On
the Ninth Day of Christmas, something from Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) who was
a significant Russian Orthodox theologian.
God wants to communicate to the world his divine
life and himself to "dwell" in the world, to become human, in order
to make of humankind a god too. That transcends the limits of human imagination
and daring, it is the mystery of the love of God "hidden from the
beginning in God" (Eph 3:9), unknown to the angels themselves (Eph 3:10; 1
Pet 1:12; 1Tim 3:16). The love of God knows no limits and cannot reach its
furthest limit in the fullness of the divine abnegation for the sake of the
world: the Incarnation. And if the very nature of the world, raised from
non-being to its created state, does not appear here as an obstacle, its fallen
state is not one either. God comes even to a fallen world; the love of God is
not repelled by the powerlessness of the creature, nor by his fallen image, nor
even by the sin of the world: the Lamb of God, who voluntarily bears the sins
of the world, is manifest in him. In this way, God gives all for the
divinization of the world and its salvation, and nothing remains that he has
not given. Such is the love of God, such is Love.
Such it is in the interior life of the Trinity,
in the reciprocal surrender of the three hypostases, and such it is in the
relation of God to the world. If it is in such a way that we are to understand
the Incarnation–and Christ himself teaches us to understand it in such a way
(Jn 3:16)–there is no longer any room to ask if the Incarnation would have
taken place apart from the Fall. The greater contains the lesser, the
conclusion presupposes the antecedent, and the concrete includes the general.
The love of God for fallen humankind, which finds it in no way repugnant to
take the failed nature of Adam, already contains the love of stainless
humankind.
And that is expressed in the wisdom of the brief
words of the Nicene Creed: "for our sake and for our salvation." This
and, in all the diversity and all the generality of its meaning, contains the
theology of the Incarnation. In particular, this and can be taken in the sense
of identification (as that is to say). So it is understood by those who
consider that salvation is the reason for the Incarnation; in fact, concretely,
that is indeed what it signifies for fallen humanity. But this can equally be
understood in a distinctive sense (that is to say, "and in
particular," or similar expressions), separating the general from the
particular, in other words, without limiting the power of the Incarnation nor
exhausting it solely in redemption. The Word became flesh: one must understand
this in all the plenitude of its meaning, from the theological point of view
and the cosmic, the anthropological, the Christological and the soteriological.
The last, the most concrete, includes and does not exclude the other meanings;
so too, the theology of the Incarnation cannot be limited to the bounds of
soteriology; that would be, moreover, impossible, as the history of dogma bears
witness . . .
The Incarnation is the interior basis of
creation, its final cause. God did not create the world to hold it at a
distance from him, at that insurmountable metaphysical distance that separates
the Creator from the creation, but in order to surmount that distance and unite
himself completely with the world; not only from the outside, as Creator, nor
even as providence, but from within: "the Word became flesh". That is
why the Incarnation is already predetermined in human kind.
– Translated by Andrew Louth, The place of theosis in Orthodox theology,
in ‘Partakers of the Divine Nature’
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