"The More"

The wonderful logic of the communal ontology

Christo-logic, I suggest, is succinctly captured by the term “the more.” In precise terms, the principle of “the more” refers to the positive and mutually affirming relationship between the dimensions/distinctions that constitute being (self and other, grace and nature, heaven and earth, Creator and creation, etc.), so that:

(1) “The more” there is of one dimension (2) “the more” the others are affirmed in their integrity.

There is a positive, rather than a negative, correlation between distinct realities in Christ. “The more” applies only to terms/realities which are divine or of/from divinity; His inner life, His operation in the world, and His creatures. Our principle entails that—contrary to worldly logic—the more one term is revealed as significant and irreducible to any other, all the more essential is its relationship to each other term. Multiple extremities persist in peace, so that the Holy Trinity is both the most perfectly “one” and the most perfectly “many” in different mutually affirming senses (nature and person, respectively). Likewise, Christ is both perfect God and the most perfect Man, omnipotent Creator and finite creation. Communal ontology teaches us that—because being(s) is (are) not self-relational—the presence of the “other” is not only compatible with the uniqueness, irreducibility, and integrity of the self but the necessary correlative of the self’s very being. Contra Nietzsche, the (natural, i.e. non-fallen) nature of being is not to seize space from the other by asserting a self-determined end against all others to their exclusion. Rather, the nature of created (and divine) being is to give space, to make oneself receptive to the presence of the other in their autonomy and integrity. Christ is the perfect Man because, in His loving self-limitation, He freely makes space for creaturely freedom (through His human will) without compromising the eternal “making space” for His Father and the Spirit that He eternally realizes as the Divine Son. Indeed, He makes space for Man all “the more” as He makes space for God. Thus, Man becomes truly Himself only insofar as He makes space for God.

In many ways, I think the Reformation introduces a novel and profoundly un-Christian logic, one that implicitly sees a negative correlation between God and Man. For many of the Reformers, especially John Calvin, “the more” there is of Man the less there is of God. Hence, God’s creative act/will does not reach its fullness through synergy with human acts/will as in Orthodox and Catholic theology, but precisely through the total overtaking or determining the human will. God’s sovereignty, for Calvin, is expressed not in His ability to make space for created freedom but in His entirely self-asserted and self-determined will, which secures its glory precisely by excluding any real reciprocity between divine and human action.

It is not only in soteriology that Protestant theology expresses “the less.” The same underlying logic appears wherever divine action is conceived as excluding, rather than elevating, created participation. Ecclesiology is thinned as the Church is reduced from a Spirit-indwelt body with a shared mind and history into a merely fallible assembly of individuals with faith in Christ; sacramentality is weakened as material realities are stripped of their capacity to mediate and radiant divine life; sanctity is flattened as saints are denied any real participation in God’s ongoing work of transforming the cosmos into His body. Again and again, the pattern repeats: where God acts, man must recede. Authority cannot be shared, holiness cannot be communicated, and grace cannot truly transform and confirm creaturely freedom without threatening divine sovereignty. The result is a theology in which God’s presence is safest when it remains external, unmediated, and unilateral, and in which creaturely agency is tolerated only as passive reception. Against this, an authentically incarnational and Trinitarian vision insists that God is not diminished by communion but revealed through it—that divine fullness is disclosed precisely in God’s ability to indwell, elevate, and act through human persons without remainder or rivalry.

Christ reveals that the more God is present, the more Man is as well. The more earth is formed and filled, the more it radiates heavenly light. The more God works His will in and through us, the more we are free. The more grace permeates nature, the more nature is fulfilled and confirmed rather than erased. The more we are raised into eternity, the more time is realized as what it truly is. The more we embrace death (in Christ), the more we receive eternal life.