Today is the official release day for my newest book The Shape of Joy!

What's the book about?

Well, it's my most psychology focused book, very much about mental health. Very much about joy, in fact. The book is my take on the burgeoning field of positive psychology and how the science of transcendence is pointing toward a surprising convergence between mental health and spirituality. If you've read Hunting Magic Eels, you'll recall how I describe "the Ache," the psychological symptoms we're observing in post-Christian culture. If Hunting Magic Eels tells that story from a negative perspective, as an "ache," The Shape of Joy describes the same phenomenon from a positive perspective, how that hole within ourselves can be filled.

The thesis of The Shape of Joy is that joy has a shape, that mental health has a geometry. You see that metaphor play out across the three sections of the book. 

Part 1 is entitled "Curved Inward." In this section I describe how the modern self, following the legacy of Sigmund Freud, has collapsed in upon itself. The modern self is introverted, inward-looking, self-absorbed, and self-referential. We're trapped in our heads. The major symptoms of this inward-facing self is neurotic rumination and mental wandering, both of which cause unhappiness. Sadly, however, modern self-help and therapeutic recommendations for mental health have only doubled-down on this self-referentiality. I closely examine and point out the problems with the widespread therapeutic, educational, and parenting assumption that self-esteem provides the foundation for psychological health and resiliency. Attaching our mental health to this sort of self-referentiality, trying to achieve happiness through self-regard, has only exacerbated our psychological fragility.

This brings us to Part 2 of the book entitled "Turning Away." Here I discuss how the first step toward joy is a step back from the self. I survey the research on ego volume, mindfulness, and humility to show how inner peace is associated with getting some distance between yourself and your ego. Embodied, grounded awareness (practices of mindfulness) and hypo-egoic self-forgetting (humility) are examples of the mental health benefits of "turning away" from our internal drama to engage with the world.

I use the science of awe to pivot from Part 2 to Part 3, which is entitled "Curved Outward." Awe has been associated with a "small ego," a humbler, relational self that is connected to a larger reality. Awe and the quiet ego illustrate that we need to do more than step back from ourselves. We need to take one additional step, what I call "the outward turn." In Part 3 I survey the science of transcendence, noting how over the last twenty years positive psychology has been pointing us toward self-transcendence as the secret to health and happiness. Here we explore the surprising convergence between science and spirituality. Gratitude, wonder, hope, mattering, meaning in life, and joy all flow out of self-transcendence, looking beyond yourself. The modern self-referential self--fragile, ruminative, anxious and neurotic--needs to be flipped inside out. We need to step back from our noisy egos and then make an outward turn. Joy has a shape.

A simple theological way to describe the trajectory of The Shape of Joy is to say the book makes an Augustinian journey, starting off with our restless hearts and walking toward a Rest found beyond ourselves.

Finally, I try to keep this space free of self-promotional sales pitches, but publication days are the one day I'll stop regular programming to make an ask. 

First of all, I hope you're as interested and excited as I am about The Shape of Joy. And even if the book is not your cup of tea, maybe consider buying a copy to give as a gift. As you know, I keep my writing here free of charge, so if you've ever wanted to say "thank you" by way of financial support, buying The Shape of Joy is something you can do for me to express appreciation. 

Also, if you get your book club, small group, or Bible class to read The Shape of Joy I'd love to say thank you back by Zooming in for a chat as the author. And for the pastors out there, the book can also preach. I'd love to share its message with your community.

Even if you can't buy the book today there is still something you can do to help me. Go to Amazon and share the book with your online community, like on Facebook or Twitter, with a simple note from the bland but descriptively true ("Richard Beck has a new book out.") to something more excited ("Can't wait to read this new book by Richard Beck!)." One of the reasons I’m a pretty well-kept secret is that I don’t do social media, which keeps me healthy but creates a bit of a marketing problem. Any social media love you can spare today for the book would be greatly appreciated. 

And if you do read the book, I pray it blesses you. The Shape of Joy fills a unique gap in books addressing our current mental health crisis. On the one hand, The Shape of Joy is more clear, direct, and unapologetic in making connections to faith and spirituality than best-selling positive psychology books have been. Psychologists are often shy about God and routinely fail to be explicit about where their research is pointing. On the other hand, unlike many spirituality and self-help books, The Shape of Joy is grounded in empirical research. A walk through the endnotes is a self-guided tour through the science of happiness and well-being. The Shape of Joy is both deeply spiritual and rigorously scientific.

Thank you for following the blog and all your support! 

This will be the last post in this series, finishing up with some more thoughts about eschatology, a theology of "last things."

As I mentioned in the very first post, this series can't be about "everything." This series was, rather, an attempt at some systematization, to pull different topics into a coherent, consistent whole. In that attempt, systematic theological reflection tries to create a holistic vision of "everything." 

This series tried to do a bit of that, from creation theology to theodicy to soteriology to eschatology. We've talked also about the Triune God, Father, Son and Spirit. We've dipped into theological anthropology and ecclesiology. 

Of course, much has been left out, critical questions remain and legitimate objections can be leveled. I'm continuing to ponder how the theology of creation I've sketched in this series might accord with an evolutionary account of human origins. Also, and relevant to today's post, I'm pondering how the "ontological drop" into contingency relates to our life after death. Today's post shares a speculative reflection about that topic. That is, the body succumbs to non-being at its death, but does non-being also shadow the soul after death? And if so, how to describe that? This post will attempt that description.

So, questions, puzzles, and issues remain, but I enjoyed over this series pulling together a lot of disparate thoughts into a "theology of everything."

While this post concerns the status of creatures after death, it's also an attempt to connect back to the beginning of this series to try to close some loops.

To recap: Creation is both ex nihilo and ex Deo. We come "from nothing" but also "from God." Created existence, to exist at all, has to be rooted in God. And yet, created existence, being from nothing, is shadowed by non-being should its connection with God become severed. Consequently, should we divorce ourselves from God we drop into contingency and begin a drift into non-being.  

Following Maximus the Confessor, at the instant of our creation humanity moved away from God and suffered the "ontological drop" into contingency. Death was introduced into created being, movement toward nothingness. As the volitional aspect of created being, the entire cosmos suffers this drop to experience the encroachment of non-being. Creation now awaits the human response to God.

From the foundation of the world God has made provision for the ontological drop. From eternity the Son was predestined to become Incarnate, joining in his person created being with Uncreated being. In his "yes" to the Father Christ reestablishes the ontological bridge between creation and God. Where Adam's "no" ushered death into created being Christ brings life:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned...But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many...If, because of the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. (Romans 5.12,15,17) 

The work of Christ in uniting created being to God is vindicated at his resurrection from the dead. Easter demonstrates that death has "no dominion" over Christ's created being. In Christ created being overcomes the "ontological drop" into contingency. Christ's resurrected body is the ontological hope of created being. Those who cross the ontological bridge that is Christ are filled with his Spirit and are thereby connected to the vivifying, resurrecting power of God. The indwelling of the Spirit is God's answer to our ontological drift into non-being.

For those indwelt by the Spirit, this life is no longer a drift into nothingness. Death becomes the birth pangs of new creation. Mortal being is exchanged for immortality, corruptible being for the incorruptible, fleshly being for the heavenly. The grain of mortal existence dies to give birth to the flower of spiritual existence:

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, made of dust; the second man is from heaven. As one of dust, so are those who are of the dust, and as one of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the one of dust, we will also bear the image of the one of heaven.

What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Look, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:

“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15.42-55)

Concerning the fate of those who die separated from God's Spirit, those who have yet to say "yes" to their own birth and creation, what follows is final bit of theological speculation. 

To start, there are puzzles regarding the logical and metaphysical consistency of some Christian conceptions regarding the following:

1. The separation of the soul from the body at death.
2. The persistence of the disembodied soul in an intermediate state between death and Final Judgment.
3. The belief in a bodily resurrection.

From a systematic theological perspective, there is a great deal of diversity, ambiguity, and controversy regarding how all these beliefs might cohesively hang together. For example, where do souls go after death to await future judgment and/or the general resurrection? Does this intermediate state reflect a "pre-judgment" status before a final judgment? (Think here of Jesus' Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man.) Also, if the soul is separated from the body at death how are the souls of the dead reconnected to their mortal bodies at a future bodily resurrection?

Many Christians skirt or avoid these puzzles by dropping one of the three beliefs above. For example, you might drop the idea of an intermediate state and surmise that, upon our death, we immediately undergo judgment and find ourselves in either heaven or hell. Many Christians also assume a very Platonic view of the afterlife, dispensing with the notion of a future bodily resurrection. That is, upon death souls are separated from their bodies to await judgment in some intermediate and disembodied state to, eventually, go on to face a final judgment at some future date. There is no bodily resurrection in this view, just the soul going through various transitions: separation from the body, awaiting judgment, facing judgment. The trouble with this Platonic perspective is that it flies in the face of Paul's strong belief, cited above, that the resurrection is embodied.

In an attempt to address these puzzles, which seem to revolve around disembodied souls existing in an intermediate state, I have poked around looking for some answers to these questions. In what follows I'm going to borrow from and elaborate upon a piece of Paul Giffiths' argument in Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures. Let's end this series with some final speculations.  

Here's the basic idea: The soul is always embodied. Even after death. There is no such thing as a disembodied soul. Borrowing from the Hebrew idea of Sheol, the soul is not disembodied but is, rather, "shaded" by death. The indeterminate state between death and resurrection is inhabited by shades rather than disembodied souls. 

In his treatment of this, Paul Griffiths speaks of "discarnate animate bodies." Following the Hebrew imagination, I will speak of "shades." The basic idea is the same: while the dead are separated from their material flesh (they are "discarnate") they continue to posses a type of body. As Griffiths states, "the discarnate soul has a nonfleshly body of some kind, as do all creatures." (See sections 1, 18, and 22 of Decreation for Griffiths' treatment of "disincarnate bodies").

Though I am shifting away from the traditional word "soul" to speak of "shades" to name post-mortem human being, I would argue that we've always imagined, described, and depicted "souls" as "shades." Think of Jesus' Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. Think of Saul calling Samuel up from Sheol. Think of how the souls envisioned in Revelation are clothed in white robes. Think of how we "see" ghosts, the souls of the dead, as faded images of their former lives. Think of Dante's Divine Comedy where he encounters embodied shades in his travels. Think of C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. Think of the early Christian belief that Christ descends into hell to rescue the shades imprisoned in hades. Think of the embodiment of angels. In short, I would argue that the word "shade" has always better captured depictions of post-mortem existence than "soul" given how in every case we imagine embodiment, even if ghostly, spectral, spiritual or other-worldly embodiment. In fact, I would suggest that it is impossible to even imagine such a thing as a "disembodied soul." Any "soul" we'd imagine would have some connection to embodiment as a "shade" of a prior material existence.  (Griffiths uses the word "trace" to describe the connection between the shade and its prior fleshly existence.)

To offer a definition, "shaded" existence is existence where non-being has come to occlude the creature's material being. More simply, the material creature has died. In this sense, shaded existence is "immaterial" existence but not disembodied existence. 

Admittedly, all this is highly speculative, but I believe a contrast between shaded embodied existence versus disembodied souls solves, at least grammatically, some of the puzzles and inconsistencies described above. Specifically, shaded existence preserves embodiment from death through the intermediate state to resurrection and judgment. Shaded existence also avoids needing to describe how souls get separated from and reunited with bodies at death and at the resurrection. That is, shaded embodiment doesn't need, at the resurrection, to be reconnected to its former material constituents. Rather, shaded embodiment undergoes the change and transfiguration Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15. 

So, back to the question at hand: What happens to those who are disconnected from Christ when they die? 

When a creature separated from the Spirit dies its death is experienced as an ontological catastrophe, as an ontological loss. Rather than a birth, the experience is one of death. Non-being wins a victory over the material being of the creature who is thrown into ontological darkness. This darkness is also an apocalypse. In the darkness the creature faces its moral separation from God and its ontological precarity. This state is variously described as judgement, wrath, and hell. The creature suffers the shadow of non-being, exists as a "shade" of its former existence. Far from God and having suffered loss, the shades weep and gnash their teeth. They dwell in darkness. They are salted by fire.

The tradition differs as to the ultimate fate of the shades of hell. Some contend that God allows the shades to continue their drift into non-being. Separated from God, shaded existence eventually evaporates into nothingness. This view is described as mortalism, conditionalism or annihilationism. Rebellious creatures cease to exist. Refusing to exist in God, the creature becomes nothing. There is no other place to go. In Decreation, Griffiths argues for this position, that the shades can self-annihilate by choosing nothingness over God. This view is not my view, but if my view is incorrect this is the view I would fall back to.

Others contend that the shades of hell can and will remain in a state of intransigent rebellion for all of eternity. The shades cannot annihilate themselves and God refuses to allow them to drift into non-being. Consequently, the shades persist in the outer darkness for all eternity. This view is called self-exclusion or voluntarism. See C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. I find this view harder to believe in as I find it implausible that a stasis such as this, if solely due to the creature's volition, could persist for eternity. In a face-off between finitude versus infinity I'm betting on infinity. I find it more plausible that creatures complete their journey into either Being or non-being, that everyone, eventually, gets to where they are going, reaching either God or nothingness. That said, many feel constrained by their reading of Scripture that eternal self-exclusion, or something like it, is the proper view. The majority voice of the Christian tradition also supports them.

My view, however, as described in the last post, is apokatastasis, the ultimate and comprehensive restoration of created being.

According to apokatastasis, the shadow of non-being cast over created being will be fully overcome. Biblically, this is described as the final and ultimate defeat of death:

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human, for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in its own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all. (1 Cor. 15.20-28)

When death, the last enemy, is defeated God will be all in all. Ultimately, all of created being will say "yes" to God. Creation will consent to its birth. With this consent non-being is overcome. Undergoing the pedagogy of death, darkness, and hell, the shadow of shaded existence gives way to the Dawn. Creation crosses the ontological bridge. The birth-pangs of contingency are overcome in the birth of new creation. Created being is transfigured, divinized. In Christ, God became a human being so that human being, the whole of it, can become God. Theosis. Stated even more broadly, God became created being so that created being, the whole of it, can become God. Death, the last enemy of created being, is defeated. All die in Adam, but all will be made alive in Christ. Alpha and Omega. God will be all in all.    

"Even while I am old and gray, do not abandon me"

I'm 57. I started this blog in 2007, when I was 40. Time has passed. Sixty is right around the corner, and it's starting to feel like, at ACU, I'm entering the final stage of my career. Ten more years to go. And times flies so fast. 

In 2007 I used to wear my hair long. It was...a look. But over the last few years I've started to cut my hair short. People who haven't seen me in a while need a beat to recognize me. They're looking for a long-haired hippie. "Why did you cut your hair?!" they exclaim and ask. Well, because I'm losing it. That's why. 

They say that 50 is the new 40, so I'm not suggesting that 57 is in anyway "old." But at 57 you do start to notice the time. I'm not constantly looking at the clock, but I've started to glance at it. 

Psalm 71 is a prayer for the aging, asking for God's continued presence, help, and provision:

God, you have taught me from my youth,
and I still proclaim your wondrous works.
Even while I am old and gray,
God, do not abandon me,
while I proclaim your power
to another generation,
your strength to all who are to come.

This week in my "Theology of Everything" series I cited Maximus the Confessor. He described how we put our dying to use for our sanctification. Put my dying to use. I think about that a lot. A person once shared with me that "it takes a lifetime to become a human being." Aging is a huge part of that process, and I'm only just starting on that journey. I feel so late to this game of becoming a human being. So many virtues still to acquire. 

O God, you have taught me from my youth. I still proclaim your wondrous works. As the clock ticks, do not abandon me. Let me, here at 57, proclaim your power to another generation. 

In this post, and the next/final post, I want to put forth an eschatological vision, which is also tied to soteriology and theodicy. Two critical ideas, again taken from the church fathers, are theosis and apokatastasis.

God is both our origin and our destiny. We come from God and we return to God. In the end, we become God. We are united with God. We are divinized. As Athanasius said, "The Son of God became man so that man might become God." Our "becoming God" is what the church fathers call theosis. 

Maximus the Confessor described theosis as a developmental process. First, our being must be connected to the source of our well-being. This is our consent to being born again in the Spirit. In turning toward Christ and being filled with the Spirit our being is connected to the source of our well-being. Establishing this connection--being to well-being--is the first task of life. Upon this connection the process of theosis commences where, continues Maximus, our being and well-being culminate in eternal well-being, finding our final rest in God. 

What, then, is the fate of those souls who, upon their death, have not yet been born again, who have not yet connected their being to the source of their well-being?

Instead of reinventing the wheel, let me simply reshare and endorse Sergius Bulgakov's vision of apokatastasis, which I described in a series last fall. Apokatastasis is the vision espoused by some church fathers, such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, to describe the ultimate restoration of all things, God coming to be "all in all." 

As the creature drifts toward non-being it suffers decay and, eventually, death. For the baptized and spirit-filled, those whose being has been pneumatically connected to the source of their well-being, this transition is experienced as transformation and transfiguration, as a birth, movement from a death-saturated contingent existence into incorruptible life. 

For those not pneumatically connected to the source of their well-being, death transitions the soul into a state of judgment and torment. Death reveals to the creature its separation from God, which can only be experienced as painful suffering. We can recall here the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Death reveals to the rich man his separation from God. The man awakens to find himself, like the prodigal, in a far country. Death is an apocalypse, an ontological exposure. In death, non-being fully eclipses material being casting the lost soul into utter darkness. This darkness also burns. In the fire and darkness the soul faces and experiences judgment, the consequences of separation from God.

The pain the soul experiences is purgative, not punitive. Restorative, not retributive. The fire purifies the soul. Here is how Bulgakov describes the soul's condition and experience after death:

Human being [will be] clothed in Christ, who is the Truth and the Life, by the life-giving Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Truth. This means that every human being is inwardly confronted with the truth about himself. Every human being sees himself in truth, by a vision that is not abstract but living, like the consuming flame of a fire from whose light one cannot hide, for all will become visible...

No falsehood, no self-deception, no error will have a place in the kingdom of truth, and this "exposure" by the Spirit of truth is already the judgment. By virtue of the truth this judgment becomes for everyone a self-judgment, a shedding of the veils of falsehood and self-deception that cover emptiness...This illuminating and transfiguring power is expressed in the image of fire, not natural of course but "spiritual," which will penetrate the "spiritual" body and the spirit itself. The fire of the future age consumes, but it also transfigures, illuminates, gladdens...

[E]very human being will be placed before his own eternal image in Christ, that is, before Christ. And in the light of this image, he will see his own reality, and this comparison will be the judgment. It is this that is the Last Judgment of Christ upon every human being.

Bulgakov continues by describing how this confrontation with Christ results in repentance:

It is impossible to appear before Christ and to see Him without loving Him. In the resurrection there is no longer any place for anti-Christianity, for enmity toward Christ, for satanic hatred of Him, just as there is no place for fear of Him as the Judge terrible in His omnipotence and the fury of His wrath. The Lord will come as He was on earth: meek and humble in heart, though now in glory. But his meekness and humility will burn hearts by their love and their judgment. God-Love judges with love the sins against love.

In light of this judgment, it is the fate of every human person to come to Christ. All will consent to being born again. Apokatastasis is the moral logic of creation. If God created the world then God will rescue the world.  

A Maximus the Confessor says, "The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things." God wills that the mystery of the Incarnation be actualized always and in all things. Creation becomes Incarnation and Incarnation becomes Creation as created being is joined, through Christ, to God's Being. The hypostatic union we witness in Jesus is the destiny of creation, the mystery of the Incarnation realized in my own being. The Logos that is the ground of our created being is tethered to the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, through whom the Spirit draws us into the Triune life of God. We are drawn to the Father through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.

From a different angle, as we've described in this series, the world hasn't yet been fully created. The world is, rather, being born. Apokatastasis, in this view, is the true creation of the world. Fully and finally. Creation is happening right now and sits out before us. As Bulgakov writes, "This is God's inalienable gift to creation, the completion of His work on the world." The beginning of the world and its final redemption are a single creative act. Following Paul in Romans, what we experience in this life are labor pains. This world is a womb and we are being born.

These birth pains continue until the whole of creation is birthed. The vision of the afterlife here, these eschatological labor pains, is one of gradual purgation and developmental transfiguration as we move from glory to glory toward theosis and our divinization. Bulgakov again describing this:

Creaturely eternity is becoming, growth, ascent from glory to glory...Infinite stages of eternity, an unending ladder of ascent from earth to heaven, are introduced here...Eternal life is a path, not a way station, not a stagnation in some nirvana. It is creative ascent in the reception of divine life and its revelations...

Eternal life, or eternal bliss, is deification, the reception of divine life..."God will be all in all." 

There is no stasis in the afterlife. Hell is purgative, a developmental, restorative process. We are saved through the fire. Bulgakov:

[H]ell's torments of love necessarily contain the regenerating power of the expiation of sin by the experiencing it to the end. However, this creative experiencing is not only a passive state, in chains imposed from the outside. It is also an inwardly, synergistically accepted spiritual state...This state is appropriately perceived not as a juridical punishment but as an effect of God's justice, which is revealed in its inner persuasiveness. And its acceptance as a just judgment corresponds to an inner movement of the spirit, to a creative determination of the life of the spirit. And in its duration ("in ages of ages"), this life contains the possibility of creative suffering that heals, of a movement of the spirit from within toward good in its triumphant force and persuasiveness. Therefore, it is necessary to stop thinking of hell in terms of static and inert immobility, but instead to associate it with the dynamics of life, always creative and growing. Even in hell, the nature of the spirit remains unchanging in its creative changeability. Therefore, the state of hell must be understood as unceasing creative activity, or more precisely, self-creative activity, of the soul, although this state bears within itself a disastrous split, an alienation from its prototype [the Image of Christ]. All the same, the apostle Paul defines this state as a salvation, yet by fire, after the man's work is burned.

Stepping back, we can ask the question: Who are the lost? The "lost" are those who are still being born, those still undergoing the labor pains of creation. 

Again, the salvation of the lost, through the fires of hell and the eschatological labor pains, goes to the very logic of creation itself. The moral logic of creation implies apokatastasis, the restoration of all things where God is "all in all." "Otherwise," says Bulgakov, "creation would appear to be an error or failure, since it would end with the eternity of hell, even if this were accompanied by the eternity of heaven. An eternal separation of humanity into the elect and reprobate is clearly not the final meaning of creation. One must therefore suppose that this separation has an inner proportionality of grace that assures a final positive sum of all the pluses and minuses of history, a universal harmony, total and beautiful." 

Creation will come to its completeness and fullness. Creation shall not be stillborn.

In this "theology of everything," creation, Christology, soteriology, theodicy, and eschatology converge upon a single point. Apokatastasis. Creation is Incarnation, the universal realization of the hypostatic union between creation and God. Creation, salvation, and theodicy are a single unified act, God's eternal and predestined response to humanity's fall and our ontological drop. As Bulgakov states, "Only deification is capable of justifying creation. It is the only theodicy."

The world was created by Grace, the world exists in Grace, and the world returns to Grace by Grace. 

We have been saved from the foundation of the world.

Having discussed soteriology in the last few posts, I want to turn to a discussion of final things in the last three posts of this series. 

In this post we'll discuss how the creature approaches death.

Perhaps this post isn't necessary for this series as it isn't doing a lot of heavy theological lifting. But I want to insert it here to share a reflection about what it means to be "born again" in the Spirit while still moving toward death. That is to say, following the last post, I've been filled with Christ's Spirit, the same Spirit that raised him from the dead, yet I will still experience physical decline and, eventually, death. Given this, how does this "theology of everything" explain this mixed picture, our victory over death while still experiencing death?

When Ignatius of Antioch journeyed to Rome to face his martyrdom, he wrote to the church consoling them about what was about to happen:

Birth-pangs are upon me. Allow me, my brethren; hinder me not from living, do not wish me to die...Allow me to receive the pure light; when I shall have arrived there, I will be a human being.

All has been reversed here. Death has become a birth. Dying is living, and living is dying. Developmentally, here in this life, we are not yet human beings. But after our death, we will grow up and become fully human. 

When the creature consents to being born again, its death becomes the means of its sanctification and maturation. Death is no longer an end, but a means. Our dying becomes a tool. As Maximus the Confessor says, 

The baptized acquires the use of death to condemn sin, which in turn mystically leads that person to divine and unending life. Such will ensue if indeed the saints, for the sake of truth and righteousness, have virtuously finished the course of this life with its many sufferings, liberating their nature within themselves from death as a condemnation of sin and, like Christ, the captain of our salvation, turned death from a weapon to destroy human nature into a weapon to destroy sin.

Note well the phrase: "the use of death." For the "born again," due to our pneumatic incorruptibility, united as we are to the Spirit, death can no longer destroy our human nature. But our dying can be used as a weapon to destroy the sin in our lives. Death becomes a resource for my sanctification. 

Life is learning to die in order to be born again. The creature participates in using their death to become a human being. To be clear, this isn't a stoical acceptance of death as the cessation and end of life, a materialistic, nihilistic vision of "dying well." We are describing death as birth-pangs, as moving toward mystical union with God. Again, death is being used as a tool. The soul is perfected and purified as it moves through this world of contingency, full of suffering and tribulation. The soul experiences this life as a birthing, as labor pains in a process of sanctification. 

We die to arrive as human beings.

From before the foundation of the world God has made atonement for the moral rupture caused by human sin. 

And yet, this atonement is no "get out of jail free" card as the moral rupture persists and deepens if we fail to "look to the cross." Before we were born we had already been forgiven. But if our will remains violent, depraved, vain, and selfish we continue to wallow in the mud like the prodigal son in a far country. Nothing changes about God's love for us in the cross. God's love has simply become visible to us within history. And yet, everything changes for us when we turn toward the cross. Everything changes when I, as the prodigal child, rise from the mud in "coming to my senses" and take my first step back toward home. The Father's love is our only hope. Our hearts will remain restless until they rest in Him.

Phrased more traditionally, confession, repentance, and conversion are absolutely critical. We must be transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. This is the flame of evangelism, to call all prodigals home. The church is a lighthouse on the shore of a raging, stormy sea. The vocation of Israel was to call all nations to the worship of God. As Gentile late-comers to Israel's story, we step into that vocation and mission. The church is called to make the love of God visible in history and to fulfill the Great Commission:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Beyond the moral rupture, there is also creation's ontological predicament, its ontological drop into contingency. Beyond forgiveness there remains the "last enemy" of death. As described in the last post, through the Incarnation God re-connects created being with Uncreated Being. This is the Christological mystery of the hypostatic union as described by Chalcedon:

Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.

Famously, in the Chalcedon definition of Christ's "two natures" there are four negatives: without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation. I expect some of you might be getting lost in the metaphysical weeds here, so let me spell out the simple but critical point: In his person Christ unites two qualitatively different sources of being, the created and the Uncreated, without one replacing or mixing with the other. A unity that maintains an ontological difference is established. This "ontological bridge," as I described it in the last post, is called "the hypostatic union." 

The establishment of this ontological connection is how Christmas saves us, how the Incarnation itself is salvific. The success and victory of the hypostatic union is demonstrated at Christ's resurrection. In Christ we see how created being survived death. In the resurrection we see how the ontological drop was and can be overcome. As it says in Romans 6: "We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him." With this ontological bridge established between created, contingent being, vulnerable as it is to death and decay, to God's Uncreated Being, we can now follow the ontological path trail-blazed by the resurrection. Resurrection overcomes the ontological drop. Romans 8:

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

Through the Holy Spirit our created being is connected God's Uncreated Being, giving us the same power to overcome death that was demonstrated in Christ's own resurrection. This is why Jesus says that we must be "born again" by the Spirit:

Jesus replied to Nicodemus, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

To overcome death the creature must consent to being "born again." We must walk across the ontological bridge. Connecting our flesh to Christ's Spirit is the only way to overcome our ontological contingency.

Here again we face the flame of evangelism. You must consent to your second birth. You must walk the ontological bridge that is Christ. You must be indwelt by the Holy Spirit. You must step away from the shadow of non-being and into the Light.

Let me state this even more simply, given the theology I've been working out. 

Human life exists between two poles, Being (creation ex Deo, "from God") and non-being (creation ex nihilo, "from nothing"). You are always moving toward one pole or the other, toward either Being or non-being. Morally, we describe this movement as toward either darkness or Light. Ontologically, we describe this movement as toward either death or Life. If you are walking toward non-being--into darkness and death--you must turn around. We call this turn metanoia, translated as "repentance" in our Bibles, but which literally means "to turn around." Anyone walking into non-being must "turn around" toward Being, Light and Life. Morally, this "turning around" means looking to the cross, confessionally confronting your sin in embracing the mercy of God. Ontologically, this turning around means "being born again" in the Spirit. Evangelism, therefore, in my "theology of everything," along with prophetic speech, has a simple, singular goal: Persuading people to turn around. From darkness to Light. From death to Life.

One way I think about the task of evangelism is that it seeks to overcome the despair of the creature by pointing toward Christ. 

First, the guilty creature will despair. The shame-crippled creature will stumble. Consequently, we point the sinner toward the cross. The evangelist makes the love of God visible. Provision has been made. Believe. Confess. Repent. Rise from the mud and come back home. 

Second, the creature shadowed by death will also despair. Life is haunted by contingency. All around, the creature beholds and suffers disease, decline, damage, and decay. Being fades into non-being. We walk through a vale of tears. The creature weeps, mourns, and suffers existential despair. Consequently, we point the creature toward the resurrection. Death has been defeated. Contingent being can be overcome by walking the ontological bridge that is Christ. But you must be filled with the Spirit that resurrected Jesus from the dead. Flesh, shadowed by non-being, cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Your corruptible and contingent being must be clothed in the pneumatic incorruptibility of the Spirit.  

As Jesus said, you must be born again. 

Having worked through the hamartiological aspects of salvation, in this post I want to turn to the ontological aspects of salvation.

To recap, the fall of humanity from the instant of creation had hamartiological effects and ontological effects. In the last few posts we've worked through the hamartiological side of this equation, drawing attention to the atonement made available to us from the foundation of the world and the necessity of us responding to that atonement. 

And yet, sin isn't the only thing involved with our fall from grace. As described in the early posts of this series, when humanity severed its connection with God it experienced an "ontological drop" into contingency. Created being began drifting toward non-being. Death, disease, damage and decay came to shadow creaturely existence. 

Without God's intervention all of created being would fade away. Creatures, being creatures, cannot hold themselves in being. Thus, death is the destiny of everyone and everything. 

Given this slide toward non-being, God acts to reconnect creation with Himself. An ontological cord is created to tether creation to God, preventing its slide into non-existence. The establishment of this connection is called the Incarnation. In the Incarnation, God's Being is connected to created being. The hypostatic union of Christ's two natures, human and divine, is the ontological cord God provides to reconnect the severed ontological relation between God and the cosmos. 

Perhaps the best patristic expression of these ideas comes from Athanasius in Contra Gentes:

For the nature of created things, having come into being from nothing, is unstable, and is weak and mortal when considered by itself...So seeing that all created nature according to its own definition is in a state of flux and dissolution, therefore to prevent this happening and the universe dissolving back into nothing, after making everything by his own eternal Word and bringing creation into existence, [God] did not abandon it to be carried away and suffer through its own nature, lest it run the risk of returning to nothing...lest it suffer what would happen...a relapse into non-existence, if it were not protected by the Word.

Again, in the Incarnation creation and God are reconnected and, following Athanasius, this halts our drift into non-being. Where the first Adam breaks the ontological connection with God the second Adam restores the connection. The Incarnation is God's response to the "ontological drop" of created existence into contingency. This is how the Incarnation, following a great deal of patristic thought, is, in itself, salvific. Where the cross of Christ concerns the hamartiological aspects of our salvation, the Incarnation concerns the ontological. Christmas saves as much as the cross.

The hypostatic union of the Incarnation, the connection between Christ's two natures, created being and uncreated Being, establishes an "ontological bridge" between our contingent existence and God's own Life. As contingent creatures, the only way we can escape from non-being is to cross over this bridge. If we fail to cross this bridge our being remains contingent and continues its drift toward non-being. Death remains our destiny. 

For those who cross over the ontological bridge contingency is overcome through our reconnection with God's vivifying life. For those connected to Christ, death has been defeated. 

"make haste to help me"

It's quite a petition to ask God to hurry up. There are moments in life where our need is pressing and urgent. The clock is ticking. I'm mindful of all the devastation from hurricane Helene and the emergency response in the immediate aftermath. I watched a clip of a TV reporter who was live broadcasting from a flooded road. A woman had driven into the waters, which had risen over her car doors. She cried out for help and the reporter called 911. As he resumed his report the woman continued to cry for help. He called back to her, reassuring her that help was on the way. But her distress continued. Finally, the reporter couldn't in good conscience wait any longer. He stopped reporting and waded into the chest deep waters to rescue the woman from the car. Sometimes, help has to hurry.

Many Psalms, like Psalm 70, have this sort of urgency. "Lord, make haste to help me!" The CSB translation: "Lord, hurry to help me!" 

As I've shared before, in the Orthodox monastic tradition many of the Psalms were interpreted psychospiritually. That this, the attacks and the need for help concern temptations. We ask that God "hurry to help us" in the midst of an acute, spiritual struggle, when we are being assailed by unwanted and troubling desires and impulses. A lovely example of this comes from Every Moment Holy, Volume 1, a prayer for battling a destructive desire:

Jesus, here I am again,
desiring a thing
that were I to indulge in it
would war against my own heart,
and the hearts of those I love.

O Christ, rather let my life be thine!
Take my desires. Let them be subsumed
in still greater desire for you,
until there remains no room for these lesser cravings.

In this moment I might choose
to indulge a fleeting hunger,
or I might choose to love you more.

Faced with this temptation,
I would rather choose you, Jesus—
but I am weak. So be my strength.
I am shadowed. Be my light.
I am selfish. Unmake me now,
and refashion my desires
according to the better designs of your love.

Given the choice of shame or glory,
let me choose glory.
Given the choice of this moment or eternity,
let me choose in this moment what is eternal.
Given the choice of this easy pleasure,
or the harder road of the cross,
give me grace to choose to follow you,
knowing that there is nowhere
apart from your presence
where I might find the peace I long for,
no lasting satisfaction
apart from your reclamation of my heart.

Let me build, then, my King,
a beautiful thing by long obedience,
by the steady progression of small choices
that laid end to end will become like
the stones of a pleasing path
stretching to eternity
and unto your welcoming arms
and unto the sound of your voice
pronouncing the judgment:

Well done.

Before turning to our ontological predicament regarding the fall, one more post to tie up some loose ends and make some things clear regarding our hamartiological predicament and our relationship to the cross of Christ.

In the last two posts I described the hamartiological aspects of the fall and God's response. Though humanity fell at the instant of our creation, creating moral separation from God and incurring guilt, provision was made from the foundation of the world. Prior to our sin atonement had been made. Grace precedes our guilt. 

The point to underline here is that, though we fell, we were already caught. Though we had opened up an abyss between ourselves and God, we discovered a bridge already spanned the distance between us. 

The simplest way to describe all this is just to say "God is love." No matter what we do, no matter how bad it gets, God is love, always providing rescue simply because that is who God is and what God does. There is no "plan" of salvation beyond God being God's very own self. God is the plan. 

So, in the death of Jesus we aren't seeing God "figure something out" in regards to human sinfulness. We aren't beholding God's "Plan B" after experiencing a setback. We aren't seeing God "responding" to our sin. We aren't witnessing God work through some sacrificial logic of appeasement that "allows" God to forgive us by reconciling conflicting impulses within himself (like love and justice, or mercy and holiness). There are no "impulses" within God that come into "conflict" (like his love and justice) and God doesn't "need" to do anything (like shedding blood) in order to forgive us. These are pagan notions. What we are witnessing in the crucifixion of Jesus is something that has already and always been true about God. What we behold in the cross is God's own self, God's very heart. That is what I mean by Calvary as a "theophany," atonement less as a "mechanism" than a "revelation." The love of God becoming visible within history. 

As I described in the last post, we need this theophany. Imagine, for example, if the atonement were invisible to us. If the atonement were invisible a host of bad outcomes would follow. Living with the "knowledge of good and evil" is a severe moral burden. The weight of shame and guilt, as we contemplate our moral separation from God, is a crushing psychological burden. And while God could "tell us" that all is well, we really do need to "see it." A theophany is needed. 

Jesus describes this in comparing his crucifixion to a story from Numbers. In John 3, in his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus says this:

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

This is a reference to events in Numbers 21, when the Lord sent "fiery serpents" to punish the Israelites. To save the people Moses cast a bronze serpent and placed it upon a pole. If bitten by a serpent the people could "look at the bronze serpent and live." To be sure, this is an odd story. Something pagan and magical seems to be at work in the cultural background. But setting that aside, in John 3 Jesus uses this story to make a comparison. Jesus will be like the bronze serpent. If we look at him hanging on the cross, like the ancient Israelites, we will live.

Sin is the poisonous bite of the serpent. And having suffered that bite we are dying. But like the bronze serpent, Jesus is lifted upon the cross within history so that we can look toward him and live.

There are a few points I want to underline here. 

First, again, the theophany. Like Moses' bronze serpent, we need something visible to turn to. An invisible atonement would leave us lost, confused, and despairing. We'd have nothing to "look at" after suffering the sting of sin. Consequently, the cross of Christ is "lifted up" within history to give our despairing hearts a visible object of assurance and pardon.

Second, Jesus describes the "looking" of Numbers 21 as faith in John 3. To "look" upon the theophany of our atonement is to trust in it, to have faith in what we are beholding. From a hamartiological perspective, our having faith in Christ, our trust in him, is critical for our salvation. Though atonement has been made, the moral rupture between ourselves and God is volitional in nature. We have rebelled. We have chosen enmity with God. Consequently, to heal this rupture we must turn toward Christ and trust in the Lamb Who Was Slain from the foundation of the world. More than that, as it says in Revelation, we must "follow the Lamb wherever he goes." This is both atonement and ethics, justification and sanctification. 

The fact that atonement has been made for us prior to our fall isn't a "get out of jail free card." The temporal priority of grace in relation to our sin doesn't lead to Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace." The eternal nature of our atonement, which is simply an expression in God's very own nature and life, doesn't imply that there is nothing we need to do on our side by way of trust or holiness. All is grace, but to make explicit another aspect of my theological system here, we need to exercise our free will in the "looking" and the trusting in the provision God has made for us. Our assent to being saved is necessary for our being saved. 

Let me say that again: Our assent to being saved is necessary for our being saved, for without this assent the self-inflicted moral rupture separating us from God persists.  

In the language of John 3, we must assent to "being born again." There needs to be a free and conscious embrace of the cross. Without this, we remain in a state of moral confusion, separation, rebellion, and enmity. As rebels, we need to lay down our swords at the foot of the cross. Our hamartiological predicament--our separation from God--can be healed in no other way. As prodigals in the far country, we must come to our senses and return home. Like the Israelites, we've been snakebit by sin and must look toward the cross in order to live. Fail to look, and the poison keeps running through our veins. 

God has pardoned us, provision has been made, but we are dying. The cross has been lifted up within history. As a sin-bitten person, where are you looking right now?

Phrasing all this more simply and traditionally, we need to accept Jesus Christ as our Savior. Sin-stricken as we are, we must look toward the cross, trust in Christ's sacrifice, and accept Jesus as our Savior. This is the only way the hamartiological wound we've inflicted upon ourselves can be mended. You must assent to being saved. 

Having described the ontological and hamartiological aspects of the fall, I want to turn in this series to God's response to creation's predicament. We'll be discussing soteriology and eschatology.

To start, let's focus on God's response to human sinfulness, the hamartiological predicament of the moral rupture between ourselves and God.

If, following Maximus the Confessor, humanity fell from grace at the instant of creation then the first thing to note is that Christ is the "lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13.8). Other places in the New Testament also describe atonement as having been made before the beginning of time:

You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. (1 Peter 1.18-20)

Just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will. (Eph 1.4-5)

Christ makes atonement before the foundation of the world. We were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. 

So, while humanity falls in the first instant of creation, provision had already been made. The moral rupture was anticipated and had already been bridged. Though humanity fell into sin our guilt had already been removed.

This gift of grace, extended to us before the foundation of the world, becomes visible within history in the crucifixion of Jesus. To be clear, Calvary does not mark a change in God's affections toward us, wrath becoming favor. Such a notion violates core commitments in our doctrine of God. God is impassive toward human sin and does not require anything by way of sacrifice in order to forgive us. As we've seen, we've been forgiven before we even existed. 

Calvary is, rather, a theophany. God's love is manifested within history at Golgotha. The atonement made before the foundation of the world is made visible at a particular time and place. 

Given that humanity has been forgiven from the beginning of time, why would the theophany of Calvary be needed? Why make the atonement visible within history?

For four related reasons.

First, as described in the last post, when the creature stands before the holiness of God it will fall into despair. "Woe is me, I am lost!" Beyond fear, we also experience guilt and shame. The atonement becomes visible in human history to reassure the creature. When we despair over our sinfulness we can turn toward Calvary to behold our forgiveness. Praise and gratitude follow.

Second, humans are tempted to minimize the reality and severity of the moral rupture our sin has caused, the gravity of our situation. When the creature becomes indifferent or calloused toward sin it persists in drifting toward non-being, choosing nothingness over God. The visible display of the cost of sin at Calvary confronts the conscience and prompts contrition and repentance. 

Third, love requires definition for proper emulation. To know love we must see it. 1 John 3.16: "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us." There is also the imitation of self-offering love. Pay attention to second part of 1 John 3:16: "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters." The cross defines love and shows us how to love. The theophany of Calvary is a pedagogy of the heart.

Fourth, to draw us toward Himself God makes his love visible in history to evoke our ecstatic longings and desires. Our love seeks the object of its desire. The love made visible at Calvary evokes our love and draws us toward God. As Jesus says in John 12, "When I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself.”  

For these reasons the atonement made from the foundation of the world becomes visible within history. Were atonement invisible we would grow anxious and uncertain and fall into doubt and despair. If the cost of sin was invisible we would become indifferent to our predicament and calloused toward sin. In a world of moral confusion and incoherence, we need a precise vision of love to emulate. And, finally, we need the love of God to become visible to evoke the longings and desires that draw us to God.

Having dwelled upon the ontological consequences of the fall, in this post I want to linger a bit on the moral consequences. This is a speculative bit of hamartiology, a theology of sin. 

Again, borrowing from Maximus the Confessor, at the instant of creation humanity falls from grace. Man steps away from God and chooses non-being. This is a delusional and prideful attempt to exist independently of God, primordially so and in every personal recapitulation of the fall. 

Again, while there are ontological consequences for this turn toward non-being, our focus here is upon how humanity creates moral separation from God. A moral rupture is introduced into the relationship between creature and Creator. Human sinfulness sits in stark contrast with the Holiness of God. We are plunged into darkness while God sits in inaccessible light.

This moral separation between the creature and Creator is painful and distressing when brought into awareness, when our eyes are opened to "the knowledge of good and evil." Guilt, shame, and fear enter consciousness. This conscious confrontation with the moral rupture is well captured by Isaiah when he beholds the glory of God:

"Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”

Biblically, this experience of "Woe is me, I am lost!" is described as the judgment of God and the wrath of God. Crucially, these descriptions do not speak to God's emotional state, for God is ever tranquil and exists only as boundless love. God's impassivity in the face of human sin, God's loving oceanic stillness, means that God is not triggered, disturbed, aggrieved, agitated, or angered by human sin. God is ever and only love. Beneficent and calm. As Julian of Norwich described when she gazed into the love of God:

"I saw no wrath except on man’s part, and that He forgives in us. For wrath is nothing else but a rebellion from and an opposition to peace and to love..."

The words "judgment" and "wrath," therefore, are relational terms which name the moral distance between the creature and God and the psychic and ontological impacts of increasing distance from God. Sin is "judged" simply as a consequence of our distance from God, along with the consequences incurred by that very distance. As the creature moves further away from God any goodness or virtue it experiences in life is eroded by non-being. The creature experiences the encroachment of non-being as pain and torment, as a "burning" akin to fire. 

And yet, while the creature can descend into this torment, deeper and deeper into "hell," the creature cannot extinguish its own life. The existence of the creature is ex Deo, as a continuous ontological dependence upon God. As long as the creature exists a tether of grace abides. No creature, as created existence, can be wholly separated from God. Otherwise, the creature could not exist. Given this ontological tether, despite any present separation or torment, the creature's future remains eternally open to God.

To conclude with a clear and vivid Biblical vision of the theology of sin and judgment described here, we can turn to Jesus' Parable of the Prodigal Son. Note in the story that there is no wrath on the father's side. The father's love remains constant. Any separation between the son and the father is wholly due to the son's rebellion. This is Julian's vision: There is no wrath on God's side, only on our side. Our experience of being "in a far country" from God--judgment, wrath, torment, hell--is wholly due to our movement away from God.

A lingering issue from the last post is why, exactly, Adam's choice dropped the whole of creation into contingency. Why did the sin of Adam have cosmic ontological consequences?

Both the Bible and the Christian theological tradition point to an array of answers here. Below are my speculations.

Biblically, it seems clear that the fate of creation is tightly linked to the fate of humanity. This suggests to me a hamartiological and ontological connection. What, then, is the nature of this connection?

I want to suggest, along with many of the church fathers, that creation be considered an ontological whole. There are a variety of ways we might imagine this, but one way is to view creation through a Christological lens, positing a "cosmic" or "universal" Christology. I'll follow Maximus the Confessor again here, who describes created realities as the many logoi of the one Logos. Again, because creation is ex Deo all of creation is held together by the Logos. All reality is grounded in God. Thus, each individual and particular manifestation of created reality is a reflection of the Logos. Maximus calls these created realities the logoi, which is plural for logos. Consequently, there are many logoi but only a single, unified sustaining Logos. As Maximus says, 

We affirm that the one Logos is many logoi and the many logoi are One. Because the One goes forth out of goodness into individual being, creating and preserving them, the One is many. Moreover the many are directed toward the One and providentially guided in that direction. It is though they were drawn to an all-powerful center that had built into it the beginnings of the lines that go out from it and gathers them all together. In this way the many are one. (Ambiguum, 7)

So, when we look at created reality the many are One and the One is many. Each created reality is a particular expression (logoi) of the single, underlying reality of God (the Logos). 

If this is true, and here is my speculative leap, humanity represents the volitional aspect of the logoi of creation. If creation is a united "body" then humanity is creation's "mind." Humanity is creation's ability to say either "Yes" or "No" to God. And given that the logoi of creation reflect an underling ontological whole, as humanity goes so goes creation. Thus, when humanity rebels against God, primordially and continuously, the logoi of creation as a whole remains "dropped" into ontological contingency and thereby drifts into non-being. Creation will remain stuck in this "dropped" condition until humanity, as a whole, says "Yes" to God. All particular logoi must return to the Logos, the many converging back upon the One. In the language of Romans 8, "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." 

Again, as humanity goes, so goes creation. The many are one. Creation is saved as a whole, all together.

"the water has risen to my neck"

The image of Psalm 69 is that of person drowning. The water has risen to my neck and I am about to go under. So we cry out to God.

A lot of us are feeling this way. Drowning. Pushed to the edge. About to crack. At our limit. Holding on.

Perhaps the question I am asked the most when I spend time with churches and organizations is this: "Are we really having a mental health crisis, or are people just more willing today to admit mental health problems?" The question takes many forms, like "Are kids today really more anxious than prior generations, or are they just using the word 'anxiety' more than ever?" Or: "Has mental health terminology creeped into normal everyday speech and is now being used to describe normal everyday experiences?"

The answer is that no one really knows. We have patterns and trends which are open to various narratives or explanations. My sense is that it's a bit of both. Our mental health crisis might be artificially inflated by an overuse of mental health terminology and a quickness to self-diagnosis ourselves. But I also think people are struggling. I don't think we need to get overly fixated on if our mental anguish is greater than that of prior generations. Pain is pain. Like Psalm 69, people are really drowning.

So, where do we turn?

The other question I'm asked a lot concerns the role of God in mental health. Religious folks tend to go in one of two directions here. Some, generally conservative folks, dismiss or avoid mental health technologies, from medicine to therapy. In this view, mental health problems are, at root, spiritual problems. The other view, more likely held by progressives, is that mental health is wholly a medical issue and that God doesn't have a lot to do with it. 

I think both of these views are wrong. I don't think you can grow tomatoes by praying for them to appear out of thin air. There is this thing called gardening that God gave us to grow and cultivate tomatoes. In a similar way, God gave us technologies that promote mental health and well-being and it would be foolish not to use these when needed. And yet, I also think it's a mistake to ignore the role faith and spirituality plays in psychological well-being. As I describe in The Shape of Joy (due out in about two weeks), one of the best kept secrets of psychology is that faith and spirituality have been repeatedly shown to be predictive of health and happiness. God is good for you. 

This isn't to say we should approach God in a therapeutic, utilitarian manner. I know a lot of pastors and theologians who worry about reducing God to "the therapeutic." I tend to respond to this concern with Augustine: Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. If God is our Creator and the ground of our being then it stands to reason that we'll thrive when we make contact with and abide in that ground. Mental health improves when psychology makes contact with ontology. Living in the real matters.

In the last two posts I've worked through some thoughts regarding a theology of creation. I'm doing that, as you might have picked up on the last post, to create some connections between theodicy and soteriology, how the "problem of evil" (theodicy) might be implicated in our theologies of salvation (soteriology).

In my thinking, the doctrine of creation I'm working through helps to connect a moral conception of the fall ("sin") with what I described in the last post as "the ontological drop," the drift of being into non-being. In many Protestant spaces these twinned aspects of the fall--sin and death--tend to become separated. Generally speaking, only sin is the focus of salvation and the ontological consequences of the fall are left uncommented upon. This impoverishes our visions of salvation and shifts questions away from soteriology toward theodicy. That is to say, when you lose a rich ontological description of the fall questions that should have been handled by your theology of salvation get left unanswered and are, therefore, dumped into the theodicy bucket. Theodicy becomes the leftovers of an undercooked soteriology.

Again, the "ontological drop" happens when Adam severs his dependence upon God. The contingent nature of creation starts being shadowed by non-being. Separated from God, creation slides toward non-existence. 

When did this "ontological drop" happen?

In another speculative move, perhaps the most speculative of the series, I want to borrow the contention from Maximus the Confessor that creation dropped "immediately." At the very moment of creation it fell away. This is, you know, not the normal idea. Generally, we think of Adam and Eve's sojourn in Paradise as lasting for a season. But on three different occasions in his writings, Maximus describes how humanity fell the "instant" we were created. For example:

"...our nature unnaturally fell at the instant it was created, thus depleting its whole potential." (Ambiguum, 42)

"But at the instant he was created, the first man, by use of his senses, squandered this spiritual capacity--the natural desire of the mind for God--on sensible things." (Ad Thalassim, 61)

Humanity was created whole and perfect, but the moment we stepped into contingent existence our passions pulled us away from God. Two things happen in this first instant. First, there is a moral separation from God. Sin is introduced. This creates a hamartiological rupture focused upon human volition. ("Hamartiology" is our doctrine of sin.) Following Maximus, at the instant of creation humanity falls and become morally separated from God. 

The second thing that happens is that, due to sin, created existence "drops" into its contingency and becomes shadowed by non-being. Separated from God's vivifying power, creation begins drifting away from life. Death, disease, decay, and damage begin to eat away at being.

One of the things I'm trying to do here is tightly link what is often described as "moral evil" and "natural evil." Moral evil is human sinfulness, and we can point to the harms caused by human beings. Natural evil, from cancer to earthquakes, causes suffering of a different kind, and can't be directly blamed on human choice. The theology of creation I'm sharing here is connecting the two. At the instant of creation sin ontologically drops us into contingency. At the instant of creation the potential shadow of non-being becomes actual. 

Because creation is ex Deo, when humanity fell away from God, both hamartiologically and ontologically, "evil" is movement toward non-being, nothingness. When humanity rejects God, the only positive existent good, we can only be choosing nothingness. This where creation ex nihilo is the flipside of creation ex Deo. If you turn away from God you are turning toward nothingness. Sin is choosing non-being, non-existence, and death. When you walk away from God you walk into the void. This is the hamartiological aspect of the fall.

The ontological aspect of the fall is what I've already described in great detail, the slide of being into non-being. Consequently, natural evil, like moral evil, is movement into nothingness. If you want a scientific frame for this, for creatures our drift into non-being appears as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the drift of order into disorder. Life toward death. This is the ontological aspect of the fall.

Summarizing, "evil" is the word creatures use to name non-being. Non-being might look like sin or it might look like entropy, but these are two sides of the same coin. One side is hamartiological and the other side is ontological. Since creation is both ex nihilo and ex Deo movement away from God is movement into nothingness. We move either toward God or away from God, toward either Being or non-being. Goodness names one direction, evil names the other.

Now, I do want to be clear in all this that if you're looking for a "solution" or "answer" to the problem of evil in this post, it's not being offered. Again, what I'm floating here, which isn't novel but really a summary of a great deal of patristic thought, is a twinning of soteriology and theodicy, linking sin and death, into a whole gestalt. As a reminder, the point of this series is some systematization, to pull a lot of theological threads together into a comprehensive, coherent whole. 

The "win" here, in linking hamartiology and ontology, is that when we turn to soteriology and eschatology in the posts to come we have before us a single problem, creation's movement toward non-being.