COMPONENTES

Zizioulas’s soteriology determines his understanding of death and life. Quite simply, his soteriology is this: Jesus Christ himself is salvation.17_{Although Zizioulas is}

best known for his doctrine of the Trinity and his ontology of communion, and rightly so as he devotes most of his writing to these topics, Zizioulas anchors all of his theology in Jesus Christ, for “the New Testament and all subsequent Christian doctrine simply point to the person and event of Jesus Christ.... all doctrine simply recalls the event of Christ” (LCD, 9).18 _{In fact, Zizioulas understands the early Christian}

identification of Jesus Christ’slifeas bothbeingandtruthto be crucial for all theology, to the extent that “it is solely upon this basis that the great achievements of Trinitarian theology of the fourth century can be judged to their full value” (BaC, 80, but all of

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15. Again, sinful humans are still persons, or relational beings, but self- contradictory “dying beings” because of their self-referential (idolatrous) way of being in relation.

16. Extremely important is Zizioulas’s differentiation between the divine communion and our participation in the divine communion (BaC, 93–94). As Alan Brown observes, “for Zizioulas, it is not possible to ‘project’ the mode of being of the Church onto the divine being, since the mode of being of the Church already is the mode of being of divine being; and, for Zizioulas, there are not ‘two communions’, one divine and one human—rather there is one divine communion, in which humans participate, this participation being the ecclesial mode of being that is the Church” (“On the Criticism ofBeing as Communionin Anglophone Orthodox Theology,” 70).

17. “Christ is the truth not because he is an epistemological principle which explains the universe, but because he is life and the universe of beings finds its meaning in the incorruptible existence in Christ, who takes up into Himself

(α’νακεφαλαι'ωσις) the whole of creation and history. Being is inconceivable outside of

life, and because of this the ontological nature of truth resides in the idea of life” (BaC, 80; cf. Brown, 54).

18. Cf. Aristotle Papanikolaou: “The incarnation is not the event in which the divine energies are communicated in their fullness to the human nature, it is the event in which the human nature itself exists, is, in the person of Christ” (“Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” 369).

“Truth and Communion,” 67–122, is pertinent). As observed above, the Chalcedonian definition provides the terminological muscle for most of Zizioulas’s christological work. Thus, when he defines “salvation” as “the union of the created with the uncreated,” Zizioulas does not mean a generic union, but the person of Jesus Christ, in whom created and uncreated are united “unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably... without the distinction of natures being taken away” (LCD, 108; and NPNF2–14, 264-65). Outside of this person, Jesus Christ, there is no salvation—no created-uncreated union, and therefore no life and no being for creation. As a person is not an idea, commodity, property, or function, but “an identity formed through a relationship,” our salvation must involve receiving Jesus Christ’s unique filial relationship, sharing in his sonship (LCD, 111).19 _{As Zizioulas emphatically states,}

“The Christian approach to God as Father originates exclusively from this relationship of the Son to the Father, and the right that the Son bestows on us to address God as Father with him” (LCD, 26). As we shall see, Zizioulas understands the Christian life of faith to be the mode of participation in Jesus Christ’s filial relationship with the Father that is proper to history.

As Zizioulas understands personhood in terms of relations, to be saved means to become a new person by being brought into new relationships with God and creation (personal and non-personal creation) through Jesus Christ. We do not become possessors of life, but receive life just as Jesus Christ receives his life as Son through the Spirit from the Father—paradigmatically in the resurrection.20 _{“Real life cannot be}

brought to an end by death and will never prove false. Real life springs from the resurrection, which is to say from Christ who himself transcends biological death” (LCD, 99). Furthermore, participation in this life means that we also participate in Jesus Christ’s mediation of his life to creation. Salvation requires this mediation because

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19. Zizioulas’s logic actually runs the other direction—from Jesus Christ’s sonship to a doctrine of personhood.

20. Without the resurrection, we would not know what true life is, because “Man is under the impression that he is in possession of life, but what he calls life is in fact no more than a process of dissolution. Death masquerades as life: its claim to be life is a tragic consequence of the fall” (LCD, 99).

If man is to endure, all creation must endure, for man cannot live without creation. If man is to survive death, all creation has to be transformed so that no part of it succumbs to death.... The salvation of the world must be the salvation from death (LCD, 101–02).

Therefore,

Christian dogmatics... must take the threat to our existence very seriously. It must insist that the death of every single person, even of every single entity, is an outrage, and say clearly that creation has become captive to death (LCD, 101).

Though Zizioulas does not explicitly mention it with any frequency, the resurrection provides the center of gravity for all of his doctrine. Crucially, Zizioulas understands the resurrection as “the Spirit’s act in transcending all limits, and all dissolution and death” (LCD, 107, cf. 106–09).21_{The resurrected Jesus Christ, living a life unthreatened}

by death in the power of the Spirit, is the eschatological Adam, the head of all creation. I.D. Jesus Christ’s Recapitulation of Creation

Zizioulas expounds a fairly robust doctrine of recapitulation, but one obscured for many westerners by his refusal to understand sin juridically. Zizioulas appears to confirm these western suspicions by hurrying past the Crucified to the Resurrected, thereby allowing the Resurrection to eclipse the Cross.22 _{As McPartlan notes: “Calvary}

is... the backdrop to the Resurrection for Zizioulas. In itself [the Cross] is a failure,” merely “an event in the preparatory Economy which tells us nothing about Theology [God in himself]” (247 and 249).23 _{As before, the “in itself” makes all the difference.}

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21. Cf. Papanikolaou: “Instead of following Christ or being sent by Christ, the Spirit realizes (conduire) the Resurrection of Christ” (“Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” 364).

22. The Cross does not absorb Zizioulas’s attention as the Resurrection does, but he is notsilentabout it: “The Cross of Christ, and especially the idea of his descent into Hades, are the only way to communion with God. Only in utter incapacity can human capacity be realised” (C&O, 242).

23. Alan Lewis (seconded by Alan Torrance) argues that “Zizioulas seems reluctant to acknowledge the death of Jesus as significant for God’s being.... This surely evades the finality and reality of the death of Jesus, presupposing an ontology in which God swamps non-being with the power of being, rather than receiving non- being into himself and thus going beyond it” (“The Burial of God,” 350, n. 31). In response, Zizioulas writes, “The Cross is precisely this passage [from being subjected to natural causation, death and individualism to immortal life in freedom and love] which God himself went through in the Incarnation, i.e., owing to the fact that the Son freely assumed human nature. This passage of the Cross is as real as anything, and it is implicit in all my references to Christology. The fact that I insist that Christ finally overcame the tragic aspect of human personhood and the necessity of

The Resurrection does not eclipse the Cross, but gives it meaning, and thereby gives humanity truebeing: “All things in Christology are judged by the resurrection.... The fact that finallydeath is conquered gives us the right to believe that the conqueror of death was also originallyGod” (BaC, 55, n. 49).24 _{For this reason, Zizioulas recommends a}

“beyond redemption” Christology which does not stop with redemption from sin “but reaches beyond that, to man’s destiny as the image of God in creation,” thereby including the “negative (redemption from the fallen state)” and the “positive (fulfilment of man’s full communion with God; what the Greek Fathers have called theōsis)” (C&O, 237).25 _{This is to say that redemption must give way to recapitulation: yes,}

Christ redeemed the fallen, but he did so that human persons might again be the crown of creation.

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biological nature because of his Trinitarian personhood (i.e., becaue the Father raised him from the dead in the Spirit; Romans 4:25; 8:11; Acts: 3:15) and not because of God’s receiving non-being into himself... does not turn my position into a ‘docetic tendency’” (C&O, n. 87, 142–43, citing Alan Torrance’s Persons in Communion, 304). Moreover, Zizioulas asks whether the only way to affirm the history of Jesus Christ “to be real and not ‘docetic’” is to affirm that God accepts non-being and evil into his being, which would result in the assertion that the defeat of evil and death involved God making evil and death part of his own being! Lewis and Torrance gesture towards a real lacuna, viz, Zizioulas does not attend sufficiently to the particularityof the life and death of Jesus Christ, but his point nevertheless stands that a resurrection- less cross simply would not be good news: “with the aid of love as an anology, we shall be able to reach an understanding of the Christology of the cross (a person who loved us so much as to die for us); but without an ability to follow it into the resurrection (a person who conquered death) Christology brings with it nothing ontological” (BaC, 108). Furthermore, it seems that Lewis and Torrance misjudge Zizioulas, for death is “overwhelmed” by the personal coincidence of “freedom and love” in the Son, not abstract power—a concept requiring the ousianic ontology Zizioulas assiduously avoids.

24. In the words of John Manoussakis, “Theologically, then, it is the resurrection that is the ‘final cause’ of the crucifixion” (“The Anarchic Principle of Christian Eschatology in the Eucharistic Tradition of the Eastern Church,” 30). Consult LCD, 108–14, and especially 104, to see why Zizioulas’s eschatological ontology does not involve adoptionism.

25. Zizioulas draws on the insight found in Irenaeus in nuce and developed by Maximus “that the Christ event would still be realised even if there had not been the Fall” (C&O, 237, n. 42). Here, it is difficult to understand how Zizioulas could mean the particular, irreplaceable, Jesus Christ—cf. the criticisms of Farrow, especially his accusation that “it is often semantically impossible to substitute the name ‘Jesus’ where Zizioulas has the title ‘Christ’,” although it is not clear that this is because of “a Eutychianizing process” (92–101, quote at 97). Note that Zizioulas uses “redemption” to describe what Barth describes as “reconciliation”—both stress that salvation is bigger than this.

God created humans to be the priests of creation, entrusted with the personalization of all creation in order that it might enter into personal communion with the source (aitia) of eternal life.26 _{Christ fulfilled this vocation to mediate life to all}

creation, which God willed from the beginning and will be the eternal calling of human persons. Thus, to fulfill their vocation, all human persons are called to the transformative union with Christ’s body, the Church.

Now it is this role [priest of creation], which Christ performed personally through his cross and resurrection, that he assigned to his Church, which is his Body. The Church is there precisely in order to act as the priest of creation who unites the world and refers it back to God, bringing it into communion with him. This takes place in the Church particularly through the sacraments. The meaning of the sacraments, for example that of baptism, is that through it the attitude of the fallen Adam is reversed. Man dies as to his claim to be God in creation, and instead recognises God as its Lord. Through the path of asceticism, the Church educates man to sacrifice his own will, his self- centredness, and subject himself freely to the will of God, thus showing that man has reversed the attitude of the first Adam (“Proprietors Priests,” 6–7). The priesthood of Christians certainly has no meaning or being apart from Christ’s priesthood in the Spirit, yet in the Spirit, “[h]is priesthood is realized and portrayed in historical existence here and now as a eucharistic community” (BaC, 231). The community’s sacramental koinonia does not surpass, but affirms, the cross and resurrection.27 _{In particular, Zizioulas understands the Eucharist, viewed}

Christologically and eschatologically, to be this life of personal koinonia, calling it: “the summing up or the anacephaleosis of the entire reality of the salvation of the world” (“The Orthodox Church and the Third Millennium,” 30). In order to become a member of Christ’s body, to fulfill the call to share his filial relationship to the Father, to participate in this life of eternal communion in the power of the Holy Spirit, and to mediate this life to all of creation, humans must be baptized.

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26. As Williams notes: “redemption is neither an extra nostransaction, nor an event of illumination or revelation, but the establishing of communion” (“Review,” 101). Though as the latter it illuminates and reveals.

27. Contra Russell (179). Likewise, Russell’s critique that Zizioulas “focuses on the signifier and not the thing signified” fails to grasp that, for Zizioulas, the sacraments are not “a window to higher things,” but “the very substance of a transformed cosmos” (C&O, 298).