In this post, I will go through the second part of the chapter entitled, “God as Creator” in Kallistos Ware’s book, The Orthodox Way. The second part of the chapter largely focuses on the creation of man and the issue of what man is. Truth be told, I do not thing churches do a very good job teaching regarding the Christian view regarding human beings. It is often reduced to, “Human beings are sinners in need of salvation.” Although that is true, it simply leaves out way too much. Hopefully the rest of Ware’s chapter can help provide deeper insight.
Microcosm and Mediator
The first thing Ware emphasizes that since man is comprised of body, soul, and spirit, he occupies a unique position in God’s created order. Things in the physical universe are comprised of materiality, whereas angels are purely spiritual, without any materiality. It is only human beings who are comprise of both a material body and a spiritual intellect. In that respect, “Man stands at the heart of God’s creation. Participating as he does in both the [spiritual] and the material realms, he is an image or mirror of the whole creation, imago mundi, a ‘little universe’ or microcosm” (49).
Given that unique position, human beings play a unique role as mediators of God’s creation. To the point, human beings have the vocation to act as priests of God’s creation–“to reconcile and harmonize the [spiritual] and the material realms, to bring them to unity, to spiritualize the material,” and “to manifest the spiritual in and through the material” (50). In that sense, Ware says, it is the Christians who are the only true materialists.
Image and Likeness/Priest and King
The next thing Ware emphasizes is that which is said in Genesis 1:26-27, when God says, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” Most people wrongly think that image and likeness are little more than synonyms, but Ware points out that Orthodoxy has always seen them as two different things. Simply put, we are created in God’s image, in so much that created to be God’s representatives in the created order. Hence, “image” speaks to man’s potential for life in God. We are created for a purpose, but since human beings are created with inward freedom, it is up to each person to realize that purpose. As Ware states, “The image is that which man possesses from the beginning, and which enables him to set out in the first place upon the spiritual Way” (51). The likeness of God, on the other hand, “is that which [man] hopes to attain at his journey’s end” (51).
This is crucial to grasp if one is to understand the difference between the Orthodox view of the origin of man and the typical Evangelical view of the origin of man. Chances are, if you grew up within Evangelicalism, you were led to believe that God originally created “back then and there” a “perfect world” in which Adam and Eve were perfect. But then when they sinned, they screwed things up for not only God’s perfect creation, but for every human being ever since. Thus, salvation in Christ means that through Christ we can get back to that original perfection.
That is not at all what Orthodoxy teaches. Early Church Fathers like Origen and Irenaeus specifically taught that although man is created in God’s image, he won’t reach full perfection until the consummation of all things. Thus, man at his first creation was the equivalent of a little child who still needed to grow into that perfection and likeness of God. Thus, the story of Adam and Eve is a depiction of humanity in this first creation, not necessarily two original perfect people who screwed it up for everyone else. We are created in God’s image and are called to cooperate with God’s grace by the use of our free will, so that we will gradually become perfect in God and thus be according to His likeness. As Ware puts it, “It need not mean that man was endowed from the outset with a fully realized perfection, with the highest possible holiness and knowledge, but simply that he was given the opportunity to grow into full fellowship with God. The image-likeness distinction does not, of course, in itself imply the acceptance of any theory of evolution, but it is not incompatible with such a theory” (52).
Given all that—given that man is made in God’s image, that he is both microcosm and mediator of God’s creation, and that he is both priest and king of God’s creation—Ware points out that means that man can do two things than mere animals cannot do. Indeed, this gets to another key element regarding who human beings are. First, Ware says that human beings have the ability to bless and praise God for the world. In this respect, Ware argues that man is best defined, not as a logical animal (although we most certainly have the ability to use logic), but rather as a eucharistic animal, in that we have the ability to see the world as God’s gift, and thus a sacrament and a means of communion with Him. Secondly, Ware says human beings also have the ability to reshape and alter the world, and so to endue it with fresh meaning. Thus, in addition to being a logical and eucharistic animal, man is also a creative animal, whose “vocation is not to dominate and exploit nature, but to transfigure and hallow it” (54).
Put all that together, it provides quite a different understanding of the nature of man than the oversimplistic view that, sadly, most Christians who’ve grown up in Evangelicalism tend to have. Upon reflection, this gets to the heart of a major deficiency within Evangelical Christianity. It tends to reduce all of Christianity little more than this: (A) God created everything perfect, but Adam and Eve screwed it up for everyone, (B) I’m a sinner, I feel guilty for doing bad things and I’m afraid of going to hell, (C) Jesus came, was crucified, and rose again to prove he is God, and so (D) If I say I believe that happened and if I put my faith in him, I’ll go to heaven and avoid hell. Simply put, the problem with all that is that it is just a very childish and shallow understanding of both the actual Gospel and what Christianity has taught for the past 2,000 years. As C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity, God wants us to have a child-like heart, but a grown-up’s head, and sadly, much of Evangelical teaching is still at a third-grade level.
Evil, Suffering, and the Fall
Ware’s final issue in this chapter is that of evil, suffering, and the fall of man. After all, how can we reconcile our belief in a loving God who created everything and called it good with the reality of suffering and evil? To the point, there simply isn’t an easy and clear answer. All you have to do is read the Book of Job to realize that when it comes to the question of why God allows suffering, God simply doesn’t give us an answer. That being said, although suffering cannot be “justified,” Ware emphasizes that what lies at the heart of the Christian message is that suffering, if accepted and offered to God, can be used to transform and transfigure us from being simply image-bearers of God to being more like God. As Nicolas Berdyaev said, “The paradox of suffering and evil is resolved in the experience of compassion and love” (57).
This is precisely what the cross (and resurrection) of Christ is all about. It isn’t that suffering and evil are good, but that they, in a way we as human beings do not understand, are present in this first creation in which we are image-bearers of God. And if we co-operate with God’s grace, put our faith in Christ, and “pick up our cross” and follow him, God is able to use suffering, evil, and death itself to transform this first creation and to bring about a new creation. In other words, in God’s sovereignty, suffering, evil, and death become tools by which God transforms us from being image-bearing creatures to sons of God who are like Him.
Ware addresses the problem of suffering and evil this way: “Without freedom there would be no sin. But without freedom man would not be in God’s image; without freedom man would not be capable of entering into communion with God in a relationship of love” (59). All of this invites us to contemplate the nature of man, the reality of this creation, salvation in Christ, and the promise of the new creation. C.S. Lewis uses the analogy of tin soldiers being made into real soldiers. As God removes the tin and replaces it with real flesh, from the tin soldier’s point of view, it seems like God is killing it and destroying the only thing it has ever known. The tin soldier doesn’t realize that God is actually making him into something more than it was.
The point is this: Although we are created in God’s image, we are not yet what God intends for us to be. We are all “in process” and this first creation is God’s workshop in which, if we choose, we can be re-created into something greater than we are. But that transformation requires us to choose to relate to God within that communion of the passion of Christ, in which suffering and death are used to bury the old so that the new can come to life and we can then truly be like Christ. In that sense, physical death is not the end of life, but actually is the beginning of its renewal.
One final thing deserves to be mentioned—that of the concept of “the Fall” and “original sin.” In the Christian West, heavily influenced by Augustine, we have come to think of the Fall and Original Sin in terms of a specific event in history, in which a previously perfect Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit, and thus “fell” from that originally perfect state, not only contaminating the rest of humanity but also all of creation.
Ware says that is not the Orthodox view. Rather, he states, “The doctrine of original sin means rather that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men’s suspicions and hard to win their trust” (62). In other words, in this original, first creation—in this “tin soldier reality,” if you will—sin and evil are simply realities. And since, although created in God’s image, we are originally naïve and childish, and we inevitably use our free will to choose to sin. It is, if I can say it this way, part of our original human nature. Thus, even though we are not guilty of the sins of others, we are nevertheless always involved.
Conclusion
What all this means, at least how I am processing it all, is the following. I’m not sure we should understand creation itself, the creation of human beings, salvation in Christ, and the new creation solely in horizontal/linear and thus chronological terms. By that, I mean I don’t think we should see things as: (A) An original, perfect creation in the past, (B) A point in time in the past when two people sinned and plunged creation and humanity into corruption, (C) Christ’s death and resurrection in the past now make it possible for (D) us to go to heaven in the future, after we die.
Rather, I think we should realize that the very chronological concepts of past, present, and future are concepts that apply to this created order, and this created order is “step one,” the “workshop,” and thus a “lower creation.” Thus, the Christian Gospel of the incarnation is that of the uncreated God becoming incarnate within this lower created in the person of Jesus the Son, in order to breathe His Spiritual life into us image-bearers, so that we could become like the Son, who is the ultimate image of the invisible God, and thus ascend with the Son into the “higher creation.” It is already, and eternally present, like the paper on which our flat, one-dimensional, chronological timeline of history is written. Given our limitedness of this lower creation, we can only begin to understand it all in terms of chronological points in our linear sense of history. But the full majesty of it all goes beyond our limited sense. It isn’t just a matter of past, present future, but rather of the higher incarnating into the lower, so that the lower can be taken into the higher. It means that of the original, lower, one-dimensional nature we see as pinned on a flat horizontal line, being transformed into the higher, multi-dimensional reality of the super-natural creation in which God is all in all.
I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I do think it begins to get us to a better understanding of not only creation, but also of man himself in relation to God and salvation itself. The way from the lower to the higher, from this natural creation to the supernatural creation, is the way through suffering and death. A seed must die before it becomes a plant. Death must precede resurrection. Because of this, the Orthodox see the cross of Christ as both the way of suffering and the way of victory over death. As Ware states at the conclusion of his chapter:
“It has been truly said that there was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted outside Jerusalem; and though the cross of wood has been taken down, the cross in God’s heart still remains. It is the cross of pain and triumph—both together. And those who can believe this will find that joy is mingled with their cup of bitterness. They will share on a human level in the divine experience of victorious suffering” (64).
Not only do Protestants tend to limit redemption primarily to each individual’s salvation from sin, what the late Dallas Willard referred to as “the gospel of sin management,” but I was taught that our immaterial souls are both immortal, and that they are he *real* us–that our physical bodies are simply temporary receptacles four our souls, to be shed in heaven. Now I understand this is simply neo-Platonism, not Christianity. Also that it plainly violates I Timothy 6:16, which asserts that God alone is immortal by nature, as well as I Corinthians 8:11, 23, I Corinthians 15, etc., which teach the redemption of our physical bodies, coupled with the re-creation of the material world.
What Would Bishop Ware say regarding Paul’s teaching than sin and death entered the world through the sin of Adam? You touched on it above, but I still haven’t figured out exactly how to reconcile the view that the accounts of the fall were/are largely figurative with Paul saying that Adam’s disobedience brought sin/death into the world.
I’m really enjoying the series. I’m going to dig out my copy of Ware’s *The Orthodox Church* and read it again.
Pax.
For what it’s worth, I suggest Paul’s connection of Adam’s sin and death indicates they are both inherent in the creation in which we live, without one being the cause of the other. Romans 5:21-22 puts it, “For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” (NSRV) We need not read ‘through’ as if it means ‘because of.’
Well put. Paul is referring to Genesis 1-3, but all the while, the “Adam” of Genesis 1-3 IS HUMANITY in this first creation. Ultimately, there is THE “old man” (i.e. Adam, humanity in this natural created order) and THE “new man” (i.e. Christ and the resurrected humanity in Him).
Good work!
(A small typo: one instance of ‘breath’ should be ‘breathe’.)
(Lloyd is another name for Rod.)
Thanks. That interpretation makes perfect sense. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it that way before!
Pax.
Lee.