Let’s Give the Heave Ho to Neo-Palamism

Posted on 15 March 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

By Robert F. Fortuin

After being asked to respond to David Bentley Hart’s provocative substack reflections on Neo-Palamism,¹ I’m taking the opportunity to revisit the essence/energies distinction and to argue that Neo-Palamism deserves a firm, grateful Heave Ho. Hart’s polemic against Neo-Palamism is memorable partly for its stylistic relish and partly for the severity of its verdict (nothin new under David’s sun): Neo-Palamism is “a silly school of thought” that has “done grievous harm” to Orthodox self-understanding. Yet the deeper philosophical interest of his essay is not the insult; it is the diagnosis. Neo-Palamism—at least in the modern form Hart has in view—does not merely propose an imprecise distinction between divine essence and “energies.” It reconstructs the past, narrows the range of legitimate Orthodox thought, and installs a metaphysical architecture that subtly changes the grammar of God, the Trinity, and theosis.

In what follows, I want to build on Hart’s critique by naming a pattern that helps connect his metaphysical objections to his sociological and ecclesial ones. I will call that pattern ontological quarantine: the impulse to protect transcendence by placing God behind an ontological barricade, then offering a regulated form of access to what has been cordoned off. If this sounds more like cultural theory than theology, that is exactly the point: a metaphysics can become a strategy of identity and control. Hart hints at this when he says Neo-Palamism functions like “grand systems of ideological or institutional or ethnic identity,” involving a “reconstruction of the past” that can be “violent or confining.” Ontological quarantine is how that reconstruction becomes spiritually persuasive.

The burden of my claim is simple: a quarantined God is not the God of Nicaea, and a quarantined theosis is not deification but managed proximity. The tragedy, if Hart is right, is that the quarantine has come to be mistaken for Orthodoxy itself—especially by those “recent converts who have been fooled” into thinking Neo-Palamism is “convertible with Orthodoxy as such.”

Neo-Palamism builds a barricade and calls it intimacy

Hart’s most incisive observation is that Palamas (whatever his own coherence) aimed to articulate and defend the possibility of divine intimacy with deified creatures, while Neo-Palamite frameworks often sound like they are doing the opposite: building an “insurmountable barricade” between God’s “eternal energies” and God “in himself.” If that is accurate, it is not merely an interpretive mistake; it is an inversion of the spiritual telos. Theosis becomes a doctrine about why we cannot touch God, rather than how God has drawn near.

Here is where ontological quarantine clarifies the dynamics. Modern Eastern Orthodox imaginations—formed by a strong apophatic instinct, and often by a certain philosophical anxiety about the limits of creaturely knowing—are tempted to treat God’s essence (ousia) not merely as inexhaustible but as absolutely unknowable in such a way that any immediate communion with God must be ruled out in principle. God becomes the ultimate unapproachable reality: not simply beyond comprehension, but beyond any immediate encounter with God “as God is.”

Quarantine is comforting because it seems to preserve two claims at once:

Transcendence: God remains inaccessible “in himself,” the ousia sealed off from creaturely participation; and
Religious access: we still have a robust spiritual life because we can “participate” by way of something else: God’s operations, effects, “energies,” or modes.

But notice the cost: the very structure meant to safeguard the unknowability of the ousia risks reifying that unknowability into a metaphysical architecture: a real, not conceptual distinction in God; that is to say—essence behind, operations in front so that transcendence becomes not simply the infinite depth of God, but a kind of ontological remoteness. What begins as apophatic humility can harden into a layered model of God, where God’s essence is treated as a distinct, unreachable object and “energies” function as an intermediate zone of contact. And when Hart complains that Neo-Palamites expend “neurotic” energy insisting on the barricade, he is diagnosing not reverence but a pathology of mediation: the fear that any claim of immediate communion would trespass upon the inviolability of the divine essence.

A quarantined God, on this model, is not primarily worshiped as Father, Son, and Spirit encountered in the economy of salvation; rather, God is approached through a metaphysical interface that promises genuine participation while ensuring that the ousia remains untouched, unentered, and functionally absent from communion.

Essence and operations: everyone distinguishes—so what is the dispute?

Hart insists (correctly it seems to me) that “all Christian tradition, East and West,” distinguishes divine essence from divine operations, and that the question is whether this is a conceptual distinction or a real one. That move matters because it deprives Neo-Palamite apologetics of its favorite posture: We have a unique Orthodox metaphysical key that the West lacks. Hart’s counterclaim is: no, everyone has the distinction; what differs is the ontological weight assigned to it. This is where philosophical precision is indispensable. A conceptual distinction can mark two true ways of speaking about one and the same reality: God as unknowable in essence, God as knowable in action; God as infinite depth, God as self-manifestation. A real distinction, however, implies that there are two (or more) ontologically distinct items: essence as one “thing,” operations as other “things,” perhaps multiple operations each with their own subsistence.

The logic of ontological quarantine pushes toward the real distinction, because quarantine is only effective if what mediates is not simply a way of speaking but a reified layer. If “energies” are merely the living God in act, then the barricade collapses. If “energies” are ontologically distinct, then the barricade stands: you can have communion with what is “of God” without communion with God “in himself.” The quarantine has been secured.

Hart believes that once you do this you have left the mainstream patristic grammar behind: Neo-Palamism is “irreconcilable with the Eastern Patristic tradition,” including the Cappadocians and Maximus. Indeed. But whether one accepts that full historical claim or not, the philosophical point is yet sharper: a real distinction in God invites composition. It turns God into a layered reality. And a layered absolute is not absolute.

The “logical cypher” problem: why a real distinction fails even as metaphysics

Hart’s metaphysical critique peaks in his claim that “the very notion of a real distinction of essence and operations is a logical cypher,” one that “means nothing much even in regard to finite beings,” and is “preposterously nonsensical” when applied to the infinite God. That is a strong charge, but it can be stated as a crisp argument:

If essence and operations are really distinct in God, then either God is composed (essence + operations), or there is some further principle that unites them, or they are simply un-unified.
If composed, God depends on constituents and is not ultimate.
If united by a higher principle, that principle is more ultimate than God.
If not unified, God is internally divided.

A real distinction therefore runs afoul of the doctrine of divine simplicity. The typical attempt to avoid this, claiming the distinction is real but “not like creaturely composition”, often sounds like an exemption from intelligibility. One may certainly say God is not comprehensible; but to say the doctrine is not even coherent is a different matter. Hart’s point is that the real distinction, as often deployed, is not merely mysterious but vacuous.

Ontological quarantine again helps explain why such a logically unstable notion can nevertheless feel compelling. When a community needs an identity marker, a “clear enunciation of a true Orthodox system,” as Hart describes the historical conditions, coherence can be traded for boundary maintenance. A doctrine can function as a badge even if it is metaphysically brittle.

“To be is to act”: the metaphysics of presence and the illusion of a hidden substrate

Hart’s section title “To be is to act” signals that the dispute is not only about a particular distinction, but about the basic metaphysical grammar of being. David argues that in finite beings there is a conceptual distinction between essence and any particular activity, but that we do not treat the activity as something ontologically other than the agent. He pushes the thought further: what is an operation “other than a mode of real presence,” and what is real presence “other than the immediate reality of an ‘essence’”?

This is the point at which ontological quarantine is revealed as a category mistake. Quarantine imagines essence as a hidden substrate behind presence, a “thing unto itself” separable from manifestation. But that is precisely the metaphysical picture that classical theism resists. God is not a substrate. God is not an entity that “has” operations the way a creature “has” actions. If God is the source of being, then God is pure actuality actus purus and thus cannot be divided between what God is and what God does. Hart recounts being “corrected” by David Bradshaw, who suggested God must have unrealized potential because God could have created infinitely many worlds he did not create. Hart treats this as philosophical ineptitude, and rightly so, but the deeper point to be made here is metaphysical: Bradshaw’sargument imagines God as a being among possibilities, standing before external options, defining himself by a choice among them. That is exactly the “modern” picture of freedom many analytic philosophers assume. And it is precisely the picture that the patristic insistence on divine simplicity is meant to refuse.

A quarantined God is typically a God with “room” in himself—unrealized potential, internal reserve, layers of accessibility. But the God of Nicene metaphysics is not a being with internal slack; God is infinite fullness. If one accepts that, the real distinction between essence and operations becomes not a safeguard but a distortion.

The trinitarian corruption: essence as an object “distinct from the Trinity”

Hart’s “greatest objection” is that Neo-Palamism corrupts both trinitarian theology and metaphysical cogency. The trinitarian critique is perhaps the most theologically consequential: Neo-Palamite discourse can depict the divine essence as an unattainable object “distinct from the order of trinitarian relations.” Hart even cites the notorious formulation ascribed to Palamas: “In God, there are these three: the essence, the trinity, and the energies”—a statement Hart calls clumsy.

Why is this so destructive? Because Nicene trinitarianism is not a theory about three divine individuals “over there” and an essence “behind” them. The logic of Nicaea is that we know God as Father, Son, and Spirit precisely through the economy of salvation: the Spirit unites us to the Son, and thus we are brought into the presence of the Father. The “taxis” of trinitarian relations is known through the “taxis” of the economy, and this depends on the absence of any subsistent mediation between us and God.

But ontological quarantine requires mediation. It requires something that is “of God” but not God-in-himself. That is why quarantine tends to push the Trinity to the margins: the Trinity becomes, at best, a community of hypostases behind the energetic interface. The “energies” do most of the work; trinitarian relations become an afterthought.

This is not merely a doctrinal inconvenience. It changes the meaning of deification. If theosis is entry into trinitarian life, then any framework that places an ontological layer between us and that life risks turning theosis into participation in a divine periphery rather than communion with God.

The sociological engine: identity systems, reconstruction, and convert enforcement

Hart’s essay is not only metaphysics; it is ecclesial sociology. He explains why Neo-Palamism gained prominence: it filled a vacuum, served a survival strategy for embattled churches, and offered an identity differentiator, especially against Roman Catholic manualist Thomism. Then he adds the sharper claim: the system’s triumph has been enforced with “strident” zeal by “converts who know nothing of the wider tradition,” producing an “incalculable impoverishment” of Orthodox intellectual life.

This is the social ecology of ontological quarantine. Quarantine is not only about God; it is about boundaries: who is “inside” true Orthodoxy and who is suspect. A doctrine becomes attractive as a marker precisely when it can be used to police belonging. Once it becomes a marker, its metaphysical deficiencies can be ignored because its social function is fulfilled.

Hart’s recounting of the effacement of Byzantine scholasticism and suspicion of the Russian Silver Age illustrates how a system can “reconstruct the past” and confine present imagination. Neo-Palamism, in this telling, becomes not an interpretive option but a gate: it tells you which Fathers count, which centuries matter, which modern Orthodox thinkers are “gnostic,” which philosophical vocabularies are permitted. Sounds familiar?

This is why Hart is so harsh with the claim that many converts have been “fooled” into equating Neo-Palamism with Orthodoxy. The question is not whether converts are sincere; it is whether the system they inherit has been packaged as “the tradition” in a way that flattens the tradition’s actual plurality.

Ontological quarantine thus appears as a spiritual-political technology: it provides a metaphysical rationale for why God must remain behind a boundary, and an ecclesial rationale for why Orthodoxy must remain behind a boundary to safeguard against the corruption of the West.

The analytic infection and the domestication of mystery

Hart adds an especially modern twist: Neo-Palamism in the Anglophone world has been amalgamated with analytic philosophy of religion—often through former evangelicals accustomed to formalizing fundamentalism. That is significant because it reveals a peculiar double movement:

Neo-Palamism is marketed as mystical, anti-scholastic, beyond “logic-chopping.”
Yet it is increasingly expressed in the idioms of analytic metaphysics, with their own hidden assumptions about possibility, freedom, and being.

This is not a harmless translation. Analytic habits tend to treat “possibility” as a landscape of options external to the agent and “freedom” as selection among those options. That model almost forces the Bradshaw-style claim that God has unrealized potentials because he could have done otherwise.

But if God is the infinite act of being, “possibility” cannot be an external field in which God is a chooser. The more one imports that model, the more one is tempted to picture God as finite—qualified by relations, modified by choices, internally structured by options. Hart thinks Maximus would have found this abhorrent.

Ontological quarantine thrives in such conditions because it can appear as a solution to analytic anxieties of converts. If God is one item among many, we need a theory of access and mediation. If God is pure act, we do not.

Toward an unquarantined transcendence: what the essence/operations distinction should do

If the real distinction collapses into incoherence or composition, why does the essence/operations language persist? Because it is genuinely useful when used as a conceptual distinction that protects two truths simultaneously:

God is incomprehensible (no finite concept exhausts God).
God is immediately present (God is not hidden behind a layer of being).

An “unquarantined” account would say: we encounter God in God’s operations not because operations are something other than God, but because our knowledge of essence is always knowledge of essence as in act. Hart appeals to John of Damascus precisely to show that knowing a thing through its operations does not imply operations are ontologically distinct entities; it is how all knowledge works—of God and neighbor alike. The traditional wisdom here is not “God is behind a curtain,” but “God is inexhaustible.” Inexhaustibility is not distance; it is depth. The error of ontological quarantine is to treat depth as separation.

If we accept Hart’s principle that “all ousia is parousia” that being is presence, presence is encounter, then the “energies” are not a buffer zone but the living God as personally present. Theosis then becomes intelligible again: not attachment to divine emanations, but participation in the trinitarian life into which the Spirit incorporates us.

Theosis without intermediaries: communion as participation in trinitarian life

Hart’s claim that Neo-Palamism undermines theosis is not incidental; it is central. He argues that Gregory of Nyssa condemned Eunomius’ proto-Palamite move because it renders deification “fundamentally meaningless” by breaking the logic of Spirit–Son–Father communion. If there are enduringly subsistent, ontologically distinct “energies” mediating between creature and God, then deification risks becoming participation in those entities rather than entry into God’s own life.

An unquarantined vision of theosis emphasizes that:

The Spirit’s indwelling is not contact with an intermediary level but immediate union with God.
The Son is not a veil behind which essence hides; the Logos is the eternal manifestation of divine depth.
The Father as archē is not a metaphysical object “distinct from the Trinity” but the personal source of the one divine life.

On this account, transcendence is not secured by distance but by the very fact that the divine life we enter is inexhaustible. We do not become God by nature; we participate by grace in the divine communion. No quarantine is required because intimacy does not threaten God’s otherness; it reveals it as non-competitive.

Why the quarantined God became plausible: modernity’s allergy to immediacy

It is worth asking why ontological quarantine has such appeal now. Modernity has trained many of us to believe that immediacy is either impossible or dangerous:

In epistemology: immediacy sounds naïve; everything is mediated by language, culture, interpretation.
In politics: immediacy sounds authoritarian; power must be checked by procedures.
In technology: immediacy is risky; access must be gated by interfaces.

So, it is not surprising that some forms of theology become interface-theologies: they describe God as if God were accessed through protocols. Neo-Palamite “energies” can be made to function like a metaphysical API: real access, but never direct contact with God “in himself.”

Hart is outraged because, on his reading, this is not merely a modern adaptation but a betrayal of Nicene logic. The Fathers did not invent intermediaries to protect God from us; they confessed that God gives himself: Spirit to Son to Father, in the economy that reveals the eternal life. This also explains why the quarantine approach can be so attractive to converts. Converts often need clarity; they want a system. In a fragmented world, a system that claims to be uniquely “Orthodox” and absolutely necessary for theosis is intoxicating. Hart notes exactly this apologetic posture: the essence/energies distinction is treated as uniquely Orthodox and indispensable.

Once the doctrine becomes the badge of authenticity, its internal incoherences become less visible, because its primary work is social and psychological.

A constructive proposal: replace quarantine with covenantal immediacy

If one wants to preserve what is spiritually motivating in Neo-Palamite language (God’s unknowability, the reality of participation) without importing the quarantining structure, one might reframe the entire matter in a more personalist and trinitarian key:

Essence names God’s inexhaustible depth: God is never captured by our concepts.
Operations name God’s personal self-giving: God is truly present, truly acting, truly encountered.
The distinction is conceptual (our modes of speech and knowledge), not an ontological cleavage within God.

This framing preserves both apophatic humility and sacramental realism without turning divine transcendence into a locked room.

It also undercuts the tendency to treat the Trinity as decorative. If God’s operations are God’s presence, then God’s presence is trinitarian: the Spirit unites to the Son, the Son brings to the Father.

There is no “third realm” of energies between us and God.

Ending where Hart ends: the curious triumph of a “rickety” touchstone

Hart closes with astonishment: how strange that a “rickety” and “jarringly un-patristic” school has become the touchstone of Orthodoxy for so many, even for those who presume to speak for “the tradition of the fathers.” That line can sound like mere lament, but it names a genuine philosophical and ecclesial problem: when identity systems capture a tradition, they often mistake the badge for the body.

Ontological quarantine is a name for that capture at the metaphysical level. It is what happens when a tradition, anxious to preserve transcendence or distinctiveness, reimagines God as an inaccessible core and reimagines participation as regulated contact with a mediating realm. It is not simply a bad theory; it is a posture toward God. And it has consequences: it can impoverish intellectual life, flatten historical memory, marginalize trinitarian grammar, and turn theosis into something like managed exposure to divine “energies.”

If Hart is right, the antidote is not to reject all distinctions, nor to collapse mystery into easy familiarity, but to recover a more classical metaphysics of presence: to be is to act; God is pure act; and the divine life we enter by grace is not behind a barricade, but infinitely deep. Unquarantined transcendence is not less reverent. It is more trinitarian. It dares to say that the God who is incomprehensible is also the God who gives himself—without intermediaries—because the only “distance” between creature and Creator is not a metaphysical wall but the joyful, endless asymmetry of participation: ever truly united, never exhausted, always drawn deeper into the life of love and knowledge that is God. For that we will have to give the Heave Ho to Neo-Palamism.

Footnotes

1 David Bentley Hart, “Thoughts In and Out of Season 16,” Leaves in the Wind (1 July 2025).

Posted in David B. Hart, Philosophical Theology, Robert Fortuin | Leave a comment

What Do Angels Sing? Recent Reflections on the Pythagorean Harmonia Mundi

Posted on 14 March 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

by Ryan Haecker, Ph.D.

What is the origin of music? Can we think a thought of music before the sound of music? Was music, perhaps, first performed by artificial instruments, by singing, or, before both; in nature; as by the birds; and even among the planets and stars? And if the music of nature is, in some way, prior to that of men, may there not also be another music, before both; that is sung by the angels; in the harmony of the worlds – which we can, perhaps, call the very principle of music itself?

Angels are said to sing before any sound. Biblical scripture have preserved such an account. In The Book of Job, God asks of Job:

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4/7, KJV)

The Book of Isaiah similarly records a vision of the six-winged Seraphim:

I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne… Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings… And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. (Isa. 6:4, KJV)

This same vision is later repeated in The Book of Revelation.

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. (Rev. 4:8, KJV)

And the Roman liturgy also recites this thrice-holy Trisagion in the Preface to the Eucharistic liturgy:

SANCTUS, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth
HOLY, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts

The angels are, on this account, thought to sing in heaven before we may sing any song on earth. And such an angelic music could communicate divine into human music.

Choirs of angels could, perhaps, be imagined to be heard throughout the whole created cosmos. Yet this account may also appear to present a problem: for if any song is music, and music must be made in the intervals of time, and angels are said to exceed any duration in time, then there may be neither space nor time where angels may be said to sing. Angelic music may thus seem, for us, to be but a most impossible music, neither in nor beyond the time of any sound, which could ever be sung for earthly ears to hear and songs to celebrate.

Augustine wrestles with a semblance of this problem when, in De Musica, he describes how music may be bound in time even as he gestures upwards towards a, higher, trans-temporal, and heavenly music that resounds in the moving image of eternity. Such a heavenly music may be, for Augustine, as for Orpheus, the primordial origin of music.

Angels are, beginning with Origen, and continuing in Augustine, the numinous spiritual intelligences, created first among all creatures on the first day of creation to think through all of the ideas. Angelic light is, then, but an semblance of this angelic intelligence, and the intellectualization of all ideas – including the idea of music itself.

Angelic music must, it seems, impossibly enter into, even as it exceeds, both in and beyond the boundaries of time. Augustine suggests a divine source of musical rhythms: for music, if it is divine, may not pass away in time, yet music, if it marks the intervals in time, must astonishingly also enter into time. Yet how, if music must be made in time, may angels sing in and beyond time? If music is nothing if not made in time, how may we say that the angels sing? And if the angels are said to sing, what, we may say, do the angels sing? We have perhaps, with the scholastic formulation of modern musicology, long since forgotten how to ask and answer this question, of the essence, of the metaphysics, and, we may dare to say, even of the angels of music. We must, if we are to recall this music of the angels, recollect, from the primordial past, the first thought of the first music.

Pythagoras is said, by ancient authorities, to have first counted to construct the harmonic chords of music, the universal music (musica universalis), and the harmony of the worlds (harmonia mundi). The harmonia mundi that is sung as by the angels through the movement of the celestial spheres. This music can, no doubt, never be directly seen or heard, not because it is too dim and soft, but only because it is too bright and loud. The pillar of Pythagorean arithmogony, the hidden ‘hearth’ (hestia), is, here, the central fire and first principle of arithmogony, which radiates and reflects its invisibly brilliant pure light through the streaming spatialized signs of the numbers, ratios, and proportions of the countable cosmos. The pure light of the hidden hearth can, in this way, shine forth from its inmost centre to its most outstretched periphery, where, at last, it can be reflected from its antipodes to be imitated in and by all of the intermediary lesser lights, spheres, and spirits. The sun, moon, and stars may, then, by reflecting this light to light, intermediate so as to communicate this pure light to any and all lesser lights, mathematics, and music.

Plato describes, after the allegory of the cave of The Republic, the dialectical division and combination of the Pythagorean Quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Music is, for Plato, as mathematical as it is dialectical, deliberative, and free. It results, in The Parmenides, from the production of proportions in the idea of number, and, in The Republic, as it is determined by dialectic. And it is through this dialectic, beginning at the start of the Timaeus (34b-36d), that Plato then divides, combines, and mixes the elements of the cosmos according to harmonic ratios and proportions across the mediating silence of the emergence of any music in time (Plato, Timaeus, 1238-40). The interstitial intervals of silence are, then, nothing more than the negative judgments of dialectical division in all of its recombined relations. And these relations are, moreover, mediated, even as each may be messaged by the celestial daemons, lesser gods, and angelic spirits. Platonic musicology, like Pythagorean arithmogony, is thus principally this music of the ideas, the worlds, and even of the angels, which is, primordially prior to any music that we may hear.

This Pythagorean-Platonic metaphysics of music was thereafter to be fatefully subverted and subsumed into a more empirical and mathematical physics by Aristotle and his student Aristoxenus. Aristotle had, in the Posterior Analytics (75a38-b20), denied any trans-generic demonstration of empirical music from mathematical forms when he denied any demonstration from the higher genera of arithmology and astronomy to mathematics and music (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 122). Musicology could, thereafter, be developed as an autonomous and specific science, without regard for the sovereign science of metaphysics.

Aristoxenus, in Elementa Harmonika, similarly started, at the advent of ancient musicology, with this same presupposition by bracketing any prior mathematical musicology. He thus studied music as merely a system (systemata) of the tones (tonoi) in the place (topos) where it may be heard to situate the systematic structure of the tones in phenomena, where music is, at last, nothing more mathematical than the intervals of the rhythm that is heard amongst any and all empirical sounds.

Angelic music could, we may argue, then create the conditions for the modern spatialization, mathematization, and petrification of the dialectical dynamic of music in a flattened field of univocal representation. Modern musicology can be narrated to begin, after the spatialization of Descartes and the conceptualization of Kant, as an abstraction of the musical in the mathematical. Music could thereafter be essentialized in and by an entirely apriorist spatialized geometry of a fully formalized musicology, culminating, perhaps, in musical set theory, with its concomitant corollary in the atonal, anarchic, and ultimately unenjoyable music of Arnold Schönberg and John Cage. Such a fully mathematisized musicology would per impossibile need no performance, audibility, and creative spontaneity.

And if postmodernity, in the fully realized nihilism of modernity, appears as but a perverse nihilistic parody of this ancient angelic metaphysics of music, then it may, without the ecstatic participation, sacramental liturgy, and holier music of salvation of a cosmic poetry, be all the more liable to commercial commodification and fascistic domination.

Augustine’s angelology has, however, preserved a precedent for this metaphysics of music. For his hidden Platonism is no less a hidden Pythagoreanism. And he could, perhaps, have answered this problem by arguing, following from the Pythagoreans, that the music of the angels is, not so much contained in, as creative of the time of music: for if angelic music is truly, as it was the Pythagoreans, a way of counting out the cosmos, in any space, time, and place, then we may imagine that the angels can also create time by making music. Angelic music may, in this way, be more originary and creative than the time of any other music.
Spatial reality may, in this way, be generated by music, just as music is made by the angels, in an angelic generation of space, time, motion, along with the whole created cosmos. Music can thus be considered to create the cosmos: angels sing by singing the thought of the creation of the cosmos, as a whole, in its part, and in every place.

An echo of this creative conception of angelic music can be heard to resound in the later literary tradition of angelic music. Dante Algieri writes, in Paradiso 28 (94-96):

And rising, choir to choir, I heard ’Hosanna’ sung to that point which, fixed there, hold them all, and always will, ubi they’ve always been.
(Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, 273)

And John Milton writes, in Paradise Lost (IV.682-88):

“Celestial voices to the midnight air…With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds In full harmonic number joined, their songs Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to heaven.” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, 124)

And he writes, again, in At a Solemn Music (25-29):

O may we soon again renew that Song And keep in tune with Heav’n, till God ere long To his celestial consort us unite, To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light.
(John Milton, At a Solemn Music, 58)

What, then, do angels sing? Angels sing, we may say, as ‘all the sons of God shout for joy’, the continuous creation of the whole harmony of the worlds: celestial chains, eternity in an instant, and an instant of eternity, seen as it is sung in every time, space, and punctiliar place.

(Originally published in Noesis: Theology, Philosophy, Poetics, Issue 6, in 2019)

* * *

Dr. Ryan Haecker is a theologian and philosopher whose research in systematic and historical theology explores the absolute theological questions of logic, science, and technology. He is the editor of the book New Trinitarian Ontologies (Cascade Books), and the author of the forthcoming book Restoring Reason: Theology of Logic in Origen of Alexandria (Verlag Karl Alber).

Posted in Philosophical Theology | Tagged angels, Augustine, harmonia mundi, harmony, music of the spheres, Plato, pythagoras | Leave a comment

Ecumenism Exemplified: Reminiscences of an Anglo-Orthodox Summer-School

Posted on 12 March 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

The sun was shining in the sky
With unimpeded ray.
He did his very best to make
The place serene and gay,
And this was strange, because it was
An English summer day.

The rain had vanished sulkily,
Because it thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
Now August had begun.
‘With all these people here,’ it said,
‘We ought to spoil their fun.’

The rooms were close as close could be,
The lectures dry as dry.
No heresies had raised their heads,
No schisms wandered by.
You could not think a thought, because
It was too hot to try.

The Thomist and the Palamite
Were walking hand in hand.
Each did his very best to make
The other understand.
‘If only we could both agree,’
They said, ‘It would be grand.’

‘If sixty trained philosophers
Argued for half a year,
Do you suppose,’ the Thomist said,
‘That they could get it clear?’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Palamite,
And shed a bitter tear.

‘Let us collect some simple souls,’
The Thomist did beseech,
‘For they have very much to learn
And we have much to teach.’
‘Why, yes,’ replied the Palamite,
‘That ought to heal the breach.’

The older theologians heard,
But never a word they said.
While one discreetly winked his eye,
Another shook his head,
Meaning he much preferred to spend
The afternoon in bed.

But crowds of simple souls rushed up,
All eager for the treat.
The Thomist and the Palamite
Sat on the garden-seat,
And all the simple souls sat round
In circles at their feet.

‘The time has come,’ the Thomist said,
‘To talk of many things,
Of angels perched on needle-points
And how a seraph sings.’
‘And also,’ said the Palamite,
‘If energies have wings.’

‘But stay,’ exclaimed the simple souls,
‘Before you start your chat.
We have not got the least idea
What you are getting at!’
‘No matter,’ said the Palamite,
‘We quite expected that.’

‘A lot of time,’ the Thomist said,
‘Is what we chiefly need,
Six blackboards and some coloured chalks—
They’re very good indeed—
And here are forty-seven books
Which we propose to read.’

‘But not to us!’ their hearers cried,
Turning extremely blue,
‘We did not know that was the sort
Of thing you meant to do!’
‘Oh dear,’ the Thomist said, ‘Of course
I should say, fifty-two.’

‘It’s very kind of us to come
So far from hearth and home.’
The Palamite said nothing but
‘Fetch me another tome.
I mean the one in fourteen parts
About the Church of Rome.’

‘It seems a shame,’ the Thomist said,
‘To lead them such a dance;
And yet we surely must not lose
So promising a chance.’
The Palamite said nothing but
‘They’re used to it in France.’

‘We weep for you,’ the Thomist said,
‘We deeply sympathise.
You boggle at the simplest words
Like “supernaturalise.”’
‘And even,’ said the Palamite,
‘Like “demythologise.”’

They lectured in alternate spells
Until the set of sun,
And then the question-time began,
But questions there were none,
For on the grass the simple souls
Lay sleeping every one.

E. L. Mascall

Source

Posted in Poetry & Fiction, Theology | 1 Comment

Following the Lamb under the Shadow of Babylon

Posted on 7 March 2026 by johnstamps2020

by John Stamps

Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
She has become a dwelling place of demons,
a haunt of every unclean spirit,
a haunt of every unclean and loathsome bird. (Revelation 18:2)¹

Yes, I know it’s an anachronism to talk about “politics,” “economics,” or even “religion” in the Bible. Those are modern distinctions we impose on the ancient world. The ancient world never separated power, money, and the gods the way that we do.²

Which brings us to Revelation 18. I’m about to do the very thing I just said we shouldn’t do: talk about economics in the Bible. St John describes in gruesome detail the fall of “Babylon the Great Whore.” The kings of the earth mourn. The merchants mourn. Even the captains and sailors mourn.

Why?

Because their trade collapses. Revelation 18 is a funeral lament for the global economy of Babylon. When Babylon falls, the kings, the merchants, and the sailors all wail. Not because justice has been done, but because the system that enriched them has collapsed. But heaven sings no dirge. Heaven doesn’t mourn. Heaven celebrates.

Rejoice over her, O heaven! (Revelation 18:20)

The contrast between heaven and earth could not be more dramatic. Heaven celebrates what earth mourns. Earth mourns the death of a market. Heaven celebrates the end of a system built on human exploitation.

St John gives us a long cargo list. It reads like a shipping manifest from the ancient Mediterranean. It drips with imperial wealth and aristocratic consumption.

The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargo anymore:
cargo of gold and silver and precious stone and pearls;
and fine linen and purple cloth and silk and scarlet cloth;
every sort of scented wood and every vessel of ivory and every vessel of costly wood,
and bronze and iron and marble;
and cinnamon and spice and incenses and myrrh and frankincense,
and wine and olive oil and fine flour and wheat;
and cattle and sheep;
and horses and carriages… (Revelation 18:11-12)

But then comes the chilling final item on the inventory list:

καὶ σώματα καὶ ψυχὰς ἀνθρώπων
“and the bodies and souls of human beings.” (Revelation 18:13)

That final entry reveals everything. Empire doesn’t merely trade in goods. Empire traffics in human beings. Pliny the Elder famously complained that Rome was sending vast amounts of gold eastward to India just to satisfy its appetite for luxury. In his Natural History, he laments that India had become

the sink of the world’s most precious metals… There is no year which does not drain our empire of at least fifty-five million sesterces … So great is the labour employed, and so distant is the region drawn upon, to enable the Roman matron to flaunt see-through clothes in public … Thus is India brought near: by greed, and women’s decadent need to follow fashion.³

Pliny lists the luxury items from India and Arabia that Rome was addicted to: pepper, cinnamon, nard, frankincense, myrrh, ivory, pearls, precious stones, silk, cotton fabrics, ebony, and tortoiseshell. The list of overlapping luxuries between Pliny the Elder and St John is striking. So is their moral critique, except that Pliny doesn’t inventory slaves. Pliny criticizes luxury for draining Roman wealth. St John criticizes luxury because it devours human lives. St John takes the glittering inventory of empire and then exposes the human cost hidden at the bottom of the ledger.

If you read Genesis carefully, you can get hardened to how the Bible measures wealth. For example, Abraham the Sheikh-Warrior-Pilgrim had accrued massive wealth. Here is how Abraham’s senior slave breathlessly describes his owner’s inventory of property:

The slave of Abraham am I. And the Master has blessed greatly my master, and he has become great; and he has given to him flocks and herds and silver and gold and male slaves and female slaves and camels and donkeys. (Genesis 24:35)

In the 21st century, we measure our wealth by luxurious cars, sumptuous lifestyles, grand houses, and the size of our 401(k)s. But if you were a sheikh in the ancient world, wealth looked different. You measured it by the number of garments you owned, the shekels of silver and gold you accumulated (or plundered), the size of your flocks, and the number of slaves in your household. The more, the better. That was simply how wealth was measured.

It struck me while reading Genesis 24 that Abraham’s senior slave—“the oldest of his house, who ruled over all that belonged to him”—doesn’t even have a name. This human being, entrusted with managing Abraham’s entire estate, appears in the story as just one more item in the patriarch’s inventory.

The Bible knows this world quite well. This is precisely the world that Revelation unmasks.

Revelation reveals the horror at the heart of an economy that treats human beings as property or merchandise. The Apocalypse of St John is an uncovering, a revealing. And what it reveals is not subtle. When political power, economic exploitation, and spiritual idolatry merge, the result is Babylon. Kings rule. Merchants profit. Ships move cargo. And at the bottom of the ledger appear “the bodies and souls of human beings.”

One early Christian theologian saw the implication clearly. In his Homilies on Ecclesiastes, St Gregory of Nyssa asks a devastating question about slavery:

God said, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” If he is in the likeness of God and rules over the whole earth, who is his buyer? Who is his seller?⁴

Since humanity bears the image of God, Gregory argues, no human being can be reduced to property. Human beings are not commodities. Souls are not merchandise. Slavery is a great evil.

Yet Babylon always has its logic. It always finds a way to make the unthinkable appear natural. St John gives us a clue about how the system works.

The merchants of the earth grew rich from the power of her luxury. (Revelation 18:3)

This is truly a revealing phrase. Luxury isn’t just a lifestyle. In Babylon, it becomes a power, a dynamis (δύναμις). The entire system is driven by the power of luxury, and the ultimate commodity becomes human lives. For St John, luxury is never just comfort. It is a dynamis that devours human beings.

If I put on my René Girard hat for a moment, systems like this run on what he calls “mimetic desire.”⁵ As Girard observes, “In addition to the appetites we share with animals, we have a more problematic yearning that lacks any instinctual object: desire. We literally do not know what to desire and, in order to find out, we watch the people we admire: we imitate their desires.”⁶ That is, I desire what you desire, and soon you desire what I desire. Prestige spreads by imitation; desire multiplies by rivalry. Entire economies can be built by inflaming the sense that someone else possesses the life you want. Babylon’s marketplace runs on the imitation of desire.

The merchants grow rich. The kings grow powerful. The crowd keeps imitating. The whole system runs on rivalry, envy, and resentment. The New Testament calls these forces “the principalities and powers.” They are not merely governments or markets or temples. They are the spiritualized systems in which power, money, and the gods reinforce one another.

And no society is immune to them. Not Rome. Not Byzantium. Not modern democracies. Certainly not ours.

Girard wants to unmask the hidden violence that underlies our social and economic order. According to Girard, the Bible progressively reveals what our cultural mythologies conceal. Mythology justifies violence; the Bible exposes it. The Apocalypse of St John brings this unveiling to its final clarity. In Revelation 18, the mask finally comes off Babylon.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for Christians living in the Trump era, or any era shaped by the seductions of wealth, power, spectacle, and resentment. The real question of Revelation is not, What will happen to Babylon? The real question is, Whom will the church follow?

To be blunt, what does it mean to follow the Lamb who was slain in a world still enchanted by the Beast?

Revelation’s answer is clear. We are indeed more than conquerors. But the church does not conquer by seizing the machinery of empire. The beating heart of the Apocalypse stands a startling vision. St John hears that the Lion of Judah has conquered. But when he turns, he sees something entirely different:

And I saw in the midst of the throne and the four living creatures and in the midst of the elders a lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered… (Revelation 5:6)

In the Apocalypse, God’s victory does not appear in the form of imperial power. It appears in the crucified Messiah. The Lamb defeats the Beast by exposing the lie at the heart of imperial power.⁷

Babylon always looks invincible. Right up until the hour of her fall.

Woe, woe, the great city,
Babylon the mighty city,
Because in one hour your judgment has come. (Revelation 18:10)

In a single moment of human history, Babylon collapses. We thought the Soviet Union was invincible. It wasn’t. Every empire looks invincible until the fateful day when the merchants begin to weep over their cargo of “the bodies and souls of human beings.” Because Babylon never falls when we expect. Yet empires always fall. They look permanent. They aren’t.

Because in the end, the Lamb who was slain—not the Beast—rules history. As the angel declares to John:

These will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those with him are called and chosen and faithful. (Revelation 17:14)

And that, finally, is the vocation of the church under every empire: to follow the Lamb who was slain wherever he goes. (Revelation 14:4)

Footnotes

All translations from the Greek and Hebrew Bible are my own, unless otherwise indicated. If you’re curious about my translation choices, I always defer to BDAG and HALOT. When I don’t, it turns out to be a mistake. ↩︎
Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Nongbri argues that the idea of “religion” as a sphere separate from politics, economics, and social life is a relatively modern European development that has been projected backward onto the ancient world. ↩︎
William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), 6, discussing Pliny the Elder’s critique of Rome’s luxury imports (Natural History 12.41). ↩︎
St Gregory’s sermon is often regarded as one of the earliest recorded arguments in world history to attack slavery as an institution rather than merely regulate it. Gregory’s critique of slavery is unusually radical in the ancient world. Another striking early Christian protest appears in St Patrick of Ireland, himself a former slave, who condemned the enslavement of newly baptized Christians in his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, lamenting that they were “carried off into slavery … still clothed in the white garments of Christ.” See Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Anchor Books, 1995). ↩︎
Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1995). Bailie offers a wide-ranging introduction to René Girard’s account of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and sacred violence, arguing that the biblical revelation, especially the crucifixion of Jesus, exposes and ultimately undermines the sacrificial violence at the foundation of human culture. ↩︎
René Girard, All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings, ed. Cynthia L. Haven (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2018), 190. ↩︎
Revelation contains lurid and often troubling imagery of divine judgment. Yet the victory of the Lamb and the saints is described not in terms of holy war but in terms of faithful witness: “They conquered the Dragon by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” (Revelation 12:11) ↩︎

Posted in Gregory of Nyssa, John Stamps, Theology | Tagged apocalyptic, God, Jesus Christ, mimetic desire, Political theology, René Girard, revelation, Slavery | 8 Comments

A Home That Is Not a Party: Toward a Sacramental Communitarian Vision

Posted on 6 March 2026 by Jonathan Tobias

by Fr Jonathan Tobias

The day closes without argument.
Water receives what the sky gives back.
Lamp by lamp, the town keeps watch.

Light descends; the earth remembers.
Water holds the second sky.
We walk the margin between what passes and what abides.

Our public life right now often feels like an argument conducted at high volume and low trust. Each side of the partisan divide insists it is defending what matters most: freedom, justice, order, dignity, tradition, compassion. Yet even when these words are spoken sincerely, they seem to land without resonance. We are talking past one another, and increasingly, living past one another too.

For some time now, I’ve found myself looking for a political home and not finding one. What I have discovered instead is not a party — and not even something political in the usual sense. It is a way of seeing and living that begins much closer to the ground. I have come to think of it as sacramental communitarianism.

It begins with a simple intuition: that human beings are formed not primarily by abstract arguments or political programs, but by shared practices of meaning — meals, worship, work, neighborliness, memory, and care for place. A society is healthiest not when it achieves perfect agreement, but when it sustains habits of belonging.

“Sacramental” here is not meant in a narrowly religious sense. It means recognizing that ordinary things — bread, water, land, language, friendship — carry significance beyond their utility. They mediate presence. They hold us in relation. They remind us that life is received, not manufactured.

And “communitarian” does not mean coercive conformity. It means acknowledging that persons become persons only in relationship: in families, congregations, towns, and networks of mutual obligation. We do not create ourselves out of nothing; we inherit, respond, and contribute.

I see this most clearly not in theory but in the ordinary practices that shape a life: tending a garden, where the soil teaches patience and dependence; singing in a choir, where harmony is learned by listening rather than asserting; working to preserve places like the Cupola House, Hayes, Kadesh, and the Newbold-White House, where memory becomes a shared responsibility rather than a private sentiment.

And I’d add one more particularly religious thing: pray. Pray for everything and everyone. Offer a quiet blessing and thanksgiving wherever you go.

From this perspective, a gentle critique of our familiar divides comes into view.

On the one hand, parts of the cultural left sometimes place such confidence in institutional solutions and expressive individualism that the slow work of community formation — the habits of fidelity, care, and responsibility — is overshadowed. Structures matter. Justice matters. But no structure can substitute for the formation of persons who know how to live with one another in trust.

On the other hand, parts of the cultural right often speak eloquently about tradition and order while neglecting the fragile, everyday practices that actually sustain them: hospitality, patience, local responsibility, and attention to the vulnerable. Cultural preservation without communal nurture becomes nostalgia — a memory of belonging without the work of sustaining it.

Both sides, in different ways, can drift toward abstraction — toward systems, identities, or programs — at the expense of the ordinary, incarnate life we actually share.

In recent years, some thinkers have proposed “post-liberalism” as a remedy for our social fragmentation. Their concerns are understandable. Modern life often feels lonely, rootless, and unmoored. Yet post-liberalism frequently carries its own risks. It can grow pessimistic about modernity as such, suspicious of pluralism, and vulnerable to authoritarian temptation in its understandable longing for cohesion. At times it misdiagnoses our moment, attributing every social ill to liberal democracy itself rather than to the deeper erosion of shared practices and institutions of belonging.

The problem is not simply that we have “too much freedom.” It is that freedom has become detached from formation — from communities that teach us how to use it well.

A sacramental communitarian vision is less interested in overthrowing modernity than in inhabiting it more humanely. It asks:

How do we form people who can live with freedom responsibly?
How do we sustain local communities in an age of mobility and fragmentation?
How do we honor pluralism without dissolving into isolation?

This vision is not theoretical. It is already present in the work of writers and practitioners who have long attended to the life of community. Wendell Berry’s essays and stories return again and again to land, memory, and neighborliness — not as sentimental ideals but as the real soil in which human flourishing grows. Henri Nouwen reminds us that hospitality and presence are not strategies but disciplines, ways of receiving one another as gifts rather than problems. Stanley Hauerwas challenges the church to be not a political lobby but a formed community, a people whose life together quietly witnesses to another way of being human.

Even literature carries this intuition. One thinks of the Shire in Tolkien’s legendarium — not as escapist fantasy but as a mythic image of a society grounded in shared life: gardens, meals, festivals, obligations, and loyalties. The drama of Middle-earth unfolds precisely because such communities exist and are worth preserving. They are not perfect. But they are real, and they are loved.

Sacramental communitarianism does not promise to resolve our political conflicts. It offers something more modest and more demanding: a reorientation of attention.

Attend to the place where you live.
Attend to the people who share your days.
Attend to the practices that make life meaningful — worship, work, table, care, conversation.

These are not distractions from public life. They are its foundation.

A healthy society will not be built solely by legislation or protest, though both have their place. It will be built by people who know how to belong — who understand that freedom is sustained by responsibility, that identity is formed in relationship, and that the ordinary world is charged with meaning.

Such people are not easily manipulated by fear, nor easily seduced by utopian promises. They are steadied by memory and hope.

And they may yet provide the quiet answer to our loudest arguments — not by winning them, but by outliving them.

Posted in Jonathan Tobias | Leave a comment

Praying in the Wilderness: The Lord’s Prayer in a Time of Fear and Grief

Posted on 5 March 2026 by Jonathan Tobias

by Fr Jonathan Tobias

My tears have been my food day and night,
while people say to me continually,
“Where is your God?”

Psalm 42:3

I did not learn the Lord’s Prayer in comfort.

Like many Christians, I first memorized it as a child in calm and orderly places: in church pews beneath stained glass, or at a bedside where the world felt safe and contained. The words came easily then. They sounded simple, almost serene.

But I did not truly begin to understand the Lord’s Prayer until I met it again in the wilderness.

Many Christians I know today feel something like that wilderness. Not all of them would use that word. Some speak instead of anger. Others confess to a persistent anxiety, as though the ground beneath our common life were quietly shifting. Still others feel a tightening despair they can scarcely name.

Yet beneath these emotions lies something deeper.

We are grieving.

Something we trusted about our world seems to be breaking before our eyes — whether we speak of political turmoil, cultural fragmentation, cruelty toward the vulnerable, or the bitter divisions that now run even through the churches, the sense of loss is real.

And hard.

But we are not alone in history. The early Christians also faced a breaking world. And they continued to pray.

They prayed not because history looked hopeful, but because they had learned that prayer is how the people of God remain human when the world grows monstrous.

In such seasons, the first task of prayer is not composure.

It is honesty.

Before Christians can speak of hope, we must sometimes allow ourselves to grieve what is broken. There are moments in history when restraint becomes a kind of denial, when the faithful response is not to stiffen our resolve but to let the heart break open before God.

The Scriptures are not embarrassed by such tears. The Psalter is soaked with them. “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept,” the exiles sang when they remembered the ruins of Zion. Even the prophets who spoke most fiercely of judgment were often those who had first learned to mourn.

Christ himself did not rebuke sorrow. He sanctified it.

Standing before the tomb of Lazarus, knowing full well that the raising was only moments away, Jesus nevertheless wept. The tears were not a lapse of faith. They were a testimony to love in a wounded world.

Perhaps Christians in our own moment must relearn how to weep.

Let me say this plainly.

Today, we need to cry.

Not as those who despair, but as those who refuse to harden their hearts. Grief honestly expressed before God does something that anger cannot do. It releases the soul from the tight fist of fear. It breaks the cycle by which sorrow becomes rage and rage becomes despair.

Tears, in the strange arithmetic of the Kingdom, are a kind of prayer.

The Franciscan writer Richard Rohr has recently reminded Christians of something the tradition has long known. In his small and thoughtful book The Tears of Things, he writes about what the ancient world called lacrimae rerum—“the tears of things.” Beneath the anger and outrage that often dominate our public life lies something more truthful: sorrow for a wounded world. When Christians allow themselves to grieve honestly, that sorrow can become compassion, and compassion becomes the beginning of healing.

Only then can we return to the prayer Jesus taught us.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

In prosperous societies we often hear these words politely, almost abstractly. Yet in the wilderness they sound different. In the wilderness, daily bread is not a metaphor. It is survival.

Israel learned this when they wandered through the desert, far from the familiar securities of Egypt. There were no granaries there, no markets, no predictable harvests. There was only manna—bread from heaven—falling with the morning dew.

It came just enough for the day.

No more.

The lesson was not merely about food. It was about trust. God was teaching his people to live one day at a time within his providence.

Christians living under Rome understood this instinctively. They did not possess the illusion of control that modern people often assume. Their prayer for daily bread was literal, urgent, and humble. They knew that tomorrow belonged to God.

Perhaps we must learn this again.

When the world seems unstable and the future uncertain, we are invited back into that same wilderness school. The prayer does not promise that history will become easy. It promises that God will sustain his people through it.

Bread still falls in the desert.

“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

This may be the hardest petition of all.

In troubled times, injuries multiply. Words are spoken that cannot easily be forgotten. Communities fracture. Families divide. The temptation to nurse resentment becomes powerful and intoxicating.

Yet Christ places forgiveness at the very center of the prayer that sustains his Church.

This does not mean pretending that injustice is harmless. Nor does it mean abandoning the pursuit of truth or justice. It means refusing to allow hatred to colonize the heart.

The early Christians prayed these words in a world where their persecutors sometimes stood only a few streets away. To pray for forgiveness was not an act of sentimental kindness. It was an act of spiritual resistance.

They would not allow the violence of the empire to reproduce itself inside their own souls.

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

This final petition acknowledges something that sober Christians have always known: evil is real, and it moves through history with terrible force. No generation is spared from encountering it in one form or another.

There is another temptation that arises in troubled times.

When the world begins to feel dark and unstable, Christians sometimes begin searching anxiously for the Antichrist. Every age has done this. Believers scan the horizon of politics and culture, trying to identify the singular figure who must surely embody the final enemy of Christ.

Yet the New Testament speaks about this mystery in a subtler way.

In the First Epistle of John, the apostle writes with striking clarity: “You have heard that antichrist is coming; so now many antichrists have come.” The spirit that opposes Christ, that seeks to mimic divine authority while denying the truth of God, has been present in the world from the beginning.

It appeared in the ancient tyrannies of the world. It showed its face in emperors who demanded worship as gods. Christians living under Nero knew something of that terrible spirit. They felt its pressure in the machinery of empire and the cult of absolute power.

And the Church did not defeat it by successfully naming the Antichrist of the week.

Indeed, there is a deeper mistake hidden in that impulse. When we try too quickly to identify the Beast, we risk giving evil a kind of solidity it does not truly possess. The Christian tradition has always been cautious here. Evil is terribly real in its effects, but it does not have the kind of being that goodness has. It is not a rival principle standing alongside God. It is a distortion, a parasitic shadow cast where truth and love are refused.

For this reason, Christians have often been wiser to remain modest—even agnostic—about the ontology of evil itself. We encounter it existentially, in cruelty and deception and the abuse of power. But to objectify it too confidently, to point and say there it is, is often to misunderstand its nature. Evil moves through human history not as a stable thing we can isolate and destroy, but as a corruption that spreads wherever the light of Christ is resisted.

And so the Church does not overcome it by naming the Beast correctly. She overcomes it by remaining faithful to Christ.

The Church endured it by prayer, by love of neighbor, and by the stubborn refusal to surrender hope.

In recent months many Christians have found help in a small but bracing book by Hanna Reichel, For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional. Reichel reminds believers that faithfulness in anxious times rarely begins with grand gestures. It begins with ordinary acts of fidelity: prayer, hospitality, service, care for the vulnerable, and the stubborn practice of mercy in a frightened world.

Such simple acts may seem small beside the vast machinery of history. Yet they are not small in the Kingdom of God. To feed the hungry, to welcome the stranger, to visit the sick, to comfort the grieving—these are not merely gestures of kindness. They are quiet acts of rebellion against the powers that thrive on fear and cruelty.

More deeply still, they are participation in the prayer we have been given. Each act of mercy is a way of saying with our lives what we say with our lips: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And so the Church continues her work even in troubled times—praying, serving, forgiving, tending the wounds of the world—trusting that the Kingdom often advances in precisely such small and hidden ways.

For the spirit of antichrist is not only found in rulers or regimes. It is found wherever power exalts itself against truth, wherever fear demands loyalty that belongs only to God, wherever human beings are treated not as neighbors but as enemies or disposable burdens.

It is found wherever power is preferred to meekness, wealth to the blessedness of the poor, retribution and cruelty to mercy and righteousness—wherever the face of Jesus is not recognized in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, or the imprisoned.

Such spirits appear again and again across history.

Sometimes they are subtle.

Sometimes—painfully—they become unmistakable.

Yet the Christian task remains the same in every age. We resist the spirit of antichrist not primarily by denunciation but by fidelity: by worshiping the true King, by loving our neighbors, by refusing hatred, and by continuing to pray even when darkness gathers.

For Christ has already entered the wilderness of this world, and the wilderness does not belong to the beasts forever.

But the prayer does not end with fear.

It ends with deliverance.

The Kingdom toward which we pray does not arrive through our mastery of events, nor through the collapse of our enemies. It arrives because God remains faithful to his creation even when human history appears to unravel.

And so the Church continues to pray.

We pray through seasons of confusion.

We pray through seasons of injustice.

We pray through seasons when the world seems ruled by beasts.

We may grieve.

We may lament.

We may even weep for our country and for our churches.

But grief spoken before God becomes prayer.

And prayer keeps despair from having the final word.

For the wilderness is not the end of the story.

It is the place where Israel learned to trust God.

It is the place where Christ himself fasted and prayed.

And it is often the place where the Church rediscovers what faith really means.

Bread still falls in the desert.

And the Kingdom still comes.

The beasts of history rise and roar, and Babylon always seems invincible for a season. The spirit of antichrist passes through every age, sometimes subtle and sometimes terribly plain. Yet the Church does not survive by identifying the beast. She survives by praying in the wilderness, by loving her neighbors, and by trusting that even here—even now—bread still falls in the desert.

Empires pass. Tyrants fade. The loud certainties of every age dissolve like dust on the wind.

But the prayer of Christ endures on the lips of his people, who are never “raptured away,” but remain and stay, and love and pray.

And somewhere, even in the wilderness, the Kingdom is already coming.

* * *

Fr Jonathan is a retired Orthodox Priest who resides in Edenton, North Carolina. He blogs at Jonathan’s Substack.

Posted in Jonathan Tobias, Spirituality | 2 Comments

Glory Looks Like Crucifixion: John’s Gospel and the Crisis of Vision

Posted on 27 February 2026 by johnstamps2020

If Jon McNaughton did not exist, it would be necessary for American civil religion to invent him.
Parody is impossible in 2026.

by John Stamps

Cast out your bread upon the face of the waters, because after many days you will find it. (Ecclesiastes 11:1)¹

I never took Qoheleth’s advice very seriously. But in 1990, I wrote an article for Leaven, a delightful and now-defunct Church of Christ journal. Much to my surprise, delight, and amusement, nearly every week, academia.edu informs me that someone, somewhere, has read it.² Bread cast upon the waters has a curious way of returning.

So I went back and read my younger self. I believed then that I was diagnosing institutional drift. Secularization, Enlightenment assumptions, legalism, and church-growth pragmatism. I was circling something real. But I couldn’t quite name it.

What I could not yet see was the deeper issue. Cultural Christianity is not primarily a political mistake. It is a failure of vision. Or, as St John would say, it was our failure to behold.

The Church’s Crisis of Vision

St John’s Gospel does not begin with a program for reforming the world. It begins with a claim about God’s glory (δόξα/doxa) tabernacling in the midst of the world:

And the Word became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we beheld his glory… (John 1:14)

If you hear the echo of Moses erecting the tabernacle in the wilderness, where the fiery presence of God filled the tent of meeting, then you are hearing correctly. Christian faithfulness begins not with political mastery but with beholding doxa in our midst. The Church’s fundamental act of obedience in the world is not control but paying attention.

Worldliness, then, is not first about musical styles, marketing strategies, or politics. It is about a failure to behold glory. Worldliness is a way of inhabiting creation without perceiving that it is “charged with the grandeur of God… like shining from shook foil.” (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

In John 9, Jesus Christ heals a man born blind. The story is not merely about restored eyesight but about rival modes of vision. The man who was blind ends the story confessing and worshiping Jesus, while the Pharisees, armed with Scripture, authority, and institutional confidence, remain unable to see.

Blindness and sight, in John, are theological realities. The Church becomes worldly not when she engages culture, but when she shares our culture’s blindness.

The Burning Bush shackled in chains

In my earlier life within the American Restoration Movement, we believed we could “just read the Bible for what it says.” We denied interpretation while practicing an aggressively modern literalism. Scripture became a blueprint, a constitution, a quarry of facts. The Holy Spirit was reduced to logic’s assistant. Faith became assent to sufficient evidence.

The irony is severe. In trying to escape culture, we inadvertently baptized Enlightenment epistemology. Secularism stalked our blind side.

But this flattened, one-dimensional view of knowing gravely underestimated Jesus Christ, the light of the world, who transforms not only what we know but also the way we see. Glory permeates his entire life, from the manger to the empty tomb, appearing in unexpected places and in unexpected ways. When Jesus is arrested, he becomes the burning bush, and the garden becomes holy ground.

At the thorn bush, God names himself ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν — “I AM the One who Is” (Exod. 3:14 LXX). In the garden, Jesus simply calls himself ἐγώ εἰμι, without qualification.

When therefore he said to them, “I AM” (ἐγώ εἰμι), they drew back and fell to the ground. (John 18:6)

When Jesus utters the sacred name, they collapse before him. And then they arrest him.

The theophany takes an unforeseen turn. If we expect an Exodus replay, we are sadly mistaken. The I AM handing himself over to crucifixion unleashes no thunder. There are no plagues, no humiliation of enemies at the Sea of Reeds. Instead, the Word made flesh is on the receiving end of the humiliation.

The burning bush now switches direction to the binding of Yitzhak. The One before whom they fell down in fear and awe now stands shackled in chains as their prisoner.

The mysterium tremendum et fascinans (“the fearful and fascinating mystery”) dissolves away. Shock and awe do not translate into obedience. Here, the Gospel overturns every expectation of power. The Shekinah glory allows himself to be seized, bound, and struck. He does not summon legions. He does not resist. Darkness appears to overcome the light. The One who spoke light into being submits to eclipse.

We are not sufficiently scandalized by the Passion narratives. A more honest reaction may be found in the story of the Bishop of Reims recounting Christ’s arrest and torture to Clovis, king of the Franks. Hearing of the crucifixion, Clovis leapt up in anger: “If I had been there with my brave Franks, I would have avenged his wrongs!”

We chuckle at Clovis’s naïveté. But we should also recognize the impulse. We want a God who conquers with vengeance, thunder, and plagues. We want a God who responds to violence with violence. We want a God who is on our side.

Instead, God allows himself to be led outside the city and lifted up on a cross. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.”³

We have yet to fully plumb the ethical and political depths of such a Lord and God. For Jesus does not act like any lord or master the human heart would invent.

Glory Revealed in the Cross

The most devastating correction that Jesus Christ offers to worldly Christianity comes in John 12. As he approaches his death, he announces:

The hour has come that the Son of Man might be glorified. (John 12:23)

The attentive reader of John’s Gospel recognizes that Jesus Christ is glorified, lifted up, and exalted upon the cross. Not despite the cross, but on it.

Any attempt to align the Church too comfortably with cultural triumph, political success, or civilizational dominance must reckon with this. Δόξα is revealed in self-giving love: love that lays down his life for his friends, love given for the life of the world, love that looks like the grain of wheat falling into the earth and dying.

In 1990, I leaned heavily on H. Richard Niebuhr’s famous typology in Christ and Culture, maybe too heavily.⁴ The five options still offer us a useful map.

Christ against culture
Christ of culture
Christ above culture
Christ in paradox
Christ transforming culture

But a map is not the territory.

The temptation within Niebuhr’s “Christ transforming culture” model is subtle. It can smuggle in expectations of visible victory and measurable institutional influence. Glory begins to look political. Faithfulness begins to look like prestige, scale, leverage, and political access.

But in John’s Gospel, glory looks like crucifixion.

The Church does not transform culture by mastering it. She bears witness to a different kind of power. The power of God is revealed in self-giving love rather than domination.

This does not mean the Church retreats into pious irrelevance or that she abdicates responsibility for the common good. The crucified Lord does not sanction apathy. But the mode of our engagement is transformed. We do not beg the principalities and powers for political leverage. We do not secure our place by proximity to the throne. We speak for the suffering when their cries are silenced. We serve the suffering. We suffer with the suffering. We remain faithful. The Church’s authority in the world is cruciform. She persuades rather than coerces. She serves rather than seizes. She overcomes not by domination, but by endurance in love.

Seeing and Believing

John closes his Gospel with a beatitude that speaks directly to our epistemological anxieties, without necessarily soothing them:

Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed. (John 20:29)

This is not a rejection of sight. It is a redefinition of it. Thomas sees and touches. But those who come later must learn to see through testimony. Faith is not consequently irrational. Rather, it is participation in a revelation that exceeds empirical control. It is trust in the witness of those who beheld glory.

The modern project demands verification before allegiance. The Gospel calls for allegiance that opens our eyes. In John, faith is not intellectual capitulation but relational entrustment. It is not the abandonment of reason, but the surrender of autonomy.

And this is why the Church must remain, in some sense, distinct from the world. Not as a defensive sect, but as a community trained in a different way of seeing.

A Colony of God’s Glory

In 1990, I ended my essay provocatively: “Let the Church be a sect.” Ugh. I argued the real question of Christ and culture is not whether the Church ought to be sectarian, but what kind of sectarians should we be? Ugh again.

I would say things quite differently now. Let the Church be a colony of God’s glory, borrowing for a moment Paul’s image of politeuma (πολίτευμα) in Philippians 3:20.

The Church is not a ghetto. She is not a marketing brand. She is not a therapeutic center. She is a people who gather weekly to rehearse a different vision of reality. Where bread and wine become communion, where Scripture is proclaimed as living Word, where the crucified Jesus is confessed as the risen Lord.

The Church does not exist to impress the world but to shine within it. The cross of Christ is not a strategy for civilizational uplift. It is the judgment of the world’s wisdom, especially our religious wisdom. Here, my 1990 instinct still stands: the Church is healthiest when she is not successful, not impressive, not easily integrated into surrounding plausibility structures.

The Christian claim is inescapably particular and therefore disruptive: this crucified Jew is Lord of heaven and earth. That claim will never sit comfortably inside pluralistic relativism. Nor should it.

John’s Gospel ends not with cultural dominance but with testimony:

These things are written so that you may believe… and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:31).

Jesus offers life in all its forms: living water, the bread of heaven, resurrection from the grave, light in darkness, fruit-bearing branches, breath of a new creation. He offers not βίος, the life we cling to, but ζωή, the life of God himself. Life that abides in love, communes with the Father, endures unto the end, and gives itself for the life of the world.

Faithfulness in an Age of Blindness

I conclude with St Thomas’s confession, the high-water mark of Christology in the New Testament. The risen Jesus commands Thomas to stick his finger into the marks of the nails and to thrust his hand into his side. It is not a suggestion. We can cease to marvel that the risen Lord bears the scars of crucifixion unto ages of ages. The Lion of Judah remains forever the Lamb who was slain.

Thomas does what any honest empiricist must do. He tests the claim, and he discovers that the truth he touches stands over him.

My Lord and my God. (John 20:28)

The discerning reader recognizes this is the most radical political statement in the entire Bible. Thomas’s confession is not politically neutral in a world where the emperor was hailed as dominus et deus. If Jesus Christ is Lord and God, no Caesar, no king, no tsar, no president, no tyrant can claim ultimate allegiance. For Christians, Jesus redefines power, kingship, glory, and truth. Jesus does not attack Caesar directly. He doesn’t need to. Instead, he renders Caesar insignificant.

Politics remain in the story. We can’t avoid political questions. They simply become very, very small. They are not our identity.

If the Church seems tempted in every age either to withdraw from culture or to dissolve into it, Jesus Christ offers us another way.

We behold.
We worship.
We bear faithful witness.

The world does not need a more efficient Church. It needs a Church that beholds. A Church that, like the man born blind, can say with disarming simplicity to whoever asks, “I was blind; now I see.” The Church does not master the world; she beholds the Crucified and bears witness. Everything else is blindness.

If Jesus Christ is Lord and God, then glory has been redefined, power has been unmasked, and allegiance has been relocated. The cross stands at the center of the world, not as a symbol of religious devotion but as the revelation of what God is like and what true authority looks like. The Church does not survive by securing relevance, prestige, or proximity to power. She survives by seeing rightly. We behold the Crucified. We worship the Risen One. And having seen his glory, we bear witness in a world still dazzled by lesser lights.

Footnotes

All translations from the Greek and Hebrew Bible are my own, unless otherwise indicated. ↩︎
Stamps, John (1990) “Christ, Culture and the Worldly Church,” Leaven: Vol. 1: Iss. 3, Article 5.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/leaven/vol1/iss3/5 ↩︎
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 360. ↩︎
H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951). ↩︎

Posted in Bible, John Stamps, Sacraments, Theology | Tagged Christ transforming culture, Christology, crucifixion, doxological epistemology, Exodus, glory, Gospel of John, Jesus Christ, Lordship of Christ, Political theology, Seeing and Believing, theology, vision | 13 Comments

Cast into the Scholarly Void

Posted on 24 February 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

I have never considered myself a theologian, much less a scholar; but once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, several journals incomprehensibly published articles by me. Though 20+ years have gone by since those heady days, I thought I’d try it again. I had this idea …

So I wrote my article, decided upon a journal, and then attempted electronic submission through Scholar One. I discovered that in this new world I do not have an identity. One must belong to an institution recognized by the god Ringgold.

I tried to explain to Ringgold that my true identity is hidden in Christ, but it remained unmoved by my pleas. I then invoked the ineffable category “independent scholar,” but Ringgold pitilessly replied: “There are no independent scholars. Besides I know you aren’t a real scholar. You don’t even have a Ph.D. No institution, no membership in the Sage Journals universe. I hereby cast you into the outer darkness. Be gone!”

Suddenly I found myself surrounded by impenetrable blackness.

“So this is the scholarly Void I’ve heard so much about. Hmm, it’s not nearly as bad as I feared.”

Posted in Humor | 11 Comments

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Eclectic Orthodoxy

Let’s Give the Heave Ho to Neo-Palamism

What Do Angels Sing? Recent Reflections on the Pythagorean Harmonia Mundi

Ecumenism Exemplified: Reminiscences of an Anglo-Orthodox Summer-School

Following the Lamb under the Shadow of Babylon

Footnotes

A Home That Is Not a Party: Toward a Sacramental Communitarian Vision

Praying in the Wilderness: The Lord’s Prayer in a Time of Fear and Grief

Glory Looks Like Crucifixion: John’s Gospel and the Crisis of Vision

The Church’s Crisis of Vision

The Burning Bush shackled in chains

Glory Revealed in the Cross

Seeing and Believing

A Colony of God’s Glory

Faithfulness in an Age of Blindness

Footnotes

Cast into the Scholarly Void

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The Church’s Crisis of Vision

The Burning Bush shackled in chains

Glory Revealed in the Cross

Seeing and Believing

A Colony of God’s Glory

Faithfulness in an Age of Blindness

Footnotes

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