As I read chapter 1 of David Bentley Hart’s The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology, I find it important to grasp why I’m more drawn to a dualistic Divine/created ontology. It is, indubitably, due to my own experience with God. Of being on “this side”, surely of unbelief, but beyond that, of profound ignorance to the religious drive and the power of symbols which produce it. The leap of faith was not just unbelief to belief, but the intuited (perhaps revealed) apprehension of the _here and the there, the mundane and the Sublime, the profane and the Sacred, the created and the Divine, and all the cosmic enormity entailed thereafter. The perception of God as God, the “not-this” and the “not-that”, but impossibly, unmistakably the Good; this qualia being properly called the state of faith. The inherent duality in the conversion experience, and the revelatory unveiling of analogous dyadic contrasts, are self-similar.

But further beyond, I understood the beauty of the Incarnation with respect to this newly internalized duality, as a harmony so graciously, so mercifully manifest in the Person(a) of Christ, in all the motifs, epithets, and signifieds embodied through Him by virtue of either full Divinity and full humanity: that the identity of Christ be a microcosm of absolute totality, “Christ is all and in all” (Colossians 3:11). This coming to faith in the Gospel does not only evince the great, all-encompassing rift between the One and man, a despairing proposition in itself (James 2:19), but at once the apex instantiation of reconciliation in the God-man Christ Jesus: that faith be commensurate with the means requisite of salvific efficacy in Christ, as that leap is no lesser miracle than God become man, than man be made divine. The acquisition of faith and salvation are mythopoetically isomorphic, and hence fittingly, interweaved as gradations of the same motif. These follow a clear phenomenological hierarchy of belief, understanding, then union, the enrapture of the subject within the fullness of this revelation being proof in itself of its sublimity, its totalizing, self-sufficient Truth of having beheld Truth.

That being said, I have also felt disgruntled by how elusive, how fickle this understanding was over time, outside bouts of euphoric Understanding, if only because of how little credence it gives to ancient, well-trodden experience of God’s immanence, God’s “here-ness”, which as Hart writes, is irrevocably transformed by the anti-Arian, post-Nicene framework of a fundamental border between God and creature:

Neither the difference between creatio ex nihilo and mere demiurgy nor the difference between divine begetting and divine making could any longer remain comfortably uncertain; much less could those two differences remain inextricably entangled with one another. In every sense, the interval between the “there above” and the “here below”, which had for so long been a spacious realm of inexact and relative degrees of the divine and natural, now had to contract into an inviolable line of demarcation.¹

This new scheme did gift us the understanding of God as the interior intimo, being so metaphysically anterior to creation as to be unboundedly close to it². But, this in turn required innovations like the energies of Neo-Palamism to “bridge” the remaining gap, occupying intermediary roles previously held by the angelomorphic deuteros theos³ (at other times, the Ruach Ha’Qodesh, or the Shekinah)⁴. These two, Logos and Spirit, having been subsumed into the Divine identity, the Divine ousia, could no longer be appropriately (or at least, correctly)⁵ construed as maintaining this traditional mediatorship, the one which made the Trinity idea plausible historically. God becomes more of an abstract yet necessary “ground of Being” in His most immanent; this demarcation— the alienating rift between us and God qua God —is preserved.

To an extent, this serves a Christocentric understanding beautifully: The God-man is the sublimest mystery, a productive paradox, a wonderful impossibility internalized in validation of all absurdities of faith. Christ thusly encompasses the gamut of devotional archetypes, e.g. the ever-caring Good Shepherd and the all-powerful Pantocrator. All human grief, anger, pain; and all Divine splendor, majesty, authority are thereafter conveyed via the only Image of the Invisible God (Colossians 1:15).⁶

This however uproots an entire generation’s schemata of the immanent God. Of all the ancient theological ideas swept up in this radical separation of God and man, I personally find the notion of the angelomorphic “pre-Incarnate Christ” to be a most direct victim of the Logos’ newly unqualified deity, its absence necessarily appointing the Incarnation as the most consequential of God’s modes of immanence. In the work of St. Justin Martyr, indicative of early Church Logos Christology, his subordinationist exposition grounds the mysterious Angel of the Lord, further all Old Testament theophanies, all therefore Christophanies. Christ’s intercessory functions as the Word of God (both properly God and also His quasi-divine messenger) and as the human Messiah are left inextricably enmeshed.

In the advent of the Nicene creed, the primitive Logos’ inherent immanence is interpreted away and even labeled outright heresy, especially when appearing in the teachings of anyone not canonized pre-300s. Christ’s humanity is then increasingly clung to as God’s “here-ness”. To not callously dismiss Logos theologies like St. Justin’s that grant the Logos a distinct intermediary role as Logos, one must now “stretch” Christ’s humanity across time and space, a glorified humanity able to present itself before its creation in time, in service of the Divine will. An enjoyer of mystery, I see no need to interpret away the possibility of such extra-spatial or extra-temporal feats by the risen Lord (John 20:19). Nevertheless, any scheme which necessitates a time-traveling man, or pressing still, a requisite mechanism of Christ’s “human energies” (whatever that means in a truly human way) to explain any non-visionary, tangible or even anthropomorphic presence of God, is very strange!

It is a common, recurring understanding across all religions, that there is a sense in which God can be known to us, even outside the wonder of Christ’s Incarnation, as God. Some, like Hart, go the extra mile and posit a monistic understanding, in the vein of Neo-Platonic emanationism. I am not expressly opposed to this, but I am skeptical. I pray that Hart is able to tread the lines between tapping into this intuition, and disregarding the primacy of Jesus in mediation with God, as Logos, as King, Prophet, and Priest, as Christ. All I can say with certainty is that God Himself is an inexhaustible paradox, at once nearest and furthest, light and darkness, present and absent, inside and outside, part and whole, first and last. That then these be One, would be a mystery fitting of God most of all. §