout the universe. Not only was this an absurdity on the face of it, but it negated the meaning of the word “principle.” Good and evil were not to be explained on the basis of a dual principle, but rather “the good is both the principle and the goal of all things, even of those things that are evil.”[1]

Okay, that is all well and interesting. But what I want to do with this is to attempt to identify how this type of dualism is presently present within the 21st century world, whether that be in the sacred or secular.

My simple observation is this (and this is for Christian consumption, primarily): The devil himself loves nothing more than leading people into the delusion that in fact he is equiprimordial with the living and triune God. He likes to lead his kingdom of darkness, and even us Christians who are still, in principle, in it (but not of it), into the fantasy that his powers of darkness represent a real-life contradiction of God’s life and Light. It is easy, in our bodies of death as we are, to give into this satanic delusion; indeed, even as Christians. In this current world of chaos and disorder it might in fact appear that the devil and minions have an upper hand on God’s economy in the world in Jesus Christ. But just as the Paulicians and Bogomils logic of antiChrist proportions were defeated, indeed, imploded, by folks like Maximus and John of Damascus, in their own respective ways, that same theo-logic applies against the inherent dualisms of our day in the 21st century.

Hence, there is no absolute dualism between the living God, and the minions of darkness. As the Apostle Paul triumphantly declares: “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him” (Colossians 2:13–15). Jesus as the Theanthropos came and destroyed, not an abstract evil, but a concrete one as that has polluted the human being, from the inside/out. Even though evil and sin remain consequential things in this ‘evil age,’ they eschatologically have already been put to death by the Godman, Jesus Christ. He currently is reigning at the Right Hand of the Father, which so contraposes the so called god of darkness, that the apparent war can be said to have never even really gotten off of the ground for the satanic horde’s parasitic “nothingness” economy.

And so, our Lord, contra the dualistic-delusion exhorts: “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world (John 16:33).” He has not left us as orphans, or as defeated ones. What can death do to us? The same thing it did to Jesus. Though we die, yet shall we live. The forces of this current world order have been defeated; death has been put to death; the scourge of sin has lost its power; and we in fact are the victorious ones as we stand in the Victor of God’s grace for the world in Jesus Christ. This doesn’t necessarily make our daily lives easier, per se, but it does let us know that even though we might feel like we are drowning in the scuz of this world system, even within our own bodies of death, we know as Christians that the power of God, the Gospel funds our lives in Christ by the Holy Spirit, to the point that we can stand in victory. Even if such victory, to the dark-system, looks like defeat (like weakness and foolishness).

Dualism is a wicked evil in our world. Most Westerners are caught in its clutches by their submission to New Age theatrics and demonism (this is ironic because New Ageism is based broadly in Eastern monism—I need to flesh this out more fully since New Age ostensibly denies dualisms::I don’t think they actually achieve that though). But as we have already visited, these types of dualistic movements have been present throughout the world order since at least Genesis 3. And yet, even before these fake-power-plays came into existence in the natural world order, God had already pre-destined Himself to be for the world, to not be God without, but with us in Jesus Christ. The Enemy, the darkness has never had an eschatological chance in hell to get beyond the boundary of hell God had always already determined for it in His free life as the Deus incarnandus (the God to be incarnate).

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600—1700), Volume 2 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 219–20.