A Response to Peter Jones
Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Far West Region
April 8, 2011, Escondido, CA
In praise of distinctions
To begin with, I want to heartily affirm Dr. Jones’ valorization of distinctions—beginning
with the basic ontological distinction between God and creation and continuing to the various
distinctions within creation itself. It is a strange mindset that judges distinction as alienation, and
Jones rightly calls attention to the poverty of what he calls ‘one-ism’, in its tendency to masquerade
ontological oneness as harmony and castigate the supposed dissonance of ontological difference.
Really, it should strike us immediately as absurd that the mere declaration that all things are one
would be the kind of word that makes for peace. Instead, those who say so are like the prophets of
whom Jeremiah complains: ‘They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, “Peace,
peace,” when there is no peace.’ (Jer. 8:11) Such babbling prophets only exacerbate the alienation so
characteristic of modernity.
In underscoring the abiding distinction between God and his creation, Jones enables us to
speak meaningfully of this alienation. Precisely because we are not God, we are able to do things with
the world that he made that run counter to his intentions. Because we aren’t God, that is, we are able
to sin. The two-ism Jones champions carves out space to speak of sin—and because it enables talk of
sin, it likewise enables talk of redemption. Unable or unwilling to countenance a God distinct from
creation, one-ists are left unable to speak meaningfully of the alienation of creatures from God and
one another; nor can they speak of their reconciliation.
Furthermore, despite one-ism’s purported exaltation and celebration of the cosmos, its
commitment to ‘the non-dual joining of matter, consciousness, and spirit into an undifferentiated One’
evinces a profound discomfort with the world as it is. For the world to be good, it seems, it must be
divinized. Thus one-ism fails to let God be God and to let the world be the world. Precisely by denying
that the world is God, two-ism can confess that the world is God’s creation and is therefore, as he
himself says, ‘very good’ on its own terms (Gen. 1:31).
In outlining the contest of two-ism and one-ism, Jones offers a helpfully sweeping account
of the rising tide of neo-paganism in Western society. He paints this seascape in the twilight of
modernity and clarifies our context as a struggle to affirm the transcendence of the God who created
out of nothing over-against a motley army of pantheisms. As is often the case when painting on such
a massive canvas, though, the detail work suffers at points. Let me briefly touch up the picture by
turning our attention to three details.
Touching up the details
Firstly, consider Jones’ worry about the ‘Easternization’ of the West and of the church.
Implicit in such a worry is a dynamic of contamination, in which the healthy West somehow catches
the disease carried by the East. This is hardly helped by our standard division of religions into the
‘Western ones’, such as Judaism and Christianity, and ‘Eastern religions’ like Hinduism and
Buddhism. Such a division has never been very accurate, not least due to Judaism’s (and therefore
Christianity’s) birth in that middle region stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. It is
even less accurate today, as the center of gravity shifts with breathtaking speed to the South and East.
I worry, then, that to speak of the West’s ‘Easternization’ does very little descriptive good and
threatens to collapse into jingoism. Furthermore, as Christianity grows precisely in places like India
and China, we may very soon be hoping for the Easternization—that is, the Christianization—of the
increasingly post-Christian, if not post-secular, West.
My second concern arises with Jones’ statement that ‘Vatican II officially recognized the
mysticism of pagan religions as a valid form of spirituality for Christians.’ He cites Nostra Aetate,
which affirms that ‘[t]he Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions
[i.e., Hinduism and Buddhism].’ Certainly an outward-looking council, one in which the Roman
Catholic Church nearly did an about-face, Vatican II was eager to affirm all it could. It did not,
however, affirm the mysticism of pagan religions as valid for Christians. It said what theologians have
said since Justin Martyr (and John and Paul), that the Word has been at work in the world far longer
than the church has been proclaiming the gospel. If we discern truth, even a kind of holiness, in
other religions, we may and must rejoice in it—even as we share the gospel with those among whom
we find these fragments of the truth. To ask believers to choose between fidelity to the gospel and
approbation of such fragments of truth is to pose a false dilemma. That said, this is a difficult balance
to strike; doubtless many have heard the world-affirming words of Vatican II as an abandonment of
Christian distinctives and an invitation to relativism. Still, this is to misread the council.
The final issue concerns Jones’ critique of an incipient one-ism in Brian McLaren’s work.
Jones takes issue with McLaren’s involvement with the Vision Project and suggests that McLaren
‘concludes, as far as I can tell, with this same notion of synthesis in view: “the beautiful whole that is
as big as the cosmos, and bigger still, in which every particle is known, named, and loved. Can we
even say something absurd? Can we say that this beautiful whole is even bigger than God...”’.
McLaren’s comment is, I believe, somewhat tamer when placed in context: ‘Can we say that this
beautiful whole is even bigger than God,’ he writes, ‘because it begins with God in all God’s infinite
fullness, and then adds creation?’ Though the language is a bit loose, McLaren seems merely to assert
God’s expansive love for the world he created, such that ‘every particle is known, named, and loved.’
That said, the Vision Project, of which McLaren’s essay is a part, certainly does seem to
reflect the one-ism about which Jones warns us. We might question the wisdom of McLaren’s
involvement with this latter project; if it signals an allegiance to the Vision Project’s comprehensive
aims, we ought question that involvement. But it may just as well be reflective of a strategic decision
and, I suspect, a constitutional inclination on McLaren’s part, to search far and wide for common
cause.1 Call it a post-fundamentalist approach to Christian engagement in the world—that is, an
approach taken by one still looking over his shoulder in fear that a fundamentalist might be about to
kidnap him. I suspect that McLaren takes this approach far too often; it seems to be his modus
operandi. Surely at times a battering ram (the fundamentalist weapon of choice) is called for rather
than a group hug. McLaren probably needs to learn to say ‘no’ to the world (knowing very well how
to say ‘no’ to the church). However, I do not believe he is a car-carrying one-ist.
All of this about McLaren is to say that I wonder whether, in his laudable defense of the
basic ontological distinction between God and creation, Jones has not grown shy of union and
synthesis—categories which in themselves are perfectly serviceable for Christian theology. In his
concern that ‘[t]he church, listening to the culture, is aping the new Oneist hybrid of spirituality and
activism, but with little sense of a Gospel-driven love of sinners or the personal piety and holy living
essential to the Creator/creature distinction’, surely it is the neglect of sin and holiness that ought
occupy us rather than the uniting of spirituality and activism per se. After all, might such a unity
merely mean that, for instance, a church born from and nourished by the lavish grace of God in turn
gives freely to support the widows and orphans in its midst and, with Paul, ‘remember the poor’ (Gal.
2:10)?
Irenaeus: a model for engagement with one-ists
By way of conclusion, then, let me offer, and indeed champion, an ancient model for our
contemporary engagement with one-ism, especially as it is found in contemporary Gnosticism, that
‘dualism on a monist background’ about which Jones warns us. Irenaeus, the late second-century
bishop of Lyons, articulates an uncompromising two-ism, but in so doing he offers a compelling case
for the union and communion of humanity with God in Christ for which one-ists clamor. Rather
than merely dismissing one-ism, the bishop trumps a one-ist view of reality by exposing its failure to
deliver on the goods; it cannot produce the unity that it celebrates.
A relentlessly curious and creative thinker, McLaren’s bold claims far too often outstrip the nuance of his thought. He
strikes me as decidedly joyful and hopeful, but not patient, in his work.
1
Response to Jones 2
Irenaeus begins with a radically transcendent view of God and a basic ontological distinction
between the Creator and his creation; he is an unabashed two-ist. ‘[T]he origin of all is God’, he
writes in Against Heresies, ‘for He Himself was not made by anyone, but everything was made by
Him.’ ‘He Himself in Himself’ made all there is out of nothing (2.2.4), ‘contains all and is alone
uncontainable.’ (Dem. 4; also see AH 2.1.2, 2.30.9, 4.20.2) We may be only able to make something
out of something, but God’s superiority to us lies in his ability to make something out of nothing
(2.10.4).2 ‘And in this respect God differs from man, that God indeed makes, but man is made’
(4.11.2). In deploying this basic ontological distinction, Irenaeus bleaches talk of God and creation.
That the one is not the other frees each to be itself in a manner appropriate to it. God is utterly selfsufficient and wants nothing, ‘for He is always full of all good’ (4.14.3). He is not cold towards his
creation, but is in his very antecedent fullness free to create and enter into fellowship with his
creation without care. It is no slight to evoke creation’s utter contingency; that is simply what it
means to be the creation that God judged ‘very good’.3 It is just this ‘very good’ that the Gnostics are
unable to affirm.4 To return to a point I made earlier: God’s creation, we might point out to
contemporary neo-pagans, doesn’t need to be deified to be very good; it is so on its own terms, by
virtue of God’s having made it and passed favorable judgment on it.
But Irenaeus knows that establishing the distinction between God and creation alone is
insufficient. There is a problem, and it is not one of ontological difference but an alienation between
God and creation brought on by humanity’s sin. While never erasing distinction, Irenaeus’ burden is
to articulate God’s way of reconciling the world to himself. Once the problem of alienation is clearly
on the table, in fact, it is the very distinction between God and the world that grounds the possibility
of reconciliation. It is because God is antecedently full in himself, because he is the ever-living one,
that he can give himself to his creation freely. It is as the one whom death cannot hold that he can
suffer and indeed die for the sins of the world. Irenaeus moves from the assertion of distinction, to
the problem of alienation, to the solution of reconciliation in Jesus’ recapitulation of Adam and the
Spirit’s ‘accustoming’ of believers to receive God.
So, while reconciliation in no way compromises distinction, Irenaeus’ deeply biblical
intuition is that distinction is ever and always ordered to communion, to fellowship. We must take
care that, as we develop what Jones calls a ‘comparative antithetical hermeneutical system by which the
truth can be clearly articulated and defended as over against “the Lie”’, we do not miss the end of
God’s ways with the world, which is fellowship. And reconciled fellowship is the oneness for which
the one-ists of our day long, no matter how confused and corrupt that longing has become. After all,
who wants to be gathered together with those with whom one remains in enmity? It is not the mere
gathering that makes a people one, but their being reconciled to one another, a company of enemiesbecome-friends.
One-ists are wrong to assert an ontological oneness, but they are right to value and seek
unity. The problem is that what they seek they will never find, apart from the one in whom all things
hold together, the one in whom all things in heaven and earth have been summed up. It is he who
unites all things—even, we can say, with appropriate caveats in place, God and the world. It is a
function of the inimitable majesty of God that he condescends to humanity, opening his home to us
and making his creatures into sons and daughters. Our two-ist commitments ought never prompt us
to back away from the glorious truth that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, that he
bound himself to humanity in Christ in order to re-establish communion with his people and,
through them, his creation. While the God-creation distinction abides eternally, we see in Christ that
it abides for the sake of ever greater fellowship.
Frances Young argues that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was ‘the fundamental factor in the development of Christian
distinctiveness.’ (Young, ‘“Creatio Ex Nihilo”: A Context for the Emergence of the Christian Doctrine of Creation’, Scottish
Journal of Theology 44 [1991]: 140)
3 For the details of the basic ontological distinction, see AH 3.8.3.
4 See Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 47-50.
2
Response to Jones 3