[Note: If you have not yet read it, please see my introduction to this essay conversation here.]
Justin’s opening essay “Holy Agony: The Birth of God’s Children” powerfully compares the suffering endured by every mother during birth to the suffering of Christ on the cross. I loved the vivid and instructive connection. He concludes that “this process of spiritual birth is happening within the creation as a whole and it is also happening within every particular being.” Justin’s focus on birth imagery in Paul has a lot to commend it. However, as Justin cites Paul in Romans 8 regarding the birth pangs of all creation in its struggle to achieve freedom and life, Justin argues that the world is subjected by God to futility and death. To help justify why God makes use of death, Justin says that Paul’s choice of “labour pains” is “a symbol that evokes meaningful hardship.” This, however, ignores the opening chapters of Genesis where the pains of giving birth are themselves a result of our life in exile from God within this realm of death. More importantly, I find it impossible to think that Paul considered God to be the author of evil and suffering or that Paul considered the evil archons of this fallen cosmos to be faithful servants of God. In exegeting Romans 8:20 (about “the one who subjected” the creation to futility), Justin says that “the futility of death and decay has been imposed upon the creation by God” and also that “it seems likely ...that Paul imagines the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places as the adversaries of Christians, but not as adversaries of God” as “the cosmic powers of this present darkness are ultimately participating in the will of God, as all things are.”
While I agree that every creature participates in the will of God, the scriptures are very clear that not every creature participates perfectly in God’s will. Even Jesus Christ must pray in great distress, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Apart from Christ, all of us violate God’s will as we seek to make lies into the truth and as we labor to make our fantasies into false realities that we can force upon ourselves and others. These same lies and false labors are also true of some angelic powers who have found the compromised human condition a ripe opportunity for deceit and oppression. David Bentley Hart says that, for Paul, “the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth.” Hart concludes that, “whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God.” Finally, Hart points out that this mix of fallen, mutinous, and incompetent angelic beings “are the gods of the nations” and that one Pauline text “even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number.” (See here for all quotes above.) Paul also writes that we are saved only as these rebellious and confused powers are conquered by Jesus Christ so that they can once again “be ‘subordinated to’—’hierarchically arranged below’—the Son, and through him the Father” so that, finally, “God will be ‘all in all’” (see here).
Regarding Romans 8:20, specifically, and the reference to “the one who subjected” the creation to futility, there are three identifications given by exegetes: God, Adam, and the fallen angelic powers that Paul sees as oppressing this world. Justin makes the case that it was God who subjected creation to death, and all three options have strong precedents among prominent theological voices. They are also, of course, not mutually exclusive options. As one example that I find compelling, however, Saint John Chrysostom’s Homily 14 on Romans identifies humanity as a whole as the primary focus of this one who has subjected all of creation to futility. Chrysostom says that creation was subjected “on account of you, O man” and that Paul “gives ourselves as the cause of” both creation’s subjugation to death but also its redemption and glorification as it awaits the glorious revelation of the sons of God: “For your sake [creation] became corruptible; yet it has had no wrong done it. For incorruptible will it be for your sake again.” I don’t think “for your sake” is the best language here, but Paul’s parallel is strong between humanity subjecting creation to death and then also being the hinge-point of the general resurrection.
It would be fun to dive more deeply into the Pauline texts and their reception in the first centuries, but it seems best to turn in conversation with Justin to the metaphysical and theological questions taken on their own merits. As I said, I agree with Justin that “the cosmic powers of this present darkness are ultimately participating in the will of God, as all things are.” There is no ultimate cosmic dualism in the New Testament, and all the evil forces of this fallen world are created by God and continue to participate in the will of God to some degree. This participation, however, is incomplete and our many failures to participate with God’s will, as his various creatures, leave many gaps where fallen time is filled with our creaturely lies and distortions.
I think Justin would agree that the will of God is only good, but I gather that Justin considers God’s unknowable nature to be beyond good and evil so that God can give a lower place to evil in creation within a greater plan to achieve God’s good will. God can, therefore, as Justin puts it, create evil and death so that creation is subjected to futility by God through these lower realities but only temporarily as creation strives to realize the goodness that God also created as the highest aim or will for creation. (With this attempt of mine to summarize Justin’s thinking, I am indebted to some comments that Justin made as several people engaged with him in various forums about Justin’s first essay.)
Justin’s understanding shares some common ground with my own understanding that God must allow evil as a contingent possibility that some creatures will choose along the way to accepting their own creation. However, I would contend that the freedom of creatures is violated if this pathway of sin and death is the only route that creatures can take (which I suspect is what Justin would say). Some creatures must be able to reach unhindered participation in God’s life without recourse to sin or subjection to death.
I can respect Justin’s case for the fact that death and even evil (in some sense) are part of God’s creation—God’s servants as it were—made by God as the farthest distance from God’s own life that God intends for us so that we might have the option of fleeing away from God and choosing something other than what God desires for us. However, if this is what Justin believes, it runs into serious trouble, in my understanding, if two substantial clarifications are not put in place. First, it would not be true creaturely freedom if every creature would be forced to take this pathway of flight away from what God intends. Second, I would also need to have it made very clear that God does not intend for evil and death to befall anyone. Another way of saying this is that, if sin and death are the only option by which God can create, then sin and death are not created by God (as Justin seems to suggest) but are external requirements that constrain God. I would not suggest that God created evil or death in any sense (more below), but it is an even greater problem if we say that evil and death are not God’s creature but somehow equal to God. Justin, I think, holds that God somehow contains both good and evil in an apophatic sense while also maintaining that God’s will for creation is only good in its outcomes. I agree that God’s goodness is apophatically beyond our grasp. However, I would also say that no revelation of goodness commonly recognized as good is ever in conflict with God’s goodness but will only point toward a greater goodness still that lies within our ongoing life with God.
It is a basic claim of theology across a wide range of human traditions of wisdom and religion to hold that God is only good and that God contains no evil. This leaves evil with no place to be except in a few insubstantial and entirely contingent zones of creaturely potential. In other words, evil only exists in any sense at all when a new creature who has been invited to participate in divine life chooses instead to seek some false kind of life apart from God. This kind of choice on the part of free rational spirits must be an option early on for all creatures in their immature and early stages of accepting and participating in their own creation by God. However, it must not be a choice that all creatures will make. Some creatures will choose to pursue life with God and their own mature place in creation without any period of flight away from God or attempt to find and make a life of their own. These are the unfallen angels of various traditions of religion including Christianity.
However, before trying to summarize my own case more fully in direct opposition to Justin’s, I want to keep circling back to points of agreement that I have with Justin. I can agree with him that God puts death in place as a kind of limit to our flight away from God as a body of creatures who have taken a path away from God. Our being placed within a strictly sequential kind of time and being subjected to bodily death is kind of like having rumble-strips placed on the side of the highway so that we don’t drive too far off the road. However, even though I can agree with Justin that God provides bodily death as a kind of gift to some creatures who need these limits placed on them, I cannot call death the will of God or even a part of God’s good creation. I also cannot say that everyone must die in this way. Some unfallen angels will have never known, firsthand, what death was like in any sense related to even a temporary and contingent separation from God’s life. Again, even here, there are caveats to share by way of clarification. There is some sense in which the kenotic love of God involves a continual giving away of oneself or dying to oneself that characterizes the relations between members of the Trinity. God also relates to creation in this way by meeting us as a lifeless corpse in a grave at the very end of our flight away from God. This kind of kenotic love is one that all creatures should strive to imitate, and it is how God “tramples down death by death” to quote a very old Easter hymn. Therefore, we can talk about a kind of death for God and even for unfallen angels, but it is not the tearing apart and separation that happens with fleshly death in this fallen world (or even of any kind of death that our soulish bodies might experience in any other age or realm above or beyond this current one). The only death that is part of divine life is a death that continually offers itself to all others as food and strength and life—the death of divine Eucharistic life and of God’s kenotic love.
The death that we hear about throughout scripture as the greatest and final enemy of God (for example, the Amalekites are associated typologically with death from very early in the biblical stories) is the death that results in our fleshly existence (and even in the loss of our fleshly existence in a soulish body of some kind that “awaits”—beyond fallen time—the general resurrection and restoration of all creation). This death is not a punishment for sin but is simply the outcome of our attempt to aim at anything other than God’s life. Any such misdirected pathway is allowed by God to play itself out within the strict limits of sequential time and bodily corruption (i.e., this fallen cosmos).
Another area of agreement that I have with Justin, I think, is a baseline understanding of all creatures as being capable of ignorance and error without a “fall” or “sin” being involved. I believe that even unfallen angels, especially as they first take up their callings in God’s household, are capable of ignorance and error without this involving any actual turning from God. This is the reason that David Bentley Hart, for example, lists out the full range of angelic rebellion, ignorance, and incompetence when talking about the natures of the various powers at work between heaven and earth. It is not a matter of two diametrically opposed camps with all free rational spirits fitting into either a life of flawless participation in God’s life and will or a life characterized by pure hatred for God and opposition to divine life together. With these kinds of far more expansive and lively conceptions of reality, I love encountering theologians like Sergei Bulgakov who will add layers by arguing that unfallen time cannot be simply sequential and by saying that there are probably as many different kinds of time as there are kinds of angelic life (with each kind of time being a concrete mode of experiencing the creaturely temporality that is common to all).
With all of this in view, then, I will briefly sketch out my own position regarding how all of this relates to the claim that our cosmos is the result of an atemporal or metahistorical human fall. In a nutshell, holding to an metahistorical human fall involves two beliefs:
That all of life within our universe is connected as one body in some real way that we can talk about in terms of a cosmic humanity or the image of God within all of creation.
That we can talk about this unified body of humanity as being only one part of a larger spiritually embodied creation into which we are entering by means of a severely limited experience (including a strictly sequential kind of time and some categories of mass, energy, and space that are subject to entropy and other closed or destabilizing qualities).
For those who can accept these two claims in some sense, it becomes possible to conceptualize and talk about our entire cosmos, with us, existing as one body within an unfallen form of time (above or outside of the fallen and sequential time that we currently know). This does not mean that humans existed “before” fallen time because, this higher form of unfallen creaturely time is not limited to sequential categories. The term “atemporal” can be deceptive, as well, because it suggests that the human atemporal fall takes place outside of any kind of time and therefore within the timeless life of God. This is not the case, however, as no fall takes place in the life of God, but every fall is only an attempt to depart from God’s life. I therefore prefer terms such as metahistorical fall, but atemporal also works too, as long as it is clear that it simply refers to a fall that takes place outside of empirical history or sequential time.
Two points are being made here. First, the human fall takes place outside of empirical history in another form of time where before and after don’t apply as they do for us now. Second, this fall occurs for all of humanity at once as one body (and the entire fleshly cosmos with us) so that we all take this path together into the fleshly and sequential becoming that we are now experiencing together as well as enacting personally, each of us, in our own individual falls over the course of our lives. (Here is another minor point of agreement with Justin, incidentally, as we both agree that the fall of Adam is a fall that we all participate with or enact personally. Justin simply denies that there is any reality to the sense in which this is also a collective human fall outside of our current sequential time.)
Not only is there no sense of pre-existence with an atemporal human fall, but Saint Maximus the Confessor even says that the atemporal fall happens at the instant of our creation collectively as the full body of humanity. To put this into a narrative format as a means of understanding something outside of categories that we currently have, picture all of life that will ever exist (from the first organisms that evolve on any planets up through to the cold extinction of our entire universe) as one unified and glorious body of life appearing suddenly amid the joyous singing of the angels around the throne of God. This glorious but infantile body of creatures (humanity understood cosmically) is immediately inclined to find a life on its own apart from God and is therefore immediately given a pathway by God to become and mature within sequential time where all these creatures will be subject to an impermanent and unstable existence where everything is continually crumbling away, undergoing entropy, and dying. This bondage to death is not a punishment but is simply the result of a real corporate inclination on the part of a large collective body of creatures, and this world of death is offered as a pathway that will put some limits in place on our potential flight away from God. This is my crude summary of the picture that Maximus the Confessor gives of our instantaneous and atemporal fall. There are a few different variations of this in earlier thinkers like Origen, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, and Saint Gregory of Nyssa, but all of them agree that we are not talking about a sequential pre-existence when we consider the collective Adam that fell and became all of us as the particular Adams and Eves.
All of this is reflected in some very elemental terms by the New Testament language of two worlds, one of light and one without light. For example, with Christ, the “light dawned upon those sitting in the region and shadow of death” (Mathew 4:16) and “a dawning from on high will visit us, to shine upon those sitting in darkness and death’s shadow” (Luke 1:78-79). Also, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it” (John 1:5). And finally, “this is the judgment: that the light has come into the cosmos, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were wicked” (John 3:19).
Obviously, these are massively complex and ambitious concepts, but they are concepts that have a long history in the history of Christian theology and a history that continues into the present day (although a very little-known minority). One example recently is the Orthodox Bishop Basil (or Vasily) Rodzianko who, near the end of his life, spent almost half a year (in 1990) at the Holy Trinity Sergius Monastery conducting research at the library on these topics and giving lectures that were collected into a book titled The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Fathers and published in Russian in 1996. This book has never been fully translated into English, but the opening sentences (according to three digital translation tools: Google Translate, Chat GPT, and DeepL) put our current situation rather bluntly:
This world in which we live was not created by God: God did not create evil, and in this world, as we all know, there is more than enough evil. Its source is not God, but ‘the prince of this world’ (John 12:31; 16:11).
This lines up very well with the description of the creation in many of the church fathers who differentiated strongly between the layered creation accounts in the opening chapters of Genesis so that this fallen cosmos is a corruption of God’s good, original, and final work. God’s creation requires our participation, and because we have not yet participated rightly and fully, this fallen world is not yet the creation of God.