The meta-historical fall (also called a metaphysical, supramundane, atemporal, or pre-cosmic fall) is an understanding of the biblical fall of man as a reality outside of empirical history that affects the entire history of the universe. This understanding of the human fall is a minority view among Christian theologians and associated by some with what they consider heresies, such as belief in the pre-existence of souls. [1]
Theologians and philosophers writing about a meta-historical fall in the modern era draw from metaphysical categories in related early patristic thought as well as Christian and Jewish Gnostic systems. [2] [3] The idea was revived by German philosophers such as Jakob Böhme, Friedrich Schelling, and Julius Müller that influenced the English poet and philosopher Samuel Coleridge as well as Russian philosophers and theologians Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Among the church fathers (especially Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius Ponticus, and Maximus the Confessor), the fall was widely seen as a movement into our present biological condition as well as into our current experience of time, and this understanding has been developed by modern scholars such as Sergius Bulgakov who argue that the Fall should not be seen as a historical event but as a "meta-historical" one. [9] [10] [11]
Sergius Bulgakov, in The Bride of the Lamb (published posthumously in 1945), said that "empirical history begins precisely with the fall, which is its starting premise." [12] Noting that his "doctrine of a supramundane fall" was defended in The Burning Bush (1927), Bulgakov described how Adam's original sin, in which we each participate personally, "did not take place within the limits of this world" but outside "at the threshold of our entry into the world" and clarified that "the idea of [human] pre-existence in the sense of a time preceding our aeon was condemned by the Church" as Origenism and should be recognized as "essentially incompatible with a healthy ontology." [13] [14] Baptist theologian David L. Smith critiqued the idea of a meta-historical fall as incompatible with the doctrine of inherited guilt and therefore "unjust" [15] while the Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck rejected this idea of the fall in Böhme and Schelling as a violation of individual free will. [16]
This concept of a meta-historical fall involves the ideas of divine eternity and multiple modes of time within which empirical history is situated and on which it depends to some extent. English theologian E. L. Mascall wrote in 1943 that the Christian tradition has always understood creation as one "non-temporal act of the divine will" through which the entire "temporal created order is maintained in existence." [17] Sergei Bulgakov described several kinds of time as different "modes of creaturely or temporal being" and included "angelic time" (with possible differentiations following the orders of angels). [18] The concept of an atemporal creation and its relation to the fall are also considered by the English philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark [19] and the French theologian Olivier Clément [20] who wrote that "holy fathers, delving into the biblical texts, showed that the Fall represented a cosmic catastrophe, an eclipse of the paradisiacal mode of being and emergence of a new mode of existence in the whole universe" [21] along with David Bentley Hart who discusses the concepts of an atemporal fall and a "fallen time" in two books. [22] [23] With a variation of this concept in the terms of analytical philosophy, Hud Hudson considers in a 2014 book how the hypertime hypothesis might inform the human fall's relation to empirical history. [24]
These conceptions of time and eternity involve the multiple layers or repetitions in the Genesis accounts of creation and fall discussed by patristic authors such as Gregory of Nyssa in On the Making of the Human where Gregory considered Genesis 1:26-27 to move between descriptions of humanity before and after the fall. [25] [26] Theologian and patristic scholar John Behr summarizes Origen as teaching that our beginning in this cosmos and its "fallen time" should be understood as a falling away from the heavenly reality to which we are also invited to return. [9] Maximus scholar Jordan Daniel Wood addresses time in relation to creation and the fall in a 2022 book, including the claim by Maximus the Confessor that the cosmos fell "at the very moment it appeared in existence" along with Adam's fall which occurred "together with coming-into-being." [10]
Anti-Gnostic Saint Augustine of Hippo argued that God did not create the world in time. Rather, time itself, to Augustine, was created by God. [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] Aquinas, responding to the assertion that "creation was not in the beginning of time", stated that "together with time heaven and earth were created." [32] Ruth Coates among others[ who? ] stated that the view that "the finite natural universe [...] has an accidental character [...] being the result of the irrational metaphysical fall of Sophia" involved the assertion that "the finite natural universe is not created ex nihilo." [4]
A meta-historical fall is sometimes considered under the larger category of a cosmic fall, understood as any concept of the fall where the entire natural world is damaged in some way by human sin. [33] Ronald W. Hepburn's 1973 entry on the "Cosmic Fall" in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas described this broader category and had one example of a "pre-cosmic" or "transcendental" fall with Anglican priest and Oxford scholar N. P. Williams who described a fall that occurred in the "life-force" and "during an 'absolute' time" before life differentiated into its many present forms and separate species. [34] [35] Concepts of a cosmic human fall are also often understood alongside one or more angelic falls. Hepburn's entry on the "Cosmic Fall" noted the examples of C. C. J. Webb and Dom Illtyd Trethowan. [36] Sergius Bulgakov considered a separate angelic fall in The Bride of the Lamb. [37] David Bentley Hart appeals to an idea from Maximus the Confessor that humanity is a methorios (boundary, frontier, or priesthood) that connects the physical and spiritual realms so that, in the human fall, all of material existence came under the "dominion of death." [38] Christopher West, in summarizing the Theology of the Body by Pope John Paul II, describes how "'original man' gives way to 'historical man'." [39]
Theologian David Bentley Hart argues that “natural evil is the result of a world that's fallen into death” and says that “in Christian tradition, you don't just accept ‘the world as it is’” but “you take ‘the world as it is’ as a broken, shadowy remnant of what it should have been.” Clarifying that he means an atemporal fall, Hart says: “obviously, wherever this departure from the divine happened, or whenever, it didn't happen within terrestrial history” and “this world, as we know it, from the Big Bang up until today, has been the world of death.” [40] In line with this claim that a human fall outside of our empirical history precipitated our current world into its reduced form of existence, Hart says that our world is not simply the creation of a good God but is also (partially and contingently) the result of creaturely failure, resistance, or rebellion. Hart writes that this idea of an atemporal fall can be taken to the extreme of a fully dualistic gnosticism, but that this dualism can also be seen as provisional so that the good, true, and beautiful in this fallen world is understood as fractured and captive portions of God's creation. [41] In his 2008 book The Groaning of Creation, Christopher Southgate criticizes David Bentley Hart and Clark Pinnock for suggesting that human and angelic rebellions have corrupted our empirical world because "a Christian theology of creation must" take seriously the Genesis 1 narrative that everything came to be through "the fiat of God" and that "divine power has shaped all the matter and mechanisms of the cosmos." [42]
As a wider context to fallenness, Sergius Bulgakov also recognizes a creaturely limitedness and imperfection regardless of any fall. This unfallen and sinless creaturely imperfection provides the context within which Bulgakov describes a separate atemporal human fall involving evil, sin, and death. He writes in The Bride of the Lamb that "creaturely creativity entails not only the possibility but even the inevitability of errors, which, in themselves, are not yet evil but prepare a place for evil" and that this is true of unfallen angels as well as of fallen angels and humanity before and after their fall. [43]
Anglican priest Peter Green wrote a book in 1920 proposing, on the grounds of modern science, that the human fall did not take place in this world but was a "pre-mundane event." [44] [45] Orthodox Christian Bishop Basil Rodzianko argued in a 1996 book that the fall and exile of the first humans from paradise should be understood in connection to the Big Bang and the formation of our current universe. He writes that "all people who have ever lived on earth ... are 'Adam's fragments'" and that we should understand "humanity as a whole" as "on the other side" of the Big Bang while the "'fragments' are on this side of the terrible explosion." [46] [47] [48] [49] [50]
Paleontologist Alexander V. Khramov wrote in 2017 that the Big Bang should not be interpreted as the "first creative act of God" but as the "first cognizable manifestation of the human fall." He was influenced by Russian religious philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Evgenii Troubetzkoy and contended that every Christian writer before Augustine believed that all creation was "altered drastically after man's disobedience." [51] [52] Having the fall located outside of the theorized Big Bang means that Khramov considers the entire history of evolution on earth to follow after the human fall as he further argued in a 2019 book. [53] [54] [55]
In the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy, the demiurge is an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe. The Gnostics adopted the term demiurge. Although a fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily the same as the creator figure in the monotheistic sense, because the demiurge itself and the material from which the demiurge fashions the universe are both considered consequences of something else. Depending on the system, they may be considered either uncreated and eternal or the product of some other entity.
Pre-existence, preexistence, beforelife, or premortal existence, is the belief that each individual human soul existed before mortal conception, and at some point before birth enters or is placed into the body. Concepts of pre-existence can encompass either the belief that the soul came into existence at some time prior to conception or the belief that the soul is eternal. Alternative positions are traducianism and creationism, which both hold that the individual human soul does not come into existence until conception or later. It is to be distinguished from preformation, which is about physical existence and applies to all living things.
Maximus the Confessor, also spelled Maximos, otherwise known as Maximus the Theologian and Maximus of Constantinople, was a Christian monk, theologian, and scholar.
In theology, apokatastasis is the restoration of creation to a condition of perfection. In Christianity, the term refers to a form of Christian universalism, often associated with Origen, that includes the ultimate salvation of everyone—including the damned and the Devil. The New Testament speaks of the "apokatastasis of all things," although this passage is not usually understood to teach universal salvation. The Second Council of Nicaea condemned as heresy any teaching, including certain forms of apokatastasis, that would deny eternal punishment for unforgiven sins, although the interpretations of this and related anathemas are disputed, since some orthodox fathers such as Gregory of Nyssa taught apokatastasis and were never condemned.
The fall of man, the fall of Adam, or simply the Fall, is a term used in Christianity to describe the transition of the first man and woman from a state of innocent obedience to God to a state of guilty disobedience. The doctrine of the Fall comes from a biblical interpretation of Genesis, chapters 1–3. At first, Adam and Eve lived with God in the Garden of Eden, but the serpent tempted them into eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden. After doing so, they became ashamed of their nakedness and God expelled them from the Garden to prevent them from eating the fruit of the tree of life and becoming immortal.
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, pamphleteer, and literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century and in the spiritual renaissance of the early 20th century.
Sophia is a central idea in Hellenistic philosophy and religion, Platonism, Gnosticism and Christian theology. Originally carrying a meaning of "cleverness, skill", the later meaning of the term, close to the meaning of phronesis, was significantly shaped by the term philosophía as used by Plato.
Valentinianism was one of the major Gnostic Christian movements. Founded by Valentinus in the 2nd century AD, its influence spread widely, not just within Rome but also from Northwest Africa to Egypt through to Asia Minor and Syria in the East. Later in the movement's history it broke into an Eastern and a Western school. Disciples of Valentinus continued to be active into the 4th century AD, after the Roman Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which declared Nicene Christianity as the State church of the Roman Empire.
David Bentley Hart is an American writer, fiction author, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and theologian. Reviewers have commented on Hart's baroque prose and provocative rhetoric in over one thousand essays, reviews, and papers as well as twenty-four books. From a predominantly Anglican family background, Hart became Eastern Orthodox when he was twenty-one. His academic works focus on Christian metaphysics, philosophy of mind, Indian and East Asian religion, Asian languages, classics, and literature as well as a New Testament translation. Books with wider audiences include The Doors of the Sea, Atheist Delusions, That All Shall Be Saved, and Roland in Moonlight.
Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, and economist. Orthodox writer and scholar David Bentley Hart has said that Bulgakov was "the greatest systematic theologian of the twentieth century." Father Sergei Bulgakov also served as a spiritual father and confessor to Mother Maria Skobtsova.
Natural evil is evil for which "no non-divine agent can be held morally responsible" and is chiefly derived from the operation of the laws of nature. It is defined in contrast to moral evil, which is directly "caused by human activity". In Christian theology, natural evil is often discussed as a rebuttal to the free will defense against the theological problem of evil. The argument goes that the free will defense can only justify the presence of moral evil in light of an omnibenevolent god, and that natural evil remains unaccounted for. Hence, some atheists argue that the existence of natural evil challenges belief in the existence, omnibenevolence, or omnipotence of God or any deity.
In Christianity, the Devil is the personification of evil. He is traditionally held to have rebelled against God in an attempt to become equal to God himself. He is depicted as a fallen angel, who was expelled from Heaven at the beginning of time, before God created the material world, and is in constant opposition to God. The devil is conjectured to be several other figures in the Bible including the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Lucifer, Satan, the tempter of the Gospels, Leviathan, and the dragon in the Book of Revelation.
Eastern Orthodox theology is the theology particular to the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is characterized by monotheistic Trinitarianism, belief in the Incarnation of the divine Logos or only-begotten Son of God, cataphatic theology with apophatic theology, a hermeneutic defined by a Sacred Tradition, a catholic ecclesiology, a theology of the person, and a principally recapitulative and therapeutic soteriology.
Sophiology is a controversial school of thought in Russian Orthodoxy which holds that Divine Wisdom is to be identified with God's essence, and that the Divine Wisdom is in some way expressed in the world as 'creaturely' wisdom. This notion has often been characterized as introducing a feminine "fourth hypostasis" into the Trinity.
Holy Wisdom is a concept in Christian theology.
The Hypostasis of the Archons, also called The Reality of the Rulers or The Nature of the Rulers, is a Gnostic writing. The only known surviving manuscript is in Coptic as the fourth tractate in Codex II of the Nag Hammadi library. It has some similarities with On the Origin of the World, which immediately follows it in the codex. The Coptic version is a translation of a Greek original, possibly written in Egypt in the third century AD. The text begins as an exegesis on Genesis 1–6 and concludes as a discourse explaining the nature of the world's evil authorities. It applies Christian Gnostic beliefs to the Jewish origin story, and translator Bentley Layton believes the intent is anti-Jewish.
Adam and Eve, according to the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions, were the first man and woman. They are central to the belief that humanity is in essence a single family, with everyone descended from a single pair of original ancestors. They also provide the basis for the doctrines of the fall of man and original sin, which are important beliefs in Christianity, although not held in Judaism or Islam.
Bishop Basil, secular name Vladimir Mikhaylovich Rodzianko was a bishop serving the Orthodox Church in America from 1980 to 1999.
The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? is a short book from 2005 about theodicy and the problem of evil by David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox Christian philosopher and religious studies scholar. This book was published after the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean when Hart wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal that attracted wide attention. Bill Eerdmans, of Eerdmans Publishing, contacted Hart and asked him to expand the column into a book which Hart did. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? has been described by writer and Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge in Christianity Today as "the most useful short treatment of the problem of evil and suffering that we have."
This is a list of books, selected essays, and selected recordings by David Bentley Hart in reverse chronological order.
The Fall was often seen, in the patristic era, as being a transition not only into our present biological state but also into time as we now experience it. As Philip Sherrard has put it, it was a lapse 'into a materialized space-time universe'. ... This kind of understanding of the character of our unfallen state has been explored by modern Orthodox scholars like Sergius Bulgakov, who have suggested that the Fall should be seen not as a historical event but as a 'meta-historical' one.
Evolution with all its suffering happens in the fallen world which is different from the primordial 'very good' creation. This approach is more consistent with traditional Christian teaching on the Fall and Redemption than theistic evolution and seems to offer a better solution for the problem of natural evil. In the twentieth century, the major exponents ... were an Anglican priest, Peter Green, Russian philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, Orthodox bishop, Basil (Rodzianko) and French Orthodox theologian, Olivier Clément.
[Soloviev] in Lectures, 9, again echoing later Schelling, Boehme, and Gnostic systems both Christian and Jewish, the finite natural universe is not created ex nihilo, but has an accidental character, being the result of the irrational metaphysical fall of Sophia following her illegitimate assertion of autonomy from God. Fallen human spirits (expressions of Sophia in this world) find themselves enslaved in crude and, above all, mortal material bodies: thus, the task of deification concerns the spiritualization precisely of matter, the flesh, rather than the whole human being. Indeed, that human beings can cooperate with God in this task, in Lectures, is predicated on their natural participation in the divine Sophia.
In Julius Müllee the scholasticism was carried so far as to revive the ancient Gnostic theory of the fall of man before all time, a theory which found no favour amongst his theological friends.
The vision of Divine Wisdom, of Sophia, which Bulgakov took over from Soloviev. Sophia, Wisdom, is both associated with humanity at present and represents the goal of humanity. We possess it and possess it not yet in full. It is a very complex notion that draws on most various sources – Biblical, Jewish, Gnostic, Theosophical – but in Philosophy of Economy Bulgakov relies in particular on Schelling's treatise on Human Freedom (1809). Schelling's work describes a cosmic or metaphysical 'fall', of which the Biblical fall was an expression. This fall provides, in turn, humanity with the task of overcoming it and restoring the unity, and wisdom is the principle that enables this restoration. There is a 'heavenly, timeless Sophia and an empirical Sophia'. Sophia becomes thereby the 'living link between God, man, and nature' – an idea that serves their unification.
Soloviev again offered an alternative treatment of the Christian topic of the fall similar to his theology of history, he did not integrate it into the biblical story of the fall, but, firstly, made World Soul the subject to fall and, secondly, placed this event prior to the creation of human beings (Muller 1951. pp 93-123). The cosmic and historical processes are about the strife of the fallen Sophia or Soul to reunite with God through man and through nature. ... In elaborations on the relationship between Sophia, man and the world, Soloviev follows Böhme. Before him, the German thinker had found a confirmation of his view of Sophia as God's plan for the world or 'heavenly humanity' in the Old Testament texts on Divine Wisdom. Just as the world is a projection of Sophia in nature, man is a reproduction of Sophia. But since the fall of man and the world, both have ceased to be Sophia's image, and have instead become subject to Sophia's rival.
And of the mystical thought of Boehme he said, "That the system is capable of being converted into an irreligious PANTHEISM, I well know. But at no time could I believe that, in itself and essentially, it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed; and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary." The only explanation for the attitude of Coleridge in the note on Boehme as well as throughout the Philosophical Lectures is not that his opinions had changed, but that he had become extremely sensitive toward the charges of mysticism and metaphysics which could a prior imperil his campaign of renovation. ... The meta-historical fall of the Spirits and the consequent redemptive act of Creation were the first two great mysteries. ... The origin of evil Coleridge attributed to a metahistorical fall of the Spirits. Even a third time he teased his readers in the Aids to Reflection saying that "I might have added to the clearness of the preceding views if ... I could have entered into the momentous subject of a Spiritual Fall or Apostacy antecedent to the formation of man - a belief the scriptural grounds of which are few and of diverse interpretation but which has been almost universal in the Christian Church." That he might have pulled together several loose threads purposely left dangling in his exposition of Original Sin had he "entered into the momentous subject of a Spiritual Fall" is no doubt true.
Sergius Bulgakov was perhaps the first major Orthodox theologian to wrestle in depth with the relationship of evolution to the traditional theology of creation, Paradise, and the Fall. In the Bride of the Lamb (1945), Bulgakov affirms both the veracity of the biblical story and a "certain approximate and relative truthfulness" of the scientific picture of the world's development. He reconciles the apparent contradictions between these two approaches to the world and especially to the appearance of humanity by postulating that the events described in Genesis belong not to empirical history, but to "meta-history", "beyond the limits of this world" and that consequently no empirical traces of Eden or primal human perfection can be found.
In order for human beings to be held responsible for their sins, they must have committed them. A meta-historical Fall would be unjust. The origin of sin in the human race must be a space and time historical event.
Olivier Clément in "Le sens de la terre (Notes de cosmologie orthodoxe)", Contacts 19 (1967), pp. 252–323, as translated by Alexander V. Khramov.
The Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that ... reduced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends. ... Something far more glorious than the pitiable resources of fallen time could ever yield.
The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death. ... It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the "powers" and "principalities" of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender.
Gregory of Nyssa did not consider the creation of Adam in the divine image (Genesis 1:26-27) to be about a historical person but about a "fullness of humankind" understood "in a single Body."
We must, then, examine the words carefully: for we find, if we do so, that that which was made in the image is one thing, and that which is now manifested in wretchedness is another. God created man, it says; "in the image of God created He him" Genesis 1:27. There is an end of the creation of that which was made in the image: then it makes a resumption of the account of creation, and says, "male and female created He them." I presume that everyone knows that this is a departure from the Prototype: for in Christ Jesus, as the apostle says, there is neither male nor female. Yet the phrase declares that man is thus divided.
As Heisenberg remarks, the idea that time does not stretch far back for all eternity but was created with the universe was anticipated in the fifth century by St Augustine. There is thus a scientific counterpart to the creation ex nihilo of Christian tradition.
C. C. J. Webb ('Problems in the Relations of God and Man', 1911, p. 270) saying that 'superhuman evil wills exist and have injuriously affected the environment of humanity as a whole' as well as Dom Illtyd Trethowan could ('An Essay in Christian Philosophy', 1954, p. 128) from a Roman Catholic standpoint saying that 'sin ... started with the angels' as a result of their fall and that this, 'we may suppose, was a disorganization of the material universe, over which, according to a reasonable theory, the angels had charge'.
The fall of part of the angels does not change anything in the original fullness of this world. ... Even though we have no direct knowledge of God's commandments in the angelic world prior to the fall of Satan, we can suppose that the angels knew an analogous situation 'under the law,' where their freedom was put to the test, a freedom that would cease to exist in the later state of spiritual maturity and experience. The holy angels are now beyond good and evil: freedom as choice has been transcended, for their choice has been made.
Very few of those who live at the upper periphery of the Indian Ocean doubt that, among the many supernal powers keeping watch over those waters—benign or capricious, transcendent or local, omnipotent or merely mighty—there is at least one who is able to govern their tides and turbulences and to keep the sea within its appointed bounds. ... Enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God. ... We live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, that the universe languishes in bondage to the "powers" and "principalities" of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the Kingdom of God. ... It is a patristic notion (developed with extraordinary profundity by Maximus the Confessor) that humanity was created as the methorios (the boundary or frontier) between the physical and the spiritual realms, or as the priesthood of creation that unites earth to heaven, and that thus, in the fall of man, all of material existence was made subject to the dominion of death. To say that God elects to fashion rational creatures in his image, and so grants them the freedom to bind themselves and the greater physical order to another master—to say that he who sealed up the doors of the sea might permit them to be opened again by another, more reckless hand—is not to say that God's ultimate design for his creatures can be thwarted. It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that the final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simply as a paedagogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory.
[Starting at 1:13:08:] Moral evil has no essence of its own, so it can only exist as a fabrication of the will continuing to will defectively. And according to tradition, even natural evil is the result of a world that's fallen into death. Somehow, that too follows from the creation of moral evil. So in Christian tradition, you don't just accept 'the world as it is.' You take 'the world as it is' as a broken, shadowy remnant of what it should have been. But obviously wherever this departure from the divine happened, or whenever, it didn't happen within terrestrial history. Now, plenty will argue: 'Oh no. It really happened within history.' No, it really didn't. This world, as we know it, from the Big Bang up until today, has been the world of death.
What might seem most offensively or perhaps risibly eccentric about this book, to certain theologically literate readers at least, is the subtle (or not so subtle) current of what looks like a slight sympathy for Gnosticism running through it. I admit that it is my conviction that there are certain notable respects in which ancient Gnosticism was far nearer to the religious vision of the New Testament than are many now well-established forms of Christian belief (which does not of course preclude the opposite also being true). If nothing else, the Gnostics of the early centuries inhabited the same imaginative and spiritual universe as the earliest Christians: they no more than Paul took the principalities and powers and elements of this world as myths or allegories; they no less than Paul proclaimed themselves free from the tyranny of the "god of this world;" and, like Paul or the author of John's Gospel, the Gnostics understood spiritual liberation as something subversive of the order of "this cosmos;" a manumission from the sway of the ancient terrestrial and celestial powers, a glorious escape from the kingdom of death. Any Christian who has not felt at least an occasional stirring of the pathos of Gnosticism—at the thought, for instance, of a small girl weeping in torment in the darkness—and of a rage against the fashion of this world, and of a mysterious yearning for another and perfect world, at once strange and familiar, cannot in all likelihood fully appreciate the spiritual and moral sensibility of the New Testament. But slight sympathy should not be mistaken for profound admiration. Despite the brave attempts of some of Gnosticism's modern apologists to treat its various systems as ingenious allegories, Gnosticism's chief distinctions (apart from its visible streak of adolescent callousness toward those who are not among the elect) were its lack of metaphysical sophistication, its consequent reliance upon absurd mythologies, and the philosophically incoherent dualism to which these things led. There is nothing in the literary remains of Gnosticism that approaches the subtlety, speculative profundity, or symbolic genius of the Gospel of John, for instance, nothing that demonstrates any awareness of the logically necessary unity of being, no hint of an understanding that everything that exists must flow from the same creative source, the same transcendent Logos, and must therefore be essentially good and inalienable from the God who made it.
Creaturely being allows the existence of different possibilities, which are not equivalent, even if their integral gives a positive and desired result. The mere presence of different possibilities already signifies that none of them are infallible, or perfect, that all are in a state of seeking. Perfection is what is sought by, not given to, creatures, who do not know the chef d'oeuvre, and this is not only because of sin but primarily because of creatureliness. It is precisely in this sense (in what other?) that Scripture speaks about angels: "His angels he [God] charged with folly" (Job 4:18). The service of the holy angels, free of evil and sinfulness, can contain errors and deficiencies simply as a result of creaturely limitedness and therefore imperfection. This limitedness of creatures and the resulting non-infallible state in the absence of the chef d'oeuvre are also manifested in creaturely creativity. Even if evil had not entered into the world, this possibility and presence of creaturely errors and imperfections would have been inevitable. Of course, we have in mind here precisely the creaturely aspect of the world's becoming, but the latter is not limited to this aspect. It also includes the divine participation of providence with its infallibility in relation to creaturely errors and limitedness. Thus, from the side of nature, creaturely creativity entails not only the possibility but even the inevitability of errors, which, in themselves, are not yet evil but prepare a place for evil. In itself, the creativity of creatures is the work of God's love and condescension, which entrusts to the limited powers of creatures the fulfillment of God's will "both in heaven and on earth.
On one of his visits to Russia in 1990, he spent almost half a year at the Holy Trinity Sergius Monastery, where he conducted research at the library and delivered a course of lectures. As a result of this stay, he completed his book "The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Holy Fathers" (published in 1996).
{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)Khramov's book was reviewed twice in 2019 for the Russian journal Issues in Theology by Archpriest Belomytsev I. A. Oleg Mumrikov (Volume 1, No. 1) and by Alexey Gaginsky (Volume 2, No. 2). Gaginsky says that Khramov's book 'proposes a middle way called alterism' between 'fundamentalist creationism and theistic evolutionism.'