I’ve just read a fascinating section by Fr John Behr (of St. Vladimir’s in NY) on Methodius of Olympus (died around 311 AD). He was bishop of Olympus in Lycia, a prolific writer, and a martyr.

What struck me is this (which Fr Behr mentions). Methodius was an outspoken opponent of Origen, particularly Origen’s belief in the eternality of the world. Methodius developed his understanding of creation ex nihilo (which was less about the modern question of origins than it was just about a temporal beginning to the universe) in opposition to Origen. He wanted to protect the freedom of God vis-à-vis the world (as later Fathers did), but Methodius saw that a temporal beginning to the universe meant that God, the sole creator and cause, must in some sense be temporal, though he denies that God temporally ‘becomes’, i.e., that there’s a history to God’s “becoming” the necessary, self-sufficient triune being he is. What obtains necessarily can’t also come to be. But neither can that necessary being who freely creates the world ex nihilo be strictly-speaking timeless! Yeow!

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Here's a pre-Necene Orthodox father who denied strict divine timelessness. He was not condemned and remains in the Eastern tradition...drum roll please...Saint Methodius!

Jeff, there's room for you in Orthodoxy!

T

Post Edited (Tom) : 3/6/2012 6:19:21 PM (GMT-6)

Good find, Tom! 

Actually, this confirms what we've kind of intuited all along: there is no inherent incompatibility between Orthodoxy and open theism.

One need not accept evangelicalism's theological woes in order to be an open theist!

Moreover, theologically errant (effectively tritheistic) evangelical open theists can remain being open theists while re-thinking their trinitarian understanding.

Win-win. 

Post Edited (One Love) : 3/7/2012 3:57:51 AM (GMT-6)

David Bradshaw (Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom; http://www.amazon.com/Aristotle-East-West-Metaphysics-Christendom/dp/0521828651), after reviewing the Orthodox view of God and time, concludes:

“Surely God’s knowledge does undergo temporal sequence, for time is His action, and He knows it in the act of doing it. He knows that it is now 10:42 just as surely as, a few moments from now, He will know that it is now 10:43. Likewise He knows what I am now thinking and saying, not from some eternal perspective, but because He is Himself the temporal context of my utterance. Yet because eternity is also His action, of which time is the unfolded expression, He also knows time and all that takes place within time in an entirely different way. I am inclined to think that the Neoplatonists were right in holding that this other way of knowing ought not to be thought of as propositional: that it is more like the intuitive, all-at-once understanding that a master geometer has of a proof, as opposed to the laborious, step-by-step understanding of the novice."