Contra Principium: Against the Use of Depersonalized “Principles” in Christian Theology

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” 2 Timothy 3:16 (NKJV)

Let us first establish that God is the only “essence” that can exist; essence meaning an “irreducible state of being which is both form, substance, and is completely independent of all causes, being in relation only to itself and to those things subsequently dependent upon it.” All other "essential qualities" are imagined by mankind in a series of Platonic Forms that are unreal without the sustenance and willful continuance of the First Cause. If there is no truly transcendent or essential quality other than the person of God, all attempts to make God conform to a principle of action, circumscribing God to a course of action that is of necessity what God must do, makes God conform to a Law that is imagined to be above Him. "God must obey His Own Nature" is the tenant most often ascribed, so if we can reduce God to qualities or "principles", we can determine what God must do in any given situation and work out a logical and legal course of human action from there. This makes God a law-follower, a law that man can understand, manipulate and use on his fellow man. The idea that man can understand God is at the heart of Aquinas and the Scholastic approach to theology, which reached its highest logical expression in the doctrines of Luther and Calvin. These basic assumptions, albeit only in categories that man could completely understand in crystallized simplicity and an anti-historic context, became the criterion for the Reformation. Ever since, the importance and the integrity of revelation have slowly been reduced by generation after generation accepting only what "they can understand", making Christianity into a logical process built upon a foundation of revelation that logic gradually erodes. This approach is far removed from the Apostolic Fathers and the Early Church, best characterized by Justin Martyr, who insisted that God is completely unknowable and that Christ is the only aspect of God that made Him knowable (through the inner revelation of the Holy Spirit, who reveals Christ).

"Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him." John 14:6-7

To look at it another way, Scholasticism is the Mechanization of Theology, to make things logically appear as if they were inevitable and that there is no choice involved in their creation. Creation becomes a necessary expression of God's nature. Sacrifice as necessary requirement of God's justice. Redemption is an essential characteristic in Christ's compassion. While these arguments reduce aspects of God to indefinable essential categories, the question that they try to answer, "How", still begs the question "Why"? There is no logical reason why God has decided to love mankind, save us, and sanctify us to be Sons of God and Heirs of the Kingdom. There is no logical reason other than that God chose to do so.  We can say "God is" to make what God has revealed to the Christian Community seem necessary, an inevitable outplaying of Old Testament tropes and Mankind's universal falleness, but the question of Creation, Revelation, and Salvific Relationship as the Choice of a Person has been largely forgotten in Scholastic and Postscholastic Christianity.  Endeavoring to make the way God has revealed Himself and how He saves us clear, we have forgotten that "As high as the heavens are above the earth, so our my thoughts above your thoughts." It is a mystery that no amount of logic or study can reveal. All we can do is be grateful for the fact that it has been given to us through the God-Man, Jesus Christ! 

Because God is the only personality that merely is, devoid of parts and one in essence with itself (in contrast to the human person, which is a compound of time, space, matter, and the breath of God), to say "God is" in order to make His actions necessary is redundant and illogical. Nothing makes God do anything. God does because it is His choice. In this way, God is the only true existentialist, the only true Postmodernist, the only one capable of choices without being confined to predetermined circumstances or necessary course of cause and effect. He chooses the effect for His cause. God makes choices, and His Will is the ultimate origin of all things. His Will is the "Big Bang", the motion of initial cause, and everything that has happened since happened because He willed it so. And it is by this Will that the universe is sustained, because God is continuously in the process of creating. He is the hyperphysical state of energy that constantly upholds the ordered systems of the universe. He holds all together against their ultimate "ungodness" and dissipation. God is constantly in a state of decision - He makes Choices, and His Choices determine the systems that humanity thinks are logical. Not the other way around. This includes His decision to allow us to exist outside of His Choice, as the Ancient Eastern Morning Prayers say, "We are thankful that Thou hast not destroyed us in our sin... But have shown your customary love to mankind." Customary because God does not have to conform to a pattern... God is the pattern to which all else depends for context, and the consistent Creator on which the pattern rests. But it is His choice and we cannot take it for granted.

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” - G.K. Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy”

The tendency to reduce things to principles has also led to the under-appreciation of the role of humanity in the flow of revelation and preservation, the fellowship of humankind with Christ’s Body, which is the Church. Because God works conceptualized as working through disembodied principles, rather than through manifestations of His Person in Living Souls of believers, Mary, the Saints, and our contemporary Brothers and Sisters lack any kind of real didactic importance or central role in our understanding of God. The Early Church saw God as a Person, who’s Creation was a Choice, and Whose Revelation occurred through relationships with humanity. Those who were used by God were chosen by God to do the Work of God based on their love for and relationship with God, and therefore, just as modern Evangelicals now study principles of God's Nature in order to know God better, Historic Christianity studied the people   that He used and built relationships with them in order to know God. In light of this practice, the Bible takes on a new light! The Bible is the vital foundation of this human experience of the Divine, the stories of God's relationship and revelation with man, and not a book of clues that can be reduced to principles that can be used to corner God into necessary actions. 

The reduction of God to overriding principles of action which God must follow relies on the idea that the Bible is God's only form of revelation, and that it's static nature was specifically molded for the abstraction of it's principles through comparison and judgment against what we know God "must be" and what we see revealed in averages across the two testaments. The revelation is the Bible itself, not the relationships God established with the people in the Bible. This view does not recognize that even if the Word of God as a book never changes, thereby providing a knowable and unwavering witness of God's doings, by contextualizing it and applying it into personal life, the actual meaning changes. It changes as it ceases to be knowledge and becomes a Relationship! But yet, even those who believe God acts according to principle, that the Bible is both knowable and the source of all revelation, can only grow as Christians when they apply their knowledge of the scripture as a contextualized, changing, living process that reveals a personally felt and present person! 

“For the Word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” Hebrews 4:12-13 (KJV)

Therefore, the Bible is not the "Word of God" in the sense that the book itself is sufficient, our goal of faith, or even the Truth in and of itself. It is a tool for the revelation of God's Person to us, so that we can experience what those in the Bible experienced, the relationship that the Person of God desires with His created man. In this way, the Bible redefines its position in our lives, not loosing importance or fading in significance, but becoming a vessel for the light given to those who wrote It's books. It is not a book that is complete without our experience, the process of conversion and love that happens as Christ manifests in our lives. It is not to be used either critically or historically, but as the implanted seed of God's pattern for building His Divine Relationship. All of the other questions we may level specifically at the Bible are irrelevant. The artificial separation of the Bible from Church experience is also unnecessary. How the Jews understood what was saying at the time of the Old Testament's writing is unknowable and not important to us who are in Christ. What the Apostles thought they were saying is what I am saying now, that the "Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." And, "he came that we might have life, and that more abundantly." The Bible is only true when used in the context of this relationship, rooted in the Church's experience with Christ, and is focused through the lens of the Reality of Christ's Person. It is otherwise a "Law of Death" that empowers those who do not really love Christ with an excuse to equally un-love their neighbors. 

God's creation as choice leads us to the question of how we, finite humans, bare the image of God, and how we "partakers in His nature" (I Peter 1:4). I believe that it is because God chooses to let us make decisions, in a way that is inferior, but similar to, the way that He makes decisions that we are "made in the likeness and image of God" (Genesis 1:27). In doing this, God has chosen to surrender His "non-optional" principles, for we do not always will as God wills, but the effect of our wills would not exist unless God chose to continue to create through us. The existence of evil and our own ability to disobey reveals the unique flexibility and moral perspective that God has concerning the role of humanity in the world. God is able to allow us a form of inferior choice, within the confines of the flow of cause and effect, without forfeiting any of His "Rights" to Godhood, without violating any "Principles of God’s Own Nature" because He has chosen it so, revealed it to be, and we can Know His Person through Accepting it as Reality in Faith! He does not have to conform to logic, and the postmodern rejection of Scholasticism and Fundamentalism is therefore valid, but our reasoning must strive to accept what he has communicated in relationships with humanity through the ages. This concept of meaning through communication in relationships is explicitly denied by the individualistic nihilism of the postmodern ethos. But, if this relationship changes our lives, then others will believe in its power. Not until then can we talk about the "proofs of God's existence". This may be the only situation in which Orthodox can agree with the great theological innovator, Anselm of Canterbury, and state “Faith Seeks Understanding”.

Remembering that it is God's choice to save us, and not rising ourselves up in an arrogant legal assurance that God is "bound to save us" we cry out with fear and trembling to the only hope of salvation, the Author and Finisher of our faith, "Lord, Have Mercy!"