Gregory of Nyssa is available for pizza parties, tv commercials, and geometry classes.

"I said, 'Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.'" -
Psalm 82:6

"Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." - John 17:20-2o

"Gregory's grasp of the radical ontological disparity between God and creation is balanced by his understanding of the union of God with creation in the economy of salvation; and thus means what he says when he calls the practice of virtue participation in God and the presence of God to the soul: he means, in a word, deification." - The Beauty of the Infinite, DBH 198.

Deification: lets be honest, that is what it is all about. What is the future hope of mankind? What is the goal of salvation? According to Gregory it is nothing else than to participate in the Godhead.

"the entire thrust of the theology of eternal progress is precisely to show how it is possible to speak intelligently of deification, despite the ontological distance between God and creation: by showing that it is not an uncrossable abyss but a genuine distance, reconciled and yet preserved in the incarnate Logos, crossed from the divine side so that it may be crossed forever from the side of the creature." - DBH 199.

As Protestants we naturally recoil at such a notion. Sounds like some Buddhist or Mormanism, right? I mean either we are turned into gods or we become one with "the One" who is God. Either polytheism in a radical way or the drop in the water bucket anaology. Neither of these is acceptable from a Biblical perspective, so what is Gregory saying? I think he avoids both of these errors and transcends all other schemes of salvation because of his notion of the Trinity. Explaination:

The Trinity is an essential doctrine, maybe the most important part of the Christian religion: it is what makes us so different from all other religions or spiritualities. Only in Christianity do you have a combination of the one and the many in the divine. God is One, utterly unified and distinct for sure, but he is also Trinity. In that One we find a difference, a many in the three persons. Only Christianity allows for this distinction in the divine, all other religions either have one diety and substance, or have a bunch of seperate ones. But in Christianity we have both: the One God who is three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This difference allows for so many things, but let us just look at the deification idea.

The Christian tradition is the only religion that allows for a participation in the divine and yet a distinction, because it is already "built-in." God is already a dynamic Trinity of being, He is already more than one person and so allows for participation and yet distinction. That is the story of salvation. Christ comes down to reconcile us so that we might become sons of God in Him, so that we might join Him in the "sweet Trinity dance" that goes on for eternity. Notice that this does not necessarily mean the beautific vision since Christ was fully God when He was on earth - so physicality is part of divinity as well. So when Gregory talks of deification, he is not talking about losing yourself into the divine ocean, he is talking about participating in the Godhead, in the divine dance of the Trinity as a active member, through Christ. Wow. I think this is the most beautiful thought I have encountered in a while. Let it sit for a while.

Maybe an example from mathematics would help (warning: not perfect analogy, but okay!). In geometry we have what are called systems of equations. These can get pretty complex, but lets keep it simple: we are just going to talk about lines. So y = x + 5. Okay? That is a line with a slope of one and a y-intercept at 5. So it is just a diagonal line. See it? Good. Now if we have two lines and we are looking for where they intersect (solutions) there are only three possibilities. Either there are no solutions, one solution, or an infinite number of solutions. So here we go:

Think of the no solutions as the atheistic position, there is no God, how can there be any deification? This is a set of parallel lines. Never cross. What about one solution? This would be what I call "silly monotheism": Islam, Mormonism, some forms of Buddhism, Christianity-and-water. There is only one contact point, so it is not possible to all live in the Godhead.

What about the inifinte solutions? That is the "Trinitatian monotheism" option: there can be an infinite number of equations and yet only one line. Example:

x + y = 2

2x + 2y = 4

It should be easily seen that these two form the same line, but they are distinct equations, distinct "beings." So there can be multiple "beings" in this one true being, as long as we have something other than "silly monotheism" or atheism, and we most certainly do. But let us press this image a bit further. A line is infinite in measure, extending on forever - much like God's Being. He is infinite and we are merely finite. Therefore, we who are "taken up" or "participate" in His divine being (through the Son and by the Holy Ghost - Trinitarian remember) do not become infinite ourselves. That would be blasphemous and more inline with Mormanism. Rather, we all as finite members of the body of Christ, form to make up part of our own line - the aformentioned body of the Son. We all fit in our own part and are drawn into participation - being deified through the Son and taking our place in the Trinitarian movement.

"God becomes ever more present to the soul through Christ in the Holy Spirit, who is the glory that the Son had with the Father before the world existed, God's own bond of unity, the light that draws us into the Trinity's own 'circle of glory.' The blessings of the incarnation are infinte, for God is infinte." - DBH 199-200.

Therefore, Gregory sees God's infinity as something to be seriously considered, as our participation in Christ as something more than an emotional feeling, but rather an ontological reality - we are to be as gods, we are to be in Him as He is in us, that we may all be one. This is more than a statement about ecumensim (although that is implied), it is a statement about the economy of salvation. We are destined for life "in Christ", which means in the Godhead, not becoming identified with either person, still distinct and finite, but taking our already set part in the dance that is the perichoresis of the Trinity - the dynamic dance of divine love which we are called to through Christ by the Holy Ghost in the Father.

So I guess the question is: why are we still Protestants? Is justification by faith alone the best we can come up with?

Nietzsche is right...but sucks.

David Bentley Hart (DBH) may not be German, but he is definitely one of the the best (if not best) American theologians today. Of all time. Eternity? In his book (The Beauty of the Infinite - oh man!) he starts his dogmatics by addressing the postmodern condition through its founder and strongest protagonist - Friedrich Nietzsche. Following Milbank (DBH is a one man Radical Orthodox show - Monday thru Friday 6:30 pm to 11:30 pm) in defining postmodernity as an "ontology of violence", DBH contends that Christianity gives the only answer - an "ontology of peace." Check it out.

Nietzsche is the idol sounder (Twilight of the Idols) for modernity by pointing out the "Will to Power" which undergirds all action, thought, and deed. He is violently opposed to Christianity (althought not Jesus Christ, whom he understands about as well as quantum mechanics) because "Paul's gospel" is one of total transcendence - a denial of the world and all its glory. Nietzsche blames Christianity for destroying the goodness of the world even amidst all its suffering. Instead of the crucifed Christ, Nietzsche takes up Dionysus as his saviour, one who calls for violence in the name of true humaness. Nietzsche decries the "otherworldliness" of Christianity and calls it a "castration of existence." He proposes the new morality - a striving towards violence and "becoming who you are", a romantic (?) return to the warrior virtues of Greece. To him Christianity is nothing more than the slaves (poor souls) trying to will to power over those who have rightfully gained possession of life by their virtues. Christianity is nothing more than a child responding to a bully beating "It is better to have been beaten up because now I have suffering and he does not." Christianity is a poor loser to Nietzsche and should suck it up.

What say we? Well, in so many ways Nietzsche is absolutely right. If Christianity is what he says it is, then it is just a patheitic "ontology of violence", trying to gain mastery through some pansy way of one-upsmanship. Looking around this world and saying "I can't wait for Jesus to get back and fix this place" is pathetic (as well as too evangelical!). Pat Robertson needs not only to stop calling for assassinations (and lying about it), but also needs to rethink what kind of power he is willing on everyone - a power of pure violence, although in a more "soccer-momish" way. But, is Nietzsche right in his view of Christianity - the poor man's Platonism?

DBH says absolutely not. Through creation's pure "giveness" we find not some flight from diety but rather the participation of the Triune God. Christianity is not a "next-world" event, it is rather seeing this world through the lens of an "ontology of peace", best described as beauty. Even Nietzsche saw the power of aesthetics, but is not the aesthetics of peace much more desirable than the aesthetics of violence? Is not the image of the lion and the lamb laying together much more desirable (and truthful?) than the lion eating the lamb? Christianity agrees with Nietzsche - if everything is will to power alone, then violence and "nihilism" is the ultimate result of the geneology of history. But Christians proclaim a different story. This is the power of DBH's apologetic/dogmatic, we don't take on the pagan with reason (Pascal and Hume have shown that to be ineffectual outside of a priori agreement), we lay out the story of the Triune God and the story of the will to power. If radical immanence is correct (as Nietzsche saw it), then his story is the only acceptable one. But if we don't give him that (and there is no reason to) then the Christian story is infinitely more beautiful because of its Infinite source - the creational "giftedness" by the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Gospel of the Triune God might be a total affront to Nietzsche (and his followers, which are legion), but Jesus had no other intention. "Christ showed that the world was a dext that could be read differently: according to the grammar not of power, but of agape. (122)" Christ called and still calls us to throw off the sackles of power plays and demands the story of love to defeat all evil. Nietzsche, one so concerned with aesthetics showing truth, missed the true conclusion: peace is always more beautiful than violence.

"The most potent reply a Christian can make to Nietzsche's critique is to
accuse him of a defect of sensibility - of bad taste. And this in fact is
the last observation that should be made at this point: Nietzsche had atrocious
taste. (125)"

Ummm...eat it?

Heidegger and Heisenberg: Is alethia another word for quantum theory?

The Germans. They might be the most intelligent race in the history of the world, or at least were up until the second world war. Case in point: Werner Heisenberg and Martin Heidegger. One is the leader of the quantum revolution with his matrix mechanics and uncertainty principle, while the other is one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Both totally challenged our thoughts about reality and both need tons of work in fully understanding the significance of their thoughts. Let me just scratch the surface with a juxtaposition of two related ideas of these two men.

Martin Heidegger, author of Being and Time changed the way Continental philosophy works by his concept of truth and being. Basically as I read him, his claim is that philosophy from Aristotle (and maybe Plato) onward has made a huge mistake: it has focused on beings rather than Being. What does that mean? Heidegger said we are all involved in a "forgetfulness of being", that we don't really understand reality because we look at beings (like hammers, forks, etc.) rather than Being (that thing which is undergirding reality). He calls this Being Dasein (lit. "there being"). Crazy. Heidegger maintains that Being is not something immediately available, but rather Being is about prescence and "disclosedness." Heidegger uses the Greek word alethia to describe reality - a reality that is as much about unveiling as veiling, unconcealing as concealing. Reality is mediated to us by Being, everytime we examine reality some things are disclosed to us (made manifest) but other things are not (hiddeness). If we focus just on the beings themselves (the hammer itself) we are only seeing part of the show - the disclosed part. But Heidegger says truth and reality are far more complicated, there is so much undisclosed or hidden, which gives as much meaning to reality as what is disclosed. Reality might be seen like a vending machine. Heidegger says that most of our thinking has been focused on the individual candy bars (different as they may be) themselves, whereas there is a mechanism that is "revealing" those candy bars: the vending machine itself. Not a perfect illustration, but gets to the point: there is something behind each individual beings, and all thought since Plato has forgot to take into account this Being - the veiling and unveiling of reality.

Now admittingly this doesn't make a whole lot of sense on the outset. It sounds ridiculously crazy and certainly doesn't have the mathematical rigour of analytic philosophy (Russel et al.). Or does it? I think this might be where Heisenberg comes along. Quantum mechanics says something just as ridiculous to the mind in positing the theory of wave function collapse. Example: an electron can be in different energy states in an atom, ground state, first excited state, second excited state, etc. This is high school chemistry. Up until quantum it was thought that if you had the power to examine an atom, we could just look and find which exicted state the electron was in. It has to be in one and only one, right? Okay. Quantum throws a gigantic spanner in the works. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that we can't know exactly which one it is in (its position or velocity independently) but not because our measurement changes one or the other (that is the standard idea - hitting the electron with light will knock it around, changing one or the other) but becase until we look at the atom, the electron is in all energy states at once! It is literally in a number of states, called superposition, until we make a measurement (what that means is a doctroal thesis in itself) and then one of the states (ground state for example) is "acutalized" or "revealed" and the others vanish. This is what physicists have been saying for the past fifty years, even though it doesn't make much sense - and they have experimental evidence to back this craziness up. Reality is a lot more complex than we ever imagined.

So here is the link. Is it possible that this "disclosedness" that Heidegger is talking about is the same "collapsing of the wave function" that Heisenberg is talking about? Does Heisenberg provide Heidegger with the mathematical formalism for alethia and Dasein? Does Heidegger provide Heisenberg with a philosophical framework in which to describe these discoveries? Heisenberg's Physics and Philsophy might be best summed up by "Platonism won" and it seems to me that he Heidegger might give us a glimpse of how that makes sense. Being is more than just individual objects, it is about the Being behind those observations, the "revealing" which is going on. What is this Being? How does it relate to the Christian conception of the Triune God whom reveals Himself and yet hides Himself (cf. Isaiah 45:15)? More to say about that later.