RESPONSE TO P. NEGRUT'S
CRITIQUE OF ORTHODOXY

© 2003 by Orchid Land Publications

[20030609; tables added subsequently; last updated 20030612]

     Commentary on Paul Negrut’s "Searching for the true Apostolic Church: What Evangelicals should know about Eastern Orthodoxy" CRI statement DE177

http://www.equip.org/free/DE177.htm (This article first appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of the Christian Research Journal)

In the first section—"Orthodox faith or faiths?"—Negrut speaks of many differences between the Orthodox and Protestants other than belief: organization (lumping the so-called Orientals together with the Orthodox), cultural differences, etc. Differences of belief/faith get dealt with in later sections. Negrut speaks of the shortcomings of the Orthodox. When he approaches our "different" theologies, he seems initially to be more influenced by HOW our beliefs have been transmitted (in different ethnic constituencies) than he is concerned with WHAT they say. In addressing "transformations in the process of transmission and interpretation," he fails to tell us whether it is right to distinguish these from developments built on, and remaining consistent with, teachings that have gone before. Paying close attention to transmission would be, aside from the non-Chalcedonian traditions, useful in examining Orthodox doctrine only in one instance—the so-called "Latin captivity" of Orthodoxy—since the only formative divergence from the Patristic consensus in Orthodoxy has been due to the occupation of the Balkans by the Turks for over four centuries. As a result of their refusal to allow the publication of Christian writings, books were sent to Venice to be printed. There they were subject to Latin censorship.   
     Not only were un-Orthodox notes added to the Pedalion or Rudder (containing the canons); 

the Latin authorities also censored out of the calendar the Eighth and Ninth Orthodox Ecumenical Synods and the Saints connected with them—St. Photios the Great and St. Gregory Palamâs. As for development in general, a Protestant with a static view of religion will ex hypothesi have as little regard for the revelatory rôle of created time and tradition as for the soterial rôle of created matter; e.g. incarnation, resurrection of the body, material vehicles of Grace. But then, the presuppositions of a Gnostic world-view are hardly suitable for appreciating Orthodoxy.  Negrut’s comments concerning the Middle Ages seem to make no difference between the East and what took place in the West from 476 through the early centuries of the second millennium.

As for the Bible, it should be obvious to anyone that the words of Scripture have an import in one paradigm that differs from their import in other paradigms. Without the Fathers to interpret the Bible, any individual—a Luther, a Calvin, or just Joe Blow—can determine that Scripture means whatever one inclines to say it means. (The word for "wine" is "grape juice" in the passage where Christ made it from water; "wine," where it drunkenness is disparaged.) When we consider the wholly incompatible understanding of Grace among Eastern Christians, the Latins, and Protestants, it is clear that words cannot stand on their own, i.e. in the absence of an interpreter. Negrut wastes a lot of verbiage because of his apparent failure to understand this. It is naïve to speak of Scripture as though it had a fixed (paradigm-free) meaning. Since Mediævals like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus and Renaissance interpreters like Luther and Calvin had lost continuity with the Greek-language Apostolic paradigm, despite they fact that a few of the latter could read Greek. They had received the intellectual forms of their thinking from Semitic Córdova; it has also been suggested that Augustine had at least one Punic parent. The scholastics’ (the word was used for a lawyer in Greek) view of energy (actus) was, or soon became, the concept of a STATE or form of actualized reality. The import of enérgeia and its cognate verb and adjective is of course not a state; cf. Philp. 2:12-13. The scholastics were consequently unable to interpret Scripture except in the confines of the un-Orthodox thought world of their own times. Since Negrut accepts (in the Summary at the beginning of his article) that East and West have different paradigms, it’s strange that he doesn’t apply this understanding to his account of Orthodoxy. And why has he bothered to comment that the Orthodox do not consider everything in the tradition to be of equal importance?

In the next section, titled "East and West: Two approaches to theology," one might antecedently have expect Negrut to comment on the rôle of matter, energy, and time in non-Gnostic religions. He might have been expected to comment on the ontological view of Fall and Salvation in the East as opposed to the juridical understanding of the Fall and Salvation in the West. . . . Well, let’s see. He sets out from this statement: "The Western theological paradigm is creation-fall-redemption, while the Eastern is creation-deification [sic], or theosis"—as if the Fall were not part of Eastern thinking! He concedes right off that it was "under the influence of Augustine’s interpretation of the Apostle Paul" that "the West developed its theology on the legal relationship between God and humankind" and correctly continues: "Moreover, the Protestant Reformation emphasized the legal (forensic) aspect of humanity’s relationship with God in its doctrines of the Fall and sin (transgression of God’s law) and Salvation (Christ’s fulfilling the Law in place of sinners and taking upon Himself its just penalty in their behalf so His own righteousness could be legally transferred [imputed] to them)." And so on. Negrut makes no mention of the Anselmic premise that God or His justice requires a punishment before forgiveness is extended. He quotes Lossky on the apophatic approach of Orthodoxy’s "mystical approach to theology," Ah, that mystifying word mystical. To understand Orthodoxy, the term mysteric more properly designates the incarnational or "sacramental" marriage of Grace with material vehicles that is so basic to the Orthodox worldview—and so alien to Negrut’s fellow-Protestants. They have little if any room in their essentially Gnostic outlook for the possibility, not to speak of the necessity, of material vessels of Grace in their thought world. Indeed, the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ are simply incidental to his (juridical and propitiatory, rather than latreutic and expiatory) Crucifixion.. Negrut does not tell the reader that the Orthodox understanding of Salvation posits a mirror-image reversal of an ontological Fall: If the Fall was the loss of the Assimilation to God (Gen. 1:26; the energy formation of ‘omoíōsis tells us that the Assimilation energized the faculties or dynámeis of the eikón or Image of God), the restoration of the Assimilation is Salvation. (Note that the LXX, translated at Alexandria by Jews in the middle of the third century before Christ, is over a millennium older than the existing Hebrew text, where the energy interpretation is not evident.)

That the Assimilation energizes the faculties (lógos or "reason" and proaíresis "freechoice" or the Damascene’s thélēsis, i.e. the "rationality and freedom" that Negrut later correctly says St. John of Damaskós ascribed to the Icon or Image of God in human essence) and thus enables them to function in ways (as laid out in Philp. 2:121-13) that are pleasing to God is something that Negrut does not make clear.. This is so even though Negrut refers to St. Maximos (see below), who was not the first to teach that the Fall is the (ontological) loss of the Assimilation and that Salvation is its (ontological) restoration—which culminates in the Vision of uncreated Light (Energy) and théōsis.  [A page with St. Maximos's sentiments about the Assimilation to God is in the planning; it will be in English translationand linked here.]

If the creation is logikós "intelligible" precisely because it has been created by the LOGOS "Reason" (the Apostle John) and SOPHIA "Wisdom" (the Apostle Paul), this of course goes unmentioned in the description of Orthodoxy thinking about creation. The cosmos would be "wordy" (logikós would be twisted to mean that) if the Creator had been a Word (when LOGOS is so mistranslated in John 1:1,3. Also missing in Negrut’s account is the Orthodox understanding that (cf. John 8:58 and Luke 1:43) Jesus is YHWH.

Of course, "God is a Mystery." But it would have been more opportune to have said that His uncreated, infinite Essence is incomprehensible to finite human reason; and that His Being beyond being is ontologically imparticipable by a created being. Only through the revelatory and other energizations of the divine Nature can we obtain a glimpse of what He is like. Revelation tells us what God is not and thus gives us (or at least our noûs, on which see below) an inkling of the Being beyond being that He is. Negrut keeps rendering théōsis as "mystical union"—with no reference to what mystical means in an ontological framework and the usual confusion of Deificiation (apothéosis, becoming God in essence) with Orthodox Divinization (thëōsis in the uncreated Energies). .

With such misunderstandings, one cannot expect much from the discussion of the Trinity in the next section on "The doctrine of God." What one misses is a stress on the prime importance of the Trinity in Orthodox thinking and praying. As there is no need to repeat my remarks in the foregoing, I will simply point out that our different thought worlds lead the Orthodox to understand the Father to be the Source of all being (uncreated and created) and the Augustinian West to understand the Unity of God to reside in the one divine Essence. (For other details, see

http://orlapubs.com/AR/R140.html.)

This short section has little to take exception to except the writer’s failure to reveal why the details (e.g. the Filioque) are what they are. There was not only the political motive discussed by Protopresvyter John Romanides but also a difference between Augustine’s thought world and that of Orthodoxy.

In the section on "The doctrine of creation," Negrut writes about the "fact that the Orthodox Church never systematized its doctrine of the relationship between the Creator and creation." One can only wonder why he has never read those books about the "cosmic Christ." The Orthodox teach that the Incarnation transfigured the entire cosmos. The Incarnation united created human nature with uncreated divine Nature. It was Christ’s Glorification, His Resurrection, that actualized the potential of that union, once the Crucifixion had removed the obstacles in an act of perfect Worship: Christ’s worshipers could not be re-created and reborn as members of His risen Body sharing His uncreated Life (2 Pet. 1:4). I venture to think that some of this section is garbled, but I refrain from going into niggling detail, as the author seems to be trying very hard (more or less within his own framework) to understand Orthodoxy, for which he deserves credit—as he does for granting that different paradigms exist in East and West. It can be added that much Orthodox literature is of little help to him in this effort.

We note that Negrut holds that it was from Neo-Platonism that Maximos got the idea that "every created thing is endowed with its ‘energy’ or movement." This of course comes ultimately from Aristotle. Energy is not kínēsis "motion"; in Aristotle’s thinking, it is something distinct. (Lonergan claims that Aquinas taught a first and second actus—apparently kínēsis.) But without telling us that in Orthodoxy Grace is ontological—uncreated Energy, God’s Life—Negrut leaves it open to misinterpret Grace as the Latin "created, non-energetic" habit of the created soul taught by the Latins or as the Protestant imputation of virtual righteousness (to those who in truth remain sinful). I get the feeling that the author hasn’t been able to integrate (systematize) what he has read, for which he can be forgiven. But if one is to cite St. Maximos, as Negrut does, one should note the Confessor’s view of the Fall and Salvation as being respectively the loss and restoration of the ‘omoíōsis or Assimilation to God. For it not to be lost again, worshipers need to embrace what Philp. 2:12-13 (quoted near the beginning of this piece) teaches..

We come now to the section titled "Was Adam a child or a perfect man?" Negrut misspeaks when he asserts that "The biblical account of creation of man after [archaic for "according to"] the image and the likeness [italics in the original] of God"; it has been shown that likeness is not a valid translation of ‘omoíōsis. Negrut does point out that rationality and they are "two different aspects [sic] of human beings," correctly quoting St. John of Damaskós; he says that St. John "believed ‘the expression according to the Image [italics in the original] indicates rationality and freedom, while the expression according to the likeness [sic; italics original] indicates assimilation to God through virtue." GREAT! Someone writing in English finally sees that Assimilation to God is what Salvation is! Thumbs up for Negrut! It’s too bad that he did not recognize that Assimilation translates ‘omoíōsis. He goes on to quote from Bishop Kallistos (Ware) that "However sinful a man may be, [s/]he never loses the Image; but the Likeness [sic; he good bishop has got to mean Assimilation] depends upon our moral choice, upon our ‘virtue," and so it is destroyed by sin." The passage from the word "depends" to the end strikes me as distorting what the Assimilation to God is, viz. what energizes [with the uncreated Energy of Grace] the specifically human capacities (dynámeis) of human essence, what enables worshipers of the Trinity to serve and please God. "Moral choice" and "virtue" seem too created-human to fill the descriptive need. I would prefer: ". . .; but the Assimilation is Grace, the uncreated Life of God that energizes the capacities of the human essence of worshipers of the all-holy Trinity to act in ways that are pleasing to the divine Majesty."

While "moral choice" and "virtue" are not wrong, they do seem open to being misunderstood as what the West calls Pelagianism—a concept that is hard to.make sense of in the Eastern paradigm for reasons that by now should be obvious: The Augustinian choice between all Grace or all human (Pelagianism) is not the choice offered in Eastern Christianity. The Eastern choice is between the ontological Assimilation to God (the Holy Spirit’s energizing our reason and freechoice to please God and ultimate théōsis), which cannot be lost without degrading us to the status of the animals, and an ontological deprivation of the Energies of Grace, which can be lost. Contrast the volitional or moral choices in Protestantism—being sinful but yet being treated as righteous by God vs. being righteous through one’s own willed efforts. Luther taught that faith is will-based—fiducia "confidence, trust, loyalty." That ontology is crucial in the Orthodox outlook but no part of the Protestant thought world is what Negrut should have stressed . . . but does not even mention.

When Negrut deals with Eirenaios’s likening of Adam to a religious child, innocent but immature, we again find the mistranslations deification and similarity. [The latter would be ‘omoiótēs in Greek; St. Eirenaios’s text probably exists only in Latin at this point [I haven’t checked]; if it uses the word similitudo, that would in itself block a .proper understanding.) Anyone can see that likeness (which translates Latin imago) is no different from an eikón or "image"; and that the Fathers were not speaking of synonyms when they made an ontological distinction between eikón "image" and Assimilation!

The paragraphs that follow in Negrut’s account perhaps represent as accurate an account as someone coming from his premises could make it. I would, however, observe that, while "the negative consequences of sin are many, including mortality," the Orthodox Fathers taught that God did not impose death on humanity but permitted satan to impose death to prevent sinning’s being perpetuated. Negrut refers to the "minimalist view of sin" among Orthodox theologians. He must have read few of them; the statement has got to be due to the Orthodox rejection of the Western idea that newborns bear Adam’s guilt, as there is no other evidence to account for this manner of speaking. Had he said that our view of Salvation is mimalist, who would deny that it lacks the West’s complex juridical apparatus of satisfaction, atonement, propitiation, redemption, justification, legal adoption, sanctification, and virtual union with the uncreated Essence (or any unity with the ontologically imparticipable Essence).

It is clear that Negrut is unable, in his vastly different thought world, to understand ontological separation from the Assimilation to God or to distinguish that from the choices offered in Protestant thinking—all Grace or no Grace; all God and nothing human, or the converse. I don’t mean that he cannot understand synergy, a co-energizing in which the ultimate Energy comes from the Holy Spirit and the human energy of coöperation is also an essential factor. I mean that he simply falls short of understanding the ontological character of the Fall (caused by sinning, itself a volitional matter, freechoice) in Orthodoxy or indeed its ontological reversal in Salvation by the recovery of the Assimilation to God. His recognition that we do not believe that newborns inherit Adam’s guilt is not integrated into a balanced picture of the Fall and Salvation in Orthodoxy. (The available works by Orthodox authors and commentators offer him little help.)

When Negrut interprets Eirenaios’s view of Adam as "not a perfect human being but [one who] was endowed with the potential for perfection," it might have been clearer to have said "mature" instead of "perfect." To say that Adam has only the potential (dýnamis, "capacity") for perfection is incorrect if it is understand to mean that Adam ("humanity") lacked the uncreated Energy of the Assimilation necessary to achieve perfection through synergy with the Spirit. Aside from that consideration, the giant gulf separating an ontologically fallen human (deprived of the uncreated Energy of the Assimilation to God) from a re-created and re-born worshiper and member of Christ sharing with the uncreated Grace of His Life, the Assimilation to God, is hardly "minimalist." We can and should sympathize with Negrut, as he is to be credited with sincerely trying to understand Orthodoxy. Again, most Orthodox writings in English don’t offer him much help.

If Adam "abandoned what was natural"—the Assimilation to God—he did not abandon what was essential (of the essence)—the Image or Eikón of God--what separates human from other animals. (What was normal before the Fall was natural, i.e. nature-promoting; since the Fall, however, what is normal is more often counternatural.) Negrut recognizes that St. Maximos "argues that sin does not corrupt nature (and natural will)," something that will be obvious when one understands that human essence has remained intact even when deprived of the uncreated Energies of the Assimilation to God, in which condition a person is impotent to please God. Ontological Grace is at least as important, real, and necessary to Orthodox Christianity as forensic Grace is in Augustinian thinking, and particularly in Protestantism. Grace defines human nature just as the capacities for reason and freechoice define human essence, its difference from the brute beasts. To be natural, one needs ontological Grace, not the virtual righteousness of the Reformers. One can almost say that authentic human nature (not essence) got lost in the Fall rather than simply being "corrupted." For human essence is not "tarnished." It is simply impotent to please God when deprived of the Assimilation to God, the core of authentic human nature. Until That has been restored in holy Baptism or Illumination—the first resurrection, that of the soul—reason and freechoice lack the necessary Energizations to please the Trinity. (According to the Fathers, the resurrection of the souls of the Old Testament Fathers took place during Jesus’s descent to and harrowing of Hades before He arose from death.) Purification, Illumination, and Divinization are the phases or components of Union with God.

While the next section is correctly titled (except for the word deification) "Not justification by faith but deification through the Energies," it would be clearer if "alone" stood after "faith" and if 2 Pet. 1:4 had been cited. One anticipates from the title that we will discern the difference between the Protestant volitional-forensic/juridical view of Salvation and the Eastern ontological understanding. I believe that the details in the first four paragraphs of this section are correct; but then things get muddier. One would like to see ontological Salvation include the ontologically necessary rôle of the Theotókos or Theométōr ("Mother of God," not "divine Mother") and of course resurrection—the Resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of worshipers’ flesh (see John 6:53-54, whose literal sense Protestants disown), which together constituted the core of the Apostles’ preaching. That the reception of the Assimilation involves "the sacraments" [i.e. the dozen or so Orthodox Mysteries] and "human efforts" will be interpreted rather differently in a Western paradigm of juridical Salvation, invisible Church, etc. from the way it is interpreted in a framework that premises ontological uncreated Grace as what energizes the mind, will, and noûs ("transcendent apparehension" is about as close as one can render it in English) of a worshiper who receives the Mysteries with unfeigned belief and a sincere will.

First, one needs to know that, in the Orthodox paradigm, created things can convey Grace, work miracles, and so on. Second, "human efforts" (human energizings) cannot be understood as autonomous, i.e. as not energized by Grace (as conceptualized in the East). Nor is personal Grace imposed against the assent and consent of the worshiper. To accomplish what Grace does, it must be the ultimate energizer of human good deeds (Philp. 2:13). Apart from this understanding, "human effort" will, as already intimated, be viewed as Pelagian. A good deed not energized by the Holy Spirit and a worshiper’s consent to accept and coöperate with those uncreated Energies of Grace is simply good on the human level . . . or is, as Augustine might say, predestinated. Human energizations energized by uncreated Grace represent a kind of "moral effort" that rises above purely human-caused activity. Synergy is not really our and the Spirit’s acting together as independent entities; it is the Life of God in us energizing us (Philp. 2:13), i.e. leading us and helping us, to energize what pleases God. In like manner, a recognition that the Mysteries are effectual does not mean that they work magically (automatically) or willy-nilly, i.e. without the repentance, belief, and will of the recipient, if she or he is conscious and able so to act. Non-mysteric Grace of course energizes where the divine Will dictates. Finally, an insistence on the rôle of reason in belief lifts faith above Luther’s volitional fiducia and beyond slogans divorced from rational conceptualization, lacking such reason as a given individual is capable of, they are of course superstitious. Note that Grace is simple in Orthodoxy in the sense that the twelve kinds of Grace in Latin thinking are absent.

Consider Negrut’s contention that the consequence of the teaching that "sacraments [sic] mediate the divine Energies" is "the emphasis is laid upon the participation in the sacraments and not upon a personal relationship with Christ mediated through the study of Scripture." (Here, Negrut cites Tsirpanlis, p. 107, where I find only comments about the range of meanings associated with mystérion with nothing about, and certainly no denial of, a personal relationship with Christ. Can it be that Negrut’s failure to find a personal relationship with Christ follows from a premise that that a personal relationship is entirely volitional and does not involve being an ontological member of Christ’s risen Body, or indeed a premise that ontology and will are necessarily always as much at odds as they often are in moral choices? If sharing Christ’s uncreated Life and being one with Him is NOT a personal (and most intimate) relationship, what sort of logic is Negrut subjecting his thinking to?.

He proceeds to comment, "When confronted with these discrepancies [over the number of Mysteries], the Orthodox take refuge in the belief that what matters is that God’s saving Energies are mediated to man in the Church." Unless one is prepared to deny that those who are saved and are worshipers of the Trinity are members of Christ or that the Church is the Body of Christ, the foregoing statement is, so far as I can ascertain, semantically whimsical. Can the view that the Church is not Christ’s Body or the view that Christians are not members of Christ (in whatever sense one’s paradigm dictates) be considered Christian at all?

Negrut understands that the Orthodox teach that a worshiper "responds to the divine energies with [one’s] own energy. Between the two energies there is a ‘synergy.’" Referring to Tsirpanlis’ chapter on monasticism, he writes: "The means whereby human beings participate in the divine Energies are the sacraments [sic] and human effort." He is obviously reluctant to admit that matter can convey Grace under stipulated conditions (the Gnostic side of Protestantism), or that human effort in synergy with the Holy Spirit needs to be understood, not as the coöperation of independent beings, but as the overlapping energization of the human will by the energizings of Grace that the human will responds to and is thus enabled to follow the promptings of the all-holy Spirit. What seems clear to us is opaque in Negrut’s either-or paradigm, where it is assumed that an act is all divine or all human—an assumption derived from the premise we all accept—that wills are individual. Once you take leave of the ontological framework, coöperation cannot be a joint "operation"; one will or the other performs a given act and gets credit for it. Given such an outlook, human effort can play no valid rôle in sanctification; or rather, it does so only when that is all there is to it, as in the case of Pelagianism. In the Orthodox framework, having one’s own capacities and, for that matter, one’s own energies energized by the Holy Spirit is a human response that is intelligible as something corresponding to Negrut’s idea of playing one’s part. But for him, playing one’s part is presumably limited to the fiducial response (predestinated or not, as the case may be) of trusting Jesus. That limitation is as strange to the Orthodox as our concept of worshipers’ energizings being energized by the Holy Spirit is to him.

"When asked about the biblical grounds for this doctrine,"

—presumably the teaching of a worshiper’s being "helped along the way by icons, relics [Negrut seems to forget Acts 19:12], Saints, and above all by the Virgin Mary" [as if she had not been an essential link between God and humanity] . . . as well as perhaps the teaching that "the path to deification [sic] includes asceticism, prayer, contemplation, and good works"—

Negrut says that "the Orthodox respond that these teachings were [i.e. "have been"] received from the Tradition." Where else could they have come from? Don’t Protestants speak of the Lutheran or Calvinist or Wesleyan traditions that interpret what Scripture means? Since the words of Scripture have meanings corresponding to the axioms of one’s cognitive paradigm, the only meaning they can have for an individual is what has been interpreted (according to the relevant axioms). It would be naïve to believe that the words of a divine book convey the same meaning to people whose thinking is conditioned by different paradigms. Every handed down interpretation of the Bible is a "tradition"—of a duration as brief as that of the Latter Days Saints, or of the 388 years from Reformers to our time, or the almost six centuries since Augustine, or indeed as long-standing as the almost two-millennium-old Patristic tradition. Again, where else can any interpretation or belief not individualistically invented on the spot come from except from some tradition? Given the obviousness of the foregoing, Negrut’s comment must be taken to mean more than is being said. Whatever that may be, it is untenable if it is meant to deny that a Bible contains changeless dogma (which, like an axiom or an assumption or premise posited by Aquinas or Luther rather than an Eastern Father, is not truth-vulnerable) is empty of meaning until it has been filled in (say, over time) by with doctrines, teachings that energize it with meaning.

In the final section, "’Coming home’—to what?" we read: "Since [hu]man[ity]’s perceptive and rational faculties are understood as barriers in the way of deification [sic], the Orthodox believe that they have to be abandoned." How on earth can Negrut have come to this understanding of Orthodoxy? If you change abandoned to read "used but also surmounted (by noûs)," you would be closer. Of course, if you believe that a "Word" (of command or promise) created the cosmos, the cosmos is wordy. But if you believe that God’s Reason (LOGOS) and Wisdom (SOPHIA) created the cosmos, as the Apostles John the Theologian and Paul wrote in the New Testament, how can the cosmos be viewed as irrational? And how can Christianity be understood to be devoid of reason and wisdom? Rising above reason and will and feelings to the "transcendent apperceptions" of noûs (which the Fathers locate in the heart) in no way requires or implies that a Christian should "abandon" one’s "perceptive and rational faculties"!

Negrut sloganizes that "under the influence of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic categories, they [scil. the Orthodox] make philosophical distinctions between God’s essence and energies"—which a bit further on he characterizes as "impersonal." He falls flat on his philosophical prat when he continues: "In teaching a mystical [sic] union between God and man, the Orthodox place the divine Persons in [he writes "into"] a kind of intermediary level between essence and energies." The Fathers were clear enough in distinguishing essence, energy, and hypostasis (person). Negrut himself has earlier observed that the divine Energies are "closely associated" with the Essence, which would mean that they fall between God’s Essence (or the Persons of the Trinity Who exercise them in union) and created persons. As far as I can see, Negrut adduces no grounds for assuming that the divine Persons constitute a kind of intermediary level between essence and energy; that does not follow from anything that has gone before. Negrut continues by claiming that "this doctrine moves the three divine Persons a step back from the work of Salvation. Particularly, the offices of the Son and the Holy Spirit fade into the background as the mystical union with God is realized through impersonal [how could they be personal except in the sense that they are bestowed or activated by a Person?] Energies." Concerning the background or context of the uncreated Energies, Negrut makes no attempt to show how or why the Holy Spirit’s energizings in Philp. 2:13 presumes a background that "the offices of the Son and the Holy Spirit fade into" other than the self-evident truth that every office involves an energization—in which case he could be construed as contradicting a tautology. Negrut does not even attempt to show how his unlikely conclusion follows from the Energies’ being distinct from the Essence and from the Persons (though every uncreated energization is activated by the divine Persons).

Let’s step onto less cluttered terrain to ascertain what in fact does follow from not distinguishing the Energies from the Essence. First, we could never know anything of God’s unknowable and imparticipable Essence if the Energies did not reveal (to our intellects) that He IS and what He is not; and (to noûs) some aspects of His Being beyond being. Second, God could presumably not (against the evidence of Scripture) change His mind or willing if reason and volition and love were part of His changeless Essence: Only predestination would be left, some humans being predestinated to hell and some to Heaven, quite apart from what any "human response."

Negrut’s perception of Orthodox doctrine is thus left a tangled in a thicket of disarray when we examine it in detail. That the way Orthodox act, e.g. the Greek hierarchs’ proclamation (contrary to Jesus’s final injunction in St. Matthew’s Gospel) that they do not proselytize, is open to criticism does not entail that the Patristic consensus on belief is open to Negrut’s untenable and at time illogical criticisms. I do not criticize the sincerity of his search. I criticize his inability to step outside of the axioms of his own thought world in order to see how Orthodox beliefs comport ever so nicely with the premises of the Orthodox conceptual universe. I would also criticize his sloganizing way of putting down an Aristotelian idea rooted in the thinking of any literate speaker of Hellenistic Greek as Platonic and Neo-Platonic—as if everything that Plato, Philo, or Plotinos taught were ipso facto wrong! What IS Platonist is the pagan and Western Christian doctrine that the soul is immortal by nature rather than solely by Grace! What IS Platonic is the premise that the created world of matter and time play no valid or essential role in religion!

To back up what he says in this connection, Negrut cites the "Orthodox theologian [E.] Timiadis" as arguing that "To a certain extent, the dissatisfaction expressed at the use by the early Fathers of Aristotelian terms [T gets that right] . . . such as essence and energies, is very understandable. Whatever arguments may be advanced in their favor, they still risk being misunderstood . . . [They will be misunderstood in other paradigms!] A God Who is reluctant to be with us, Who sends us alternative powers and energies, contradicts the very sense of Christ’s Incarnation. [cited from "God’s immutability and communicability" from Theological dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches [vol. 1, ed. T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), pp. 45-46]). Since I have not read the article, I can only conjecture that T is granting that if the distinction of essence and energies is in a non-Orthodox paradigm—"on account of their impersonal character"—misunderstood to imply "a God Who is reluctant to be with us," while not conceding that it is similarly vulnerable in its own paradigm.

To get a handle on the beliefs of Orthodoxy, one must begin at the beginning, setting out from the premises that essence, energy, and hypostasis are a "triad" of separate items; that the divine Reason created a cosmos that is not wordy but intelligible as well as being a creation in which in which created matter has been destined to be soterial and in which created time "plays" a valuable revelatory and indeed a necessary doctrinal rôle. Orthodox writers should, in my opinion, cease calling the Creator a "Word" and avoid misrendering "(according to) the Assimilation to God" as "(in) the Likeness of God." It is very misleading to call what is mysteric or incarnational "mystical." Confusion at the level of vocabulary is close to being inexcusable. (See

http://orlapubs.com/AR/R191.html.)

Interpreting Orthodox concepts in a Gnostic framework—one in which matter (Incarnation, Flesh, the Theotókos, Transfiguration, Resurrection, Mysteries, etc.), Energy/Light, and time (tradition) can have no essential soterial or revelatory rôles in religion is sufficiently antilogistic and irrational that all commentators should be very wary of the pitfalls that doing that poses...

SEE HERE FOR THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 
SACRILEGE AND IMMORALITY
(in preparation)