Is Pope Francis a Universalist?

My Facebook feed has been lighting up the past 24 hours with links to this Huffington Post article capturing excerpts from Pope Francis’  Wednesday homily. The key quote, as translated by Vatican Radio:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! … We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

It’s unclear what exactly Francis means here, although one explanation certainly is that Francis is advocating universalism “Do good because in the end we will all meet one another there.” Another is inclusivism, a la the end to C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, in which Francis essentially adopts Aslan’s statement that all good deeds are rendered in the name of Christ, regardless of whether the doer is a Christian. A final possibility, borne out by Reuters’ translation of the comments – “Just do good, and we’ll find a meeting point.” – is more traditional, that Francis is discussing the universal availability of the atonement, which not everyone ultimately will accept.

Moore, Oklahoma

I was thinking a lot last night about this most recent tragedy to befall the innocent. We had Sandy Hook, and Boston, and West, and now Moore. And those of us “winter Christians,” who tend to struggle with the problems we see in the world around us – this is our time. The summer Christians who perhaps tend to downplay suffering and tragedy must sit up and take notice, and for once, everyone is on the same page. Our page.

But I’m also a person who in the past year has learned that not only do I love the physical world around me, but that it’s OK for me to love it. And not only that, God loves it, too. He loved it so much, he took on flesh and allowed himself to experience the physical world for himself – or at least as much as he could. He even suffered and died so that he could restore it to himself. For whatever reason, God loves the world and the people in it that much.

So I recoiled a bit as I heard some of the same old reactions to the Moore tornado that we hear after every tragedy – reactions that sound uncomfortably close to the lyrics from some classic hymns: “Just a few more weary days, and then I’ll fly away.” Or, “This world is not my home; I’m just a-passing through.”

Class Day 2 – Athanasius and Gregory: God Is Not a Monster

My wife has subscribed to Facebook updates from Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and while most of them are perfectly fine, every so often DeMoss posts something like this:

Did you notice who killed the firstborns? The Lord (Ex. 12:29). And years later, God Himself put to death His own beloved Son so we might be set free from slavery.

Back away slowly.

It’s worth remembering that even as the early church fathers explicitly focused on the notion of theoprepes, what is fitting for the divine, we do this, too. Everyone puts God in a box. Can God sin? If your answer is no, then you have decided it is not fitting for God to sin. Can we describe God with feminine pronouns? If your answer is no, again you have used theoprepes. 

For Origen and his successors, theoprepes was important because it was a significant criticism from the Greek pagans, who largely agreed with Plato’s conception that the soul had sinned and fallen into the body. Therefore, the body was something like a contaminant, and unfitting to house God. The incarnation thus was a major stumbling block, and the early fathers needed to explain why theoprepes  allowed for God to take on flesh.

Athanasius of Alexandria followed Origen in this vein with his work On the Incarnation of the Word. In answering the question of the fittingness of the incarnation, he argued it was not only for the liberation of humanity from sin and death, but to restore humanity its dignity. Further, it was not the annulment of creation, but its culmination. The world was renewed by the same Word who created it.

Class, Day 1 – Origen: Your God Is Absurd

Following is a summary of a lecture given yesterday by my professor in Patristic and Medieval Theology.

To understand Origen of Alexandria – or Gregory of Nyssa or almost any other Greek-speaking early church father – you have to understand the concept of theoprepes. Plato introduced the concept of theoprepes when he went after Homer’s depictions of the gods. Because the gods/god are/is the ultimate Good, Plato has a big problem with the way Homer makes them act, but because Homer’s poetry is foundational for Greek culture, Plato can’t just dismiss it outright.

So he metaphorizes it. He maintains the truth of the moral lessons but rejects the historicity of the depiction, which he considered blasphemous because the gods did not act in a fitting manner. And that is theoprepes, the concept of what is fitting for the divine.

Origen is faced with a similar dilemma.

He believes in the inspiration of Scripture, which for him writing about 200 C.E. is still just the Old Testament, but he recoils at the anthropomorphism of God found there. And with good reason, from his perspective. When Celsus writes the criticism of Christianity to which Origen responds in Against Celsus, one of his prime concerns is the anthropomorphism of God – it’s just not fitting, in Greek thought, for God to act this way, and a literal reading of Scripture was a huge stumbling block to those educated Greeks to whom Origen was reaching out.

Not only that, he finds numerous places where the text contradicts itself or describes absurdities. So he argues for a metaphorical-allegorical reading of those pieces of scripture where theopedes is violated.

Gregory of Nyssa and the Salvation of Satan

I’m speed-reading through some works by the church fathers for an upcoming short course called Patristic and Medieval Theology, and in the early going it’s very Eastern-oriented: Origen, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Ceasarea. They’re all Greek-speaking Christians from the eastern half of the Roman world – Alexandria and Asia Minor.

Origen is probably the most famous of those names. Based in Alexandria, Egypt, his notions of asceticism and spirituality were hugely influential, and he’s considered one of the – if not the – most brilliant theologian before Augustine, who came around about 200 years later. He’s also famously odd, not only thanks to his idea that humanity could, through ascetic practice, achieve perfection (and thus transcend the physical body into some sort of spiritual state) in this life, but also because he’s essentially Christianity’s first outspoken universalist, arguing that eventually all things would be restored to God.

I say Christianity’s first outspoken universalist, but of course, one could argue that in fact that title belongs to Luke or Paul of Tarsus; after all, they’re the ones who use the language of all things being restored (Acts 3:21) and every knee bowing and every tongue confessing. Nevertheless, Origen, writing around 200 C.E., gets credit for first explicating a full-on concept of universal reconciliation.

He wasn’t alone, however. Gregory of Nyssa, himself no slouch intellectually, followed Origen’s footsteps around 380 C.E. In his Address on Religious Instruction (also known as The Great Catechism), Gregory put forth the notion of universal reconciliation as part of his theory of atonement.

Gregory’s notions of atonement, judgment and reconciliation all stem from this formulation of evil: It doesn’t exist.

Before the First Day of Creation

In the great debate between creationism and evolution, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is the notion that God created the world in seven days with the power of his word, which would preclude a billions-year-long process of evolution.

This notion seems to come from two misunderstandings – 1, how the key text of Genesis 1 actually describes creation, and 2, how creation narratives work in ancient texts like the Old Testament. Clearing up these misunderstandings could help creationists come to grips with evolution – in fact, I would argue the creation texts of the Old Testament fit the world described by science quite well. There is, in fact, much less contradiction between the Bible and science than many assume.

Boston

I returned from Boston yesterday; my week was mostly a business trip, but I made sure to carve out some time for sightseeing. Boston has long been my favorite city, and it did not disappoint last week.

One of my new favorite places is the Boston Public Library, with its arching ceilings and omnipresent murals – and, above all, its cavernous study room, complete with dozens upon dozens of green-shaded lamps. If ever a monument has been built to the notion of learning, expanded horizons and the acquisition and beneficial use of knowledge, this is it.

I went to the library Thursday. Across Copley Square, workers were finishing up construction of the grandstand at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. And, of course, across the street from both the library and the grandstand, two bombs exploded during Monday’s marathon.

So many people I encountered in Boston, natives and tourists alike, were friendly, kind, helpful and – perhaps I was projecting a bit – seemingly thrilled to be in one of the world’s great cities. It’s hard to imagine how twisted by darkness one must be to experience what I experienced this weekend and remain committed to turning it into tragedy.

Shipping Up to Boston

I’m leaving town for a work conference this week. See you all when I return!

God to Job: Humans Are So Overrated

When it comes to humanity’s place in creation, we have our scripture down pat: Genesis 1:27-28.

God created humanity in God’s own image,
in the divine image God created them,
male and female God created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.”

“Master” the earth, “take charge” of its animals. Or, in the famous words of more traditional translations: We have “dominion” over this world. Throw in Psalm 8 for good measure:

You’ve made [humanity] only slightly less than divine,
crowning them with glory and grandeur.
You’ve let them rule over your handiwork,
putting everything under their feet—
all sheep and all cattle,
the wild animals too,
the birds in the sky,
the fish of the ocean,
everything that travels the pathways of the sea.

Cut and dried, right?

Not so fast.

Hell, Doubt and Easter

Well, once again I violated the cardinal rule of blogging by disappearing for a week. Sorry about that. I was out of town, and then it was a holiday weekend, and there you go.

To make it up to you, here are a couple of Easter-related things that caught my eye this week, and some comments I had on them: