“Begotten from the Father Before All Ages”: Finding a Place for the Nicene Theology of Time after Bulgakov and Behr

Two giants of contemporary Orthodox theology, Sergius Bulgakov and John Behr both suggest that most of us—meaning most Orthodox theologians or in Behr’s case, most contemporary theologians—have been thinking about time and eternity, about the relation between the Son and creation, all wrong. Specifically, they both reject as nonsensical depictions of God as “before” time.

So, Bulgakov: “God is portrayed as sitting “before” nothing and thinking about what forms of being He can create from it. Such a conception… must be rejected as blasphemous. This conception implies no more and no less than a denial of God’s eternity and the unchangeability of Divinity itself.” (Lamb of God, 125).

Behr uses similar language though he is focusing on the incarnation rather than creation: “[In] a statement such as ‘Jesus Christ is begotten from the Father outside of time and from the mother inside of time’, the begetting from the Father does not happen before, chronologically, the birth from the mother (if it did, one would have to ask: How long before? How old was the Word when he was born from Mary as Jesus?)” To think this way, he suggests, “is to speak of ‘Incarnation’ in purely mythical terms (Behr, 249).” 

In both cases, we have a kind of reductio ad absurdum, if we think of God as being “before” time, we are “blasphemous” to use Bulgakov’s terms and mythologizing, to use Behr’s. On the logical level, this dismissal of a “before time” holds, a point conceded by the person who was doubtless the unnamed target of Bulgakov’s complaint, Georges Florovsky (1949, 57).

The problem, as I see it, however, is that this image of God being “before” time (as abstracted from time) is unavoidable if we want to uphold and describe the Nicene distinction between creator and creature, between the Son as begotten and the Son as becoming flesh. To distinguish these two realities or to describe how they relate with one another, we will inevitably find ourselves describing eternal things in spatio-temporal terms. Unless we describe God or the Son in a reality “outside time” or “before time,” this distinction between creator and creature, between the Son begotten and the Son becoming flesh, threatens to collapse from a distinction between two realities (created temporal reality on the one hand and an uncreated eternal reality on the other) into a distinction between appearances (time) and reality (eternity): a move which both Behr  (John the Theologian, 196) and Bulgakov (Bride of the Lamb, 60) seem to welcome. 

There is a wealth of traditional material (far too much for me to cite) that seems designed to help us both to imagine and affirm this distinction between created and uncreated reality, specifically by dwelling on God’s or the Son’s existence “before time”: we have Psalm 55:19 (54:20 LXX) that names God as “before the ages [πρὸ τῶν αἰώνων]”,” Christ’s prayer in John 17:5 that refers to “the glory that I had with Thee before the world was;” the credal “Only- begotten Son of God” who is “begotten of the Father before the ages," and we have the Byzantine kontakion for the forefeast of Christmas that praises “τὸν προαιώνιον Λόγον” who “though he was God before the ages” is “willing to be gazed on as a young child."  This imagery of the pre-existent Logos that Behr attributes to the nineteenth century, then, is really Nicene: it reflects Nicene readings of Scripture that are then enshrined in Byzantine hymnography. 

What, then, should we make of this Nicene creator-creature distinction and the “before” language that seems at once impossible—since there can be no time before time—and indispensable—since we cannot conceive of such a distinction without it? In other words, even if we admit that Bulgakov and Behr are right that there can be no time before time should we follow them in dismissing any discussion of God’s counsel before creation or of a pre-existent Son since to do so is blasphemous or mythologizing?

The solution that I am working through has three parts: 1) I’m going to invoke a principle of accommodation from Athanasius, but widely repeated in the Patristic era 2) Then I will compare accommodations, like saying that God is “before the ages,” to maps 3) Then I will change the question from whether or not we have good maps (should we throw out “before the ages” and replace it?) to the question of how we use those maps. When we use “before the ages” correctly, I will argue, we can avoid Behr and Bulgakov’s complaint.