Christ the God-Man

The single idea that organizes Justin Popović’s entire theology: Christ the God-Man — Bogočovek in Serbian, Theanthropos in Greek — in whom God and man are united without confusion, and from whom, for Justin, every question of theology, anthropology, ethics, and culture must be answered. This file expounds the theanthropic principle and its consequence, the deification (theosis) of man.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The Organizing Center

If Justin Popović’s theology can be reduced to one word, that word is Bogočovek — the God-Man. The term is the Serbian rendering of the Greek Theanthropos, the ancient patristic name for Jesus Christ as the one who is fully God and fully man, and Justin makes it the axis on which his entire thought turns (Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015, on the centrality of the God-Man in Justin; Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019). Every major theme in his work is a function of this one: the doctrine of God is oriented to the Incarnation; anthropology is the account of the being made for union with the God-Man; the Church is the God-Man’s body; salvation is theanthropic — the deifying union of man with God accomplished in and through Christ; and the whole crisis of modern culture is diagnosed as the loss of the God-Man and the substitution of mere man (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and see Against European Humanism).

This is not an idiosyncrasy but a deliberate recovery of the classical Christological faith of the Church — the confession of Chalcedon (451) that the one Christ is made known “in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” and of the whole conciliar tradition that defended it (on the councils, see Orthodoxy: The Ecumenical Councils). What Justin adds is the insistence that this dogma is not a settled formula to be filed away but the living key to everything — that the union of God and man in Christ is the pattern, the source, and the goal of all reality, and that theology consists in thinking every question from this center outward (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

The God-Man Against the Man-God

Justin habitually sets the God-Man (Bogočovek) against a rival figure he calls the man-god (čovekobog) — the human being who would make himself god, who seeks his own divinization by his own powers apart from Christ. The opposition is Dostoevskian in origin: it is the confrontation, in The Brothers Karamazov and The Devils, between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor, between the humble God who becomes man and the proud man who would become god (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Justin’s Dostoevskian roots; and see Petrograd, Oxford, and Athens on the Dostoevsky studies). For Justin the whole history of the West, and of modern secular culture, is the tragedy of the man-god: humanism, rationalism, and their political offspring are so many attempts to build the human being up into a god without God, and they end, he argues, in the diminishment and finally the destruction of the very man they exalt (see Against European Humanism).

The God-Man is the answer to the man-god not by suppressing the human but by fulfilling it. In Christ, Justin insists, humanity is not abolished or absorbed into divinity but raised, healed, and completed; the God-Man is the true measure of man, the revelation of what the human being is and is called to become (Justin Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al., Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994, esp. the essays on the theanthropic economy and on man; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The whole difference between the two figures is the difference between a humanity that receives its divinization as a gift in Christ and a humanity that seizes at divinity by its own hand and loses even its humanity in the grasping.

The Theanthropic Economy

From the God-Man Justin derives what he calls the theanthropic economy — the whole saving work of God, which is theanthropic through and through because it is accomplished by the God-Man and communicated through his body the Church. The Incarnation is its foundation: because God became man, the union of God and man is now a permanent, embodied reality in the person of Christ, and everything that follows flows from it (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The death and resurrection of the God-Man are, for Justin, the conquest of death — the theme that his own experience of the war years had made existential rather than academic (see Formation and the Great War). Death, he insists again and again, is the great enemy, the problem of problems that no humanism can solve; and the God-Man alone has solved it, by rising, so that the Church’s whole life is participation in the victory of the Risen One over death (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, on the conquest of death and the resurrection).

The Church, in turn, is the extension of the theanthropic economy through time: the body of the God-Man, in which human beings are grafted into Christ and made partakers of his deifying life through the sacraments and the ascetic-liturgical life (see The Orthodox Ecclesiology). And the goal of the whole economy is theosis — the deification of the human person, the real participation of man in the divine life by grace, made possible because the God-Man has united divinity and humanity in himself (see Orthodoxy: Theosis).

Theosis: The Goal of the God-Man’s Work

For Justin, the purpose of the Incarnation is the deification of man — the ancient patristic axiom, given classic form by St. Athanasius, that God became man so that man might become god (by grace, not by nature). He expounds salvation not primarily in juridical terms of debt and satisfaction — categories he associates with the Western humanist deformation of the faith — but in the theanthropic and deifying terms of the Greek Fathers: the human being, fallen into sin and death, is healed and raised and made a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) by being incorporated into the God-Man (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, on deification and the theanthropic life; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and see Orthodoxy: Theosis). This deification is not an individual achievement but is worked out within the Church, through the sacraments and the “theanthropic virtues” — faith, prayer, love, humility, fasting — by which the person is progressively united to Christ and transformed (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, on the ascetic virtues as the path of theosis).

The theme of personhood is central here, and it links the mature theology back to the Athens dissertation on St. Macarius. Man is made to become a true person (ličnost) precisely by union with the personal God in the God-Man; the fulfilment of the human being is not the impersonal absorption offered by non-Christian mysticism or the isolated self-assertion of the man-god, but the personal communion of the deified human hypostasis with the Holy Trinity through Christ (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on personhood and knowledge in Justin, tracing it to the Macarius work; and see Petrograd, Oxford, and Athens).

Why It Matters

The theanthropic principle is what makes Justin a systematic thinker and not merely a polemicist. His famous attacks on European humanism and on ecumenism are not free-standing prejudices; they are corollaries of the God-Man idea. Humanism is wrong, in his account, precisely because it is anthropocentric where reality is theanthropocentric — because it puts man where the God-Man should be (see Against European Humanism). And his ecclesiology and his polemic against ecumenism both rest on the claim that the Church is the one body of the one God-Man, so that the unity of the Church is a given theanthropic fact rather than a goal to be negotiated among divided “churches” (see The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism). To understand Justin at any point, one must return to this center: everything he wrote is an attempt to think, and to live, from the God-Man.

See Also

References

  • Popović, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994. (The theanthropic economy; the conquest of death; deification; the theanthropic virtues; man and the God-Man.)
  • Popović, Justin. Dogmatika Pravoslavne Crkve, 3 vols., in the Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. (The systematic exposition of the God-Man as the center of dogmatics.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The God-Man as organizing center; the Dostoevskian man-god; personhood and knowledge.)
  • Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (The theanthropic principle in Justin’s theology.)
  • Scripture and councils: 2 Peter 1:4 (partakers of the divine nature); Chalcedon 451, Definition (the two natures of Christ).