Did Christ Dwell Among or In Us?
One day last year, during a dogmatics class, the verse in St. John’s Prologue where he says Christ came and dwelt among us came up conversation. I forget why it came up, but what caught my attention was the little preposition: εν (“en”).
That is what is normally translated as ‘among’ in most English translations, but to my knowledge it had more of the meaning of the English word ‘in’. ‘Among’ and ‘in’ have two very different meanings in my mind. Orthodox theology is very clear about God taking on human nature and deifying it. ‘Among’ sounds more like God coming, living alongside us, maybe the same place and same time, but still as something other than us.
But I only have a feel for these words in English; what I really wondered was what the feel of the Greek word εν is in Greek, that is, to a native Greek speaker. When we were discussing this, Bishop Alexis happened to be right down the hall, and he spent more than twenty years living and breathing the services, the Scriptures, and the Fathers in Greek, 100% of the time.
When I asked him what the Greek sense of εν was, whether it had to be ‘in’, or whether it also held the meaning of ‘among’, he looked at me as if this question were so obvious that he was wondering if he might be missing something, all the more so, because this word not only means ‘in’ in English, but even sounds the same as the word ‘in’ when you pronounce it in Greek. It is in. It does not mean ‘among’. The Fathers’ understanding of this phrase is very clearly that Christ dwelt in us.
My Greek professor back in college would warn us not to be too rigid in our translation of prepositions. I still hear his warning, and realize I need to be careful about drawing too much meaning out of a little, two-letter preposition. However, this is one case where both the native speakers and the Fathers (according to Bishop Alexis) are clear that the understanding is not so simple as Christ coming and setting up his tent next to ours, but that Christ set up his tabernacle within us, in mankind, deifying our nature, establishing the kingdom of God within us.
I had a conversation, yesterday, with a professor from seminary who challenged some of what I said above. The challenge against what was said is that this verse, John 1:14, is speaking of the Incarnation and not of deification, and that verse 12, "becoming children of God", the deification verse. In other words, deification is 'Christ taking up residence in our hearts' (what I seemed to be talking about above) and Incarnation was 'God coming and dwelling among us' so that we had the opportunity to be deified.
ReplyDeleteI think part of the misunderstanding-this is my rebuttal to those comments-is the suggestion that Incarnation and deification are two distinct things. In a sense they are different, yes, but I would argue that these verses, the Word came and 'tabernaled' in us, is Incarnation and (at least) the potential of deification all at the same time. My understanding is that Christ is in everybody, and, that taking on human nature and us sharing in that same human nature, we are all, to some degree, united with Christ. That does not mean every human is a saint. It seems to be a matter of degree: the extent to which we partake in Christ, we are more a part of Christ. In a manner of speaking, he is "baked in" to the very essence of the nature of what it is to be human. We can also see those who "become beasts in their passions", that is, to partake in animal passions and literally become less human and more beastial, which would be deification working in reverse, I guess.