The Gospel According to the Eastern Church
Theological Letters
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LECTURE 2
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE EASTERN CHURCH
We’re jumping into our first session on this series, which is about the Gospel according to the Eastern Church Fathers. I mentioned previously that the term “the gospel” is used frequently by Christians. But what is meant by that term, what the gospel is thought to be, varies depending on whether you’re a Protestant or a Catholic or Orthodox. And so in order to understand the Eastern Church Fathers, where I’d really like to begin is understanding the Gospel according to these Fathers.
The way I want to approach this is less by starting with the fathers themselves and what they have to say, and instead focusing on a biblical doctrine. My own spiritual journey led me to Orthodoxy, and the journey of studying religion and philosophy and eventually led to my discovery of the Eastern Church Fathers. There’s a doctrine in the scriptures, in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in Jewish tradition, outside of the scriptures of resurrection, namely, the doctrine of resurrection to judgment. And when I studied that doctrine, prior to ever encountering the Eastern Church Fathers, it was actually that doctrine and the anomalies about it, the strange threads that emerged in looking at it, which first awakened me to something that’s happening in the scriptures in this doctrine, something that at the time of studying it, I saw as nothing more than just contradictions in the Bible, in Jewish tradition, until the church fathers gave me tools to resolve those contradictions.
And so it’s really with this biblical doctrine that I want to focus as a way in. Because what we’ll see is certain threads in the New Testament, in statements by Paul, for example, that make very little sense unless you read them with the Eastern Church Fathers. And then when you bring the Eastern Church Fathers into the conversation, what you see is that those threads begin to make sense. In fact, I would suggest that the biblical teachings about resurrection and specifically, the teachings of the New Testament do not make sense unless you read them the way the Eastern Church fathers do. And so this is where I want to start. I want to start there and specifically with this question: What is the faith of Abraham? St. Paul tells us that we’re of the faith of Abraham. So what is that faith?
Western vs. Eastern Views of the Gospel
Before jumping into answering that question and this doctrine of resurrection, I want to start by quickly laying out what I see as a simple and quick, easy way to differentiate the western view from the eastern view of the gospel more generally.
In the West, there is a tendency, and this emerges very early on in the Latin West, to see God as a lawgiver. First and foremost, he is a judge. He is someone who gives laws, who commands and then judges you for how you behave. And thus, when talking about the gospel, usually the answer to what is the Gospel begins with a problem and a solution. And the problem, of course, is that we’re law breakers. God has given commandments. He’s told us to do certain things. He’s set a very high bar, and we have not met that bar. And so when we stand before this judge, we face a problem of condemnation. And so the gospel really focuses on our predicament before a future judge, future judgment, post mortem, post death. Accountability to our judge is really the problem that the gospel is meant to remedy. And so then this is where Christ, where Jesus and the Incarnation enters in as a judicial solution.
I will say that Protestants and Catholics obviously disagree about how Jesus remedies that solution. In a Protestant context, Jesus ends up taking our punishment on himself. He also produces merits before God, and then somehow there is a transaction that occurs where our demerits, the things that we would be judged and condemned for before God, end up being transferred to Christ. And since he’s been punished for those, we’re off the hook. And then also because he is righteous, good, upright, pleasing to God, his merits end up being credited to us. And so this is where Catholics refer to this in polemical terms as a “legal fiction.” This is what the gospel is, that God is willing to enact a legal fiction based on your faith, whereas the Catholics, on the other hand, believe that there’s something a little more substantive happening in terms of, yes, there is forgiveness of sins that comes through Christ, but Christ in the work that he’s done, affords an opportunity for grace, which, in the Catholic context, means assistance in doing good deeds. And so even though salvation is by grace, what that grace does, that assistance from God does, is it allows us to do meritorious deeds before God, so that we are judged righteous, not as a legal fiction—a judge saying we are good and upright and righteous when we are not as in Protestantism—but instead that we actually are righteous because Christ has helped make us righteous.
Now, as I said, this is something that is pervasive in the Latin West. You begin to see early on contrast between the way Alexandrian Christians versus Latin Western Christians talk about certain doctrines. For example, when talking about whether there’s any sort of post mortem correction to the soul, where you find mention of that in Alexandrian Christians, you find it referred to as a fatherly chastising or healing or correction of the soul. It has a sort of therapeutic tone to it, whereas when you see somebody like Tertullian talking about this, he talks about the devil and prison and a pound of flesh and those sorts of things, where it’s very sort of punitive and judicial in nature. So that change in culture, that difference in culture, you see in the ways of thinking about this very early on.
I’d mentioned that Augustine and Augustine of Hippo’s ways of thinking about things specifically solidified some of these doctrines. And certainly this is true within the Latin west. So Augustine is the one who really introduces in a much more formal way than we had ever seen before in the Latin West, a doctrine of merits and demerits.
In Augustine’s early thinking, Augustine is wrestling with this question of, what does it mean for a person to be righteous or just. And the reason he’s asking the question of “just” is because in the Latin Vulgate, the term for righteousness is translated into justice, or justitia. And justitia in Latin means to render to each its due. So if you’re due punishment, I give you punishment. If you’re due praise, I give you praise; reward, I give you reward. So that’s what justice refers to.
And so Augustine when asking this question, “Well, what does it mean to be just?” His answer is, it means you render to each its due. Now, how this plays out in Augustine’s thinking is he recognizes that when we face choices, oftentimes our choices mean that we have two competing desires, and we have to pick one over the other. So I’ll give an example. Let’s say I’m sitting in this chair and I’m relaxing, and I’m enjoying relaxation right now, but I think I should really go exercise. I should go for a run right now. Okay, those two things are incompatible. I have to either elevate the good of relaxation over exercise and pick that—pick to sit here and enjoy relaxation and not exercise—or I have to abandon relaxation in order to exercise.
And so this is what Augustine calls the “order of loves.” The reason he calls it order of loves is because he presumes that we have an internal desire or affection or love for things that are good. And so relaxation appeals to me. It is a good. I have a certain love for it. Exercise and physical health, also being a good, I have a certain affection or love for that. But every choice then reflects a hierarchy of competing goods. And so what Augustine presumes here is he presumes that there actually are, in reality, certain goods that are superior to others.
When I make a choice to either relax or exercise that choice may be right or it may be wrong. Let’s say that in reality, exercise is the greater good, but I choose relaxation. Then my order of loves is out of step with reality. I have elevated one good above another, but in reality, the order of goods is different—that would be unjust, because my order of loves is out of step with the order of reality.
So Augustine comes to the conclusion that a person’s inner loves and how they are ordered, the hierarchy of their inner loves is what determines whether they are just or unjust. And of course, Augustine would say that the greatest good of all is the love of God. And so this is the one that must be at the top. So the just man, if we look into his chest and we see his order of loves, we’ll see that God is at the top. And then we’ll see all of reality ordered accordingly, angels, humans, cats, dogs, and then all the other things that appeal to us, food and love and all these sorts of things, and they will reflect reality. They will mirror and parallel reality entirely.
Now, Augustine, early on in his theology, he asked the question, what do I do if I look inside and I determine that I am unjust, my orders of loves are unjust? Let’s say I love food more than exercise, and I should love exercise more than food. Well, Augustine says in book one of On Free Choice, well, you will to fix it, just make a choice and reorder those loves. So that’s the early Augustine.
But what happens is a controversy emerges in Augustine’s world, and this is, incidentally, how a lot of Augustine’s theology is shaped, and a lot of Christian theology generally is shaped—a controversy emerges, a heretic emerges, a question is posed, and suddenly there’s a realization that something needs to be made clear. Now I would say, in Augustine’s case, his theology often changes, and this would be one such example of it changing in the face of controversy.
So Pelagius, if you’ve ever heard of Pelagianism, is someone who emerged in opposition to Augustine. Now, as an aside, Pelagius actually is not the real problem early on, it’s actually Celestius, who is a follower of Pelagius, and Celestius wanted to be elevated. He wanted to be ordained. And so this is what prompts a letter that points out a series of his teachings that are really problematic. And incidentally, Celestius’ teachings were problematic—he taught things that were clearly contrary to Christianity. But this is what begins the Pelagian controversy.
And in this controversy, what emerges is really the question of, what does it mean that we are saved by grace? Because if justice is something we can just will, then if I find that I am just and I stand before God and I am judged to be just, then in what sense is my justice a grace from God? And that’s the new question that emerges in the face of the Pelagian controversy that becomes central to how Augustine begins to think.
And how Augustine begins to answer this question, in this context of these order of affections and order of loves and merits and demerits, is this: he concludes that maybe the order of loves that we have is not something that we can just fix. The way this develops for Augustine is, he suggests that, in a fallen state, after Adam and Eve have corrupted our species, we have disordered love. So inevitably, even though maybe some of our loves are in a proper arrangement, we have disordered loves. They are out of whack. They don’t match up with reality, and certainly we don’t have a natural love for God above all other things. And so the result is that our deeds are inherently unjust in character, and for that reason, they produce demerits before God, things that at some point we will be held accountable for.
Incidentally, this is what gives rise to Augustine’s notion of the necessity of sin. Augustine presumes that everything we do is sinful. Now he doesn’t mean—and this would be a great misunderstanding—he doesn’t mean that you necessarily steal rather than not steal, or you necessarily commit adultery rather than not commit adultery, or you necessarily murder rather than not murder. What he means is, even when we obey the law, we choose to not murder rather than murder, we choose to not commit adultery rather than commit adultery, we choose to not steal rather than steal—the act itself comes from disordered loves, and therefore it still is sin. It still has demerits before God. So even when we obey the law, we are sinning. According to Augustine, this is the necessity of sin.
And the question becomes, how do you fix that? And this is where Augustine introduces a doctrine later called by the Council of Trent “prevenient Grace,” where what the Holy Spirit does is the Holy Spirit comes in and fixes that order of loves, and fixing that order of loves, now you can obey the law in a way that is meritorious, that’s from a proper order of loves. And so this is how Augustine tries to balance it. If I obey the law out of my own strength without any grace, then it will be demeritorious and not praiseworthy. I will be condemned for it. It will be sin. But if the Holy Spirit comes in and fixes the order of loves and now I obey the law, it will produce merits, and it will be righteous and just. And this is how the work of Christ ends up allowing us, enabling us, by grace, to do meritorious deeds.
Now he also, very critically and importantly to Western theology, introduced a doctrine where he didn’t want to leave any room for the Pelagians. So the question was, well, what about Adam and Eve? Is this just that we need grace because of the fall, but we didn’t need grace when we were in the garden? And Augustine’s answer is no, Adam too, needed grace. And his notion here is that what Adam had is something called original righteousness. And original righteousness means that grace that keeps the order of loves in check was there and given to Adam from the start, and that that’s why it would have been easy for Adam to obey and to produce merits. But had Adam not fallen and produced merits and been just, it still would have been of grace.
Now the reason this is critical, and we’ll see this in later talks when we start to talk about anthropology and the difference between East and West, is because this really establishes what’s called a nature-grace divide, where nature can’t be pleasing to God, and it always needs grace, even before the fall.
But nonetheless, this is where you get this concept of merits and demerits. And of course, Protestantism doesn’t abandon that notion of merits and demerits. It just disputes the idea that after the fall we produce meritorious deeds. It suggests that Christ produced merits, and Christ gives those merits to us, and he took on our demerits and he was punished.
So all of this provides the Western framework where the Western framework of the gospel is really about God as a law giver. God is a future judge. Us as law breakers, us as people who face a future judgment, and that’s the predicament, us as people who innately are incapable of being just, God who somehow makes us just, either by crediting that to us or by enabling us to do meritorious deeds. And about the gospel, about our future predicament, which is about merits and demerits before a future judge. That’s really what the gospel is, what Christianity is, according to the Latin West.
Now, for the Eastern Church Fathers, things are very different. In the Eastern Church Fathers, you don’t see a concept of merits and demerits the way you see it in Augustine. Future judgment is far less about weighing good and bad deeds, or something like that. Future judgment has more to do with testing the sort of quality of the soul.
Here’s the shorthand of what we’re going to see unfold for the Eastern fathers: when they look at God, God is first and foremost, the giver of being, He who calls being into existence and gives life. God is primarily providential, and Providence in the eastern fathers means that he wills the good of the creature. And the good here refers to proper formation. So the good of an eye is to see. Blindness is an evil to the eye.
So God is primarily the source of life and the one who nurtures beings toward the good, toward proper formation. But free creatures must participate in their own formation. That’s what free will means, or free choice means in the Greek context. I mean self-determination, or self-authority is actually what the word is derived from. So this sort of self-determination. And so even though God can call free beings into existence, we must participate in his providential coaxing toward good. And for that reason, what happens is that free creatures, like angels and like humans, can choose to turn away from the good and bring destruction upon ourselves.
And in this sense, destruction and death and corruption is not a judicial punishment. It’s actually something that is inevitable. It’s like a principle of physics. When you turn away from the source of life and goodness, you inevitably begin to erode and to die. And as we’ll see, whatever God imposes on us, the way the Eastern fathers understand God introducing death, or more accurately, dissolution, to the body of Adam is ultimately redemptive. God never ceases to be providential toward his creatures. Everything is aimed at restoring and continuing the providential care and bringing us back to life into our goodness.
And ultimately the incarnation is about the author of life himself entering our corrupted state in order to heal it and restore it. And Christianity is about inviting us into that hospital in order to experience that therapeutic healing and restoration in order to complete the creation of man and restore us to our proper good that was intended from the first. That’s really the picture of Christianity and of the Gospel according to the eastern fathers.
The Doctrine of Resurrection
Now we’re going to flesh that out and explain that over the course of several sessions here. So let’s begin with this question of resurrection, the doctrine of resurrection. And as I said, the question, what is the faith of Abraham?
Now, when I used to teach, I’ve taught in several different schools, and some have been Christian and some have not been but when I would teach in a Christian context, and specifically a Protestant or an evangelical context, and I would get to this topic, one of the questions I would always ask my students is, what does resurrection do? The resurrection of Christ. Christ is raised from the dead. We celebrate it on Easter or Pascha, if you’re going to use what the Orthodox Christians call it. He’s raised on Pascha. What does that do?
Well, my students would usually give me one of three answers. It tells us that God accepted his sacrifice on the cross—that was one answer. It proves that Jesus is who he said he is—that was another answer. It shows us what we’ll one day experience.
Now, what I would always point out to them is that all of these answers are about telling, proving or showing, and my question is, what does it do? What does it do for you? And they seem to be at a loss in order to answer that question.
So I had set up a new problem and say, let me ask you this, see your understanding of the gospel again. Keep in mind, this is a Protestant and evangelical context. Your understanding of the Gospel is that you have a judicial predicament. You have certain sins that a judge will one day condemn. Jesus is punished for those sins, and that gets you off the hook. So let me ask you this: if the punishment that gets you off the hook is accomplished at the cross, then would you be saved if God just left Christ’s body in the grave?
And as my students thought about that, it seemed to make sense, right? The gospel has to do with my sins. What gets me off the hook is that Christ was punished for those sins. That was done at Golgotha, so I guess I’d still be saved even if he was left in the grave. So I do a survey. How many people raise your hands? How many folks think you would still be saved if he left them in the grave? And usually, half the students were persuaded. They’d raise their hands.
Now I would point out to them that there’s at least one theologian I know of, Paul Tillich, who would agree with them and doesn’t think that the historical resurrection really has any bearing on that. But there’s another theologian, a Jewish theologian, who strongly disagrees. His name is St. Paul, who tells us that if Christ has not been raised, we’re still in our sins. You are not saved, and we, of all people, are to be most pitied.
But the question is still there, why? What does it do for you? What does Christ’s resurrection do for you? And I think this is the real question. This is the real question that when we answer this, we begin to step into the waters of the Eastern Church Fathers. We begin to see the gospel in a way that moves us much closer to understanding where the Eastern Church Fathers are coming from.
So as we begin to look at this question, I want to start by reading a passage from St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, chapter four, verses 16 to 22, and I probably modify a few words in here as we go, in keeping with the original Greek:
“Therefore, it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, I have made you a father of many nations in the presence of him whom he believed God, who crafts life for the dead and who calls non-being as being, who contrary to hope, in hope, believed so that he became the father of many nations, according to what was spoken, so shall your descendants be and not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body already dead since he was about 100 years old and the deadness of Sarah’s womb. He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God and being fully convinced that what He had promised, he was able to perform. And therefore it was accounted to him for righteousness.”
Now in this passage, one of the things that we see come up again and again and again is that Abraham believed God in the face of death. He considered the deadness of his own body. He was as good as dead. Paul tells us he considered the deadness of Sarah’s womb, and his faith was in God, who crafts life for the dead, or who is the life crafter.
So there’s a clear connection here between what Paul is saying about God. He is the life crafter. He calls the non-being as being, which, incidentally, these are technical terms that are often lost in translation. But this has to do with God calling things into existence. He calls the non-being as being. This has to do with creation and bringing things into existence and bringing them to life that previously did not exist, and his trust is in that God, the giver of life, the source of life, and his trust is in him in the face of death. That’s really the contrast.
And also, what we also see here is that there is some rabbinic background regarding how the rabbis had interpreted Abraham’s faith about Isaac, because one of the troubling questions we often face, which might be a little more troubling to us than it was for many ancient peoples, was the question of, why on earth would you ever sacrifice your son? That seems, quite frankly, evil. And so why are you listening to any spirit who’s telling you to do that sort of thing in the first place?
But how the rabbis had understood Abraham’s faith, and we see this actually alluded to in the book of Hebrews, in Hebrews 11:17, is that they had presumed that Abraham believed that God would reanimate Isaac, that he would raise him from the dead. Because the real question that Abraham faced was not so much, why would God ask me to do this? The real question was, how is it that God is going to bring about a nation through Isaac when he’s dead? That’s the real question, because he has a promise from God, and this command seems to overtly contradict that promise.
And so the way the rabbis had interpreted that is that Abraham must have believed that he was going to offer a sacrifice, and then God would reanimate his son, that he would raise him from the dead and then proceed to bring about this nation.
So all of this is connected. What you begin to see is that Abraham’s faith is a faith in resurrection. Abraham’s faith is that God who brings about things that live, that calls the non-being into being, who is the crafter of life will raise his son from the dead. That’s what Abraham’s faith is, and that’s what Paul is identifying as the faith of Abraham.
So what does that mean? What does it mean to have faith in God and in resurrection, in the promise of resurrection, in the hope of resurrection from God, the life crafter?
Three Key Questions About Resurrection
Now I mentioned that there are certain threads about resurrection in the New Testament that begin to raise important questions and force us to think beyond just a simple reanimation idea, something that really goes beyond just the idea that what resurrection is, is you were dead and now you come back to life.
There’s three questions that I think we should ask in order to guide this exploration:
According to the Scriptures, who is resurrected?
What is resurrection?
Having answered the second question, how is that accomplished?
So these three questions will guide us, and as we’ll see, I think it will illuminate for us the doctrine of resurrection in the New Testament, and begin to press us toward some ideas that we really see as central to the Gospel according to the Eastern Church Fathers.
Who Is Resurrected?
So let’s begin with the first: who is resurrected?
In terms of resurrection, the doctrine of resurrection, we find anticipations of this doctrine prior to the New Testament. We see it in the Old Testament. In the book of Daniel, for example, there is a prophecy about God calling people back from the dust, calling people from the dead in order to give account. The Book of Isaiah also talks about this future Day of Judgment, where the Archangel Michael is involved in calling the dead back to life, and we see them being brought forth for judgment.
The Book of Wisdom also, while not canonical outside of Orthodox circles, was certainly canonical according to the eastern fathers, also anticipates this resurrection. And in Second Maccabees 2, we see this hope of resurrection amongst the faithful Jews. In Second Maccabees 7:9 what we see is a mother and her son being martyred for their Jewish faith. And there’s a clear anticipation of a future resurrection for the righteous.
We also see this, even in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The belief is echoed there. And also Josephus, the Jewish historian, in his dissertation on Hades, when he talks about the dead being ushered into the realm of the dead, he anticipates a future day of judgment.
And the common traits across all of these—what we see in the biblical passages, what we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls, what we see in Josephus—is that there’s really four components of this doctrine prior to the New Testament:
The dead will be reanimated, that somehow souls and bodies will be reunited, or at the very least, those who are dead will come back to life.
Those who are brought back will be judged in the flesh. And this is the important part of reanimation. You can only be judged in the flesh if you get your flesh back after death, so they will be judged in the flesh for the deeds that they did in the flesh.
Those who are righteous will be rewarded for their righteousness, and those who are wicked will be punished for their wickedness.
The righteous will shine like the sun, or they’ll shine like the stars of heaven. This is something that we see anticipated in certain Old Testament passages. We see it in Second Maccabees and that hope of resurrection.
So what is that all about? What is this hope that somehow the righteous will not only be rewarded, but they will shine? They will radiate some kind of light.
In the New Testament, we find the doctrine really develops and what all of this means becomes much clearer. So the first thing I just want to say is that in the New Testament, all these threads are echoed. It’s echoed in the New Testament that the dead will be raised, that they will be judged, that the righteous are rewarded, the wicked are punished, and even the shining aspect that I’d mentioned takes on new meaning and life in the light of the New Testament.
Just an example from the Gospel of John. This is from John 5:28-29: “The hour is coming when all who are in the graves will hear His voice, referring to the Son of Man, Christ, and will come out and those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation.”
So right there we see this echoing of these early themes. The dead being called out. And here they are being called out by the Son of God. And the righteous and the wicked will experience two different things. One is the resurrection of life, and one is the resurrection of condemnation. And this is based on having done good or having done evil. So we see that echo in the New Testament.
Now we could just stop there. And a lot of people do. They presume that what resurrection is, if you ask them, “What is resurrection?” they’d say, “Well, it’s you’re reanimated. Your soul is put back into your body, and then you’re brought forth for judgment.” That’s pretty much all they think about the doctrine of resurrection.
But this is really a superficial reading, and the reason this is a superficial reading is because if we press it with certain questions, we begin to see that there are certain inconsistencies or problems that begin to emerge.
So I want to note three statements from Paul that if we look at them carefully and we press them, we press this basic understanding of resurrection with these statements from Paul, we realize there are certain problems that begin to emerge, and as we press them with these statements, what we’ll begin to see is that there’s good reason to think that not everyone is resurrected.
Here’s the first statement. This is from Romans 6:9 Paul says: “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him.”
If resurrection is just reanimation, you died and now you’re brought back to life, is it true that you’ll never die again? Is Lazarus still with us in the flesh? There have been plenty of people prior to Christ who were raised. Lazarus is one such person. We also have the widow’s son. We have people that Elijah brought back to life. Are they still with us? And if the answer is no, if Lazarus, having been raised, died again, then what Paul seems to say here is evidently false.
Paul is saying that, having been raised, you can’t die, but if Lazarus died, then Paul’s wrong. So is Paul saying something that’s false, something that’s contradictory, something that’s incoherent? How are we to make sense of what Paul’s saying there?
Let me read to you, just in case you’re wondering, “Well, maybe Lazarus is lurking around someplace.” According to tradition, that’s not true. This is Methodius writing in the third century. He says, “The son of the widow of Sarepta and the son of the Shunamite and Lazarus, we must say, they rose to die again.” So according to tradition, no, they’re not lingering about. And so they evidently were raised only to die again. And Methodius is not the only one who states this.
So the question is, if you’re going to affirm that Lazarus rose to die again, then must you say that Paul is incorrect, that he’s saying something false in the book of Romans? It seems that neither is desirable. We don’t want to say that Lazarus is still about, but we also don’t want to say that Paul is incorrect.
So what is going on here? It seems, and we’ll see this play out, that what’s critical to understand is that there’s something categorically different about what Christ experiences in resurrection. It seems that in order to interpret Paul in a way that makes sense, we must say that what Christ experienced, Christ’s resurrection is categorically different than what Lazarus experienced. But what is that difference?
Here’s a second statement from Saint Paul. This one is from First Corinthians 15. So this is First Corinthians 15 verses 20 to 23 Paul says, “But now Christ is risen from the dead and has become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since by man came death, by man also came the resurrection for the dead. For as in Adam, all died, even so in Christ, all shall be made alive.”
Here, Paul identifies Christ as the first fruits of resurrection. Another question emerges: if first fruits means that he really is the first to be raised, what are we to make of Lazarus? What are we to make of the widow’s son? In what sense is Paul right in saying that Christ is the first fruits of the resurrection, if others have been raised likewise?
And again, what seems to emerge here is the only way to make sense of Paul, and what he’s saying is to suggest that something categorically different happened in Christ, that what Lazarus experienced is actually not resurrection. But again, we’re faced with this question, then, what is it? What is it that Christ experienced that’s different than what Lazarus experienced? I thought Lazarus was resurrected, wasn’t he? Perhaps he wasn’t.
This is not the only place where Paul says this. He echoes this sentiment in Colossians 1:17-18, where Christ is the first born from the dead. Again, in what sense is he first born from the dead if others have been resurrected? And again, it seems to be that what we must suggest is that no one, in order to make sense of what Paul is saying, no one prior to Christ’s resurrection experienced resurrection. They experienced something different.
Third statement from Paul. This one’s from his epistle to the Philippians. This is Philippians 3:10-11: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of His suffering by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
Now again, if we look at the Old Testament statements, and even many of the New Testament statements that state quite clearly, everyone righteous and wicked, everyone who’s ever walked the face of the earth will be reanimated and brought forth, will be raised and brought forth for judgment—what point is there in saying that I hope that I may attain to the resurrection? Isn’t it guaranteed? There’s no hiding from the resurrection. I might not want to stand judgment, but there’s no getting out of it. Everybody’s going to experience it.
So in what sense, why hope for something, speak in a conditional that you may experience that something, if it’s inevitable? Shouldn’t Paul say something more like, “Well, I hope to be judged righteous at the resurrection,” because obviously we’re all going to be raised? The only way again that this makes sense is if resurrection refers to something that only the righteous experience.
Once again, it seems that there must be a difference between what Lazarus experienced and Christ’s experience, and here we have to expand that and say Paul is hoping to attain something that is unique to the righteous, that perhaps the wicked don’t actually experience resurrection. They may be raised, but it’s not resurrection.
So this begins to press us in this question. We have two options here. The one option is that we either say that Paul is stating all sorts of things that make no sense whatsoever, and it’s all false. Now I know we don’t want to do that, so the alternative is to say that there is a difference between being raised and being resurrected.
Being resurrected is something that Christ was the first to experience. Lazarus didn’t, nor did anybody else who was raised, and resurrection is something that only the righteous experience. The wicked are raised, but they’re not resurrected. But in order to make that sort of statement, we have to draw a distinction. And what sort of distinction can we draw? Can we draw one? Is there biblical justification for drawing one?
Now, obviously, I think the statements of Paul are biblical justification enough to start to draw a distinction. But does Scripture give us any insight into what that difference is, the difference between reanimation, raising and resurrection?
Well, we can already by looking at the Gospel of John and looking back at this statement from Christ, we can already see that the New Testament itself draws a distinction between two types of resurrection or two types of raising. So in the statement I read from Christ, “the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear His voice and will come out those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation.”
Notice that Paul in his letter to the Philippians, when he talks about hoping to attain the resurrection from the dead, it is not just resurrection, it’s resurrection from the dead, just as here, Christ distinguishes one type of resurrection from another, resurrection of life from resurrection of condemnation. There are two different things happening here that Christ is referring to, and so perhaps what we have happening in Paul is that Paul is talking about hoping to attain the resurrection from the dead, is talking about a very specific experience that only the righteous experience.
We also see the same sort of thing, not only in Paul and his differentiation, but also in the book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation itself distinguishes the first resurrection, which it says those who experience that are immune to death from later resurrections. So scripture, again, consistently distinguishes two types of experience, one type of resurrection that’s unique to Christ and then to the righteous, from reanimation by people like Lazarus and resurrection of the kind that the wicked experience of future judgments. So these are two different things.
And as we can see in the book of Revelation, that second resurrection comes with an experience of a second death, which is what the book of Revelation refers to in Revelation 21:8. And incidentally, it’s noteworthy that the second resurrection in Revelation actually omits the word anastasis, the word for resurrection.
Also, it’s interesting to note that in early Christian iconography, you’ll notice that in icons, the Christians often wrote on the icons what they are. This one is the crucifixion. This one is the ascension. This one’s the resurrection. On the icon of the raising of Lazarus, it is not the anastasis of Lazarus. It’s not the resurrection of Lazarus. It’s the egersis, the raising of Lazarus. They do not refer to it as the resurrection of Lazarus, because there’s an understanding in the Christian east that Lazarus did not experience the resurrection from the dead, or the resurrection of life. He was raised, brought back to life only to die again. And that is something that is not true of resurrection, in the proper sense, of what Christ experienced.
What Is Resurrection?
So this leaves us with this question, what is resurrection? So that’s the second question I had asked. I said that we would look at three questions. And the first question is, who is resurrected? And apparently the answer is resurrection in the proper sense, the sense in which Christ experienced the resurrection, the answer is that Christ is the first to be resurrected. The people prior to Christ, such as Lazarus and others, were not resurrected, and in the future, the righteous will also experience the resurrection in the sense of Christ, but the wicked will not. They will be raised, but they will not experience resurrection. So who experiences it? Not everyone, the righteous experience it.
So what is it? This brings us to our second question. What is resurrection? That was the second question I mentioned. But what we begin to see is that there are certain unique traits to it. So if we follow these patterns throughout Scripture, what we begin to see is, one that I’ve already mentioned, it is something that is unique to the righteous. We have no instance in the scriptures, where the wicked are said to be resurrected in the sense of what Christ experienced. They experienced a resurrection of condemnation, a resurrection of judgment, or something like that. But that’s a categorically different thing. So when we’re talking about resurrection in the sense of what Christ experienced and the righteous experience, it’s unique to the righteous. No wicked person can experience it.
A second trait that emerges with it is immunity to death. So this was the first statement we saw from Paul in Romans 6:9 where he talked about Christ having been raised, can’t die. It’s not that he says having been raised, he won’t die. Says having been raised, he can’t die. He is immune to death. And the same thing is said about the righteous in Revelation 2:6 so in the book of Revelation, when it talks about that first resurrection, and blessed are those who experience that death has no authority over them. It has no dominion over them anymore.
So immunity to death, not just that you happen to live forever, but immunity to death, is a second key characteristic of resurrection proper, and this is categorically unlike raising where you can die again. Incidentally, we raise people all the time. We talk about near death experiences, where someone dies in a hospital, and near death experience actually is inaccurate. They are dead, and we’ve developed enough technology that we’re able to bring them back if they haven’t been dead for too long, and voila, they come back only to die again. That is not resurrection. They have not been resurrected because they are not immune to death.
Now Paul fleshes this out even further in First Corinthians 15. This is really the place where we get the most thorough statements from Paul in terms of this aspect of resurrection, this immunity to death. I’ll be reading verses 35 to 51 here:
“But someone will say, how are the dead raised? And with what body do they come? Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be but mere grain, perhaps wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as he pleases and to each seed its own body, all flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another fish and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies, but the glory of the celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars. For one star differs from another star in glory.
So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption. It is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being, and the last Adam became a LIFE GIVING SPIRIT. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth and made of dust. The second man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust. And as is the heavenly man, so are also those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man. Now this, I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
Now in this passage, Paul gives us a number of insights into what resurrection is, but the consistent theme is that what resurrection is is a metamorphosis. It is a transformation. Paul’s entire point, when he talks about not all bodies being the same, and the glory of one differing from the glory of the other, is to differentiate types of body, types of element, the terrestrial, from the celestial, and to suggest that the body as it is raised in the resurrection, it is metamorphosized from one type to another type.
Now it is the same body. This is important to understand resurrection and reincarnation are different things. Reincarnation would be that the soul moves from this body to a different body. Resurrection is that this body is brought back to life and changed. It’s metamorphosized.
So what is that metamorphosis? He tells us precisely what it is: we put off death and we put on no death. We put off corruption and we put on incorruption. The terms here being thanatos and athanasia, putting off death for no death, immunity to death. And same with phthora, which is corruption.
So these terms have a broad meaning within the ancient world. Corruption, phthora, has to do with any sort of erosion or dying. So we might think of it this way. The very simple sense is think of a seed. When a seed is planted and it begins to grow, this is what’s called generation or becoming. This is actually what this movement from non-being into being. I’d read that passage where Paul talks about God being, the one who calls the non-being is being. In technical philosophy, in the ancient world, that movement of a seed, from seed form into fully gestated, fully formed thing is a movement from non-being to being. When a human moves from that small seedling form into fully formed that’s a movement from non-being into being. This is called generation, or becoming.
The opposite of that is what phthora is. So any point at which it moves forward, the plant grows, and then it begins to erode and deteriorate and die. That erosion, deterioration and death is phthora. The entire process is phthora. It’s not just the final end point. If along the way, it’s corrupted meaning, rather than being properly formed, it diverges and begins to get warped or twisted in some way that’s unnatural. That’s also phthora. So phthora refers to any divergence from proper formation.
So I’d mentioned the Eastern fathers understand God to be primarily providential. Meaning, what he does is he doesn’t just call things into being, but he ushers them and cares for them and make sure that they end up fully formed. But with free beings, we can diverge. We have some control in that process, and we can choose to go off in paths that are not proper formation. And that’s phthora. It’s not just the sense of our heart stops and the soul leaves the body. That’s certainly death, but death and phthora in the Eastern Church Fathers and in the New Testament means much more than that. It’s any distortion, corruption. It’s a deformity in my limb. It’s illness, it’s mental disorders, it’s sin, in the sense of moral transgression, and yes, it is also the gradual erosion and dissolution of my body. All of that is corruption, divergence from proper formation, divergence from our teleology, our telos, our proper end or formation.
And what Paul is telling us is that even though we currently are in bodies that are susceptible to that right, we are susceptible to divergence. We’re susceptible to sinning. We’re susceptible to sickness and to disease. We’re susceptible to aging, erosion, death. What happens in the resurrection is that is put off. The body is metamorphosized in such a way that that’s no longer possible. It’s not just that it doesn’t happen is that the body is immune to it. That is really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about resurrection.
How Is Resurrection Accomplished?
Now this brings us to a very strange question. How is this accomplished? A reason I say that’s strange is because the temptation might be to just say, well, it’s God. He works miracles. He can do whatever he wants. He’s God. But Paul actually answers this question for us, and his answer is critical to how the Eastern Church Fathers understand the gospel generally, and resurrection in particular. And incidentally, Paul’s not the only one who answers this.
So let’s look at one more anomaly in what Paul says, one more statement that seems to make no sense whatsoever. This is from First Timothy 6:6: “It is He, God alone who has immortality.”
Now, hold on, Paul, I thought you just said that we put off death for no death or immortality. I thought the gospel of Christ offers to us immortality. Is that not true? I mean, you just said that God alone is immortal. So how are we to reconcile this?
And this brings us to the last question concerning resurrection. How is this accomplished? If it is a categorical metamorphosis of our being, such that we are immune to death, immune to corruption, how is that accomplished? And the clue is actually in that statement by Paul, God alone is immortal.
It’s important to understand that, according to Paul, according to Greek philosophy, according to the Scriptures, all creatures are actually inherently corruptible. Just being a creature something that moves into being—you did not exist and you were called into being, just like that seed that moves into the form of a plant—that makes you changeable. And that’s actually quintessentially how, when you identify what is the central feature of a creature, according to the Eastern Church Fathers, that we change. That’s the one characteristics that’s consistent across all creatures: we change.
But the problem with being a changeable being means that we can change for the worse. Not all change is good, and we can move and change in ways that are bad, that are corrupt. And so if we are going to escape this one type of negative change, phthora, corruption, how is this accomplished?
And the answer is right there in Paul, God alone is immortal. There’s only one being, if that’s even the right term, that is immune to death and immune to corruption, and it is God. And so this brings us to a critical doctrine, which is the doctrine that we somehow can participate in God’s own immortality.
So let me read to you Second Peter 1:4: “His (that is God’s) divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, so that through them, you may escape corruption (that’s that term, again) that is in the world and may become partakers of the divine nature.”
Here, Peter tells us quite plainly, how do you escape corruption? You escape corruption by partaking of the divine nature. So Paul told us that what resurrection is is the putting off of corruption for incorruption, the putting off of death for no death. And Paul hinted how that happens, because he says God is the only one who’s immortal. And Peter says it explicitly, you escape corruption by partaking of the divine nature.
And that right there is the central notion of the gospel, according to the eastern fathers, that God alone is immortal, that God alone has life. Christ, incidentally, says this in John 5. He says quite clearly that the Father has life in himself, and he’s given it to me to have life in myself. This referring to His eternal generation, his begetting, the father giving him his own nature from eternity, which we’ll talk about when we get to the Ecumenical Councils. But then he says, “but you refuse to come to me to have life.”
Christ is very clear that when he offers them, you and me, eternal life, what he’s offering them is the life of the father that’s in him, and if you come to Him, He can give you that life. So scripture never talks about immortality or incorruption as a magic trick where God just says, “See, you’re corrupt, voila, you’re incorrupt,” or “you’re subject to death. Voila, now no death instead.”
The way scripture and then the fathers talk about it is that the only way for a creature to transcend the creature’s own changeability, corruptibility, susceptibility to death is to participate in the only nature that is immune to those things. That nature is God’s. That is the way in which you escape death. That is how you put off corruption for incorruption. That is how resurrection is accomplished.
So now let’s come full circle again. When we read Paul telling us that we are of the faith of Abraham, and that what Abraham’s faith is, is that he looked to God, who calls being out of non-being, who crafts life, and he looked at his own death and the deadness of Sarah’s womb, and he trusted God to raise his son from the dead, were he to sacrifice him—what is Paul talking about?
He’s talking about a faith in resurrection. He’s talking about a faith that we believe that having been subject to death and corruption, God is able to raise us from the dead, not as a magic trick, but because He offers us a means and an opportunity of participating in his own nature, partaking of his own nature. That’s what the offer of the gospel is: a union with Christ so that we can partake of the divine nature, so that we can escape death and corruption and ultimately attain to the resurrection of the dead. That’s the gospel.
Now, I had said I don’t think the New Testament makes sense unless you read it in that light, and it doesn’t make sense for the reasons that I pointed out. Many of the statements in the New Testament become incoherent or false unless you read it in that light. But that is how the Eastern fathers read it, and that is central to their understanding of the Gospel itself.
So as we continue on here and we talk about this, we’ll dive deeper into what they have to say, in particular about this doctrine, about participation in the divine nature, about something called Theosis, deification, being made by grace, what God is by nature, by partaking of the divine nature. But that is central to how they understand the incarnation, the gospel and Christianity generally, so we’ll talk about that more next time.
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