Echoes in Early Christianity · A Theory of Everything

The ideas in this book are not new in every respect. Christian thinkers in the first several centuries wrestled with the same knot of foreknowledge and freedom, and some of them reached for strikingly similar pictures. This chapter introduces six of them.

None of these writers was a Latter-day Saint, and none held the model in this book. Most of them believed God created the world from nothing, that God is utterly beyond time, and that God’s nature is infinitely different from ours. Those differences are real, and they are noted below. The point is not to recruit them, but to listen to them, and to see where they were reaching toward the same light.

Origen: Foreknowledge Does Not Cause

Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 253) argued that God’s foreknowledge is not the cause of what happens: “it does not happen because it is known, but it is known because it will happen.”Origen, Philocalia 23.8, from his lost Commentary on Genesis; trans. George Lewis (1911).

When God planned the world, Origen writes, “His thoughts traversed the whole course of the future,” seeing that if one thing occurs another follows, all the way “to the end of all things,” yet God “is not at all the cause of the occurrence of any particular event.” His example is Judas: God foreknew the betrayal, but Judas was not compelled, and could have been an apostle like the others.

Echo: Origen’s picture of God’s thought traversing every sequence of consequences closely resembles Chapter Two, and his insistence that knowing is not causing is the distinction at the heart of this model. Difference: Origen speaks of God foreknowing what will be, a single future, rather than the full field of possible futures.

The passage survives because, a century later, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus are traditionally credited with compiling the Philocalia, an anthology of Origen’s writings, and chapter 23 preserves his argument against astrological fatalism. Its occasion matters. Origen is commenting on Genesis 1:14, where the lights in the heavens are given “for signs,” and he insists that signs are not causes: the heavens may signify the future without forcing it. That is a direct ancestor of this book’s distinction between knowing a future and making it actual.

Gregory of Nyssa: Humanity as One Whole

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395) argued that God’s creation of “man” in Genesis 1:27 includes all humanity at once: “the entire plenitude of humanity was included by the God of all, by His power of foreknowledge, as it were in one body.”On the Making of Man 16.17 (NPNF trans.); see also 16.16 and 22, where God is the One “Who beholds the future equally with the present.”

He is also known for the idea scholars call epektasis, from Paul’s “reaching forth unto those things which are before.”Philippians 3:13. In The Life of Moses and On Perfection, Gregory teaches that the soul never reaches a final resting point in its ascent toward God; true perfection is unending growth in goodness.

Echo: Gregory’s vision of all humanity held together as one whole in God’s foreknowledge is close to the universal reach of the Atonement in Chapter Ten, and epektasis will feel familiar to anyone who believes in eternal progression. Difference: for Gregory, progress is endless precisely because God remains infinitely beyond us. That is near to, but not the same as, the Latter-day Saint hope of becoming like our Heavenly Father.

The two ideas fit together in Gregory more than first appears. Because humanity is one whole in God’s foreknowledge, he can say that the creation of human nature is complete from the beginning even though individual people come into being over time; history is the unfolding of a whole God already holds. That is not far from this book’s description of time as possibility becoming history, though Gregory frames it as the unfolding of a fixed fullness of persons rather than the actualization of free choices.

Maximus the Confessor: Fixed Purposes, Free Modes

Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) may be the closest of all to this book’s central principle. He distinguishes between the logos of a thing, the purpose God gives it, and its tropos, the mode in which it actually exists and acts, which for rational creatures is shaped by free choice.Ambigua 7 and 42, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers, trans. Nicholas Constas (2014).

In Ambigua 42 he applies the distinction directly: innovation takes place in the mode of a thing, not in its principle, so that God can do something genuinely new without destroying the nature He made. Echo: God fixing the end while the way of reaching it is freely lived is very near to “God can fix an outcome without fixing the choices that lead to it.” Difference: Maximus’s logoi concern natures and their divine purpose, not particular historical events or prophecies, and his framework assumes a God utterly beyond time.

Maximus lived through, and died because of, a controversy that bears directly on agency: whether Christ had a real human will alongside His divine will. Maximus insisted that He did, and was mutilated and exiled for it; his position was vindicated at the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681. For Maximus, Christ’s human will freely and perfectly aligned with the Father’s, which is why salvation could be both a divine work and a fully human act. That has a direct bearing on the open question about the Atonement in Part Two: the one outcome no substitute could secure rested on the free obedience of one Person.

Irenaeus: Christ Sums Up Every Life

Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–c. 202) taught recapitulation: that Christ gathers up the whole of human history in Himself. “When He became incarnate, and was made man, He commenced afresh the long line of human beings, and furnished us, in a brief, comprehensive manner, with salvation.”Against Heresies III.18.1 (ANF trans.).

Elsewhere he says that Christ “passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants; a child for children,” and so on through youth and age.Against Heresies II.22.4. Echo: recapitulation is an early form of the idea that Christ is connected to every human life and knows it from the inside. Difference: for Irenaeus it is mainly about Christ reliving and healing the story of Adam and the stages of human life, not co-experiencing each individual history across time.

Justin Martyr: The Seed of the Word

Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165) taught that the divine Word had planted a seed of Himself in every human being: “the seed of reason (the Logos) implanted in every race of men.”Second Apology 8; and 13, where each thinker “spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic word” (ANF trans.).

Echo: this is the patristic ancestor of the Light of Christ in Chapter Eleven, a real participation in Christ present in every person. Difference: Justin ties the seed to reason and to the Word’s role in creation, not to the Atonement.

Boethius: A Rival Worth Taking Seriously

Boethius (c. 477–524) offers the most famous Western answer, and it is a genuine rival to this model. God, he says, “abides for ever in an eternal present,” and His knowledge, “embracing the whole infinite sweep of the past and of the future, contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place.”The Consolation of Philosophy V, prose 6 (trans. H. R. James, 1897).

Because God sees our choices as present rather than predicting them, His knowledge imposes no necessity on them, any more than our seeing something happen makes it happen. Why a rival: for Boethius, God sees the one actual history, all at once; there is no unresolved field of possible futures from God’s standpoint. Why worth wrestling with: Boethius protects freedom without giving up the completeness of God’s knowledge, the same goal this book has.

A reader should ask whether the two views can be combined. One could hold that God knows every possible history (this model) and sees whatever becomes actual in an eternal present (Boethius). The cost is that the openness of the future would then be openness only from our side; from God’s side the actual history would already be in view. This book’s model, as stated, seems to want the openness to be real for God as well, since it says which future becomes actual is “not necessarily fixed.” That is the precise point at which the two part ways.