Sunday, Jan. 19. First, the good news: I’m getting lots of reading done. I’ve even finished three or four chapters of Ilia Delio’s “Christ in Evolution” (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), and I’ve had plenty of time to read slowly and think about what I’m reading.
Which means I’m beginning to understand her.
This is quite an accomplishment, I think, because Delio has advanced degrees both in the sciences and theology. A Franciscan sister and chair of spirituality studies at Washington Theological Union, she has some very good things to say about the intersection of science, religion and spirituality.
But she writes like an academic, and often, too often, I find myself at the end of a paragraph wondering what in blue blazes I just read.
The bad news: I’m reading Delio because I’m back in the hospital for testing, after an emergency room admission that didn’t leave me enough time to pack carefully before we dashed over to the ER. Delio’s “Evolution” was on the top of a stack of books I hadn’t read, and that’s the only reason I grabbed it. So, without my having planned it that way, I have plenty of time — and reason — for reflection.
This time through “Christ in Evolution” (my second), I’m coming to a new understanding of Christology, an abstract term for theological speculation on the nature of Christ. Delio traces its history from the present back to the first chapter of John — “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Since God created the universe by means of the word made flesh, or Christ, it follows that Christ is somehow present in all of God’s creation. Citing the 13th-century Franciscan theologians Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, Delio says:
The profound reflection of God throughout creation signifies that the created world is a sacrament of God. because the world expresses the Word through whom all things were made (John 1:1), every creature is a “little word” of God. In this respect the whole world is sacramental and incarnational, every aspect of creation is a “little incarnation” of the divine Word. (62)
And this:
[…] the trace (or vestige) [of creation] is the most distant refection of God and is found in all creatures. That is, every grain of sand, every star, every earthworm reflects the Trinity as its origin, its reason for existence, and the end to which it is destined. 61-62)
All of this, in turn, intersects with some other things I’ve been reading lately. And, by a series of logical leaps too convoluted and idiosyncratic to go into here, it helpss me believe in a personal God. In addition to the prolog to John’s gospel, I’ve been wrestling with these data points:
- Einstein famously said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings” (I’m quoting from a Wikipedia collection of “Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein” here.)
- Einstein also said (still quoting the Wikipedia page), ” I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking but by immutable laws.” That’s very close to my way of thinking.
- I’m powerfully drawn to the stories about God in the book of Genesis, which have to me the deep insights and authenticity of the best folklore. I’ll never understand Einstein’s God (and I haven’t read Spinoza), but I can relate to a creator God who walks in the garden with Adam and Eve at the time of the evening breeze.
- Or a God who is willing to bargain with Abraham to 50, 40, 30, down to 10 “righteous [people] in the city.” (It doesn’t work. Not even 10 are found, and Sodom is destroyed.) This God of the Hebrew Bible, “gracious and merciful […], slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love,” is even willing to bicker with a peevish Jonah after sparing Ninevah, with its 120,000 “persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals.”
- In his farewell discourse toward the end of John’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” I take that no so much as a promise of future heavenly bliss as a new way of relating to God — and to our neighbors.
I’m also drawn to another kind of story, one I was powerfully reminded of it as I was reading Ilia Delio in my hospital bed.
It’s a story of Christ, the preexistent Word of God become human (see where I’m going with this?) so human beings could find union with the divine by a process called theosis, which Wikipedia defines as “a transformative process whose aim is likeness to or union with God.”1 In a page on the related concept of divination, Wikipedia explains:
It was inconceivable to Jewish piety. Yet it was adopted in Eastern Christianity by the Greek Fathers to describe the spiritual transformation of a Christian. The change of human nature was understood by them as a consequence of a baptized person being incorporated into the Church as the Body of Christ. Divinization was thus developed within the context of incarnational theology.
Often cited in discussions of theosis is St. Athanasius, who was heavily involved in the fourth-century Christological debates (there’s that word again) that led to the Nicene Creed, affirming “Jesus Christ as ‘the Son of God’, as ‘begotten of […] the essence of the Father’ (quoting from Wikipedia again), and so on and some length. Happily, what he said about union with God was more direct and straightforward. The Wikipedia article on diviniation sums him up:
Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (c. 296–373), stated his belief in literal deification: “The Word was made flesh in order that we might be made gods. … Just as the Lord, putting on the body, became a man, so also we men are both deified through his flesh, and henceforth inherit everlasting life.” Athanasius also observed: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God. [Ellipsis in the original.]
Another data point, and one that’s important to me. I don’t want to go too deep into this rabbit hole, but it reminds me of Tuomo Mannermaa, a Finnish theologian who studyed the early Greeks, including Athanasius, in dialog with Russian Orthodox clerics.2 He maintained that for Martin Luther, “Christ -–and therefore also his entire person and work -– is really and truly present in the faith [of a believer] itself (in ipsa fide Christus adest).” Literally: “Christ is present in faith itself,” in Luther’s original Latin.3
One of Mannermaa’s books, probably his most accessible, is titled Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification, trans. Kirsi I. Stjerna (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005). Now let’s climb back out of my rabbit hole.
A prayer for ‘good courage’
When I was in the hospital, we were in the runup to our annual meeting at my parish church, and Debi was able to call up the annual report on her laptop as she prepared for it. (Spoiler alert: She was elected to the council the following week and chosen to be the coming year’s vice-president.) Our pastor closed her part of the annual report with a lovely Anglican prayer adopted by the ELCA retreat center at Holden Village in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State:
Holden Village Prayer: O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us through Jesus Christ our Lord.
There’s background HERE in Ordinary Time on the Holden Village Prayer, aka the Prayer of Good Courage. I thought it was well-timed while I was in the hospital sweating out a diagnosis. Besides, we always need a bit of good courage.
Notes
1 Wikipedia’s discussion of theosis is scattered across three separate pages: (1) a disambiguation page headed “Theosis,” where I found the definition; (2) a page on “Theosis (Eastern Orthodox theology)“; and (3) a page titled “Divinization (Christian),” which discusses both the Eastern Orthodox and Western Christian traditions.
2 On second thought, I want to duck back into the rabbit hole for a minute. In a thought-provoking post to his blog Just Another Jim, retired minister JIm Nelson has a thought on Mannermaa’s dialog with Orthodox theologians I want to hold onto:
Reading Luther with these new eyes he recognized that Luther was dipping into the same well as the Russians (ie, the Chalcedonian fathers, and especially Athanasius), and Luther was understanding them in much the same way as the Russians. In essence, dialog with the Russians allowed Mannermaa to read Luther in his proper Medieval context rather than the Modern context in which he had been interpreted for generations.In case you haven’t figured it out, I believe Mannermaa was on to something. […]
For future reference, here’s a cite: Jim Nelson, “Some Thoughts on Mannermaa the Ecumenist,” Just Another Jim, Aug. 7, 2026 https://justanotherjim.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/some-thoughts-on-mannermaa-the-ecumenist/.
3 Back down the rabbit hole for another cite. I blogged about the Finnish school HERE (on Nov. 11, 2022) ,in a post headlined “Finns re-examine Luther on justification by faith, the indwelling of Christ and other theological headaches,” and lifted the Mannermaa quote from Ted Peters, emeritus professor of systematic theology and ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
[Uplinked Jan. 28, 2025]
Ordinary Time 