God the Creator’s outgoing activity towards and dwelling in the created world has been expressed in a rich variety of images in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The centuries immediately before and after the times of Jesus were particularly fertile in this regard in both the Hebrew and Greek cultures, especially in the cross-fertilisation that occurred in many of the great cities of the Hellenistic-Roman world, such as Alexandria. These images enriched the New Testament and from there have entered the bloodstream of much Christian theology and philosophy, not least that of the Eastern Christian traditions of Orthodoxy. We must therefore delve, briefly, into these rich mines of insights from the past. They hold out the promise of light in our quest for a rebirth of images to aid our understanding God’s relation to the world.
Biblical scholars have, in recent decades, emphasised the significance of the central themes of the so-called ‘Wisdom’ literature (the books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) and the Wisdom of Solomon). Some characteristic passages, reflecting the flavour of this evocative literature, follow.
The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds dropped down the dew.1
Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
‘To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live ...
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth ...
When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
When he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep ...
When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker (little child),
And I was daily his delight, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race’.2
From the Wisdom of Solomon:
There is in her [wisdom] a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle. For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.
For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance to her.
For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.3
Wisdom was created before all other things, and prudent understanding from eternity.
The root of wisdom – to whom has it been revealed? Her subtleties – who knows them?
There is but one who is wise, greatly to be feared, seated upon his throne – the Lord.
It is he who created her; he saw her and took her measure; he poured her out upon all his works,
Upon all the living according to his gift; he lavished her upon those who love him.4
One biblical scholar has recently expressed her conclusions concerning this literature in the following terms:
These various wisdom texts and traditions link wisdom to God’s role as creator and to God’s life-giving and redemptive power. On the one hand, wisdom is the content of what one must know to understand the deep logic underlying the natural world and the social order alike ... By discerning that coherence (be it through God’s gift or human effort) and by following the ethical ‘way’ consistent with it, people could shape their lives in congruence with God’s will. On the other hand, more than simply the content of God’s creative acts, Wisdom is also God’s working partner, or perhaps even the expression of God’s own creative self. As the self-disclosure of Wisdom, then, creation is not simply something God has done, but a glimpse into the very heart and nature of God.5
In this broad corpus of writings the feminine figure of ‘Wisdom’ (Greek Sophia), according to another scholar, is a ‘convenient way of speaking about God acting in creation, revelation and salvation; Wisdom never becomes more than a personification of God’s activity’.6 This Wisdom endows some human beings – those who respond to her call – with a personal wisdom that is rooted in their concrete experiences and in their systematic and ordinary observations of the natural world (what we would call ‘science’). But wisdom is not confined to this, and represents the distillation of wider human, ethical and social, experiences. All such wisdom, imprinted as a pattern on the natural world and in the mind of the sage, is but a pale image of the divine Wisdom – that activity characteristic of God’s relation to the world. In the present context, it is pertinent that this important concept of Wisdom (Sophia) unites intimately the divine activity of creation, human experience and the processes of the natural world.
The significance of Wisdom has been emphasised7 in relation to our attitude to the environment and the applications of biotechnology, for Wisdom theology is at the centre of creation theology. Celia Deane-Drummond writes that, anthropologically,
[W]isdom is the art of steering, applying knowledge to the experiences of life in a way that includes a ‘fear’ of the Lord. This ‘fear’ is not so much terror or religious experience of awe, but piety characterized by faith in God as the creator and sustainer of life. Wisdom values the human capacity to discern truth and celebrates human freedom ... This anthropological thread is important in that it puts its emphasis on the right relationship between humanity and the Creator, which is the basis for finding wisdom.
And, in a more cosmic perspective,
Wisdom seems to function as the artificer of creation ... and as [such] it follows that wisdom is involved with all created beings ... all of matter and all ordering comes through wisdom.8
This concept of Wisdom comes to us now as a major biblical and traditional resource for imaging the panentheism we have found to be needed to express our theological response to the contemporary worldview of the sciences. Theists brought up in a culture shaped by the Bible may be forgiven for thinking that we seem to be arriving ‘where we started’ and beginning to ‘know the place for the first time’.
But other memories should also reverberate in the minds of Christian theists. Did not St Paul call Jesus the Christ ‘the wisdom of God’, the one ‘who became for us wisdom from God’?9 And he goes on to describe what the Corinthians had heard from him, and other evangelists, as ‘God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory’.10 J.G. Dunn, in his study of the nature of Christ, Christology in the Making, concluded that
The doctrine of the incarnation [of God in Christ] began to emerge when the exalted Christ was spoken of in terms drawn from the Wisdom imagery of pre-Christian Judaism ... Christ showed them what God is like, the Christ-event defined God more clearly than anything else had ever done ... As the Son of God he revealed God as Father ... As the Wisdom of God he revealed God as Creator-Redeemer.11
No wonder Eastern Christians dedicated their greatest church, in Constantinople, to Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. This specifically Christian theme, of Jesus as the manifestation in human form of the Wisdom of God active in creation, will emerge even more explicitly as we now consider another concept, one genetically linked to that of Wisdom and so pertinent to any insight into the relation between God and the created world.
This concept has been implanted firmly and deeply within Christian thought by the prologue to the Fourth Gospel (John 1), which is famously read as the Gospel at the Eucharist on Christmas Day. This prologue is really a poem, or hymn, about the ‘Word’ (Logos in Greek), but contains prose interpolations (omitted below) concerning John the Baptist and believers. It can be set out as follows:12
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it ...
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.
But to all who received him ... he gave power to become children of God ...
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth ...
From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.13
Scholarly study has revealed that the Word/Logos is a profoundly fruitful conflation of at least two concepts. One is the Hebrew (Old Testament) usage of the ‘word of the Lord’ for the will of God expressed in utterance to the prophets (‘The word of the Lord came to ...’) and in creative activity (‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth ... For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm’14). The other sense attributed to Logos is that which arose within Hellenistic Judaism as expressed by Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE). He is usually taken to echo the development within Judaism of Stoic thought, for which the divine Logos, the principle of rationality, is especially present in the human logos or reason. Philo’s Logos is the meaning, plan, purpose of and principle of reality in the universe, as the thought of God, and also as the creative power by which the universe came into being and is sustained. Both of these notions form the background to the Gospel of John and, no doubt, both would be in the minds of its readers to varying degrees. The concept of the Word/Logos of God as existing eternally as a mode of God’s being, as active in creation and as the self-expression of God’s own being, imprinted in the very warp and woof of the universe, is clearly congruent with panentheism. For panentheism unites intimately, as three facets of one integrated activity, the divine, the human and the (non-human) natural.
It is widely agreed among New Testament scholars that there is a conflation in the Gospel of John between the idea of the ‘Word’ (Logos), with its multiple meanings, and that of the divine ‘Wisdom’ (Sophia), with its rich fusion of meanings, in order to convey what Jesus the Christ had come to mean for his early witnesses and their successors. This deeply influenced Christian thought in the next few centuries. Jesus the Christ came to be understood as the incarnation, the becoming human, of the mediator of creation – the Word which, being divine, pre-existed the historical human Jesus and was later termed ‘God the Son’.15 And we recall that St Paul could call Jesus the ‘Wisdom of God’.
In the concept of the divine Word/Logos active in creation, in shaping the patterns of the world, including that of the human person, we rediscover a fusion of images that enrich the notions of Christian sacramental panentheism and theistic naturalism to which we came through exploring the implications of scientific understanding for our understanding of God and God’s relation to the world. Again we have, in a sense, ‘arrived where we started’, but now knowing that ‘place’ in a new and enhanced and deepened way ‘for the first time’. Such is the unique spiritual and theological opportunity of our scientific times.
The Eastern Christian church (Orthodoxy) has long maintained – ever since the Cappadocian Fathers16 in the fourth century – a distinction that today still has potential for expressing the continuing, dynamic, creative activity of God. This is the distinction between
the essence of God, or His nature, properly so-called, which is inaccessible, unknowable and incommunicable; and the energies, or divine operations, forces proper to and inseparable from God’s essence, in which He goes forth from Himself, manifests, communicates, and gives Himself.17
These energies, which are specifically denoted as ‘uncreated’, are a manifestation of God in the general realm of the structures, patterns and organisation of activities in the world. God’s ‘essence’ (Greek ousia) is hidden, infinitely transcendent, beyond all understanding, yet is regarded as made known in God’s ‘energies’ (Greek energiai) – that is, in his work, the outcomes of his creative activity. The divine energies are not an intermediary between the world and God; they are God’s own self in action. This is an essentially panentheistic perception of God’s relation to the world, for God is seen in everything and everything is seen in God.
Vladimir Lossky in his classic work, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, has expounded this concept for Western readers, using trinitarian language, and it is best grasped by quoting from that work:
God’s presence in His energies must be understood in a realistic sense. It is not the presence of a cause operative in its effects: for the energies are not effects of the divine cause, as creatures are; they are not created, formed ex nihilo, but flow eternally from the one essence of the Trinity. They are the outpourings of the divine nature which cannot set bounds to itself, for God is more than essence. The energies might be described as that mode of existence of the Trinity which is outside of its inaccessible essence.18
It is in creatures – beings created from nothing by the divine will, limited and subject to change – that the infinite and eternal energies abide, making the greatness of God to shine forth in all things, and appearing beyond all things as the divine light which the created world cannot contain. This is the inaccessible light in which, as St Paul says, God makes his dwelling: ‘dwelling in light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen or can see’ (I Tim. 6:16).19
The notion of the divine energies is not a merely abstract conception, a purely intellectual distinction, for it arises out of the realities of the experience of God:
Hence the formulation of the doctrine as an antinomy ... the energies express by their procession [proceeding from God] an ineffable distinction – they are not God in His essence – and yet, at the same time, being inseparable from His essence, they bear witness to the unity and simplicity of the being of God.20
The energies manifest the innumerable names of God ... Wisdom, Life, Power, Justice, Love ... Like the energies, the divine names are innumerable, so likewise the nature which they reveal remains nameless and unknowable – darkness hidden by the abundance of light.21
I hope these extracts will give the reader some insight into this profound emphasis among Eastern Christians, for I find it more congenial to my scientific presuppositions than much Western traditional religious talk of the ‘supernatural’ as the milieu of God’s activity. Indeed, we find Lossky eschewing this term:
Eastern tradition knows no such supernatural order between God and the created world, adding, as it were, to the latter a new creation. It recognizes no distinction, or rather division, save that between the created and the uncreated. For eastern tradition the created supernatural has no existence. That which western theology calls by the name of the supernatural signifies for the East the uncreated – the divine energies ineffably distinct from the essence of God.22
We arrived at this same stance – no division save that between the created and the uncreated – as a result of exploring the implications of the sciences for our understanding of God’s relation to the world, and denoted it by the terms ‘sacramental panentheism’ and ‘theistic naturalism’. Moreover, I find this way of thinking about that relation also powerfully expressed by Lossky in relation to humanity:
It is in creation alone that God acts as cause, in producing a new subject [humanity] called to participate in the divine fullness; preserving it, saving it, granting grace to it, and guiding it towards its final goal. In the energies He is, he exists, he eternally manifests Himself. Here we are faced with a mode of divine being ... which, moreover, in the created and perishable world, is the presence of the uncreated and eternal light, the real omnipresence of God in all things, which is something more than His causal presence – ‘the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not’ (John 1: 5).23
The concluding quotation from the Gospel of John reminds us again how closely these Eastern Christian concepts are based on that Gospel and so are integrated with the concepts of the Wisdom and Word of God. The place we have arrived at is indeed richly furnished.