The False Dichotomy of “Deism or Supernaturalism”

“Bildnis des Philosophen Leibniz” by Christoph Bernhard Francke (c. 1695).

Our default today is to think of theism in terms of either deism or supernaturalism. God is thought of as either a God who intervenes and makes occasional exceptions to the laws of nature or a God who does not. As Bulgakov reiterates in a hundred ways throughout The Bride of the Lamb, however, both of these concepts are confused perversions of theism and Christianity. Deism’s absurd idea that God is an engineer who makes autonomous and lonely machines could not be farther from the truth, but the typical supernaturalist response that God is an engineer who occasionally decides to intervene within the workings of our world is equally absurd. Fundamental to the confusion in both cases is the idea that God controls things by designing them like a mechanic designs a machine. God, however, unlike a mechanic or an engineer does not make machines. Instead, God invites our free and creative participation in divine life. Creatures can be engineers and mechanics who design machines, but even our own design work is only a minor subset of our sub-creative capacities in imitation of God. At our best, we make machines to facilitate the life in our own heart and the many other lives that we also help to nurture all around us.

This rejection of any idea that God designs the world as its creator has widespread implications, and should feel a little counterintuitive to all of us benighted moderns. However, the idea that God is not an engineer is actually entirely in line with all classical theistic understandings of God found throughout church history before the last five centuries or so. Also, to clarify as much as possible up front, this rejection of supernaturalism is not to deny the reality of miracles but to resituate miracles within the more Christian ontology of a living creation and cosmos. Properly understood, all of reality is a manifestation of God’s life. What we experience as “nature” within this fallen world is only a veiled and fractured image of a reality that can actually be manifested more fully in various ways in what we experience as miracles. These miracles are simply the most truly “natural” state of affairs showing up within a world subjected to death and some degree of structural dysfunction. Preeminently, the most natural event of all within empirical history is also rather unique: Christ’s resurrection and empty grave. To this, Christians would also add the miracle of the Eucharist. We see this in Alexander Schmemann’s book For the Life of the World (which Rowan Williams calls by its original title The World as Sacrament and says is “one of the most important theological texts I’ve read in my life”) where all of the sacraments are explained as simply a restoration of the most natural state for basic materials like bread, water, wine, and oil.

Understanding this, it follows that, within a fallen cosmos, what we know as the “laws of nature” do not fully or accurately reflect the will of God. For example, there is nothing natural about creaturely death or annihilation (outside of the divine prototype, only by a kind of analogy, in God’s trinitarian life with the self-sacrifice of kenotic love). No living thing is a machine that follows external laws. Humans are, at our most natural, sub-creators who continually see and enact either God’s life or diabolical falsehoods. Bulgakov is all about this way of seeing, and he defends such a Christian metaphysics with the most careful exactitude. One of many astonishing corollaries to the rejection of these dead-end options of deism or supernaturalism is that God has nothing to do with any “possible worlds.” Virtually every famous Christian apologist in recent decades speaks endlessly about all of the “possible worlds” that God could have created and about the improbable statistical odds that this world that we have could have been so perfectly fine-tuned that it allows for the functions of biological life. While the laws of nature do reveal the goodness and beauty of God, they do not do so perfectly in a fallen universe such as ours. As the Apostle Paul says explicitly in several ways, our fallen cosmos is an imperfect reflection of God’s creation. With God’s true creation—which is an endless invitation into the fullness of God’s infinite and perfectly-actualized life—there are no other “possible worlds.” In stark contrast to such “possible worlds” reasoning that we see in most debates over God across recent centuries, Bulgakov says that “once it is summoned into being by God, the world is not only the best of all worlds but even the only and perfect world.”

It is no surprise, historically, that these two conceptions of deism or supernaturalism, with their varieties of possible worlds, feel to us like the only ways of thinking about God and creation. As a nation founded after the Enlightenment, the United States came to exist amid a mixture of deists and supernaturalists: those who thought of God as irrelevant (or even harmful) to our national purpose versus those who thought that God has intervened in history to establish a new nation with the potential to be a great blessing and a light in the world. (This all relates, as well, to how our nation was conceived after the end of civilizational Christianity at the Peace of Westphalia in October 1648 when the West replaced its increasingly voluntarist misconception of God with a voluntarist misconception of the state—both of which confusions have been increasingly hidden in subsequent years beneath a voluntarist misconception of the autonomous human person. The idea that we are functions of our wills instead of our vision has a lot to do with our idea that God is a maker of rational machinery, and that our humanity essentially consists in our capacity to make independent decisions. At the Peace of Westphalia, as the dying Christian West invented the secular nation state, we replaced the age-old networks of sacred authorities who sought together for visions of divine life (and who were found in all human societies concretely as extended family networks, guilds of craft and learning, religious traditions, and various governing classes) with the theoretically collective rational will of autonomous individuals embodied by the singular will of the nation state. It seems clear that this rather desperate maneuver was a mistake, and a mistake that will eventually require either a bottom up or a top down realignment of much of the legal and economic structures to which it has given rise worldwide. However, I’ve accidentally gotten onto a favorite soapbox of mine and started writing an entirely different essay.)

My point here is simply to consider Bulgakov’s chapter 4 and section 1 of The Bride of the Lamb on “​God and Creaturely Freedom: ​Divine Providence with Regard to the World” as the next installment in these reading notes. Bulgakov provides a radiant and eminently traditional alternative to the false dichotomy of deism or supernaturalism from this next section in his magnum opus. God is not an engineer but is both the beginning and end of an entirely free and living creation. My brief survey of all this in relation to God, to humans, and to animal life in this section of Bulgakov follows below for those who are able to subscribe and to participate with comments and questions.