A Theology of Everything

Part 12, We Have Been Saved from the Foundation of the World

In this post, and the next/final post, I want to put forth an eschatological vision, which is also tied to soteriology and theodicy. Two critical ideas, again taken from the church fathers, are theosis and apokatastasis.

God is both our origin and our destiny. We come from God and we return to God. In the end, we become God. We are united with God. We are divinized. As Athanasius said, "The Son of God became man so that man might become God." Our "becoming God" is what the church fathers call theosis. 

Maximus the Confessor described theosis as a developmental process. First, our being must be connected to the source of our well-being. This is our consent to being born again in the Spirit. In turning toward Christ and being filled with the Spirit our being is connected to the source of our well-being. Establishing this connection--being to well-being--is the first task of life. Upon this connection the process of theosis commences where, continues Maximus, our being and well-being culminate in eternal well-being, finding our final rest in God. 

What, then, is the fate of those souls who, upon their death, have not yet been born again, who have not yet connected their being to the source of their well-being?

Instead of reinventing the wheel, let me simply reshare and endorse Sergius Bulgakov's vision of apokatastasis, which I described in a series last fall. Apokatastasis is the vision espoused by some church fathers, such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, to describe the ultimate restoration of all things, God coming to be "all in all." 

As the creature drifts toward non-being it suffers decay and, eventually, death. For the baptized and spirit-filled, those whose being has been pneumatically connected to the source of their well-being, this transition is experienced as transformation and transfiguration, as a birth, movement from a death-saturated contingent existence into incorruptible life. 

For those not pneumatically connected to the source of their well-being, death transitions the soul into a state of judgment and torment. Death reveals to the creature its separation from God, which can only be experienced as painful suffering. We can recall here the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Death reveals to the rich man his separation from God. The man awakens to find himself, like the prodigal, in a far country. Death is an apocalypse, an ontological exposure. In death, non-being fully eclipses material being casting the lost soul into utter darkness. This darkness also burns. In the fire and darkness the soul faces and experiences judgment, the consequences of separation from God.

The pain the soul experiences is purgative, not punitive. Restorative, not retributive. The fire purifies the soul. Here is how Bulgakov describes the soul's condition and experience after death:

Human being [will be] clothed in Christ, who is the Truth and the Life, by the life-giving Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Truth. This means that every human being is inwardly confronted with the truth about himself. Every human being sees himself in truth, by a vision that is not abstract but living, like the consuming flame of a fire from whose light one cannot hide, for all will become visible...

No falsehood, no self-deception, no error will have a place in the kingdom of truth, and this "exposure" by the Spirit of truth is already the judgment. By virtue of the truth this judgment becomes for everyone a self-judgment, a shedding of the veils of falsehood and self-deception that cover emptiness...This illuminating and transfiguring power is expressed in the image of fire, not natural of course but "spiritual," which will penetrate the "spiritual" body and the spirit itself. The fire of the future age consumes, but it also transfigures, illuminates, gladdens...

[E]very human being will be placed before his own eternal image in Christ, that is, before Christ. And in the light of this image, he will see his own reality, and this comparison will be the judgment. It is this that is the Last Judgment of Christ upon every human being.

Bulgakov continues by describing how this confrontation with Christ results in repentance:

It is impossible to appear before Christ and to see Him without loving Him. In the resurrection there is no longer any place for anti-Christianity, for enmity toward Christ, for satanic hatred of Him, just as there is no place for fear of Him as the Judge terrible in His omnipotence and the fury of His wrath. The Lord will come as He was on earth: meek and humble in heart, though now in glory. But his meekness and humility will burn hearts by their love and their judgment. God-Love judges with love the sins against love.

In light of this judgment, it is the fate of every human person to come to Christ. All will consent to being born again. Apokatastasis is the moral logic of creation. If God created the world then God will rescue the world.  

A Maximus the Confessor says, "The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things." God wills that the mystery of the Incarnation be actualized always and in all things. Creation becomes Incarnation and Incarnation becomes Creation as created being is joined, through Christ, to God's Being. The hypostatic union we witness in Jesus is the destiny of creation, the mystery of the Incarnation realized in my own being. The Logos that is the ground of our created being is tethered to the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, through whom the Spirit draws us into the Triune life of God. We are drawn to the Father through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.

From a different angle, as we've described in this series, the world hasn't yet been fully created. The world is, rather, being born. Apokatastasis, in this view, is the true creation of the world. Fully and finally. Creation is happening right now and sits out before us. As Bulgakov writes, "This is God's inalienable gift to creation, the completion of His work on the world." The beginning of the world and its final redemption are a single creative act. Following Paul in Romans, what we experience in this life are labor pains. This world is a womb and we are being born.

These birth pains continue until the whole of creation is birthed. The vision of the afterlife here, these eschatological labor pains, is one of gradual purgation and developmental transfiguration as we move from glory to glory toward theosis and our divinization. Bulgakov again describing this:

Creaturely eternity is becoming, growth, ascent from glory to glory...Infinite stages of eternity, an unending ladder of ascent from earth to heaven, are introduced here...Eternal life is a path, not a way station, not a stagnation in some nirvana. It is creative ascent in the reception of divine life and its revelations...

Eternal life, or eternal bliss, is deification, the reception of divine life..."God will be all in all." 

There is no stasis in the afterlife. Hell is purgative, a developmental, restorative process. We are saved through the fire. Bulgakov:

[H]ell's torments of love necessarily contain the regenerating power of the expiation of sin by the experiencing it to the end. However, this creative experiencing is not only a passive state, in chains imposed from the outside. It is also an inwardly, synergistically accepted spiritual state...This state is appropriately perceived not as a juridical punishment but as an effect of God's justice, which is revealed in its inner persuasiveness. And its acceptance as a just judgment corresponds to an inner movement of the spirit, to a creative determination of the life of the spirit. And in its duration ("in ages of ages"), this life contains the possibility of creative suffering that heals, of a movement of the spirit from within toward good in its triumphant force and persuasiveness. Therefore, it is necessary to stop thinking of hell in terms of static and inert immobility, but instead to associate it with the dynamics of life, always creative and growing. Even in hell, the nature of the spirit remains unchanging in its creative changeability. Therefore, the state of hell must be understood as unceasing creative activity, or more precisely, self-creative activity, of the soul, although this state bears within itself a disastrous split, an alienation from its prototype [the Image of Christ]. All the same, the apostle Paul defines this state as a salvation, yet by fire, after the man's work is burned.

Stepping back, we can ask the question: Who are the lost? The "lost" are those who are still being born, those still undergoing the labor pains of creation. 

Again, the salvation of the lost, through the fires of hell and the eschatological labor pains, goes to the very logic of creation itself. The moral logic of creation implies apokatastasis, the restoration of all things where God is "all in all." "Otherwise," says Bulgakov, "creation would appear to be an error or failure, since it would end with the eternity of hell, even if this were accompanied by the eternity of heaven. An eternal separation of humanity into the elect and reprobate is clearly not the final meaning of creation. One must therefore suppose that this separation has an inner proportionality of grace that assures a final positive sum of all the pluses and minuses of history, a universal harmony, total and beautiful." 

Creation will come to its completeness and fullness. Creation shall not be stillborn.

In this "theology of everything," creation, Christology, soteriology, theodicy, and eschatology converge upon a single point. Apokatastasis. Creation is Incarnation, the universal realization of the hypostatic union between creation and God. Creation, salvation, and theodicy are a single unified act, God's eternal and predestined response to humanity's fall and our ontological drop. As Bulgakov states, "Only deification is capable of justifying creation. It is the only theodicy."

The world was created by Grace, the world exists in Grace, and the world returns to Grace by Grace. 

We have been saved from the foundation of the world.