PARADIGMS AND SALVATION:
WHY GOD BECAME HUMAN
    WHEN AND WHERE HE DID    

© 2000-2002 by Orchid Land Publications

[updated 20011115, 20011214, 20020506]

     We cannot analyse the incomprehensible mind of God.  But we can give reasons for why He chose a certain time and place to do what He has done--to square it with our sense of what makes sense.  
     Had the Holy Trinity wished for the true religion to preserve a Hebrew respect for the rôle of created matter and time in religion (so unwelcome in anti-sacramental Protestantism, which accepts what amounts to a Hellenistic-Gnostic view of matter and tradition) . . . and had He wanted to replace the juridical form of Hebrew religion with a "form" that He considered  suited for a maturing religion--viz. the energy ontology of Hellenism (so unwelcome in the West, which endowed its forms of Christianity with a juridical form) . . . He would have ordained, the fallible human mind assumes, for the Incarnation to take place in a milieu and time when Hebrew and Hellenistic cultures met, e.g. near Tiberias in Palestine, where Jesus grew up.   Note that Greek culture had a strong feeling for the pairing of a potentiality (dýnamis) or capacity with a cognate energy that gives life to the potential in question, making real and actual . . . and functional.   When these factors are considered, the timing of the Incarnation and its location make good sense to the human lógos--i.e. reason, one of the main components of the Icon of God, according to which  humanity was created.  (It was a dynamis energized by the Assimilation to God; see Gen. 1:26, and also further below.)  
    It is important to notice that the Old Testament concepts of the Icon of God and the Assimilation to God met with very similar Hellenistic concepts.  Later Judaism had spoken of athe Wisdom of God.   For Plato, the Stoics, Josephos the middle-Platonist, and Plotinus the neo-Platonists these concepts were taken for granted.  Josephos the Jew spoke of the LOGOS Creator as a kind of mediator between God and humanity, humans being the Icon of the Icon (i.e. the LOGOS "Reason of God").  St. John in the opening verses of his Gospel called the Creator LOGOS ("God's Reason"), and St. Paul called  Him SOPHIA ("God's Wisdom" or practical Reason).  The Greek Fathers (Greek was the language of Christianity even in Rome until the earlier third century) spoke of humans as  Icons of the Icon--namely the Reason (LOGOS) and Wisdom (SOPHIA, practical reason) of God.  If we assume that God planned Judaism and Hellenistic philosophy to marry the way they in fact did, all of this seems to be in order . . . and indeed nothing less than highly beneficial.  Those of a different thought world will see one of these religious outlooks to have been contaminated by the other.  Biblical critics belonging to a very different axiomatic paradigm or thought world from that of the Apostles (with their mysteric/sacramental matter and energy-ontology form) will never be able to sift things out except in a manner wholly different from those living in the Apostolic Age. 
    Suppose that, instead of willing the Incarnation to have the character it took, the holy Trinity had wanted the mature true religion to have a Semitic juridical Semitic form.  He could have ordained the Incarnation to take place in a pure Messianic Judaism or else under a strong Islamic influence later on.  Since Islam got its religious customs, attire, and culture from Vyzantion and its learning from non-Christian Greek scholars at the House of Wisdom (set up in Baghdad for the purpose of translating these writings; some would have been lost forever, had they not done so), Christianity could have gotten its form from the Islamic Aristotelianism of Córdova in Andalus(ía).  Resident there was the greatest culture of its day in many respects.  (The city was a large as Constantinople and Baghdad until its decline, when the Khan capital near Beijing became the largest city in the world by far.)   The Cordovan influence in fact did actually take place . . . though we think that God let it happen rather than desired it to happen.  (Western Christians will probably take the opposite position.)  SEE HERE FOR REASONS WHY GOD MAY HAVE CHOSEN THE GREEK LANGUAGE AS THE MEDIUM FOR PROCLAIMING THE ORIGINAL GOSPEL OF CHRIST.
     After up to seven centuries (or much longer in many locales) of illiterate and barbaric Dark Ages,  the cities of Western Europe outside of Spain and the Byzantine-Roman Empire) had become villages--Rome, Ravenna, Trier, Milan.  The intellectual and cultural vacuum was filled with a new culture derived from the Semitic culture of Arabic-speaking Muslims and Jews resident in Córdova.   This culture was jibed with the will-based juridicalism of the early North-African lawyer-theologians (and St. Ambrose in Milan had been a judge) who founded Western theology as well as the will-based culture of the Germanic tribes that had overrun the territories of the West.  To a Teutonic culture belonged Lombards like Anselm, Gratian, and Peter as well as Viking-Normans like Aquinas and the whole lot of Scotist-Ockhamist philosophers, whose philosophical camp Luther the inventor of Protestantism also claimed to adhere to.  The Latins preserved the mysteric or sacramental matter (respect for created matter and time or tradition in religion), but accepted the juridical form--which was greatly supported by a revived Augustinianism.  It has been stated that between 1100 and 1300, nearly all of the popes (since Charlemagne:  Franks and others) were lawyers.  
     The Protestant Reformers kept the juridical form of the via moderna (Ockham's Nominalist philosophy), but Luther--who called himself a modernist--also embraced another modernism that provided the "matter" of Protestantism:  the devotio moderna, a Gnostic-oriented anti-sacramentalism.   Sacraments came to be virtual sermons, as the Semitic Word became dominant.  (Protestant theologians say that a sacrament is a visible word which simply seals the Grace already received through the preached word.)  Even the Creator was said to be a Word.  (The earliest Latin Bibles called the Creator a Sermo.  Some Protestants today even  maintain that the Son is the "Exegesis" of the Father!)   If Protestants turned the Greek-language Christianity of the Apostles and the New Testament (with 27 references to energy in the Epistles alone) upside-down into a marriagae of Hellenistic Gnostic matter and a Semitic juridical form, the Papal Church only substituted juridicalism for the energy-ontology form.  (Thomas Aquinas understood the pairing of  potentia : actus/operatio but fatally confused actus with essence.)  Since form makes matter into whatever it really is, Juridicalism has gone a long way in influencing  what the matter (Latin sacramentalism, Protestant Word-ism) has come to be . . . and MEAN.  Since the Latin Aquinas knew that God's Essence is ontologically imparticipable--he did not separate uncreated Energy from Essence--he concluded that a member of Christ's unity with God is "intentional" (i.e. conceptual--a virtual unity).  Luther came to a similar conclusion when He said that the unity is covenantal and will-based--also virtual.
          

     We Orthodox do not try to investigate how God thinks and wills, as the Latin Scholastics were wont to do. But there is no harm, and perhaps value, in trying to deduce why certain things have been as they have been.
     Had God wanted to preserve the content of Hebrew Religion--YHWHism*--in the advanced conceptuology of Hellenism, it seems impossible to envision a better time and place than what history records:  Jesus grew up near Tiberias, where the cultures crossed intimately. 

     What was the result? The Gospels and Acts and Epistles and Apocalypse reveal the "content" of Hebrew ontology (respect for matter and time in religion) expressed in the "form" of Hellenistic energy conceptuology, where Vision (seeing) is prominent. 

(Given the mistranslations of the energy noun, the energy verb, and the energy adjective in Western versions of the Bible--and of LOGOS--and of the failure to distinguish Greek -sis energy nouns from parallel -ma result nouns (writing the rendering of omoíoma and ktísma where Greek has omoíosis and ktísis) . . . the Biblical ontology cannot be understood.  Writing "sin" for hamártema [an act] for hamartía [a sin-conducive condition resulting from the Fall and its loss of the 
omoíosis Theõ] further obscures the issue.)

This could be elaborated on, but let's not obscure the point by failing to turn at once to a consideration of how the Reformers turned this pattern upside down: They took the content of Gnosticism (matter and time play no positive, only a negative, role in human-oriented Salvation--this is often termed "anti-sacramentalism"), where hearing [Words/Book/sermons] is prominent, . . . and then "formed" it in terms of Hebrew (and Phoenician and Cordovan-Semitic) juridicalism.  If you see a mirror-image here, you are right.
     Now the question of the moment is not which is right--something that will get us nowhere, since our axiomatic cognitive paradigms are no more "true" and "false" than any definition or axiomatic assumption or premise.  One is interested first of all  in distinguishing the two as clearly as possible.  (This does not mean that I don't think one theology is true and those disagreeing with it false--just that the issue here is not which is true so much as how they differ--the basis of understanding the details that follow from one's assumptions.)  Without knowing where an individual is coming from, we can agree on words till the end of time; that is no agreement when our premises cause the words to mean different thing in different paradigms--in which our premises exclude other senses as being even possible. 
     The error of ecumenics as currently practised lies precisely in the failure to see this.  (That's why Orthodox delegates should not go to such meetings till this is brought out in the open.  Otherwise, it's a tilted playing field on which the Orthodox goal is uphill and either Western goal is downhill.  So the Orthodox cannot explain our position intelligibly [i.e. in Western terms 
and concepts] and so lose out and get an inferiority complex, . . . even though the Orthodox position is, in a fair debate, more Biblically solid than the paradigms invented a dozen centuries later on the basis of the Semitic Cordovan thought world.) 
     It is, in passing, worth noting Luther's two modernisms:  (i) The via moderna (Nominalism), where will is superior to reason (and it goes without saying, being); virtual reality overrules being.  (ii) The other was the fairly Gnostic devotio moderna that influenced not only Luther but some of the "heretics" he attacked.

     If we have drawn the distinctions with some clarity and acrivia (akríbeia), what follows?  On the "not much" side:  The Bible is still read in the two frameworks (and the third, Latin, equally novel if less Islamic, framework); and each tenet of the divergent parties is confirmed.  On the "maybe something" side:  Well, each side has got to ask the other whether it has the content and form of Christianity in order.  This could lead to asking:

--Is being (i.e. ontology) basic to truth; is understanding what the choices and their consequences are basic to free choice?  (Orthodoxy)

--Is will superior to the other two parameters (being and reason), so that virtual reality is realer than reality?  (Reformation)

We come here to the nitty-gritty.  Each party can hardly avoid choosing (unless one chooses the will-first Mediaeval Latin position):  First, which of the preceding outlooks or ideologies one will embrace; secondly, which of the mirror-image frameworks one is to embrace.  The choice is essentially arbitrary, but will naturally be influenced by a number of observations one can make--and these will probably vary from temperament to temperament, according to all of the cognitive and emotional "Christian" baggage that one has already absorbed, etc., etc.

     One caveat:  One respondent has said that this is all too intellectual and de-spiritualized, not enough from the noëtic (transcognitive) angle.  That this is not true should be obvious from the fact that the (cognitive-influencing) choices are arbitrary--and vastly  more often unconscious than consciously thought out.  These orientations are not the result of cognition in the normal sense, though it may sound that way when I put is so.

     Once we get our ROAD-MAP in order, then we can begin comparing the two views of Salvation--each justified in its own framework.  To start at the other end can only lead to confusion, I would claim.  That is what bothers me about most discussions:  How can we understand Evangelical soteriology in our Orthodox framework?  How can they understand Orthodox Assimilation and théosis in their non-energetic, will-based framework?

In Christ, God,