Peeks into a Refreshed Orthodoxy
By John Gavazzoni
The following are little peeks though a tiny window that looks out into the Truth which is in (and which is) Christ Jesus, and which this writer considers representative of a 21st century refreshment of Christian orthodoxy:
1) God IS, and from Him all things have COME TO BE. Those "all things" were created IN Christ, and are sustained and cohere in Him (Col. 1:16, 17). It pleased the Father, that in Him should dwell all fullness (Col. 1:19) (no dimension of emptiness there), and in Him dwelt (particularly) the fullness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 2:9, 10. Therefore, Creatio Ex Nihilo (creation out of nothing) is pure philosophical nonsense. There is no nothing from which to create all things. There is no existentlessness in God, no nothinglessness within fullness, no existential voidness within the fullness which is Deity.
Within Him there is no dimension of nothingness, only fullness. You cannot get "nihilo" out of fullness. Time for (major) repentance re: this matter within the ranks of Christian orthodoxy. Jonathan Mitchell's Translation of the New Testament, amplified, expanded (with alternate renderings), goes to the Greek with uncompromising objectivity: "Because, forth from out of the midst of Him, then through the midst of Him (or: through means of Him), and [finally] into the midst of Him, [is] the whole (everything; [are] all things; or = Because He is the source, means and goal/destiny of all things--everything leads into Him)! By Him (orr: To Him; For Him; With Him) [is] the glory (the manifestation of that which calls forth praise; the reputation; the notion; the opinion; the imagination; the credit; the splendor) on into the ages. It is so (Amen; So be it)!" (Rom. 11:36 JMT) From biblical revelation, supported by the frontiers of science, we know that the all-pervasive Spirit of God is the essence, the substructure, of all things.
2) The cross of Christ did not provide God with a legal basis for forgiving sin. On Golgotha's Hill, God and man met together seminally in Christ and, in Christ, we were assured of the Father's insistent non-accounting of our sins against us. Christ, in His death, did not, as it is popularly expressed and understood, "pay the price," to God, demanded by God, so that He could be free to no longer hold our sins against us. Instead, God, in Christ, "paid the price" to US, which our alienated hearts demanded of Him.
God was, so to speak, out-of-the-gate not reckoning the world's sin against them: "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, NOT imputing/reckoning/counting/accounting their sins against them." (2Cor. 5:19). God made His approach to us in Christ not reckoning our sins against us. He was not waiting for Jesus to die, in order to change His mind toward sinners. To be sure, "without the shedding of blood, there is no remission" (Heb. 9:22), but that remission has to do with the sending away of sin from our hearts of defiled consciences, not sending away from God any holding on to some kind of petulant offendedness toward us on His part.
3) Jesus never absented Himself from this world. From the Greek of the New Testament, it is clear that, by going away, He was concurrently coming to us in a new, deeper, and more intimate Way. As He went, He was concurrently pressing on progressively and salvifically further and further into the depths of our humanness, while at the time, drawing us deeper into the dimensions of His Person. The Greek of the New Testament has us believing INTO Christ, as the faith OF Christ, draws us into the heart of the Father.
While conventional translations, reeking of theological agenda-motivation, have Jesus saying in the opening of Jn. 14, that if He should go away, He will (that is at a later time) come again, the Greek text has it accurately as, if He should journey on, He IS, coming again (that is, His coming again, was concurrent with His going), and that, in the verb form of the Greek, habitually and progressively so. Taking the time also to research literal translations of 1Jn. 5:20, will reward the effort with the understanding that Christ, upon arriving, has continued to remain here with us to give us that understanding which equates to eonian life (life pertaining to the ages; life in the here and now where we need it/Him). The JMT translation of that latter passage is the most precise.
4) There is no such thing as God giving man the freedom of will to turn against Him. All that pertains to enmity toward God, to alienation of mind and heart toward, and disobedience to, God, comes not from freedom of the will, but from the bondage of the will. "Free to sin," is about as pure an oxymoron as can be imagined. When God gives us anything, that anything can only operate in us as we participate in that same "thing" as it exists in God.
So it is with the freedom of the will, or as it is commonly referred to, "man's free will." The human will can only be free as it participates in the freedom of God, and that is a gift from God. To claim, "God has given me a free will, so I can chose to sin if want to," reveals a will, in the darkness and ignorance of its heart, already bound by the chains of sin. In a word, "the Son of God sets us free FROM sin, not TO sin." Fellow believer, the more the gift of freedom operates in you, the more you are released from sin, the more you are delivered from sin, and placed on the Way of righteousness.
5) In my brief, and hardly exhaustive study of Eastern Orthodox theology, I came across the doctrine of "The Energies of God." While I have drunk deeply from some of the wells of that tradition, that doctrine I found to be deeply repugnant to my spirit, though my repugnance flies in the face of the popularity of the doctrine among early and later church fathers. It posits that the essence of God is completely unknowable to men as creatures, completely beyond our ability to grasp God's essence, and we can only know God by His "energies," i.e., by the things that He does among us.
I am going to be so bold as to assert that, as I have read the tortured explanations of that doctrine, I found them to be--rather than explanations of God's knowability or unknowability-- actually what amounts to examples of intellectual contortionism that are really more about inventing a doctrine to excuse our lack of intimacy with God, than giving voice to a mystery. It encourages a relationship with God through questionable "sacraments," ancient liturgy, icons, and the like.
Why this resistance to Jesus' clear definition of eonian life, that is, life right now, in the ages, in flesh and blood creatureliness?: "And this is eonian life, that they might know Thee, the only True God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." (Jn. 17:3). I may not need to explain to the reader that "know" there in the Greek refers to an experiential, intimate knowing, the knowing that comes not from some mere intellectual-level correspondence with God. Instead it is that level of knowing that is integral to nothing less than communion with Him who is our Heavenly Father, as in when "deep calleth unto deep..."
Such knowing traces to being made participants in the communion within Godness itself. Is it too hard for the geniuses of theology to realize that the matter of truly knowing God boils down to God gifting us with His own knowledge of Himself? That begins in the here and now and will extend into, and be perfected by the eternality of God. The above generic quotation of Jn.17:3 has "eonian life" in place of "life eternal" since, as I shall explain below, "life eternal" cannot be at all grammatically supported in the Greek.
6) To ignore simple rules of grammar in translating the original languages of the Bible, followed up by similarly reading and interpreting its text, is not some kind of theologically valid mystical approach, it's a stupid approach, and otherwise intelligent people can fall prey to all of the above. To be lacking in the courage to take a reasonably skeptical attitude toward concepts presumed to be inviolate, unquestionable, and incontrovertible, allows the traditions of men to run roughshod over the Word of God.
Nowhere is this more evident than how conventional translations of the New Testament treat the Greek phrase "zoe aionios." The phrase brings together the noun, "zoe" (a word, dating back to classical times, reserved by the Greeks to refer to life at the level of the sublime and uncommon, a level thought to be the elite turf of the philosophers alone, above life as the unwashed masses knew it and experienced it), and "aionios," the adjective form of the noun, "aion." The Holy Spirit, in turn, in the New Testament, has consistently sanctified "zoe," to refer to that ultimately high and sublime level of life, the life of God.
Pertinent grammatical rule not to be violated: The adjective form of a noun, cannot have greater force than the noun. The adjective in question here, as above, as they taught me in middle school, modifies the noun, "aion." "Aion" simply means "age" when translated into English. One can choose "eon" for "age" if preferred. Since as I've explained, the adjective form of a noun cannot have greater force than the noun it modifies, therefore, "aionios" cannot mean eternal or everlasting, as in lasting into infinity. Yet conventional translations, in the main, insist on translating "zoe aionios" as eternal or everlasting life, and also the Greek phrase meaning "into the ages," as "forever and ever."
While mistranslating "aionios," as it pertains to "zoe," as in "eternal" and/or "everlasting life," is serious enough, in that it leads to a distorted understanding of the administration of God in the ages, to mistranslate it in respect to divine punishment, as in "these shall go away into everlasting punishment," (Matt. 25:46 KJV) screams for major repentance. To do so in translation, in interpretation, in witnessing, in the theological classroom, or in preaching, is to bear false witness against God in a most egregious way.
To give the reader a down-to-earth example of how ridiculous it is to confuse what is limited with that which is limitless, suppose the owner of a feed store, and his customers, have become accustomed to speaking of a peck, or bushel, or barrel, as a "measure." A farmer coming in with that semantic reference established between him and the owner, when asking for a "measure," be it a peck, bushel, barrel, or wagon load for that matter, the feed store owner would not interpret the farmer to mean that he wants to buy a measureless amount of cattle, horse, chicken, or whatever feed. Apart from our made-up example, "measure," cannot ever mean "measureless."
Likewise, "aionios," as a measure of time, cannot mean measureless time. It cannot mean eternal or everlasting, as in "of infinite duration," nor can "aion" in a repetitious phrase in the Greek, mean "forever and ever." The love of "hell" is such, in conventional translation and interpretation, that it makes even "forever" not emphatic enough. The religious establishment, effectively turning away from the God who is love, has turned to a god of reactive vindictiveness, adding "ever" to "forever," to satiate its theological lust.
