A relatively new Christian named Miriam recently wrote to ask me if I believed what the young theologian Jordan Daniel Wood shared with me about God enabling us to change our pasts—that is if God can help us to make our broken and unfinished histories into complete and good enactments of God’s perfect will.
Man, this is the kind of concept that is so intrinsically significant for...everything...that it demands to be carefully considered. I remember reading or hearing Jordan on this topic somewhere at some time, but I clearly wasn't fully prepped to receive what he was saying at the time with the openness which it deserved. I think I ran aground on the obvious rocks of "changing the past feels cheap and like cheating." I completely get now that this is a much more nuanced supposal, not cheap at all, but thorough, and most of all, accomplishes what absolutely must be accomplished: the righting of every wrong, the making whole of every relationship, the abolition of evil, the theosis of every creature.
I wonder, though, if there are other ways to conceive of those things being accomplished without a remaking of the past, a re-writing of the story. Maybe, instead of the events of the past changing, their meaning and whole character changes. It may just be an aesthetic prejudice in me that still chafes at the thought of a re-writing of the story; like, why allow this version at all if learning things or growing in virtue and knowledge could (and may be in the age/ages to come) be accomplished differently? I'm really thankful for Benjamin in his comment bringing up Christ's wounds in the Resurrection, because I was going to as well. And I like Jordan's answer about this as a measure of the degree of humanity's total transformation such that when there are no longer any wounds in the whole of humanity, there will be no wounds on Christ. There's a poetry and a logic to that. But what if the wounds aren't *merely* that, a lingering sign of wounds still to be healed? What if they have another character to them, and are actually badges of love, their meaning having been elevated. What if, even after there is no guilt left, no shame, the wounds are retained as pure glories. I can't help thinking that there's a deeper principle signified by those wounds, a pattern of God's work, his "style" as C.S. Lewis was bold enough to call it in "Miracles": radical newness in Resurrection, yet with continuity to the old.
The same idea has been applied to the Saints, too, their special characters and charisms coming from their experiences, not least their sufferings. There are these great lines from an old Latin hymn (O qui tuo Dux martyrum) about my Patron, St. Stephen (whose name means crown):
The stones that smote thee, in thy blood
Made beauteous and divine,
All in a halo heavenly bright
About thy temples shine.
The scars upon thy sacred brow
Throw beams of glory round;
The splendours of thy bruised face
The very sun confound.
I think maybe there must be certain blessings and glories which could never arise or be brought about except through the *redeeming* and *transforming* of former pains. Isn't it conceivable that there are goods which could never have gotten their unique character without having been first transformed from evils? Something horrific at this stage and level which, as we grow in theosis, turns out to have been merely a tiny twist, a shape ("not worthy of comparison..."), that yields up a glorious pattern of growth that bears no resemblance to the twist but also could not have gotten its glorified shape without it? Instead of thinking of Creation as a static good that has been marred and must—as if in an afterthought—be rescued and reset and re-created, maybe Creation was always more like a story which was going to require its drama and plot twists in order to be brought to a glorious conclusion: the ultimate “happily ever after" that no creature could have guessed or imagined. Thinking of Creation as a story (a "narrative cosmology" we could call it?) doesn't chafe against my aesthetic sensibility as much, and still accomplishes those non-negotiables I mentioned above.
I don't want to be too confident in any of this, as you mentioned in your reply to Benjamin. They're just things I've been mulling over. Would love to hear your thoughts on them.
You defend your idea so beautifully, and it is entirely where I was for a long time. I love Japanese kintsugi, and I love the book *In Praise of Shadows* by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. It's therefore easy for me to want to say a hearty yes to your question: "Isn't it conceivable that there are goods which could never have gotten their unique character without having been first transformed from evils?" However, I've become fully convinced that God never needs evil, agony, violence, or privation in order to achieve any good. This is true of creatures too. We can learn and achieve every good thing without any recourse to evil and trauma. However, because fallen creatures do bring evil, agony, violence, privation, and death into the world, God does accomplish good by means of victory over all of these. However, God replaces all of these evils with the goodness that is accomplished by the same creatures that initially strove to do evil. At the same time, I think that every free rational creature begins in a place of utter ignorance where some degree of error and even of suffering is a given on the pathway to maturity and the full freedom of experience and mastery. In this sense, there is some history of learning by means of mistakes that is probably a part of the story for all creatures, even within the fullness of God's life. This divine and creaturely story, however, does not include a history of violence and injury.
Btw, I learned this very happy news from Jordan Daniel Wood today: "As it happens, I’m in the midst of writing a brief chapter for a volume on theology and trauma. It will lay out this vision in conversation with trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth. And as it happens, I was asked to do this after and separately from Miriam reaching out to me too. All this is a start. I hope one day to make it a whole book, God willing."
"There is some history of learning by means of mistakes that is probably a part of the story for all creatures, even within the fullness of God's life. This divine and creaturely story, however, does not include a history of violence and injury." That's a very compelling notion, extremely attractive, and, I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge, entirely possible. I can see violence and injury no longer being part of the story qua violence and injury, but utterly reframed, or even replaced by do-overs, reversals, etc. But even if the narrative does move in that direction, I can't seem to escape the linearity still inherent in this or any narrative. As Benjamin put it in his first comment, "Even if a return to those moments and a correction of those failed choices is part of the redemptive process, does that healing and restoration not constitute a new 'past' for us, and thus the suffering of that past remains formative, even if the actual function of it is merely our God-ordained correcting of it? I realize a lot of this renders a-temporal reality in temporal terms but I’m not sure how else to analogize it." But either through an atemporal new creation with no history of evil, or an evolving narrative with new chapters too glorious to imagine, our hope is in the God of absolute and perfect love. As Lewis concluded in 'Letters to Malcolm': “Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better will be.”
Regardless, I want to heartily acknowledge the goodness of acknowledging God's power over time and evil in the sphere of therapy here and now. I too have someone close to me for whom trauma and EMDR are very live issues. I pray that Miriam finds temporal healing, and in the story that God intends for her, complete fullness of being and love.
I have to say right now I agree with you. I think of the martyrs and St. Paisios teaching prayer only heals others when you are willing to take on their disease or trauma. God can heal anything, but I can’t help but think of Christ as historical and yet beyond it as we too can become.
Delightfully, I just discovered your blog while this particular question has been very present in my mind, so thank you for being an instrument of Providence. I believe that the Western Tradition's use of economic language, when understood ontologically, hints at exactly the same phenomenon of a "changing of the past." I know it's a different theological idiom than you're using here, but I think it still works.
If we understand our sin as an ontological debt to God, which means a failure to pay what He is owe, namely, justice, charity, or the divine energies, then when God redeems our "debts," He is doing something ontological that reaches back into the past. The process of divine redemption means that Christ pays the holiness we once "owed," He "credits" us for the debts accrued in the past, erasing their non-payment from the ledger, and also gifts us with the "credit" (cf. St. Ephraim) to pay it in the present and future. To understand this ontologically, we have to remember that sin begets sin and debt begets debt, but when Christ pays our debt, He wipes future potential sin/debt from our ledger, meaning, He heals the sinful habit, and by wiping the sin/debt from our habits, He heals it from our soul's memory (the place which stores the past and informs our present action), like cleaning a stain, which inevitably means going into those places in our bodies and souls where the sin "happened in the past" and removing it. To pay our debt means to give us the holiness that erases the stain of sin in our habit. To heal our future is to heal our past. This must be what the Tradition means when it says that we can "become" virgin souls again - it means it literally. Our souls quite literally become clean again, without debt, the sin removed from our habit memory, as if sin had never happened.
By the way, for those of us (I'm Catholic) who believe that Our Lady's all-holiness from conception mysteriously coincides with her life-long redemption, this reality helps explain how she is our perfect archetype. God finishes paying our debts when there is ontologically no more sin in us, and all past sin is so erased from the ledger that not even the wounds and habits exist, all habits are full of grace, and we are again virginal souls. The Lord paid Our Lady's debts so thoroughly that her holiness was eschatological ("who is that Woman who shines like the dawn, powerful as an army in array"), and the gift of virginity in her soul was factually present that her future and her past are healed from sin ever having been in her, in a way that we will only reach once we have been fully re-made by the Lord's redemption.
But by our participation in redemption, we are similarly re-made into virginal souls. For example, baptism repays the debt of Adam, so it is as though we had been conceived and born in holiness. Confession repays the debt of post-baptismal sin so it is as though we had never committed the sin. Penance and the Eucharist repay the debt of the wounds of post-baptismal sinful habits, so it is as though we never had the sinful habit. The Lord would never have made us in this fallen and sinful world if it weren't for the salvation that He intended to give us, so that all our present, past, and future could be re-made in the image of His holiness.
I wish I could be clearer, but for the sake of verbal clutter, I will leave it at that. Whichever theological idiom you use, I am struck by God's mercy and omnipotence to re-make us into His friends, His Bride, who can stand before Him without shame.
I'm with you to a very large degree. However, I suspect that we differ a bit over the need for each of us to "pay every last farthing" and to do the good things that we have failed to do. Part of the difference might be the idea of our synergy with God that is so basic in Eastern theology. God's work in Christ, as you say, does make it possible for us to restore our virginal status and make our past perfectly good again, but I think that it is something we must actively do in some real sense. It is not just a removal of past evil by God but a replacement of past evil by our own right doing. This point by George MacDonald has always struck me as clearly true: "Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil."
That's a fair point. To clarify, you're saying that an Eastern theology of synergy highlights the fact that we actively need to pay every last farthing, whereas a "debt" theology seems to allow for Christ to do the payment without our activity? If so, I agree with you that we need to pay everything back actively, though my understanding is that, within the framework of "debt" theology, Christ alone pays what He alone can pay, namely, the debt that wipes away eternal punishment, whereas we pay, through His grace, all debts of temporal punishment, namely, the wounds of sin, the lingering attachments, the developed habits, etc., are all ours to synergistically pay "to the last farthing." I imagine you wouldn't make such a fine distinction between payment for eternal and temporal punishment, especially since we are still synergistically cooperating in His remission of eternal punishment through baptism and confession. In any case, you are right that we cooperate, which is incredibly dignifying and the only way to healing.
Correct that I don’t make a strong distinction between punishments now and in other ages. This fallen age is a residue of the more substantial ages within which it sits.
I think I agree that the final end of punishment is never retribution, though I would probably say that retribution is one end. And that's a very interesting point about our fallen age, I'll have to think about that one for a while.
Thanks for this piece. This is such an important topic.
I just read an essay by John Betz in The New Ressourcement journal that had a similar theme, though his primary focus is on tradition. But what he later calls a "theology of time" is relevant here, and I think especially the last sentence is relevant to what you've written: "eternal time ... is always flowing over with provision ... it causes time itself to flow in altogether new and surprising ways..."
"The moment we see time in relation to eternity, however, and as made for union with it, everything changes. For it then becomes possible to see time not only as having some remote analogical relation to eternity (and therewith a minimal basis of meaning) but as pregnant with new (divine) possibilities. For time, we can see then, is not just a Platonic image of eternity, but essentially its Marian bearer. In the words of Edward Young, "Time is eternity; Pregnant with all eternity can give." That is to say, time is meant to be divinely fruitful, bearing forth new and indeed unheard-of possibilities, as Christ reported to the Baptist: "The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them" (Matt 11:5). Of course, with Mary we may ask how this could be (Luke 1:34), not to mention how Christ's disciples could possibly do even greater things (John 14:12). But when God is received in time by a similar fiat of faith, no matter how determined and enchained by fate things may seem, all things are possible (Matt 19:26). For by faith the eternal Logos once again enters time and time receives her king. Then, time and reality (as we know it) flow differently, carrying a sovereign power of possibility that transcends the determinations of fallen, chronological time. For whereas chronological time is forever running out, eternal time, which is the union of the two, is always flowing over with provision (Luke 6:38). Indeed, not only does it bring dead things to life; it causes time itself to flow in altogether new and surprising ways, which the saints perceive as providence."
The post brought some novels to mind that explore somewhat related topics, you might get a lot out of them: Nabokov's The Gift (this essay here discusses the theory of time Nabokov presents in it https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/halensee-a-fathers-guide-to-nabokovs-berlin/), Austerlitz and The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald (in the former there are some passages where the protagonist speculates on the non-linear nature of time, and the latter explores the self-destructiveness of remembering trauma), and of course Proust's In Search of Lost Time (where DBH might get his idea of the past being constituted in the future/present from).
This was a captivating read. I’ve been thinking about it all morning and have written and re-written this comment a few times during the course of that contemplation, so please forgive the scattered and longwinded state of this question but I’m curious to hear more from you on this subject. One of the most compelling parts (for me) of Hart’s “That All Shall Be Saved” was Meditation #3 on personhood. This idea that who we are as individuals is, in a sense, defined by not only our history and experiences but by all those who have known and loved us and been loved by us is so simple yet so strikingly true. When Hart argues that to banish these connections from our mind would be akin to changing who we fundamentally are as persons, I can’t help but agree.
So likewise, in Wood’s view as presented here, how do we reconcile the notion of “undoing” our past with the shaping of who we are? If, in a sense, God’s setting right of all things involves a reshaping of our lived experience to its most painless hypothetical version, doesn’t that kind of take us back to the question of why we weren’t created in a perfected state to begin with?
The impetus for my question is John 20. I’ve always taken the fact that Christ bears the scars of his crucifixion, even in his glorified, resurrected body, as a meaningful detail. And I suppose, now thinking about it in terms of this article, I realize I’ve always taken it to mean that resurrection, like healing, does not “undo” our lived experience so much as heals it (I think healing is meaningfully different than undoing but that’s perhaps another digression). If the “price” of genuine rational freedom or more simply, the “price” of creation is the inevitability of suffering, Christ uniting himself to that suffering feels more like paying the price than “undoing” the paying of it. And can we even speak of “undoing” that which shapes us without making the process of that undoing the new past that now shapes up? Even if a return to those moments and a correction of those failed choices is part of the redemptive process, does that healing and restoration not constitute a new “past” for us, and thus the suffering of that past remains formative, even if the actual function of it is merely our God-ordained correcting of it?
I realize a lot of this renders a-temporal reality in temporal terms but I’m not sure how else to analogize it. And I think about halfway through this I stopped asking a question and merely started thinking out loud so I’m going to stop myself here. I would love to hear your thoughts, in any form, on the John 20/resurrected and scarred Christ aspect of this.
(and in case she reads your Substack, thank you to Miriam for your willingness to share and let your story be shared).
Benjamin, thank you for this great question and reflections. I see that you just read the original interview with Jordan as well which does get into some of these things as I recall. First, my favorite part of Hart’s “That All Shall Be Saved” was also Meditation #3 on personhood. However, I think these ideas (which connect with Gregory of Nyssa an Bulgakov in my own mind) point toward this idea of changing our past and are not in conflict with it. Nothing true, good, or beautiful about any moment or any person would ever be lost as we accomplish all that has not yet been accomplished together and thereby fully reveal God's good creation for what it is (in place of the many gaps and lies that exist now in our flattened and shattered time). God does not need our failures and sins and agonies in order to create us or to teach us to love. We do learn by means of terrible suffering in this lifetime, and we are called to take up our cross in imitation of Christ and to suffer willingly together. We learn good things by terrible means now, but if we can learn these same good things by better means (that do not involve violence, abuse, and agony) then I think that part of our completion of fallen time will involve learning some lessons more than one time and learning them in better and better ways. Jordan says something like this in his interview:
"As far as what we’ve learned in the past, I think it’s true to say that, for me right now, I needed to go through this or that ordeal, or somehow I learned a lesson I would’ve perhaps not have known otherwise. Well, on the one hand, at least, we should admit that we don’t really know that. I don’t know if I could have learned that lesson in any other way. All I know is that I, in fact, learned it that one way. So what else is possible in that event, or what else has a seed of that event that lies dormant and might not yet have blossomed? I can’t perceive that until it actually happens, so I don’t know if it’s the case that that was the only way."
As for Christ's wounds, I've thought a lot about this, and I do not think it is wise to be too confident one way or the other with any of this stuff. However, I do find the ideas from Jordan persuasive here as well. He thinks that Christ body is wounded when he rises from the dead only because all of human history is not yet healed, and all of humanity is the body of Christ. As Christ ascends into heaven and ultimately takes on the body of fully healed humanity, Jordan thinks that we will have a history together whereby Christ gives himself to us fully as the food of the Tree of Life but in which we receive this gift in love and do not violently brutalize Christ. As all of humanity is healed, Christ's body will no longer have wounds because we no longer have wounds and because we will no longer have wounded Christ. This is extremely speculative, and likely foolish in many ways. However, I did try to write a little about it here almost two years back:
Haha I was reading the interview a second time before returning here to say that much of my question was indeed addressed there (you actually asked Jordan about Christ's wounds in almost the same terms that I asked you about them). Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
"God does not need our failures and sins and agonies in order to create us or to teach us to love." That, that right there is perhaps the key insight. I feel like I hold these two notions in tension, this idea that suffering can be educational, can broaden the depths of our capacity for love, and yet that we would be better for having never suffered. I've also taken comfort in God's redemptive ability to bring good from our pain. I lost my mother quite suddenly some years ago, and the profundity of that grief broke me in so many ways, but in the healing process, I came back together a better and notably more empathetic man than I'd ever been before. I like the version of myself on this side of that experience so much better than I do the version of myself that went into it. And yet at the same time, I always say I'd rather never have gone through it. Despite any good God was able to work through that pain (or more precisely, the healing from it), I'd have rather had my mother there to dance with me on my wedding day and find my way to empathy through slower and less traumatic means. (Plus I hate the whole notion of framing tragedy that befalls someone else as somehow meant as a plot point in my story, as if I'm more the main character of reality than my mother was...but I digress).
"We learn good things by terrible means now, but if we can learn these same good things by better means..." Something something seeing through a glass darkly...
"As all of humanity is healed, Christ's body will no longer have wounds because we no longer have wounds and because we will no longer have wounded Christ." That...works, actually. I completely affirm your hesitation in being too confident about this kind of thing but placing it in those terms...of humanity wounding Christ, which really is what happened...man I don't even have a response to that other than to sort of tearily gawk at the sheer profundity of it. If Christ creates from the cross, the cross really is the beginning...if Christ overcomes death by the cross, and in so doing defeats death through wounds that are the last to be healed, then Paul really was right in saying "the last enemy to be destroyed is death." Alpha and Omega indeed.
If this kind of hope is foolishness, I aspire to be a fool.
Man, this is the kind of concept that is so intrinsically significant for...everything...that it demands to be carefully considered. I remember reading or hearing Jordan on this topic somewhere at some time, but I clearly wasn't fully prepped to receive what he was saying at the time with the openness which it deserved. I think I ran aground on the obvious rocks of "changing the past feels cheap and like cheating." I completely get now that this is a much more nuanced supposal, not cheap at all, but thorough, and most of all, accomplishes what absolutely must be accomplished: the righting of every wrong, the making whole of every relationship, the abolition of evil, the theosis of every creature.
I wonder, though, if there are other ways to conceive of those things being accomplished without a remaking of the past, a re-writing of the story. Maybe, instead of the events of the past changing, their meaning and whole character changes. It may just be an aesthetic prejudice in me that still chafes at the thought of a re-writing of the story; like, why allow this version at all if learning things or growing in virtue and knowledge could (and may be in the age/ages to come) be accomplished differently? I'm really thankful for Benjamin in his comment bringing up Christ's wounds in the Resurrection, because I was going to as well. And I like Jordan's answer about this as a measure of the degree of humanity's total transformation such that when there are no longer any wounds in the whole of humanity, there will be no wounds on Christ. There's a poetry and a logic to that. But what if the wounds aren't *merely* that, a lingering sign of wounds still to be healed? What if they have another character to them, and are actually badges of love, their meaning having been elevated. What if, even after there is no guilt left, no shame, the wounds are retained as pure glories. I can't help thinking that there's a deeper principle signified by those wounds, a pattern of God's work, his "style" as C.S. Lewis was bold enough to call it in "Miracles": radical newness in Resurrection, yet with continuity to the old.
The same idea has been applied to the Saints, too, their special characters and charisms coming from their experiences, not least their sufferings. There are these great lines from an old Latin hymn (O qui tuo Dux martyrum) about my Patron, St. Stephen (whose name means crown):
The stones that smote thee, in thy blood
Made beauteous and divine,
All in a halo heavenly bright
About thy temples shine.
The scars upon thy sacred brow
Throw beams of glory round;
The splendours of thy bruised face
The very sun confound.
I think maybe there must be certain blessings and glories which could never arise or be brought about except through the *redeeming* and *transforming* of former pains. Isn't it conceivable that there are goods which could never have gotten their unique character without having been first transformed from evils? Something horrific at this stage and level which, as we grow in theosis, turns out to have been merely a tiny twist, a shape ("not worthy of comparison..."), that yields up a glorious pattern of growth that bears no resemblance to the twist but also could not have gotten its glorified shape without it? Instead of thinking of Creation as a static good that has been marred and must—as if in an afterthought—be rescued and reset and re-created, maybe Creation was always more like a story which was going to require its drama and plot twists in order to be brought to a glorious conclusion: the ultimate “happily ever after" that no creature could have guessed or imagined. Thinking of Creation as a story (a "narrative cosmology" we could call it?) doesn't chafe against my aesthetic sensibility as much, and still accomplishes those non-negotiables I mentioned above.
I don't want to be too confident in any of this, as you mentioned in your reply to Benjamin. They're just things I've been mulling over. Would love to hear your thoughts on them.
You defend your idea so beautifully, and it is entirely where I was for a long time. I love Japanese kintsugi, and I love the book *In Praise of Shadows* by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. It's therefore easy for me to want to say a hearty yes to your question: "Isn't it conceivable that there are goods which could never have gotten their unique character without having been first transformed from evils?" However, I've become fully convinced that God never needs evil, agony, violence, or privation in order to achieve any good. This is true of creatures too. We can learn and achieve every good thing without any recourse to evil and trauma. However, because fallen creatures do bring evil, agony, violence, privation, and death into the world, God does accomplish good by means of victory over all of these. However, God replaces all of these evils with the goodness that is accomplished by the same creatures that initially strove to do evil. At the same time, I think that every free rational creature begins in a place of utter ignorance where some degree of error and even of suffering is a given on the pathway to maturity and the full freedom of experience and mastery. In this sense, there is some history of learning by means of mistakes that is probably a part of the story for all creatures, even within the fullness of God's life. This divine and creaturely story, however, does not include a history of violence and injury.
Btw, I learned this very happy news from Jordan Daniel Wood today: "As it happens, I’m in the midst of writing a brief chapter for a volume on theology and trauma. It will lay out this vision in conversation with trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth. And as it happens, I was asked to do this after and separately from Miriam reaching out to me too. All this is a start. I hope one day to make it a whole book, God willing."
"There is some history of learning by means of mistakes that is probably a part of the story for all creatures, even within the fullness of God's life. This divine and creaturely story, however, does not include a history of violence and injury." That's a very compelling notion, extremely attractive, and, I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge, entirely possible. I can see violence and injury no longer being part of the story qua violence and injury, but utterly reframed, or even replaced by do-overs, reversals, etc. But even if the narrative does move in that direction, I can't seem to escape the linearity still inherent in this or any narrative. As Benjamin put it in his first comment, "Even if a return to those moments and a correction of those failed choices is part of the redemptive process, does that healing and restoration not constitute a new 'past' for us, and thus the suffering of that past remains formative, even if the actual function of it is merely our God-ordained correcting of it? I realize a lot of this renders a-temporal reality in temporal terms but I’m not sure how else to analogize it." But either through an atemporal new creation with no history of evil, or an evolving narrative with new chapters too glorious to imagine, our hope is in the God of absolute and perfect love. As Lewis concluded in 'Letters to Malcolm': “Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better will be.”
Regardless, I want to heartily acknowledge the goodness of acknowledging God's power over time and evil in the sphere of therapy here and now. I too have someone close to me for whom trauma and EMDR are very live issues. I pray that Miriam finds temporal healing, and in the story that God intends for her, complete fullness of being and love.
I have to say right now I agree with you. I think of the martyrs and St. Paisios teaching prayer only heals others when you are willing to take on their disease or trauma. God can heal anything, but I can’t help but think of Christ as historical and yet beyond it as we too can become.
So encouraging, Jesse. And thanks from me to Miriam, and also to Benjamin who commented.
Dana
Delightfully, I just discovered your blog while this particular question has been very present in my mind, so thank you for being an instrument of Providence. I believe that the Western Tradition's use of economic language, when understood ontologically, hints at exactly the same phenomenon of a "changing of the past." I know it's a different theological idiom than you're using here, but I think it still works.
If we understand our sin as an ontological debt to God, which means a failure to pay what He is owe, namely, justice, charity, or the divine energies, then when God redeems our "debts," He is doing something ontological that reaches back into the past. The process of divine redemption means that Christ pays the holiness we once "owed," He "credits" us for the debts accrued in the past, erasing their non-payment from the ledger, and also gifts us with the "credit" (cf. St. Ephraim) to pay it in the present and future. To understand this ontologically, we have to remember that sin begets sin and debt begets debt, but when Christ pays our debt, He wipes future potential sin/debt from our ledger, meaning, He heals the sinful habit, and by wiping the sin/debt from our habits, He heals it from our soul's memory (the place which stores the past and informs our present action), like cleaning a stain, which inevitably means going into those places in our bodies and souls where the sin "happened in the past" and removing it. To pay our debt means to give us the holiness that erases the stain of sin in our habit. To heal our future is to heal our past. This must be what the Tradition means when it says that we can "become" virgin souls again - it means it literally. Our souls quite literally become clean again, without debt, the sin removed from our habit memory, as if sin had never happened.
By the way, for those of us (I'm Catholic) who believe that Our Lady's all-holiness from conception mysteriously coincides with her life-long redemption, this reality helps explain how she is our perfect archetype. God finishes paying our debts when there is ontologically no more sin in us, and all past sin is so erased from the ledger that not even the wounds and habits exist, all habits are full of grace, and we are again virginal souls. The Lord paid Our Lady's debts so thoroughly that her holiness was eschatological ("who is that Woman who shines like the dawn, powerful as an army in array"), and the gift of virginity in her soul was factually present that her future and her past are healed from sin ever having been in her, in a way that we will only reach once we have been fully re-made by the Lord's redemption.
But by our participation in redemption, we are similarly re-made into virginal souls. For example, baptism repays the debt of Adam, so it is as though we had been conceived and born in holiness. Confession repays the debt of post-baptismal sin so it is as though we had never committed the sin. Penance and the Eucharist repay the debt of the wounds of post-baptismal sinful habits, so it is as though we never had the sinful habit. The Lord would never have made us in this fallen and sinful world if it weren't for the salvation that He intended to give us, so that all our present, past, and future could be re-made in the image of His holiness.
I wish I could be clearer, but for the sake of verbal clutter, I will leave it at that. Whichever theological idiom you use, I am struck by God's mercy and omnipotence to re-make us into His friends, His Bride, who can stand before Him without shame.
I'm with you to a very large degree. However, I suspect that we differ a bit over the need for each of us to "pay every last farthing" and to do the good things that we have failed to do. Part of the difference might be the idea of our synergy with God that is so basic in Eastern theology. God's work in Christ, as you say, does make it possible for us to restore our virginal status and make our past perfectly good again, but I think that it is something we must actively do in some real sense. It is not just a removal of past evil by God but a replacement of past evil by our own right doing. This point by George MacDonald has always struck me as clearly true: "Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil."
That's a fair point. To clarify, you're saying that an Eastern theology of synergy highlights the fact that we actively need to pay every last farthing, whereas a "debt" theology seems to allow for Christ to do the payment without our activity? If so, I agree with you that we need to pay everything back actively, though my understanding is that, within the framework of "debt" theology, Christ alone pays what He alone can pay, namely, the debt that wipes away eternal punishment, whereas we pay, through His grace, all debts of temporal punishment, namely, the wounds of sin, the lingering attachments, the developed habits, etc., are all ours to synergistically pay "to the last farthing." I imagine you wouldn't make such a fine distinction between payment for eternal and temporal punishment, especially since we are still synergistically cooperating in His remission of eternal punishment through baptism and confession. In any case, you are right that we cooperate, which is incredibly dignifying and the only way to healing.
Correct that I don’t make a strong distinction between punishments now and in other ages. This fallen age is a residue of the more substantial ages within which it sits.
I’d also note that punishment by God is never retributive as I’d understand it.
I think I agree that the final end of punishment is never retribution, though I would probably say that retribution is one end. And that's a very interesting point about our fallen age, I'll have to think about that one for a while.
Thanks for this piece. This is such an important topic.
I just read an essay by John Betz in The New Ressourcement journal that had a similar theme, though his primary focus is on tradition. But what he later calls a "theology of time" is relevant here, and I think especially the last sentence is relevant to what you've written: "eternal time ... is always flowing over with provision ... it causes time itself to flow in altogether new and surprising ways..."
"The moment we see time in relation to eternity, however, and as made for union with it, everything changes. For it then becomes possible to see time not only as having some remote analogical relation to eternity (and therewith a minimal basis of meaning) but as pregnant with new (divine) possibilities. For time, we can see then, is not just a Platonic image of eternity, but essentially its Marian bearer. In the words of Edward Young, "Time is eternity; Pregnant with all eternity can give." That is to say, time is meant to be divinely fruitful, bearing forth new and indeed unheard-of possibilities, as Christ reported to the Baptist: "The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them" (Matt 11:5). Of course, with Mary we may ask how this could be (Luke 1:34), not to mention how Christ's disciples could possibly do even greater things (John 14:12). But when God is received in time by a similar fiat of faith, no matter how determined and enchained by fate things may seem, all things are possible (Matt 19:26). For by faith the eternal Logos once again enters time and time receives her king. Then, time and reality (as we know it) flow differently, carrying a sovereign power of possibility that transcends the determinations of fallen, chronological time. For whereas chronological time is forever running out, eternal time, which is the union of the two, is always flowing over with provision (Luke 6:38). Indeed, not only does it bring dead things to life; it causes time itself to flow in altogether new and surprising ways, which the saints perceive as providence."
Wow! What a treasure of a passage. I clearly need to pick up more John Betz. Thank you so much for sharing!
This is wonderful.
The post brought some novels to mind that explore somewhat related topics, you might get a lot out of them: Nabokov's The Gift (this essay here discusses the theory of time Nabokov presents in it https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/halensee-a-fathers-guide-to-nabokovs-berlin/), Austerlitz and The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald (in the former there are some passages where the protagonist speculates on the non-linear nature of time, and the latter explores the self-destructiveness of remembering trauma), and of course Proust's In Search of Lost Time (where DBH might get his idea of the past being constituted in the future/present from).
Thank you for sharing these connections!
This was a captivating read. I’ve been thinking about it all morning and have written and re-written this comment a few times during the course of that contemplation, so please forgive the scattered and longwinded state of this question but I’m curious to hear more from you on this subject. One of the most compelling parts (for me) of Hart’s “That All Shall Be Saved” was Meditation #3 on personhood. This idea that who we are as individuals is, in a sense, defined by not only our history and experiences but by all those who have known and loved us and been loved by us is so simple yet so strikingly true. When Hart argues that to banish these connections from our mind would be akin to changing who we fundamentally are as persons, I can’t help but agree.
So likewise, in Wood’s view as presented here, how do we reconcile the notion of “undoing” our past with the shaping of who we are? If, in a sense, God’s setting right of all things involves a reshaping of our lived experience to its most painless hypothetical version, doesn’t that kind of take us back to the question of why we weren’t created in a perfected state to begin with?
The impetus for my question is John 20. I’ve always taken the fact that Christ bears the scars of his crucifixion, even in his glorified, resurrected body, as a meaningful detail. And I suppose, now thinking about it in terms of this article, I realize I’ve always taken it to mean that resurrection, like healing, does not “undo” our lived experience so much as heals it (I think healing is meaningfully different than undoing but that’s perhaps another digression). If the “price” of genuine rational freedom or more simply, the “price” of creation is the inevitability of suffering, Christ uniting himself to that suffering feels more like paying the price than “undoing” the paying of it. And can we even speak of “undoing” that which shapes us without making the process of that undoing the new past that now shapes up? Even if a return to those moments and a correction of those failed choices is part of the redemptive process, does that healing and restoration not constitute a new “past” for us, and thus the suffering of that past remains formative, even if the actual function of it is merely our God-ordained correcting of it?
I realize a lot of this renders a-temporal reality in temporal terms but I’m not sure how else to analogize it. And I think about halfway through this I stopped asking a question and merely started thinking out loud so I’m going to stop myself here. I would love to hear your thoughts, in any form, on the John 20/resurrected and scarred Christ aspect of this.
(and in case she reads your Substack, thank you to Miriam for your willingness to share and let your story be shared).
Benjamin, thank you for this great question and reflections. I see that you just read the original interview with Jordan as well which does get into some of these things as I recall. First, my favorite part of Hart’s “That All Shall Be Saved” was also Meditation #3 on personhood. However, I think these ideas (which connect with Gregory of Nyssa an Bulgakov in my own mind) point toward this idea of changing our past and are not in conflict with it. Nothing true, good, or beautiful about any moment or any person would ever be lost as we accomplish all that has not yet been accomplished together and thereby fully reveal God's good creation for what it is (in place of the many gaps and lies that exist now in our flattened and shattered time). God does not need our failures and sins and agonies in order to create us or to teach us to love. We do learn by means of terrible suffering in this lifetime, and we are called to take up our cross in imitation of Christ and to suffer willingly together. We learn good things by terrible means now, but if we can learn these same good things by better means (that do not involve violence, abuse, and agony) then I think that part of our completion of fallen time will involve learning some lessons more than one time and learning them in better and better ways. Jordan says something like this in his interview:
"As far as what we’ve learned in the past, I think it’s true to say that, for me right now, I needed to go through this or that ordeal, or somehow I learned a lesson I would’ve perhaps not have known otherwise. Well, on the one hand, at least, we should admit that we don’t really know that. I don’t know if I could have learned that lesson in any other way. All I know is that I, in fact, learned it that one way. So what else is possible in that event, or what else has a seed of that event that lies dormant and might not yet have blossomed? I can’t perceive that until it actually happens, so I don’t know if it’s the case that that was the only way."
As for Christ's wounds, I've thought a lot about this, and I do not think it is wise to be too confident one way or the other with any of this stuff. However, I do find the ideas from Jordan persuasive here as well. He thinks that Christ body is wounded when he rises from the dead only because all of human history is not yet healed, and all of humanity is the body of Christ. As Christ ascends into heaven and ultimately takes on the body of fully healed humanity, Jordan thinks that we will have a history together whereby Christ gives himself to us fully as the food of the Tree of Life but in which we receive this gift in love and do not violently brutalize Christ. As all of humanity is healed, Christ's body will no longer have wounds because we no longer have wounds and because we will no longer have wounded Christ. This is extremely speculative, and likely foolish in many ways. However, I did try to write a little about it here almost two years back:
https://copiousflowers.substack.com/p/undoing-the-crucifixion-of-jesus
Haha I was reading the interview a second time before returning here to say that much of my question was indeed addressed there (you actually asked Jordan about Christ's wounds in almost the same terms that I asked you about them). Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
"God does not need our failures and sins and agonies in order to create us or to teach us to love." That, that right there is perhaps the key insight. I feel like I hold these two notions in tension, this idea that suffering can be educational, can broaden the depths of our capacity for love, and yet that we would be better for having never suffered. I've also taken comfort in God's redemptive ability to bring good from our pain. I lost my mother quite suddenly some years ago, and the profundity of that grief broke me in so many ways, but in the healing process, I came back together a better and notably more empathetic man than I'd ever been before. I like the version of myself on this side of that experience so much better than I do the version of myself that went into it. And yet at the same time, I always say I'd rather never have gone through it. Despite any good God was able to work through that pain (or more precisely, the healing from it), I'd have rather had my mother there to dance with me on my wedding day and find my way to empathy through slower and less traumatic means. (Plus I hate the whole notion of framing tragedy that befalls someone else as somehow meant as a plot point in my story, as if I'm more the main character of reality than my mother was...but I digress).
"We learn good things by terrible means now, but if we can learn these same good things by better means..." Something something seeing through a glass darkly...
"As all of humanity is healed, Christ's body will no longer have wounds because we no longer have wounds and because we will no longer have wounded Christ." That...works, actually. I completely affirm your hesitation in being too confident about this kind of thing but placing it in those terms...of humanity wounding Christ, which really is what happened...man I don't even have a response to that other than to sort of tearily gawk at the sheer profundity of it. If Christ creates from the cross, the cross really is the beginning...if Christ overcomes death by the cross, and in so doing defeats death through wounds that are the last to be healed, then Paul really was right in saying "the last enemy to be destroyed is death." Alpha and Omega indeed.
If this kind of hope is foolishness, I aspire to be a fool.
Beautiful response. Thank you.
The “Quentin Tarantino’s Cosmic Justice” review is behind a paywall. Anyway you can pdf it and send it to me as would like to read it. Thanks.
Jason, I think this share link will work:
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2019%2F08%2F06%2Fopinion%2Fquentin-tarantino.html%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0S5nV6NMiVWpBMCRzZEIKIVSFbom9noie2g-A29LRzUgMldoSPSp8F6X0_aem_JO5m0q8xNeyrFjVck7J6Pw&h=AT0U2bQDObMz0hMDQKTLHGVOSyAdjsopyII9T6QkV4a9pwiBGLSXoWg2BisxbTJTiYX5q0DxgoxbnYuH7JKA7trsw0IujclQu72l7Pp9wbvy8B_v0whtnIJj6t7PwQlLbkcsVHGT7mQ5RAKWhd5wEUcv9A&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT0pvTPWYCRvJHvzHTIKvsOfEWttdd2mm-MUVj-556dofr0GNInsGn2y5Y9oaxiwyFE5KvQZhdqxfJvbBkTJgmxuprx815q9W0-IULrWrCqN8EqJBro4lblK1ROiWn5bHsHQQMwIGCMoTcDGCZujz69atalSi3J6u8FPMM6TBiqVKN1SWE0KWM5huHOLFQNXVp9ZFKmxYs8gVjnfcGcHcpx1UtSw9yU
Or this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TxMB_2LdYgquIyWid-COjVpwgpVFgr6_/view?usp=sharing
This works - thank you!
Thanks, I still can’t access though, FYI.