The East Still Beckons: On Redemption, Sanctification, Perfection, Deification, etc.
Well, since the baptism thread seems stalled at 30 comments, I'll transition the discussion via a new post instead - the record stands.
I just finished Sarah Coakley's (Oxford/Harvard philosopher/theologian) Powers & Submissions. Among other things, she compares Nyssan with (late) modern theorists and analytic philosophers. Some of her remarks are germane to our discussions about responses to the gospel. She argues for a Nyssan (Cappadocian) account of redemption on the grounds of its superior explanatory power with respect to varied responses to the gospel (the resurrected Christ), even within the Church. Her treatment of the Eastern paradigm seems to strike a better balance of divine/human agency than Wesley or Calvin, including both decisive divine action and meaningful ongoing human action yielding some sort of virtue epistemology correlative to the ontological transformation of deification. In other words Coakley (Nyssan) links the decisive divine action of redemption to human actions of obedience within the process of deification.
I'd be curious if anyone else is familiar with her argument. I'd be especially interested in our esteemed advisor's reading on her reading of Nyssan.
I just finished Sarah Coakley's (Oxford/Harvard philosopher/theologian) Powers & Submissions. Among other things, she compares Nyssan with (late) modern theorists and analytic philosophers. Some of her remarks are germane to our discussions about responses to the gospel. She argues for a Nyssan (Cappadocian) account of redemption on the grounds of its superior explanatory power with respect to varied responses to the gospel (the resurrected Christ), even within the Church. Her treatment of the Eastern paradigm seems to strike a better balance of divine/human agency than Wesley or Calvin, including both decisive divine action and meaningful ongoing human action yielding some sort of virtue epistemology correlative to the ontological transformation of deification. In other words Coakley (Nyssan) links the decisive divine action of redemption to human actions of obedience within the process of deification.
I'd be curious if anyone else is familiar with her argument. I'd be especially interested in our esteemed advisor's reading on her reading of Nyssan.
posted by Anonymous at 8:48 PM
2 Comments:
I am completely unfamiliar with her or her work, and always thought Nyssa was too lovey dovey of a Cappadocian but since no one has jumped on and I have just closed my blog after almost two years, I'll take a stab in a direction.
Claiming Nyssa et al. as Eastern I find an interesting categorization and usually hard to swallow. Maybe I am too hard set on Constantinople being the last ecumenical (I know, I know, most people list seven), but I usually associate post-Constantinople theologians/fathers with the east/west, and before that with a more unified position. That is for historical and cultural more than theological reasons but we all know they both influence theology greatly, but it is also besides the point, which is this.
How do we as westerners (in pretty much every aspect) appropriate Eastern paradigms/theologies etc. honestly? The big fear being romanticism. I mean, it's easy to hate juridical justification but there is a reason beyond the roman legal code that western theologians started to think in that way and it is not all bad. How much is the eastern longing just a nostalgia to move beyond the crap that we've dealt with for so long, and now that the eastern empires dead, a way to move beyond colonialism (we often forget about the byzantine/russian empires)?
I'm sorry I can't take up the debate your interested Dluhwizzle, but a man
Wilson, your point about our ability to appropriate Eastern paradigms/theologies is interesting. Like you, I have difficulty with the categorization of Nyssa et al as Eastern. It seems it is sometimes useful to place historical figures in terms of their relative emphasis on reason vs. mysticism, and it seems it is also sometimes helpful to describe their soteriologies in terms of relative emphasis on juridical vs. therapeutic aspects (as Maddox and Langford do, for example). Eastern does not signify much, for me. But to your point, I think we are quite capable of appropriating Nyssa's thought. The Reformers certainly did so extensively, and thus our inherited tradition is not simply Roman or Western, but one that in already heavily influenced by the Cappodocians. That's particularly true for the churches sharing the Anglican heritage, because Cranmer borrowed so much from them. But even when we consider the mystical elements that fought against the more rational elements within the Roman Catholic tradition, we see a similar synthesis. My point is that it seems to me too easy to dismiss study of the Cappodocians as nostalgic or romantic, when the reality is that our history is one in which the rational/juridical foci have been kept in tension with the mystical/therapeutic, with cycles of dominance by both sets of coordinates. While it's true that the Augustinian influence has been so powerful that we identify the West readily with the juridical thread, our heritage also includes the other. So it seems to me that it is not so much a matter of our nostalgia for a world that is not ours or a way to get beyond colonialism, but rather a matter of understanding more clearly the heritage that we are pledged to pass on. As mentioned on the baptism postings, scholars are understanding Wesley in a new light now that it is becoming more clear how heavily he was influenced, directly and indirectly, by 'Eastern' thought.
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