Jonathan's Corner
(Search & Sitemap)
> Writing >
Orthodox
Spirituality >
The Incarnation: Orthodoxy, Islam, and the Reformation
Previous
1
2
3
4
Next
Printer-Friendly Version
Now I would like to introduce another point. Is Islam better at being monotheist than Trinitarian Christianity? I would like to give an image for that.
I've heard the image that it is a fundamental error to say, excluding created spirits, that someone who doesn't believe in God would count the number of items in the universe, everything from galaxies down to protons, and arrive at a number--let us say, 1,000,000,000,000,000--and the person who believes in God simply arrives at one more--let us say, 1,000,000,000,000,001: the person who doesn't believe in God arrives at one number, and the person who does believe in God simply counts one more.
That error has been called idolatry; it's the same kind of error as going into a plant that manufactures Bibles, and after being shown the machines that lay out the paper and the printers that lay down ink, asking to be shown, alongside the paper and ink, the spiritual authority that is being put into the Bibles. The spiritual value of the Bible is not the sort of thing that is ordered as a material used to make Bibles, and it is a fundamental error to ask to be shown the spiritual meaning the same way one could ask to be shown the glue or cloth materials used for binding. It is something of the same kind of error in thinking that God is one more thing that can be counted as material objects are counted--and Orthodoxy and Islam alike would really wince at the idea that God is one more thing that lets you reach a total of 1,000,000,000,000,001 objects in your counting.
The next step of this argument is as follows: if material counting is something you misuse by applying it to God, then denying that the Trinity is still one God may be the same kind of error as counting God as one more physical thing. God is beyond material counting, but this means more than denying "God is one more thing." It may mean that if Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are God, the Oneness of God is so great that it is uninjured even by the Incarnation of God the Son. If the Oneness of God is on a higher plane my having one pen on my desk, perhaps it is on high enough of a plane that it is not threatened by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being the One God.
God is transcendent: he transcends, is beyond, anything and everything to be found in all creation. That is part of why, when we say that God is One, we mean something different from counting one pen--and something deeper. And part of this transcendence is something like heat. Depending on how tough we are, we might, or might not, be able to pick something up after it is hot from prolonged sunlight. Few of us would want to pick up a heavy black crowbar that has been soaking in summer sun and heat on the asphalt. Most of us want oven mitts, or some surrogate like a folded towel, to pick up something that has been in a hot 450° oven--it's too hot to touch with bare hands. But even a good oven mitt has limits: I would not want, even with the best oven mitt I've used, to reach into a blacksmith's furnace and pull out a large piece of iron so hot that it's getting mushy. But there is something about the one God that is transcendently hot: hotter than red-hot iron, hotter than white-hot iron, hotter than a river of rapidly boiling steel, hotter than the heart of the sun, hotter than the Big Bang. The transcendent God is hotter than the heat of fire, plasma, and the Big Bang.
Many of the controversies in early centuries of the Christian Church were about Christ as the bridge between God and his Creation--because if the divine nature is of such heat, then the Creation needs an oven mitt to be in contact with its Creator. Arius proposed one solution, that the oven mitt was the foremost and unique creation. The Orthodox response was that this wasn't good enough: a created oven mitt could insulate against a created heat, but only a truly transcendent bridge, or oven mitt, or mediator, could allow us to meet God without being destroyed: not only the fiery coal, but the oven mitt must be absolutely and fully divine. And here we can glimpse why the Orthodox Church found Trinitarian theology so necessary: she found, in fact, that the one God, if the logic is worked out and he is properly understood, to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that the doctrine of the Trinity is the radical understanding of the One God.
I mention this to guard against a reaction some may have: the reaction that says that Islam really believes in one God, while Christianity has to cross its fingers to say that. Now let me continue:
There are some people who believe that Islam is later than Christianity and extends Christian beliefs: Islam is Christianity with things added. This is quite the opposite of the truth! One way to see beyond this point is to ask the question, "What is said in Islamic worship that an Orthodox would wince at saying? And what is said in Orthodox worship that a Muslim might wince at?"
There are a number of things in Islamic worship that an Orthodox would believe: God is said to be One, to be merciful, to be the Creator of the world, and so on and so forth, and all of this the Orthodox believes. What the Orthodox would not be able to say, in good conscience, is that Muhammed is God's Prophet. That would come close to the one thing that an Orthodox would squirm about agreeing to.
Now what about a Muslim in an Orthodox "divine liturgy"? God is said to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Mary is praised as the Mother of God, icons are warp and woof to worship, and saints, perhaps called divine, share in the glory of God. Even the term "divine liturgy" may not be liked. And each of these is related to the Incarnation.
The Orthodox Church realized the doctrine of the Trinity as something it could not deny, precisely in the wake of wrestling with questions about the Incarnation. Perhaps it would be doubtful to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is a mere part of the doctrine of the Incarnation. What would not be doubtful is to say that the doctrine of the Trinity was articulated out of the Orthodox Church wrestling with heresies which gave a deficient understanding of the Incarnation. The Church proclaimed the doctrine of the Trinity after affirming what might be called "maximum Christology," that Christ was everything he could be: maximally divine, maximally human, maximally united, and maximally preserving the divine and human even as they were united.
Now we get into territory some Protestants may be uncomfortable with: the great and scandalous phrase, "Mother of God." Some may be eager to point out that "Mother of God" reflects a Greek term, theotokos, which might more accurately be translated as "Birth-Giver of God," as "tokos" refers to birth better than the full freight of the English "mother." In fact one could go further: "tokos," in Greek, is a word used to describe both the person who gives birth and the one who is born, and on out-of-context, legalistic grounds, "theotokos" could mean "the one to whom God gave birth," and one could make a mirror image of that switch to say that Christ, o prototokos twn nekrwn (Rev. 1:5), is "the dead's chief birthgiver," dodging the more sensible and customary rendering that he is "the firstborn from among the dead."
This kind of cleverness is all very nice, but it is unhelpful in understanding the theology. The reason the term "theotokos" is significant is something that happened in Arius's wake. Arius said that Christ was "a creature, but not as one of the creatures," a unique first creature through whom God created every other, lesser creature. The Church's response was, in essence, "If that is Christ, he is an oven mitt that will be incinerated if it touches the divine fire. Not good enough." In Arius's wake, it was clearly on the table that Christ had to be considered fully divine, and fully human. But one person, Nestorius, said that Christ was fully divine and fully human, but not quite fully united. The controversy came to a head when Nestorius said that Mary could and should be called, "christotokos," "Mother of Christ," but that it was absolutely inappropriate to call her "theotokos," "Mother of God." The verdict of the Church was that Nestorius had divided the Christ, because he would let the Mother of Jesus be called the Mother of Christ, but he denied that Christ was united enough that you could actually go so far as to say that she was simply the Mother of God.
The decision to call Mary the Mother of God is a move to protect the unity of Christ--that what could be said of the man Jesus could be said of God the Son, and what could be said of the Son of God could be said of the man Jesus. This is why some Christians speak--correctly--of the crucified God, because Christ is so united that it was inescapably God who was crucified if Jesus was crucified, and by the same token Christians insisted on speaking of God the Son, because Christ is so united that it is inescapably God who was born in her womb if she was the Mother of Jesus.
The reason Nestorius could only call Mary the Mother of Christ, and not the Mother of God, was because his christology drove a wedge between Jesus the man and God the Son that caused him to pull back from the full force of "theotokos." Is it a valid response to try to be picky about the Greek and say that "theotokos" is really more accurately translated "Bearer of God"? If you're really that concerned about linguistics and Greek, possibly, but in my experience that kind of argument is a matter of "Everybody has two reasons for everything he does--a good reason, and the real reason." The good reason is a linguistic concern that goes above and beyond the call of duty of meticulous precision in translation... but a real reason is one of the fixations, almost one of the theological allergies, that arose out of the medieval Catholic West being very concerned about ferreting out idolatry, that Mary the theotokos receives reverence that God alone should receive. This is a sensible enough objection, if you forget how far Incarnation goes: Mary the theotokos gave Christ his humanity, and he gave her something in the exchange. But the force of the argument may leave it legitimate in English to call Mary "the Bearer of God," but provides no theological justification to say, "On a purely material level, I have to acknowledge that Mary gave birth to God, but I am absolutely not going to say that Mary exercised the spiritual office of motherhood to the God to whom I technically have to acknowledge she gave birth." If the theology is acknowledged that is behind saying that Mary gave birth to God, full stop, it is by the same argument necessary to say that she exercised the full human and spiritual office of motherhood to God, full stop. This is how the logic of the Incarnation unfolds.
And the logic unfolds. The parents of Mary, the Mother of God, are remembered as "the ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna," and the icon depicting James, considered "the Lord's brother" (Gal 1:19), has in Greek, "o adelphotheou:" "the brother of God." And there is a deeper way that this logic unfolds.
The Incarnation is to happen in each person. Saints are people in whom the Incarnation shines brightly, but we were made for the Incarnation. Some exemplars who provide shining examples of the Incarnation are held forth as saints, but we were all made for divine, uncreated life they share in. The saints live lives out of the Incarnation, and they are part of how the Incarnation is shown to us.
Jonathan's Corner
(Search & Sitemap)
> Writing >
Orthodox
Spirituality >
The Incarnation: Orthodoxy, Islam, and the Reformation
Previous
1
2
3
4
Next
Printer-Friendly Version