Meta-historical fall

The meta-historical fall (also called a metaphysical, supramundane, atemporal, or pre-cosmic fall) is an understanding of the biblical fall of man as a reality outside of empirical history that affects the entire history of the universe. This understanding of the human fall is a minority view among Christian theologians and associated by some with what they consider heresies, such as belief in the pre-existence of souls.[1]

The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo in 1445 (originally part of the altarpiece in Siena's church of San Domenico)

History

Theologians and philosophers writing about a meta-historical fall in the modern era draw from metaphysical categories in related early patristic thought as well as Christian and Jewish Gnostic systems.[2][3] The idea was revived by German philosophers such as Jakob Böhme, Friedrich Schelling, and Julius Müller that influenced the English poet and philosopher Samuel Coleridge as well as Russian philosophers and theologians Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov.[4][5][6][7][8] Among the church fathers (especially Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius Ponticus, and Maximus the Confessor), the fall was widely seen as a movement into our present biological condition as well as into our current experience of time, and this understanding has been developed by modern scholars such as Sergius Bulgakov who argue that the Fall should not be seen as a historical event but as a "meta-historical" one.[9][10][11]

Sergius Bulgakov, in The Bride of the Lamb (published posthumously in 1945), said that "empirical history begins precisely with the fall, which is its starting premise."[12] Noting that his "doctrine of a supramundane fall" was defended in The Burning Bush (1927), Bulgakov described how Adam's original sin, in which we each participate personally, "did not take place within the limits of this world" but outside "at the threshold of our entry into the world" and clarified that "the idea of [human] pre-existence in the sense of a time preceding our aeon was condemned by the Church" as Origenism and should be recognized as "essentially incompatible with a healthy ontology."[13][14] Baptist theologian David L. Smith critiqued the idea of a meta-historical fall as incompatible with the doctrine of inherited guilt and therefore "unjust"[15] while the Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck rejected this idea of the fall in Böhme and Schelling as a violation of individual free will.[16]

Eternity, forms of time and Creatio ex nihilo
See also: Eternity § Religion, God and eternity, and Creatio ex nihilo

This concept of a meta-historical fall involves the ideas of divine eternity and multiple modes of time within which empirical history is situated and on which it depends to some extent. English theologian E. L. Mascall wrote in 1943 that the Christian tradition has always understood creation as one "non-temporal act of the divine will" through which the entire "temporal created order is maintained in existence."[17] Sergei Bulgakov described several kinds of time as different "modes of creaturely or temporal being" and included "angelic time" (with possible differentiations following the orders of angels).[18] The concept of an atemporal creation and its relation to the fall are also considered by the English philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark[19] and the French theologian Olivier Clément[20][21] along with David Bentley Hart who discusses the concepts of an atemporal fall and a "fallen time" in two books.[22][23] With a variation of this concept in the terms of analytical philosophy, Hud Hudson considers in a 2014 book how the hypertime hypothesis might inform the human fall's relation to empirical history.[24]

These conceptions of time and eternity involve the multiple layers or repetitions in the Genesis accounts of creation and fall discussed by patristic authors such as Gregory of Nyssa in On the Making of the Human where Gregory considered Genesis 1:26-27 to move between descriptions of humanity before and after the fall.[25][26] Theologian and patristic scholar John Behr summarizes Origen as teaching that our beginning in this cosmos and its "fallen time" should be understood as a falling away from the heavenly reality to which we are also invited to return.[9] Maximus scholar Jordan Daniel Wood addresses time in relation to creation and the fall in a 2022 book, including the claim by Maximus the Confessor that the cosmos fell "at the very moment it appeared in existence" along with Adam's fall which occurred "together with coming-into-being."[10]

Anti-Gnostic Saint Augustine of Hippo argued that God did not create the world in time. Rather, time itself, to Augustine, was created by God.[27][28][29][30][31] Aquinas, responding to the assertion that "creation was not in the beginning of time", stated that "together with time heaven and earth were created."[32] Ruth Coates among others stated that the view that "the finite natural universe [...] has an accidental character [...] being the result of the irrational metaphysical fall of Sophia" involved the assertion that "the finite natural universe is not created ex nihilo".[4]

Cosmic and angelic falls
See also: Fallen angel

A meta-historical fall is sometimes considered under the larger category of a cosmic fall, understood as any concept of the fall where the entire natural world is damaged in some way by human sin.[33] Ronald W. Hepburn's 1973 entry on the "Cosmic Fall" in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas described this broader category and had one example of a "pre-cosmic" or "transcendental" fall with Anglican priest and Oxford scholar N. P. Williams who described a fall that occurred in the "life-force" and "during an 'absolute' time" before life differentiated into its many present forms and separate species.[34][35] Concepts of a cosmic human fall are also often understood alongside one or more angelic falls. Hepburn's entry on the "Cosmic Fall" noted the examples of C. C. J. Webb and Dom Illtyd Trethowan.[36] Sergius Bulgakov considered a separate angelic fall in The Bride of the Lamb.[37] David Bentley Hart appeals to an idea from Maximus the Confessor that humanity is a methorios (boundary, frontier, or priesthood) that connects the physical and spiritual realms so that, in the human fall, all of material existence came under the "dominion of death."[38] Christopher West, in summarizing the Theology of the Body by Pope John Paul II, describes how "'original man' gives way to 'historical man'."[39]

Theologian David Bentley Hart argues that “natural evil is the result of a world that's fallen into death” and says that “in Christian tradition, you don't just accept ‘the world as it is’” but “you take ‘the world as it is’ as a broken, shadowy remnant of what it should have been.” Clarifying that he means an atemporal fall, Hart says: “obviously, wherever this departure from the divine happened, or whenever, it didn't happen within terrestrial history” and “this world, as we know it, from the Big Bang up until today, has been the world of death.”[40] In line with this claim that a human fall outside of our empirical history precipitated our current world into its reduced form of existence, Hart says that our world is not simply the creation of a good God but is also (partially and contingently) the result of creaturely failure, resistance, or rebellion. Hart writes that this idea of an atemporal fall can be taken to the extreme of a fully dualistic gnosticism, but that this dualism can also be seen as provisional so that the good, true, and beautiful in this fallen world is understood as fractured and captive portions of God's creation.[41] In his 2008 book The Groaning of Creation, Christopher Southgate criticizes David Bentley Hart and Clark Pinnock for suggesting that human and angelic rebellions have corrupted our empirical world because "a Christian theology of creation must" take seriously the Genesis 1 narrative that everything came to be through "the fiat of God" and that "divine power has shaped all the matter and mechanisms of the cosmos."[42]

As a wider context to fallenness, Sergius Bulgakov also recognizes a creaturely limitedness and imperfection regardless of any fall. This unfallen and sinless creaturely imperfection provides the context within which Bulgakov describes a separate atemporal human fall involving evil, sin, and death. He writes in The Bride of the Lamb that "creaturely creativity entails not only the possibility but even the inevitability of errors, which, in themselves, are not yet evil but prepare a place for evil" and that this is true of unfallen angels as well as of fallen angels and humanity before and after their falls.[43]

Ideas of integration with modern science
See also: Biblical cosmology and Physical cosmology

Anglican priest Peter Green wrote a book in 1920 proposing, on the grounds of modern science, that the human fall did not take place in this world but was a "pre-mundane event."[44][45] Orthodox Christian Bishop Basil Rodzianko argued in a 1996 book that the fall and exile of the first humans from paradise should be understood in connection to the Big Bang and the formation of our current universe. He writes that "all people who have ever lived on earth ...are 'Adam's fragments'" and that we should understand "humanity as a whole" as "on the other side" of the Big Bang while the "'fragments' are on this side of the terrible explosion."[46][47][48][49][50]

Paleontologist Alexander V. Khramov wrote in 2017 that the Big Bang should not be interpreted as the "first creative act of God" but as the "first cognizable manifestation of the human fall." He was influenced by Russian religious philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Evgenii Troubetzkoy and contended that every Christian writer before Augustine believed that all creation was "altered drastically after man's disobedience."[51][52] Having the fall located outside of the theorized Big Bang means that Khramov considers the entire history of evolution on earth to follow after the human fall as he further argued in a 2019 book.[53][54][55]

See also

Further reading
  • The Bride of the Lamb by Sergius Bulgakov and translated by Boris Jakim (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001).
  • "The Devil’s March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations" by David Bentley Hart in Theological Territories (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). Previously published in Creation 'ex nihilo': Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges edited by Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017).
  • The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? by David Bentley Hart (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005).
  • Transfiguring Time: Understanding Time in the Light of the Orthodox Tradition by Olivier Clément and translated by Jeremy N. Ingpen (New City Press, 2019).
  • "Introduction" by John Behr to Origen: On First Principles by Origen and translated by John Behr (Oxford University Press, 2018).
  • The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor by Jordan Daniel Wood (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022).
  • "Saint Maximus the Confessor on Creation and Incarnation" by Torstein Theodor Tollefsen from Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology edited by Niels Henrik Gregersen (Fortress Press, 2015).

References
  1. Scott, Mark S.M. (1 June 2012). "3: Paradise Lost: Pre-Existence, the Fall, and the Origin of Evil". Journey Back to God: Origen on the Problem of Evil. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199841141.
  2. Knight, Christopher C. (4 August 2022). Eastern Orthodoxy and the Science-Theology Dialogue. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 54–55. ISBN 9781009107761. The Fall was often seen, in the patristic era, as being a transition not only into our present biological state but also into time as we now experience it. As Philip Sherrard has put it, it was a lapse 'into a materialized space-time universe'. ...This kind of understanding of the character of our unfallen state has been explored by modern Orthodox scholars like Sergius Bulgakov, who have suggested that the Fall should be seen not as a historical event but as a 'meta-historical' one.
  3. Khramov, Alexander V. (January 2017). "Fitting Evolution into Christian Belief: An Eastern Orthodox Approach" (PDF). International Journal of Orthodox Theology. Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 August 2022. Retrieved 5 February 2023. Evolution with all its suffering happens in the fallen world which is different from the primordial 'very good' creation. This approach is more consistent with traditional Christian teaching on the Fall and Redemption than theistic evolution and seems to offer a better solution for the problem of natural evil. In the twentieth century, the major exponents of this ...were an Anglican priest, Peter Green, Russian philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, Orthodox bishop, Basil (Rodzianko) and French Orthodox theologian, Olivier Clément.
  4. Coates, Ruth (12 November 2019). Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. p. 79. ISBN 9780198836230. [Soloviev] in Lectures, 9, again echoing later Schelling, Boehme, and Gnostic systems both Christian and Jewish, the finite natural universe is not created ex nihilo, but has an accidental character, being the result of the irrational metaphysical fall of Sophia following her illegitimate assertion of autonomy from God. Fallen human spirits (expressions of Sophia in this world) find themselves enslaved in crude and, above all, mortal material bodies: thus, the task of deification concerns the spiritualization precisely of matter, the flesh, rather than the whole human being. Indeed, that human beings can cooperate with God in this task, in Lectures, is predicated on their natural participation in the divine Sophia.
  5. Otto, Pfleiderer (1890). The development of theology in Germany since Kant: and its progress in Great Britain since 1825. Translated by Smith, John Frederick. London, UK: S. Sonnenschein. p. 124. In JULIUS MULLER the scholasticism was carried so far as to revive the ancient Gnostic theory of the fall of man before all time, a theory which found no favour amongst his theological friends.
  6. Mjør, Kåre Johan (2021). "Universalising idealism: the cross-cultural case of Russian religious thought". Global Intellectual History. 6 (5): 672–689. doi:10.1080/23801883.2020.1777679. S2CID 225647781. The vision of Divine Wisdom, of Sophia, which Bulgakov took over from Solov'ev. Sophia, Wisdom, is both associated with humanity at present and represents the goal of humanity. We possess it and possess it not yet in full. It is a very complex notion that draws on most various sources – Biblical, Jewish, Gnostic, theosophical – but in Philosophy of Economy Bulgakov relies in particular on Schelling's treatise on Human Freedom (1809). Schelling's work describes a cosmic or metaphysical 'fall', of which the Biblical fall was an expression. This fall provides, in turn, humanity with the task of overcoming it and restoring the unity, and wisdom is the principle that enables this restoration. There is a 'heavenly, timeless Sophia and an empirical Sophia'. Sophia becomes thereby the 'living link between God, man, and nature' – an idea that serves their unification.
  7. de Courten, Manon (28 May 2004). History, Sophia and the Russian Nation: A Reassessment of Vladimir Solov'ëv's Views on History and his Social Commitment. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. pp. 216, 256. ISBN 9783039104062. Solov'ev again offered an alternative treatment of the Christian topic of the fall similar to his theology of history, he did not integrate it into the biblical story of the fall of, but, firstly, made World Soul the subject to fall and, secondly, placed this event prior to the creation of human beings (Muller 1951. pp 93-123). The cosmic and historical processes are about the strife of the fallen Sophia or Soul to reunite with God through man and through nature. ...In elaborations on the relationship between Sophia, man and the world, Solov'ëv follows Böhme. Before him, the German thinker had found a confirmation of his view of Sophia as God's plan for the world or 'heavenly humanity' in the Old Testament texts on Divine Wisdom. Just as the world is a projection of Sophia in nature, man is a reproduction of Sophia. But since the fall of man and the world, both have ceased to be Sophia's image, and have instead become subject to Sophia's rival.
  8. Dahl, E. J. (1957). Faith and reason in Samuel Taylor Coleridge (PDF) (PhD). Durham University. pp. 67–68, 148, 127. Archived from the original on 2 October 2017. Retrieved 14 February 2023. And of the mystical thought of Boehme he said, "That the system is capable of being converted into an irreligious PANTHEISM, I well know. But at no time could I believe that, in itself and essentially, it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed; and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary." The only explanation for the attitude of Coleridge in the note on Boehme as well as throughout the Philosophical Lectures is not that his opinions had changed, but that he had become extremely sensitive toward the charges of mysticism and metaphysics which could a prior imperil his campaign of renovation. ...The meta-historical fall of the Spirits and the consequent redemptive act of Creation were the first two great mysteries. ...The origin of evil Coleridge attributed to a metahistorical fall of the Spirits. Even a third time he teased his readers in the Aids to Reflection saying that "I might have added to the clearness of the preceding views if ...I could have entered into the momentous subject of a Spiritual Fall or Apostacy antecedent to the formation of man - a belief the scriptural grounds of which are few and of diverse interpretation but which has been almost universal in the Christian Church." That he might have pulled together several loose threads purposely left dangling in his exposition of Original Sin had he "entered into the momentous subject of a Spiritual Fall" is no doubt true.
  9. Behr, John (2017). "Introduction". Origen: On First Principles (Oxford Early Christian Texts). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press (published 7 February 2018). ISBN 9780199684021.
  10. Wood, Jordan Daniel (2022). The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press. pp. ix–x, 16. ISBN 9780268203474.
  11. Tollefsen, Torstein Theodor (1 July 2015). "Saint Maximus the Confessor on Creation and Incarnation". In Gregersen, Niels Henrik (ed.). Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. ISBN 9781451465402.
  12. Bulgakov, Sergei (2001). "Evil". The Bride of the Lamb. Translated by Jakim, Boris. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 170–172. ISBN 9780802839152.
  13. Bulgakov, Sergei (2001). "Evil". The Bride of the Lamb. Translated by Jakim, Boris. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 183–184, 192. ISBN 9780802839152.
  14. Ladouceur, Paul (2013). "Evolution and Genesis 2-3: The Decline and Fall of Adam and Eve". St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly. 57 (2): 135–176. Sergius Bulgakov was perhaps the first major Orthodox theologian to wrestle in depth with the relationship of evolution to the traditional theology of creation, Paradise, and the Fall. In the Bride of the Lamb (1945), Bulgakov affirms both the veracity of the biblical story and a "certain approximate and relative truthfulness" of the scientific picture of the world's development. He reconciles the apparent contradictions between these two approaches to the world and especially to the appearance of humanity by postulating that the events described in Genesis belong not to empirical history, but to "meta-history," "beyond the limits of this world," and that consequently no empirical traces of Eden or primal human perfection can be found.
  15. David L., Smith (2 February 1994). With Willful Intent: A Theology of Sin. Wheaton, Illinois: Victor Books. p. 343. ISBN 9781564762658. In order for human beings to be held responsible for their sins, they must have committed them. A meta-historical Fall would be unjust. The origin of sin in the human race must be a space and time historical event.
  16. Bavinck, Herman (April 2008). Reformed Dogmatics: Volume 3 Sin and Salvation. Translated by Vriend, John. Road Ada, MI: Baker Academic. pp. 306, 311. ISBN 9780801026560.
  17. Mascall, E. L. (1943). He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism. London, UK: Longermans, Green and Co. p. 62.
  18. Bulgakov, Sergei (2001). "Evil". The Bride of the Lamb. Translated by Jakim, Boris. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 70–71. ISBN 9780802839152.
  19. Clark, Stephen R. L. (1991). God's World and the Great Awakening. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 131–132, 173. ISBN 9780198242840.
  20. Clément, Olivier (2019). Transfiguring Time: Understanding Time in the Light of the Orthodox Tradition. Translated by Ingpen, Jeremy N. Hyde Park, New York: New City Press. ISBN 9781565486805.
  21. Khramov, Alexander V. (January 2017). "Fitting Evolution into Christian Belief: An Eastern Orthodox Approach" (PDF). International Journal of Orthodox Theology. Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 August 2022. Retrieved 5 February 2023. Evolution with all its suffering happens in the fallen world which is different from the primordial 'very good' creation. This approach is more consistent with traditional Christian teaching on the Fall and Redemption. ...The major exponents of this view of evolution were ...Olivier Clément.
  22. Hart, David Bentley (2005). The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 22, 69. ISBN 9780802829764. ...The Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that ...reduced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends. ...Something far more glorious than the pitiable resources of fallen time could ever yield.
  23. Hart, David Bentley (2020). "The Devil's March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations". Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press. pp. 79–80. ISBN 9780268107178. The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death. ...It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the "powers" and "principalities" of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender.
  24. Hudson, Hud (2014). The Fall and Hypertime. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP. ISBN 9780198712695.
  25. Hart, David Bentley (February 2001). "The 'Whole Humanity': Gregory of Nyssa's Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology". Scottish Journal of Theology. 54 (1): 51–69. doi:10.1017/S0036930600051188. S2CID 170733562. Gregory of Nyssa did not consider the creation of Adam in the divine image (Genesis 1:26-27) to be about a historical person but about a "fullness of humankind" understood "in a single Body."
  26. Nyssa, Gregory. "On the Making of Man (XVI.7)". newadvent.org. Archived from the original on 26 July 2022. Retrieved 8 February 2023. We must, then, examine the words carefully: for we find, if we do so, that that which was made in the image is one thing, and that which is now manifested in wretchedness is another. God created man, it says; "in the image of God created He him" Genesis 1:27 . There is an end of the creation of that which was made in the image: then it makes a resumption of the account of creation, and says, "male and female created He them." I presume that everyone knows that this is a departure from the Prototype: for in Christ Jesus, as the apostle says, there is neither male nor female. Yet the phrase declares that man is thus divided.
  27. Davies, Paul (1989). "Introduction". Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. Penguin Books. As Heisenberg remarks, the idea that time does not stretch far back for all eternity but was created with the universe was anticipated in the fifth century by St Augustine. There is thus a scientific counterpart to the creation ex nihilo of Christian tradition.
  28. Barr, Stephen M. (7 February 2020). "St. Augustine's Relativistic Theory of Time". Church Life Journal. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
  29. Tornau, Christian (2020), "Saint Augustine", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2023-04-06"God does not create in time but creates time together with changeable being while resting in timeless eternity himself (Confessiones 11.16; De Genesi ad litteram 5.5.12; the distinction of eternity and time is Platonic, cf. Timaeus 37c-38b; Plotinus, Enneads III.7.1)"
  30. "Augustine on Time: Human Time, Divine Eternity, and Why the Former is Really the Latter". www.csueastbay.edu. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
  31. "St. Augustine on Time" (PDF). Center for Promoting Ideas.
  32. Aquinas, Thomas (1947). "first part, question 46, article 3". Summa Theologiae. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Benziger Bros.
  33. Bimson, John J. (April 2006). "Universalising idealism: the Cross-Cultural Case of Russian Religious Thought". Science & Christian Belief. 18 (1): 63–81.
  34. Williams, N. P. (1927). The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin: a Historical and Critical Study. London, UK: Longmans, Green and Co. p. xxxiv, 523–524.
  35. Hepburn, Ronald W. (1973). "Cosmic Fall". In Wiener, Philip P. (ed.). Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas: Volume 1. New York, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 504–513.
  36. Hepburn, Ronald W. (1973). "Cosmic Fall". In Wiener, Philip P. (ed.). Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas: Volume 1. New York, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 504–513. C. C. J. Webb ('Problems in the Relations of God and Man', 1911, page 270) saying that 'superhuman evil wills exist and have injuriously affected the environment of humanity as a whole' as well as Dom Illtyd Trethowancould ('An Essay in Christian Philosophy', 1954, page 128) from a Roman Catholic standpoint saying that 'sin... started with the angels' as a result of their fall and that this, 'we may suppose, was a disorganization of the material universe, over which, according to a reasonable theory, the angels had charge'.
  37. Bulgakov, Sergei (2001). "Evil". The Bride of the Lamb. Translated by Jakim, Boris. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 105, 152. ISBN 9780802839152. The fall of part of the angels does not change anything in the original fullness of this world. ...Even though we have no direct knowledge of God's commandments in the angelic world prior to the fall of Satan, we can suppose that the angels knew an analogous situation 'under the law,' where their freedom was put to the test, a freedom that would cease to exist in the later state of spiritual maturity and experience. The holy angels are now beyond good and evil: freedom as choice has been transcended, for their choice has been made.
  38. Hart, David Bentley (2005). The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 2, 22, 62–63. ISBN 9780802829764. Very few of those who live at the upper periphery of the Indian Ocean doubt that, among the many supernal powers keeping watch over those waters—benign or capricious, transcendent or local, omnipotent or merely mighty—there is at least one who is able to govern their tides and turbulences and to keep the sea within its appointed bounds. ...Enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God. ...We live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, that the universe languishes in bondage to the "powers" and "principalities" of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the Kingdom of God. ...It is a patristic notion (developed with extraordinary profundity by Maximus the Confessor) that humanity was created as the methorios (the boundary or frontier) between the physical and the spiritual realms, or as the priesthood of creation that unites earth to heaven, and that thus, in the fall of man, all of material existence was made subject to the dominion of death. To say that God elects to fashion rational creatures in his image, and so grants them the freedom to bind themselves and the greater physical order to another master—to say that he who sealed up the doors of the sea might permit them to be opened again by another, more reckless hand—is not to say that God's ultimate design for his creatures can be thwarted. It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that the final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simply as a paedagogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory.
  39. "The Theology of the Body: an Education in Being Human". Archived from the original on 11 June 2022.
  40. Hart, David Bentley (12 March 2023). "A Gregorian Interview". Leaves in the Wind. Archived from the original on 14 March 2023. Retrieved 14 March 2023. [Starting at 1:13:08:] Moral evil has no essence of its own, so it can only exist as a fabrication of the will continuing to will defectively. And according to tradition, even natural evil is the result of a world that's fallen into death. Somehow, that too follows from the creation of moral evil. So in Christian tradition, you don't just accept 'the world as it is.' You take 'the world as it is' as a broken, shadowy remnant of what it should have been. But obviously wherever this departure from the divine happened, or whenever, it didn't happen within terrestrial history. Now, plenty will argue: 'Oh no. It really happened within history.' No, it really didn't. This world, as we know it, from the Big Bang up until today, has been the world of death.
  41. Hart, David Bentley (2005). The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 95–96. ISBN 9780802829764. What might seem most offensively or perhaps risibly eccentric about this book, to certain theologically literate readers at least, is the subtle (or not so subtle) current of what looks like a slight sympathy for Gnosticism running through it. I admit that it is my conviction that there are certain notable respects in which ancient Gnosticism was far nearer to the religious vision of the New Testament than are many now well-established forms of Christian belief (which does not of course preclude the opposite also being true). If nothing else, the Gnostics of the early centuries inhabited the same imaginative and spiritual universe as the earliest Christians: they no more than Paul took the principalities and powers and elements of this world as myths or allegories; they no less than Paul proclaimed themselves free from the tyranny of the "god of this world:" And, like Paul or the author of John's Gospel, the Gnostics understood spiritual liberation as something subversive of the order of "this cosmos;" a manumission from the sway of the ancient terrestrial and celestial powers, a glorious escape from the kingdom of death. Any Christian who has not felt at least an occasional stirring of the pathos of Gnosticism—at the thought, for instance, of a small girl weeping in torment in the darkness—and of a rage against the fashion of this world, and of a mysterious yearning for another and perfect world, at once strange and familiar, cannot in all likelihood fully appreciate the spiritual and moral sensibility of the New Testament. But slight sympathy should not be mistaken for profound admiration. Despite the brave attempts of some of Gnosticism's modern apologists to treat its various systems as ingenious allegories, Gnosticism's chief distinctions (apart from its visible streak of adolescent callousness toward those who are not among the elect) were its lack of metaphysical sophistication, its consequent reliance upon absurd mythologies, and the philosophically incoherent dualism to which these things led. There is nothing in the literary remains of Gnosticism that approaches the subtlety, speculative profundity, or symbolic genius of the Gospel of John, for instance, nothing that demonstrates any awareness of the logically necessary unity of being, no hint of an understanding that everything that exists must flow from the same creative source, the same transcendent Logos, and must therefore be essentially good and inalienable from the God who made it.
  42. Southgate, Christopher (2008). The Groaning of Creation. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press. pp. 32–34. ISBN 9780664230906.
  43. Bulgakov, Sergei (2001). "Evil". The Bride of the Lamb. Translated by Jakim, Boris. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 148–149. ISBN 9780802839152. Creaturely being allows the existence of different possibilities, which are not equivalent, even if their integral gives a positive and desired result. The mere presence of different possibilities already signifies that none of them are infallible, or perfect, that all are in a state of seeking. Perfection is what is sought by, not given to, creatures, who do not know the chef d'oeuvre, and this is not only because of sin but primarily because of creatureliness. It is precisely in this sense (in what other?) that Scripture speaks about angels: "His angels he [God] charged with folly" (Job 4:18). The service of the holy angels, free of evil and sinfulness, can contain errors and deficiencies simply as a result of creaturely limitedness and therefore imperfection. This limitedness of creatures and the resulting non-infallible state in the absence of the chef d'oeuvre are also manifested in creaturely creativity. Even if evil had not entered into the world, this possibility and presence of creaturely errors and imperfections would have been inevitable. Of course, we have in mind here precisely the creaturely aspect of the world's becoming, but the latter is not limited to this aspect. It also includes the divine participation of providence with its infallibility in relation to creaturely errors and limitedness. Thus, from the side of nature, creaturely creativity entails not only the possibility but even the inevitability of errors, which, in themselves, are not yet evil but prepare a place for evil. In itself, the creativity of creatures is the work of God's love and condescension, which entrusts to the limited powers of creatures the fulfillment of God's will "both in heaven and on earth.
  44. Green, Rev. Peter (1920). The Problem of Evil: Being an Attempt to Shew That the Existence of Sin and Pain in the World is not Inconsistent with the Goodness and Power of God. London, UK: Longmans, Green and Co.
  45. "REVIEWS OF BOOKS: PUSEY HOUSE TEACHING: The Problem of Evil" (PDF). The Churchman: 344–345. 1920. Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 June 2022.
  46. Rodzianko, Bishop Basil (1996). "Modern Cosmology and Ancient Theology [Excerpt from book: The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Fathers]". Bishop Basil (Rodzianko). Translated by Swezey, Marilyn. Archived from the original on 12 December 2012. Retrieved 5 February 2023.
  47. Rodzianko, Bishop Basil (1996). "Introduction from the book: The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Fathers". Bishop Basil (Rodzianko). Archived from the original on 14 August 2022. Retrieved 5 February 2023.
  48. Rodzianko, Bishop Basil (1996). "Part 1: Cosmology and theology from the book: The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Fathers". Bishop Basil (Rodzianko). Archived from the original on 14 August 2022. Retrieved 5 February 2023.
  49. Rodzianko, Bishop Basil (1996). "Part 2: Cappadocian theology from the book: The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Fathers". Bishop Basil (Rodzianko). Archived from the original on 14 August 2022. Retrieved 5 February 2023.
  50. Witham, Larry (17 September 2019). "Remembering Bishop Basil Rodzianko: 1915-1999". Orthodox Church in America. Archived from the original on 13 February 2023. Retrieved 17 February 2023. On one of his visits to Russia in 1990, he spent almost half a year at the Holy Trinity Sergius Monastery, where he conducted research at the library and delivered a course of lectures. As a result of this stay, he completed his book "The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Holy Fathers" (published in 1996).
  51. Khramov, Alexander V. (January 2017). "Fitting Evolution into Christian Belief: An Eastern Orthodox Approach" (PDF). International Journal of Orthodox Theology. Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 August 2022. Retrieved 5 February 2023.
  52. Armstrong, David (26 August 2021). "Paul's Adam and Paul's Christ". A Perennial Digression. Archived from the original on 3 July 2022. Retrieved 5 February 2023.
  53. Khramov, Alexander V. (2019). Обезьяна и Адам: Может ли христианин быть эволюционистом? (Monkey and Adam: Can a Christian be an Evolutionist?). Archived from the original on 12 September 2022. Retrieved 5 February 2023. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  54. Sidorov, Daniil (19 February 2019). "Paleontologist Alexander Khramov: For my brain, the existence of God is obvious". Tatyana's Day magazine. Archived from the original on 7 December 2022. Retrieved 7 February 2023.
  55. "Issues in Theology". Esxatos. 2019. Archived from the original on 16 January 2023. Retrieved 7 February 2023. Khramov's book was reviewed twice in 2019 for the Russian journal Issues in Theology by Archpriest Belomytsev I. A. Oleg Mumrikov (Volume 1, No. 1) and by Alexey Gaginsky (Volume 2, No. 2). Gaginsky says that Khramov's book 'proposes a middle way called alterism' between 'fundamentalist creationism and theistic evolutionism.'
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