Some Eastern Orthodox Perspectives on Science-Engaged Theology (and Their Relevance to Western Christians)

Abstract

An Eastern Orthodox understanding of science—that of Christopher C. Knight—is presented as a contribution to science-engaged theology that has implications for western Christian reflection on science as a contemporary locus theologicus. Three areas of enquiry are discussed: natural theology, the human mind in its relationship to God, and divine action. It is suggested that in each of these areas, Orthodox perspectives can provide links between the differing perspectives to be found among western Christians and provide new pathways for theological exploration on an ecumenical basis.

1. Science as a Locus Theologicus

Within Eastern Orthodox Christianity—with its characteristic stress on the thinking of eastern patristic writers1—there are still several competing approaches to the question of how the sciences of our time should be evaluated and used theologically. Of these approaches, my own is arguably the one that most fully attempts to develop the idea of science as a contemporary locus theologicus, since my attitude is that we can see the sciences of our time as providing an opportunity not only to deepen our theological understanding, but also to see in new ways how, as the psalmist puts it, “the heavens declare the glory of the Lord”. It is on this approach that I shall focus in what follows.2

My work in this area does not suggest that scientists need in any way take theological perspectives into account, but rather that theological interpretation of robust scientific theories allows clarification of certain important theological questions. This clarification relates primarily to three issues: the character of natural theology, our understanding of the human mind in its relationship to God, and the question of how God acts in the world. Inevitably, in the present essay, there is insufficient space to address these issues adequately (although the references to my previous work will provide the reader with an indication of where I have addressed them more fully). My purpose here is not, however, to provide an exhaustive account of my approaches to these issues but to indicate the way in which they represent one of the ways in which theologians are now increasingly seeing science as an important resource for theological thinking. In what follows, I shall therefore simply outline my views on how Orthodox perspectives can illuminate these issues and indicate how this illumination may often be seen as providing links between the differing scholarly perspectives that predominate in the various western Christian communities.

2. Natural Theology

Those who speak about natural theology are often influenced in their understanding of that term by their ecclesiastical or academic background. In relation to ecclesiastical affiliation, Roman Catholics (and many Anglicans) tend to understand and defend natural theology in terms that reflect the definition of it upheld by many philosophers of religion: as the attempt to develop arguments for the certainty or probability of the reality of God on the basis of “premises that neither are nor presuppose any religious beliefs” (Alston 1991, p. 289). Sometimes, these arguments have been purely philosophical in form, and they have sometimes related at least partly to aspects of the empirical world, so that scientific understanding has been incorporated into these philosophical arguments. However, as the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology once put it, there has historically been a “rich diversity of approaches to, and definitions of, natural theology”, partly because of “its inherently interdisciplinary character” (Manning 2013, p. 1). One aspect of the diversity of which he speaks is that some theologians—especially in certain Protestant traditions—either deny the validity of natural theology or else see the need for a more nuanced understanding of its character and role than has been usual.

This latter view has influenced many of those exploring science-engaged theology because of the way in which a natural theology argument that was at one time highly influential in the English-speaking world—William Paley’s “watchmaker” version of the design argument—was demolished by the kind of evolutionary understanding pioneered by Charles Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century.3 This demolition made many science-engaged theologians of the twentieth century more attentive to the way in which Protestant scholars had often become suspicious of natural theology because of the attack on it articulated by Karl Barth.

This attack was based on the way in which natural theology had often been presented—especially in the scholastic tradition—as something independent of any faith commitment, so that it could be seen as providing “preambles of faith” (praeambula fidei). This understanding seemed to Barth and his followers to have an insufficient sense of the importance of God’s revelation of himself in historical acts, so that it became common in the Protestant world to argue that theologians should either shun natural theology arguments altogether or, at the very least, insist on integrating such arguments into a theology based on revelation in historical events. As Thomas Torrance (one of the leading proponents of this latter view) once put it, natural theology should not “be pursued in its traditional abstractive form, as a prior conceptual scheme on its own, but must be brought within the body of positive theology and be pursued in indissoluble unity with it” (Torrance 1985, p. 40).

Torrance’s view may, I have argued (Knight 2021; 2022, pp. 5–16), be seen as reflecting an important strand of Orthodox, as well as of Protestant thinking. Not only did the Cappadocian Fathers, in the patristic era, modify the pre-Christian tradition of natural theology in a way that incorporated aspects of what Torrance calls “positive” theology.4 In addition, we need to take into account the Orthodox understanding of the theological task, which—especially in the hesychastic strand of Orthodox thinking5—stresses the importance of the noetic perception that arises from the intuitive mental capacity that ancient Greek philosophers called the nous.

This approach is reflected in the Orthodox understanding of contemplation—theoria in Greek—which is not seen primarily as an activity based on discursive rationality but as the direct perception or vision of the nous (the common translation of nous into English as “intellect” is potentially misleading in this respect because the modern English notion of the intellect is focused more on discursive reasoning than on the essentially intuitive apprehension that was important for patristic understanding). This focus on direct perception is underlined by Vladimir Lossky’s insistence that Orthodox theology is essentially an experiential or “mystical” pursuit and that, as such, it must be approached “in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically” (Lossky 1957, p. 8).

These understandings are reflected in the notion of the contemplation of nature—theoria physike—which was developed in the Christian east at least from the time of the fourth-century writer, Evagrius Ponticus (see, e.g., Lollar 2013). In this kind of contemplation, “the same kind of noetic, contemplative deportment that Plato had reserved solely for the eternal forms, denuded of any earthly encumbrance, is now directed towards the cosmos itself” (Foltz 2014, pp. 248–49). Evagrius saw this contemplation of nature as involving two things: training in the use of both philosophical and scriptural insights, and also “a radically altered state in which the mystic is transformed” (Bradford 2012, p. 110). While this understanding was later often broadened so as to be applicable to all Christians, and not just to highly educated ones, the notion of the importance of noetic apprehension and of spiritual transformation was still maintained, at least to the extent that ascetical effort was seen as an essential component of the contemplative task.

There have, admittedly, been recent defenders of a kind of preambula fidei natural theology within Orthodoxy, often influenced by the work of the philosopher of religion, Richard Swinburne (a convert to Orthodoxy from Anglicanism), and by the fact that historians have been able to point to what seem to be straightforward natural theology arguments in the works of eastern patristic authors. These kinds of defence have been expressed most clearly, perhaps, in a recent book of essays (Bradshaw and Swinburne 2021), in which several of the contributors attempt to defend natural theology in its praeambula fidei form. It is noteworthy, however, that in this book, there are significant differences in emphasis to be found in these different contributions. In particular, while one of the book’s editors, the philosopher of religion, Richard Swinburne, seems to defend a straightforward form of rationalistic natural theology, his fellow editor, David Bradshaw, offers a far more nuanced historical and theological understanding.

In his introduction to the book, Bradshaw notes not only that eminent Orthodox scholars—Sergius Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, Christos Yannaras, and John Ziziolas—have viewed natural theology “as at best religiously useless, in that it does not lead to a true knowledge of, or encounter with God; and at worst as positively harmful”. In addition, he goes on to make the vital point that the Greek patristic writers “certainly recognized a distinction between faith and reason [but] tended to think of them as mutually supporting and interpenetrating. Faith begins as an innate orientation towards the good, and reason, which depends on faith, is the attempt to bring this innate orientation to its full realization. No point in this process is autonomous and self-directed, for God is the good, and he is constantly active presenting the good to us in various forms, so that every choice we make is in some sense a response to him. It is this doubly synergistic view—involving the synergy of human faith and reason and of both with God—which determines the definite but subordinate role that the Greek Fathers gave to natural theology” (Bradshaw 2021, p. 3). This is, for me, an insightful comment, but I have urged that we need to expand it in terms of the concept of noetic contemplation in order to distance Orthodox thinking even more from an autonomous, rationalistic natural theology of the kind that Swinburne seems to defend.

There are three ways in which theologians of Western Christian traditions can incorporate this focus on noetic apprehension into their own thinking about natural theology. One is through the way in which one of the most influential Western “spiritual writers” of the twentieth century, Thomas Merton, has expressed the need for contemplation of nature at least partly in terms of that concept’s Eastern Christian lineage (see St. John 1998). The second is through the kind of focus on the Greek patristic tradition that has been characteristic of the twentieth-century Resourcement movement within the Roman Catholic community, which has often been critical of the developments in scholastic thinking that took place after the time of Thomas Aquinas (Boersma 2009). The third—which is linked to this Resourcement sensibility—arises from recognition that the scholastic praeambula fidei notion, as it developed after the time of Aquinas, may not correspond to Aquinas’s own approach.

Roberto di Ceglie, for example, has noted that while the truths available only through faith cannot, for Aquinas, make a direct, evidential contribution to natural reasoning, God’s influence on those who manifest revelation-based faith is such that they “take the truths of faith as orientation and criterion for their rational enquiry, orientation because they aim to confirm by reason what they already believe, criterion because in case of a contradiction, reason must be considered as surely mistaken and rational investigation must start anew from the beginning” (di Ceglie 2016, p. 143). Moreover, the natural theology of Aquinas—usually thought of as the classic example of the praeambula fidei approach—is arguably only properly understood when we recognize that he not only practised both theology and natural theology, but did so—as James Brent (2020) has put it—“rather freely, and blended them into a unified architectonic wisdom. His architectonic contains both theology and natural theology (sometimes they are difficult to sort out)”.

In light of all these considerations, I have suggested that Christians of both east and west can still see natural theology as valid provided that they modify the praeambula fidei notion of its character and recognize, with Torrance, that the relationship between its arguments and other kinds of religious knowing needs to be understood in a more complex way. I have also argued, however, that Torrance’s own view of this complexity must be modified in a way that allows, as he does not, for the noetic aspect of this integration, so that we move closer to Alister McGrath’s revision of his outlook, in which—in relation to the cosmos—the focus is on the way in which “the divine light of the logos allows us to ‘see’ the created order in the proper way, so that human limitations in discerning the divine might be overcome” (McGrath 2008, p. 173). Ultimately, however, I believe that this focus can be clarified adequately only through the Orthodox “mystical” understanding in which—as Lossky (1957, p. 43) has put it—“theology will never be abstract, working through concepts, but contemplative: raising the mind to those realities which pass all understanding”.

3. The Human Mind and the Mind of God

When Christians think about what it is to be human, they sometimes have in mind an ancient Greek or more modern kind of dualism, in which body and mind are seen as distinct entities in some kind of loose association. In recent years, however, there has been a revival of a more traditional Christian understanding, in which body and mind are seen as components of a unified being. This revival has come about not only because many theologians have reacted against the dualism common in certain periods in the past, but also—especially among science-engaged theologians (see e.g., Brown et al. 1998; Murphy 2006)—because analyses of brain scanning data and of the effects of brain damage have increasingly led cognitive scientists to emphasize and elucidate the physical basis of human mental functioning, at least as this is usually understood.

However, in their exploration of the implications of scientific insights in this field, these science-engaged theologians have until recently given little or no consideration to unconscious processes, whether of the kind assumed in the notion of noetic apprehension or of the kind in which a few of them have recently begun to take an interest because of their recognition of differences between the functioning of the two hemispheres of the brain. These differences have been made known to many through the work of Iain McGilchrist (2019), whose perspectives have been influential well beyond the boundaries of the scientific and theological communities. This influence arises from the way in which he focuses not only on scientific insights into brain functioning, but also on the way in which it is becoming increasingly recognized that our present culture is one in which we have, for several centuries, attributed great value to the capacities that arise from the left hemisphere of the brain—our quantitative and analytical capacities—but little value to the capacities that arise from the right hemisphere, which are related to creativity, emotion and intuition. McGilchrist’s analysis of this lack of balance has led, among other things, to a new appreciation, among science-engaged theologians, of the concept of spiritual intelligence and—among a few of them at least—to explorations linking this concept to the ancient concept of the nous.6

One way of exploring this link is through the strand of “disability theology” that focuses on the kind of cognitive impairment associated with conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. In relation to this, the Orthodox scholar, Petre Maican, has pointed out the relevance of the thinking of the Protestant theologian, John Swinton, who has argued, on Biblical grounds, that it is wrong to see human beings—as is often the case—primarily or only as the sum of their cognitive capacities and the web of social relationships that they establish throughout their lives. We are, Swinton argues, persons and—from a theological perspective—the loss of cognitive capacities and social relationships in old age does not diminish what is most important about personhood (Swinton 2012). The important thing, he argues, is that our personhood arises from the “breath of God” (nephesh),7 which is, according to the Book of Genesis (2:7; 6:17; 7:22), breathed into all living beings. Our true identity, he argues, is found in God, and it will be revealed to us fully only in the “world to come”. The spiritual identity with which we are endowed by God is, he suggests, not lost in dementia. Rather, it continues to exist in God even when the sum of our cognitive abilities and our web of human relationships have been lost. Swinton’s account may, Maican (2024) argues, be expanded in terms of the concept of the nous, and this reflects my own emphasis on the way in which that concept is still used within the Orthodox tradition, underlining the way in which the nous should be seen as in some sense what truly links the human mind directly to the “mind of God”.

In general, however, most of those involved in science-engaged theology have not yet seen this Orthodox focus on the nous as relevant to their exploration of mental processes, partly because their focus has tended to be on attempting to refute the widespread reductionistic view that mental processes are nothing but epiphenomena of physical brain processes. This attempt at refutation has frequently used the philosophical notion of emergence to defend the ontological reality of mental experience, using this concept to insist that “bottom up” causality—the only causality acknowledged in reductionist analysis—must be seen as being supplemented by “top down” causal effects, so that the relationship between mind and brain is seen in terms of complex feedback loops. According to this view, the qualities often associated with the term soul—discursive thought, the sense of free will, and so on—are not simply to be dismissed as epiphenomena with no ultimate reality.8

This kind of analysis is not (as we shall see) without merit, but it has the disadvantage that, as it stands, it is difficult to reconcile with the notion that these “soulish” qualities can have any reality apart from the body, so that it has become fashionable among some science-engaged theologians to discard the word soul and replace it with Warren Brown’s term, embodied soulishness (see Brown and Strawn 2012). Some, in this context, have suggested that it is helpful to think about the distinction between the body and the mind in terms of the distinction between hardware and software in an electronic computer. Without the software/mind, they say, the hardware/body has no real purpose; but without the hardware/body, the software/mind has no natural means of functioning. Just as, in a computer, software can operate only through appropriate hardware, so, according to this analogy, the human mind requires a body of some kind in order to function.

This hardware–software analogy may not, as we shall note, be as useful as it may initially seem to be. It has been helpful, nevertheless, in making many science-engaged theologians wary of the dualistic notion of the eschatological existence of disembodied souls, which is now often seen as untenable because it assumes software functioning without appropriate hardware. It has thus provided these theologians with a plausible argument for upholding the traditional Christian concept of the eschatological state, in which humans in the “age to come” are seen not as disembodied souls, but as possessing resurrection bodies. Our natural state—both in this world and the next—is not, they have argued, one in which our “software” alone can constitute our being. Moreover, since different types of computer hardware can be used to operate any particular software, this analogy has allowed these theologians to conceive of the resurrection body as significantly different to the earthly one (this notion is sometimes seen as a novel one, but in fact—albeit for different reasons—it was common in the Eastern part of the Christian world at least from the fourth century).9

It is observable that many science-engaged theologians now adopt this understanding of the body–mind relationship in a way that uncritically accepts an aspect of the materialist framework of our current scientific culture. They focus on how the human mind emerges from matter but very little on how, in a theological perspective, matter has its origin in the “mind of God”. This means that they have rejected any form of philosophical idealism, in which mind is given ontological priority over matter. I have challenged this dismissal of idealism elsewhere, partly on the basis of aspects of Keith Ward’s defence of idealism (Ward 2012) and partly on the basis of the way in which Gregory of Nyssa’s views—based on his understanding of the nous—exhibit interesting parallels not only with Berkeleyan idealism, but also with questions that arise from quantum mechanics about the role of the observer in “creating” reality.10

This argument in defence of idealism is, however, too complex to be dealt with adequately here, and the reader who is interested in that argument will need to look at what I have said elsewhere (Knight 2020, pp. 107–11; 2022, pp. 26–31). One corollary of this argument may, however, be summarized relatively briefly. This arises from the way in which I have criticized the way in which certain science-engaged theologians have assumed that our state in the “world to come” will be one in which, while the earthly body may be very significantly modified when it is transformed into a resurrection body, the earthly mind will continue much as it is in this life, differing only insofar as certain faculties, such as memory, may be made perfect rather than being (as at present) incomplete and fallible.

This assumption ignores two factors, one scientific and one theological. The scientific one is that most cognitive scientists no longer accept in any straightforward way the analogy in which mental processes constitute the functioning of “software” that will give the same results regardless of the hardware that enables it to function. Mental processes, they increasingly stress, are not only emergent from but also conditioned by the physical substrate with which they are associated. This seems to be true not only in relation to the very specific way in which the brain works, but also—if certain formulations of the notion of “embodied cognition” are accepted—in relation to the interactions between the mind and the rest of the body and between the mind and the world beyond the body.11 If we accept these insights, then—unless the resurrection body and resurrection cosmos are assumed to be identical to those we experience in this life—the “resurrection mind” that will be associated with the resurrection body and its environment will inevitably be rather different from our earthly mind.

The related theological issue is that the Christian thinking of the early centuries did not always take the view that seems to be taken for granted in much recent theological discussion of this topic. The continuity of our mental faculties in their transition from this world to the next was not simply assumed. The eastern patristic tradition, in particular, often made a firm distinction between our present, biological state—in mythical terms, viewed as the result of “the Fall”12—and the embodied state for which we were originally made and are ultimately intended. In this kind of view, the “original” and eschatological human state is something that has, in some sense, been “covered up” by our present biological state—a view often expressed in the patristic period in terms of an allegorical interpretation of the way in which God is reported to have given “garments of skin” to those expelled from Eden (Genesis 3:21).13

A useful exploration of this aspect of eastern patristic thinking is that of Panayiotis Nellas, who makes the interesting point that the patristic interpretation of our “garments of skin” relates not only to the physical body—as some scholars have supposed—but also to the soul. What such scholars overlook, he notes, is that writers like Gregory of Nyssa use the term garments of skin to refer to “the entire postlapsarian psychosomatic clothing of the human person”. For Gregory, he stresses, the Fall has brought about a situation in which the “functions of the soul … have also become ‘corporeal’ along with the body …. [they] form together with the body ‘the veil of the heart … the fleshy covering of the old man’” (Nellas 1997, pp. 50–52). A corollary of this perspective would seem to be that both body and soul are to be transformed when the “garments of skin” are thrown off in our eternal life.

For many in our present era, the particular way in which this discontinuity between our present and eschatological states was perceived may seem unpersuasive. However, what I have called the “spiritual instinct” that lies behind early understandings may still be worthy of attention even when the particular way in which that instinct was expressed may now seem questionable. In this case, the need for attentiveness to that instinct arises from the scientific insight that at least some human mental processes are not only inextricably linked to human bodies but also strongly conditioned by them. Given this strong conditioning, it seems to follow that a resurrection body that is significantly different from the earthly one implies precisely what Gregory of Nyssa seems to have envisaged: an associated mind that is also significantly different from that which we now possess.

This notion is, of course, incompatible with the widespread Christian hope that eternal life will mean the survival of our “personalities”. However, we need to recognize that our usual focus on personality may be no more than a kind of egoism, a spiritual blindness and self-centeredness to be overcome.14 Related to this perception is another important insight that may perhaps inform our thinking about eternal life. This is the notion that what we currently tend to think of as constitutive of our minds and personalities—things like our discursive rational faculty and our memories—may in fact be no more than servants, in this world, of something more central to our being: the nous (here, as we have seen, John Swinton’s analysis of personhood in relation to dementia, as interpreted by Petre Maican, seems to point in a very similar direction).

The point here is that, in the kind of late antique and medieval Christian understanding that focused on the concept of the nous, our spiritual journey in this world was often seen as having as one of its prime aims the purification of that nous, the overcoming of the distortion or darkening of its functions in our present “fallen” state. Often, in Christian literature, the nous was described as the “eye” of the soul, and it was the full opening of this eye that was seen as making possible what is sometimes called, in Western Christian theology, the beatific vision.15 In light of this understanding, it seems possible to understand the functioning of our “resurrection minds” largely, or even completely, in terms of the expanded and transformed functioning of the nous. This suggests that our transition to the “world to come” may in fact involve the shedding of all kinds of mental activity other than the direct intuitive knowing that arises from the perfected nous (something of this kind—albeit expressed in different terms—certainly seems to be hinted at in some of the most well-known New Testament passages that refer to our eschatological state).16

Might it be, then, that those of us who are believers in the eschatological state should recognize that, in that state, we may not know about anything, or even “think”, in the sense in which we usually use that term? Rather—as Gregory of Nyssa puts it of our ascent to God in this life (Laird 2004, p. 127)—“every form of comprehension” should eventually be abandoned in that ascent. This suggests that, in the “world to come”, we will simply know—directly and intuitively—in the way that mystics, in their most sublime moments in this life, are said to know. If this is valid, then continuity in our existence as unique persons will not necessarily involve continuity of much with which we tend to identify ourselves. Rather, it will involve a transformation of our whole being that will be far more radical than we usually appreciate: a casting aside of our “garments of skin” in both their physical and their mental dimensions.

A corollary of this kind of understanding relates to the concept of emergence. This corollary is that there would seem to be no theological problem in seeing most aspects of our present functioning—those not intrinsically associated with the nous—as emergent properties of our biological bodies, which will cease to function when we die and will not resume their functioning when we receive our resurrection bodies. This permanent cessation of functioning may be seen simply as an aspect of the way in which casting off our ‘garments of skin’ includes casting off all those ‘functions of the soul’ which […] have become ‘corporeal’ along with the body.

4. Divine Action

Orthodox theology has a strong “spiritual instinct” that the world—as part of the very nature given to it in the act of creation—has a teleological character. As Doru Costache has rightly put it, science, “epitomized by Darwinian evolution, does not mention the purposefulness of natural movement, whereas [Orthodox] theology … considers teleology crucial” (Costache 2019, p. 54). This contrast between science and Orthodox theology is, however, potentially misleading, even though Costache is correct in this observation that modern scientific insights arise through a methodology that precludes any mention of purpose. However, what he perhaps fails to emphasize sufficiently is that the methodology of modern science necessarily avoids the concept of purpose,17 and that what is important is the way in which at least some scientific insights are susceptible to theological interpretation in terms of purpose. This interpretation enables a kind of teleology to be seen as compatible with current scientific understanding. There are two scientific insights that are open to teleological interpretation in this way. These are the “fine tuning” of the universe that is evident from astronomical evidence and the occurrence of “convergent evolution” in the biological world. Both point to the way in which the role of chance in the development of the cosmos is not inconsistent with a broadly predictable outcome (Knight 2020, pp. 146–56).

This way of using the notion of teleology does not involve the kind of teleology that is envisaged in Aristotelian philosophy, but is of a more distinctly theological kind, which, in the model of divine action I have proposed, focuses on eschatology in a way that arises from the Orthodox doctrine of creation developed by Maximus the Confessor (which has evoked much interest in the western Christian world in recent years). In Maximus’s model, the fourth gospel’s assertion that the Logos (Word) of God “became flesh” (John 1:14) is not seen simply as a statement about a historical event. Rather, he develops his understanding through a subtle and profound perception of how everything was, in the beginning, created through this Logos (John 1:1–4).

By moulding the philosophical categories available to him to the realities of the Christian revelation, Maximus expresses his faith in terms of the way in which the Logos of God is to be perceived, not only in the person of Jesus Christ, but also in the “words” (logoi) of all prophetic utterance and in the “words” (logoi) that represent the underlying principles by which all created things have their being and act as they do. The incarnation in Jesus Christ is thus seen, not simply as a historical event, to be interpreted—as so often in western Christian thinking—as a “supernatural” intrusion into the natural order. Rather, what occurs in the person of Jesus is, for this strand of theology, intimately linked to the whole history of the redemptive process and to the act of creation itself. It takes up the fourth gospel’s insight that the incarnation does not involve “the sudden arrival of an otherwise absent Logos”, but rather “the completion of a process already begun in God’s act of creation” (Need 2003, p. 403).

It is precisely this Biblical insight that Maximus uses when he develops the Logos concept to describe a continuous process from the creation of the cosmos to the Christ event. Lars Thunberg’s comment that Maximus envisages “almost a gradual incarnation” (Thunberg 1985, p. 75) may perhaps be imprecise in its terminology. Nevertheless, it points accurately to an important aspect of Maximus’s thought, in which he could go as far as to say (in Ambiguum 7) that “the one Logos is the many logoi, and the many logoi are the one Logos”. This linkage means, according to Andrew Louth (2013, p. 42), that everything in the universe “has its own meaning in its own logos, or principle, but … all these logoi form a coherent whole, because they all participate in the one Logos of God”. As Kallistos Ware has put it, Maximus describes the logoi of created things “in two different ways, sometimes as created and sometimes as uncreated, depending upon the perspective in which they are viewed. They are created inasmuch as they inhere in the created world. But when regarded as God’s presence in each thing—as divine ‘predetermination’ or ‘preconception’ concerning that thing—they are not created but uncreated”. For Maximus, he goes on, the logos of each created thing is “God’s intention for that thing, its inner essence, which makes it distinctively itself and at the same time draws it towards the divine realm” (K. Ware 2002, p. 160).

The important thing here is that the drawing “towards the divine realm” of which Ware speaks represents an essentially teleological understanding, in which the cosmos is—as Vladimir Lossky (1957, p. 101) has put it—“dynamic … tending always to its final end”. Central to this understanding is the way in which the logoi of created things are, for Maximus, what Paul Blowers (2016, p. 113) has called “principles or signatures of a creature’s essence and nature, teleological ‘codes’ that project creatures towards their fulfilment in the divine plan”. This means, for Maximus, that all things are drawn—by their very nature, and not by some external “force” or “lure”—not only towards the eschatological state but also, arguably, towards various intermediate goals associated with the journey towards that state, so that Maximus’s framework may be seen as compatible with scientific evolutionary theory (see, especially, Jackson 2023, 2024). Indeed, as I have argued, anything that contributes towards the journey towards the eschatological state—including both events perceived as miraculous and “responses” to intercessory prayer—would seem to be possible in terms of my own extension of Maximus’s model.18

The form of teleology envisaged in this extension points, I have argued, towards a model of divine action that is very different to the “causal joint” model that has—despite valid criticisms of its incoherence (Saunders 2002)—been dominant among science-engaged theologians (especially Protestant ones) in recent decades.19 The model that I have developed not only rejects the causal joint model’s concept of temporal “special divine action”, which is seen as supplementing the “general divine action” arising from the way in which the world has been created. In addition, although my model may initially seem deistic because of its strong focus on a kind of naturalism, it actually avoids deism because it envisages a “single act” model of divine action in which there is no denial—as there is in classical deism—of the possibility of “miraculous” events or of “responses” to intercessory prayer. The resulting model of divine action is not only comparable to the scholastic primary and secondary causes model in certain respects,20 but it also undermines many Protestant science-engaged theologians’ rejection of that model, which is based on the belief it has little explanatory traction in relation to scientific understanding. This undermining comes about because Maximus’s model is, as we have seen, not merely philosophical, since it has a strong theological component, which arguably expands the notion of secondary causes in an important way.

Sarah Lane Ritchie, in her analysis of the model I have articulated, has rightly noted that God’s act of creation—incorporating the setting up of what I have called “fixed instructions’ for all eventualities—is not, for my model, “to be thought of as occurring in the past; to do so is to presume an essentially erroneous relationship between God and time”. One should not, she goes on, think of this setting up “as occurring in a far distant past—rather it is eternal and being subjectively experienced within temporal constraints” (Ritchie 2019, p. 286). What is envisaged here is in fact based on an expansion—incorporating “higher laws of nature” of the kind envisaged by Augustine of Hippo (see Pannenberg 2002)—of a very traditional Christian understanding of the origin of the laws of nature.21 In terms of this very traditional understanding, as Ritchie explains, the model I propose is not one in which we are unable to speak of God’s personal “responses” to events in the world. Rather, it is based on the argument that “responsiveness should not be conflated with temporality” (Ritchie 2019, p. 282).

In much of the literature on science-engaged theology, this kind of “single act” model of divine action is dismissed as inconsistent with basic theistic commitments. Often, this is because parallels with the thinking of profound and subtle theologians such as Karl Rahner on this topic are ignored,22 and any kind of “single act” understanding is simplistically identified with the version of it developed by Maurice Wiles (1986), in which miraculous events are regarded as impossible because temporal divine intervention is denied. As I have argued, however, the notion of higher laws of nature—especially when expanded in terms of the scientific notion of regime change (Knight 2020, pp. 202–7)—makes it possible to question, on both philosophical and theological grounds, Wiles’s assumption that the events usually called miraculous can only come about through such intervention. A single-act account, when rooted in a more traditional theological understanding of the kind I have outlined, can be of a quite different kind, in which the central Christian affirmation of the occurrence of events that seem “above nature” is not regarded as questionable but is actually reinforced.

This is especially the case because my model is further reinforced by the Orthodox sense that being “above nature” is not the same as being “supernatural” in the way that the latter term is often understood in the West. The point here is that, while Orthodoxy makes a strong distinction between the created and the uncreated, it does this in a way that denies the separation between the natural and the supernatural that has become quasi-instinctive in much western Christian thinking, and in this respect its approach is comparable to the critique of that separation to be found in the Resourcement movement in the Roman Catholic Church (see Boersma 2009). However, the Orthodox approach goes further because, I have suggested (Knight 2020, pp. 177–95), it has a distinctive understanding in which events that seem “above nature” may be seen as anticipations of the “natural” as it is to be experienced fully in the “world to come”. Such events are, in this sense, only above the “subnatural” state in which we exist in a “fallen” cosmos, not above the “truly natural” world that is God’s original and ultimate intention for the created order.

What is important in relation to our present study is not, however, the detailed reasoning behind my own proposed “naturalistic” model of divine action, or even its implications for issues such as miraculous events and the purpose of intercessory prayer. What is important is the fact that the model exhibits significant parallels with the two other components of what Sarah Lane Ritchie has described as a “theological turn” in 21st century discussions of divine action. These are the revision of scholastic understandings developed within the Roman Catholic world by Michael Dodds (2012) and the focus on the Holy Spirit developed within the Pentecostal/charismatic strand of Protestant thinking by James Smith (2010) and Amos Yong (2011).

In these parallel developments, Ritchie notes, the metaphysical basis of the causal joint model is radically challenged in much the same way as in my own model. All of the proponents of the theological turn—despite their different starting points—challenge the causal joint model’s assumption of an essentially autonomous universe that God must influence from “outside”. The challengers instead posit, in their various ways, a universe that is to be understood only in terms of God’s presence within it, arguing “that standard causal joint proposals … are dependent upon question-begging metaphysical commitments, which in turn inadequately frame the entire divine action conversation. These presuppositions involve basic ontological questions about the God–nature relationship, and especially the question of what, exactly, it means to be properly ‘natural’” (Ritchie 2017, p. 361).

Ritchie points to the way in which—as in the Thomistic approach of Dodds and in what she calls my own “panentheistic” framework—the “pneumatological naturalism” of Yong and Smith reverses the methodology of the causal joint divine action theory. Smith, she notes, labels his own version of this perspective as enchanted naturalism, and this is similar, she observes, to the understandings to be found in Dodds’ approach and in my own work (it is surely significant that Smith’s term, enchanted naturalism, and my own comparable use of the term enhanced naturalism represent independent choices of phraseology). The pneumatological framework for divine action developed by Smith and Yong is able, in Ritchie’s judgment, to perform the same metaphysical function as that performed by panentheism in my own approach, so that to be natural is seen as being fundamentally involved with God at the most basic level.

One aspect of this parallelism relates to the basic understanding of nature. Just as, for the Eastern Orthodox framework, there is “no ‘pure’ nature to which grace is added as a supernatural gift” (Lossky 1957, p. 101), so also, says Ritchie, the pneumatologists “deny the implicit deism that would legitimize the notion of an autonomous natural world apart from the Spirit of God” (Ritchie 2017, p. 374). Another similarity lies in the understanding of miraculous events. Such events are, for my own approach, an aspect of the “natural” functioning of the world that may be spoken of in terms of regime change or higher laws of nature. In a comparable way, the pneumatological approach is, Ritchie observes, one in which, if “some events seem more supernatural than others, this is due to varying levels of creaturely response and openness to the Spirit”. Such events are, she goes on (quoting Smith), “sped-up modes of the Spirit’s more regular presences” (Ritchie 2017, p. 375).

5. Conclusions

What we have seen in relation to the three topics that I have addressed is that while Eastern Orthodox perspectives are in many respects distinctive, they nevertheless manifest significant parallels with views to be found in other parts of the Christian world and may well, as a result, have a part to play in Western Christians’ exploration of science-engaged theology.

Pope John Paul II of Rome—paraphrasing an earlier statement by the Dominican theologian, Yves Congar—often said that Christianity needs to “breathe with her two lungs”, meaning that the fullness of “faith seeking understanding” requires the theologian to take into account the distinctive insights of both the eastern and the western parts of the Christian world. One aspect of this insight is, for western Christians, the need to acknowledge the validity of the comment about theological methodologies that was once made by Timothy Ware (later Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia). Christians in the west, he said, “both Roman and reformed, generally start by asking the same questions, although they may disagree about the answers. In Orthodoxy, however, it is not merely the answers that are different—the questions themselves are not the same as in the west” (T. Ware 1963, p. 9).

As we have seen, this difference in the questions asked in the two main parts of the Christian world does not mean that Christians of east and west cannot learn from one another. In relation to science-engaged theology, in particular, it may well be that the specific perspectives to be found in Orthodoxy can be helpful in providing common ground between the differing opinions to be found among western Christians. This means that Orthodox perspectives on science-engaged theology may well have an important part to play in making science—as a locus theologicus—the focus of a truly ecumenical theological endeavour: one in which all strands of Christian thinking can potentially be integrated in a pan-Christian vision.