Progressive Orthodoxy, Christian Buddhism, and Reviving Gnosticism
I’ve recently been thinking about this idea of progressive orthodoxy or rethinking Eastern Christianity for the modern age. One aspect of this rethinking is dialectical context-keeping, where we look at the biblical creation stories as theological retellings of ancient Mesopotamian mythological accounts, rather than as literal historical accounts. One thing that this approach does is it opens up the possibility of embracing a view closer to process thought than to Platonism. In the process view, things are not conceived as having concrete essences (“created according to their kind”) but rather are conceived as fluid and dynamic processes or relational entities. In this view, God is not seen as a static monad or unchanging entity but rather as a dynamic process unfolding in the world. The soul (psyche) can likewise be conceived not as the concrete essence of a person but rather as the mere fact of consciousness or awareness. This process approach, I believe, opens up room for discovering profound truths in the Buddhist tradition and integrating them with one’s Christianity.
God as Process and Person
The traditional Christian view — especially within Western scholasticism — has been a Platonic essentialism: God as a static, immutable, unchanging Essence or pure Being. Such a view, however, is hard to reconcile with the Bible, where God speaks, weeps, loves, regrets, incarnates, and even changes course in response to human repentance. The biblical God is fluid and relates to the world as a person. This biblical view aligns more with process thought than it does with Neo-Platonist theology. In suggesting a progressive orthodoxy, I am positing a move away from this conception of God as a Platonic Monad and toward a conception of the divine as a relational and dynamic being — a person! — akin to what process theologians like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne have envisioned. In this view, God is not an unchanging essence but a living presence who dwells not above history, but within it. Sure, God also transcends history, but His transcendence must not undermine his immanence. God’s transcendent element, His unknowable Essence (the way His Being is), contrasts with His knowable Energies. God is no longer the unmoved mover but the ever-moving Spirit revealing Himself through history.
The Soul, Not-Self, and Relational Ontology
Traditionally in Christian theology, especially in Augustinian and Thomistic thought, the soul is viewed as the static, indivisible, and immortal essence of a person. This, of course, contradicts the Buddhist concept of anatman (not-self), which argues that there is no permanent abiding self. In the Buddhist view, the self is a contingent process of psychophysical aggregates (skandhas) inter-dependently co-arising with other things. If we take a process view of the Christian concept of the soul, we can view the soul as mere consciousness and place greater emphasis on the person as the locus of individual identity. The person as persona takes on various roles and relationships and these relationships are the basis of self-identity. I am a son, a husband, a writer, an employee, a pet-owner, etc. — all relational terms, describing how I relate to something or someone else. My self interdependently arises with the other — I cannot be a son without relation to a mother, a husband without a wife, a writer without a pen, etc. By viewing the “soul” not as a fixed essence but as conscious awareness that arises from and participates in relational existence, we can reconcile the Christian view to the Buddhist perspective.
Reincarnation
The idea of reincarnation is often assumed to be alien to Christianity, yet historical evidence reveals a far more complex picture. In the 1st-century, the Jewish writer Philo espoused a doctrine of reincarnation; and the 9th-century writer Saadia Gaon attests to the presence of a Jewish doctrine of reincarnation in his own time. The notion of reincarnation was central to the esoteric Judaism of Isaac Luria in the 16th-century and has since become mainstream in Jewish Kabbalah. Early Christianity arose out of the 1st-century Jewish context, and a notion of reincarnation was inherited by certain early sects. The idea of reincarnation was widely accepted among “heretical” early Christians like Valentinus, Basilides, Mani, Elchasai, and Alcibiades. It was less common among proto-orthodox Christians but not unheard of. St. Clement of Alexandria and Origen, two figures who were instrumental in the development of Orthodox theology, both believed in reincarnation. And the doctrine of “aerial tollhouses” in Orthodoxy seems to be the remnant of a long-lost doctrine of reincarnation. See more about this here.
The doctrine of reincarnation or metempsychosis does not have to be taken literally. Rebirth can be a metaphor for consciousness (the psyche/soul) gradually coming into union with God. If rebirth is understood less as a literal transmigration of souls and more as a metaphor for ongoing transformation, then the Christian spiritual life itself becomes a kind of reincarnation. Each stage of metanoia — the Greek term for repentance or transformation — is a death to an old self and a birth into a new awareness. This idea resonates deeply with the Eastern Orthodox tradition of theosis, where the human person ascends toward union with God through purification, illumination, and union.
Reincarnation and aerial tollhouses have been rejected by many Orthodox thinkers but their persistence in mystical literature suggests that they are pointing to something true — if not metaphysically, then existentially or spiritually. By reinterpreting these doctrines in a non-literal manner, we can recover their symbolic potency while remaining within the bounds of orthodoxy.
The contemplative practice of hesychasm, central to Orthodox spirituality, mirrors Buddhist meditation in both method and aim. The repetitive invocation of the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” — acts like a mantra, drawing the consciousness inward. Just as Buddhist meditation leads to the realization of anatta (not-self) and emptiness (sunyatta), hesychastic prayer leads to a kenotic self-emptying, where one becomes fully receptive to the divine energies of God. The spiritual path is itself a process of reincarnation — not across lifetimes, but within this life: a sequence of small deaths and rebirths, shedding false selves and awakening to divine presence.
Christ, Dao, and Buddha
Taking a process view, we can find Christ also in the Daoist and Buddhist traditions. What is the Dao of which Lao-tzu speaks if not the Logos? “Jesus said unto him, ‘I am the Dao.’”(John 14:6) When the Universal Buddha is revealed in the Lotus Sutra, who is being spoken of except Christ? The Lotus Sutra presents a transcendent Buddha who continuously manifests throughout all worlds for the sake of awakening all beings. Similarly, Pure Land Buddhism reveres Amida (the Buddha of Infinite Light and Life), whose boundless compassion creates a Pure Land of bliss and liberation accessible through simple invocation of “Namu Amida Butsu.” The Vimalakirti Nirdesa and other sutras reveal that the so-called “Pure Land” is not some separate, distant land to which we may go when we die, but is rather this world transfigured by mystical experience. Is this not what Christ was also teaching when he said, “The Kingdom of God is within you”(Luke 17:21)?
But, unlike Jesus, Amida is not a historical figure: he is a person encountered through mystical practice. In this light, Amida Buddha and Jesus Christ can be seen as different expressions of the same universal principle: the uncreated light and loving consciousness who draws all beings into Himself. The Jesus Prayer and the Nembutsu are equivalent. When the Buddhists chant “Namu Amida Butsu,” they are invoking Christ just as much as the Monks of Mt. Athos are when they chant “Kyrie Iesou Christe.” Hesychasm, the contemplative tradition of Eastern Christianity, becomes a practice of mindful presence in which the Jesus Prayer echoes the Buddhist mantra: a rhythmic calling into deeper awareness. The Buddha-nature at the heart of Mahayana Buddhism is the “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” of which St. Paul spoke. (Colossians 1:27) Buddhism and Christian hesychasm are a single path.
The similarity between the Buddhist mystic Shinran Shonin and the Christian mystic Paul of Tarsus is uncanny. Just as St. Paul speaks of grace, so does Shinran preach of “other-power.” It is only Amida/Christ who can save you. One must turn to the Buddha of Infinite Light with true shinjin (entrusting) and this faith alone can bring you to union with the divine. This doctrine of salvation by faith alone, in both traditions, knocks down all racial, ethnic, and cultural hierarchies.
“In reflecting on the great ocean of shinjin, I realize that there is no discrimination between noble and humble or black-robed monks and white-clothed laity, no differentiation between man and woman, old and young. The amount of evil one has committed is not considered; the duration of any performance of religious practices is of no concern. It is a matter of neither practice nor good acts, neither sudden attainment nor gradual attainment, neither meditative practice nor non-meditative practice, neither right contemplation nor wrong contemplation, neither thought nor no-thought, neither daily life nor the moment of death, neither many-calling nor once-calling. It is simply shinjin that is inconceivable, inexplicable, and indescribable. It is like the medicine that eradicates all poisons.” — Shinran Shonin (in The Essential Shinran, edited by Alfred Bloom)
Compare those words of Shinran to the words of St. Paul:
“Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” — St. Paul (Galatians 3:23–29)
The Language of “Born Again”
Rather than asserting the literal transmigration of a soul from body to body over multiple lifetimes — a view rejected by the councils and the Church Fathers — we can interpret reincarnation metaphorically as the progressive transformation of the soul within a single lifetime. This aligns with Scripture’s repeated emphasis on “being born again”(John 3:3): “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”(Ephesians 4:22–24) But the metaphor of metempsychosis or reincarnation emphasizes that salvation is a process rather than a one-time event. In this view, every act of repentance is a rebirth. We are born again repeatedly on the path to salvation. This view emphasizes the continual nature of the process of rebirth: “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”(2 Corinthians 4:16) Thus, reincarnation becomes a symbolic vocabulary for spiritual evolution — the slow and often painful work of purification and illumination that occurs as we draw closer to union with God. What the metaphor of “reincarnation” emphasizes most of all is the process nature of being born again. We are not just born again in a one-time event but are continually being reborn through constant repentance and progress towards perfection.
Heaven, Hell, and Apokatastasis
A process Christianity cannot easily accommodate the rigid bifurcation of heaven and hell as fixed eternal places. Just as identity is seen as dynamic and unfolding within history, so too must salvation be understood as an ongoing process. In such a view, the afterlife is not a place of static reward or punishment but, rather, is a continuation of the soul’s process of becoming. Whether through cycles of rebirth or stages of purgation, the soul is always invited deeper into divine reality. The tollhouses through which the departed soul ascends, being tempted along the way, become less about judgement and morph into thresholds of spiritual awareness — tests of readiness that serve as initiations into the divine. And we may even hope for an eventual apokatastasis (universal restoration), as was taught by Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa in the early Church.
Aerial Tollhouses
The Orthodox Church’s traditional teaching on aerial tollhouses — often imagined as the soul’s journey past demonic accusers who attempt to block its ascent to heaven — has long been controversial, especially in the West. Yet this too can be interpreted as conveying a truth about spiritual psychology rather than a metaphysical fact. The tollhouses may be understood not as literal checkpoints in the sky, but as archetypal encounters with the unhealed parts of the soul — layers of self-deception, vice, or shame that rise to the surface in moments of transition, particularly at death but also during profound experiences like confession, prayer, or trauma.
In this light, the tollhouses become symbolic of the soul’s confrontation with its own moral history. They are not punitive checkpoints but purgative thresholds — places of sin and unresolved trauma that must be relinquished or transformed in the light of divine mercy. This aligns with the vision of St. Isaac the Syrian, where the “fire of judgement” is conceived metaphorically as the fire of God’s love: painful not because God is wrathful, but because His love exposes what is unlovely within us. This interpretation makes hellfire and tollhouses into metaphors for purification. The tollhouses, then, are less about demons and more about unrepented lust — those habits of thought that still cling to the soul and impede its ascent into full communion with the divine.
By framing reincarnation and tollhouses as metaphors for spiritual growth and purification, we remain faithful to the patristic emphasis on moral transformation, divine mercy, and mystical ascent. Rather than upholding heretical metaphysics, we uphold the central Christian claim: that Christ transfigures all who turn to Him, not through fear or fate, but through love and freedom.
Generic Subjective Continuity or Existential Passage
The idea of reincarnation, however, concerns not just rebirth within this life but also rebirth after death. The classical idea of reincarnation presumes a soul that transmigrates between bodies — a persistent, unchanging essence that moves from one life to the next. Such an idea appears to be problematic from the perspective of both the orthodox Christian framework and process thought. Buddhism, too, encounters this problem: for there cannot really be any transmigration in the Buddhist notion of rebirth since there is no atman (soul) to transmigrate.
I would like to challenge the notion that one would retain one’s memories in the afterlife. Would you even want to retain memories from this life in the next? Would the best memory from this lifetime even be worth remembering when placed next to the true bliss of God’s presence? Would you really be fully happy in the next world if you could remember the worst traumas of a previous lifetime? I don’t think one would really want to remember their previous life. Furthermore, everything we know about memory suggests that it is bound to the brain (damaging the brain can erase memories), so the soul or pure consciousness that moves from this life to the next would seem to be sans memories. And this aligns with the classical conception of reincarnation, where the “soul” metaphorically drinks from the river Lethe and experiences complete forgetfulness before being reborn in a new body.
A non-heretical interpretation of reincarnation after death might be found in the philosophical concept of generic subjective continuity or existential passage. Generic subjective continuity is a naturalistic conception of an afterlife that presupposes no supernatural or metaphysical components. Generic subjective continuity posits that while there is no enduring personal identity across lifetimes (no Platonic soul), there is a continuity of subjectivity — a passing of the flame rather than the preservation of the candle. Each new conscious being emerges from the same underlying stream of consciousness but does not retain memory or individual traits from previous lives.
Generic subjective continuity is a naturalistic theory of rebirth that rejects the notion of an enduring soul or self. Instead of a personal identity surviving death, this idea suggests that consciousness — as a type of experience rather than a particular person — continues. When an individual’s conscious experience ends at death, the next conscious experience to arise anywhere in the universe simply is the next subjective “I” from the first-person perspective. Though memory and personal identity are not carried over, the stream of awareness remains unbroken from within, much like how dreamless sleep presents no felt gap in experience even though hours may pass.
Philosophers like Thomas Clark and Wayne Stewart liken this to a shift in perspective: just as one doesn’t experience being “nothing” during sleep or unconsciousness, death may simply result in waking up elsewhere as a different conscious subject. While no personal features are preserved, the raw fact of “being someone again” continues — a kind of rebirth without a soul, rooted not in metaphysics but in the structure of experience itself. In this view, consciousness is not extinguished; rather, the condition of awareness generically continues in the universe, always finding itself “here,” now.
This is not reincarnation in the traditional sense, but a naturalistic rebirth of awareness — each new conscious subject arises from the same primordial awareness that animated others before it. If consciousness is a structural feature of the cosmos (not a discrete personal soul), then individual egos are waves on a deeper ocean. When one wave crashes, another may rise — but both are part of the same sea.
This is remarkably similar to the Buddhist idea of rebirth without a self and could be seen as consistent with the Orthodox rejection of personal reincarnation while still allowing for continuity of experience. In this synthesis, we are not importing Buddhist or heretical ideas wholesale into Christianity. Rather, we are retrieving ancient Christian insights — on theosis, purification, and divine union — and re-expressing them in a framework that resonates with both process thought and the natural sciences.
Reviving Christian Gnosticism
The framework laid out in this essay — drawing from process theology, Buddhist insight, hesychastic spirituality, and non-essentialist models of consciousness — opens a powerful avenue for re-engaging the Christian Gnostic tradition. Historically condemned as heretical, the Gnostic writings of antiquity are often dismissed for their dualism, elitism, and rejection of the material world. However, if we refuse to read them metaphysically and instead receive them as psychological, existential, and mystical literature, they can be reclaimed as profound expressions of inner transformation.
What the Gnostics called gnosis — a liberating inner knowledge — was not, in its essence, a rejection of Christ or of the body, but a yearning for intimate union with the divine light. Gnostic cosmology often symbolized the human condition as one of forgetfulness and alienation, where the soul (or awareness) is trapped in illusion, bound by powers of ignorance and desire. In this sense, the “archons” and “tollhouses” described in Gnostic texts need not be taken as metaphysical realities, but as metaphors for internalized forces — addictions, traumas, and illusions — that must be overcome in the soul’s journey toward wholeness.
Reinterpreted this way, Gnostic myth becomes a kind of sacred psychology. The fall is not a cosmic accident, but an existential condition of self-forgetting. The redeemer figure — whether called the Logos, Christ, or Sophia — is the inbreaking of divine remembrance, an awakening from within that calls us back to our deepest truth. This is fully compatible with orthodox Christianity when the narrative is reframed in psychological and therapeutic terms.
The Gnostic doctrine of the Demiurge — the ignorant or malevolent creator god who fashioned the material world — has long been a theological non-starter for orthodox believers, for Christians committed to affirming the goodness of creation. But if read non-literally, the Demiurge can be reinterpreted not as a personal being but as a symbolic representation of a blind, impersonal process — namely, the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection. In this light, the Demiurge becomes analogous to Richard Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker”: not an evil deity, but the unconscious force through which complex life arises, marked by suffering, waste, and indifference. Rather than rejecting this process, we may see it as the substrate through which divine consciousness gradually emerges. Just as Gnostic myth speaks of the hidden spark trapped in matter, so too might we say that divine awareness arises slowly through the crucible of evolutionary pressures, eventually becoming self-aware in the human being. This allows for a Christian reinterpretation: God does not act as an external artificer molding clay, but as the transcendent ground drawing all things toward Himself through and beyond the evolutionary matrix. Thus, the Demiurge — reframed as nature’s blind process — is not a rival to God, but the veil through which God becomes manifest, the rough scaffold that will one day give way to glory.
Much of what is problematic in Gnosticism — the disdain for the body, the rigid dualism between spirit and matter, and the elitism of secret knowledge — can be discarded without losing the essential mystical insight. That insight, when reinterpreted through a progressive orthodox lens, becomes a poetic and visionary language for the soul’s journey of purification and divine union. We need not affirm the metaphysics of the Gnostics to learn from their existential vision.
Thus, far from being a threat to orthodoxy, Christian Gnosticism can be seen as a distorted but earnest attempt to express what the Orthodox tradition affirms in its most mystical register: that Christ dwells within, that the soul is meant for transfiguration, and that salvation is a return to the fullness of being through knowledge (gnosis) and love (agape). When read rightly, the heretical becomes heuristic — the myth becomes map — and the fragments of forgotten gospels begin to point us once again toward the radiant truth of the incarnate Logos.
Is God God?
Getting back to our dialectical context-keeping approach to Scripture, where we read the creation accounts as theological retellings of Mesopotamian myths... If the creation account is not to be taken literally, why should the idea of “creation” itself be taken literally? Does the Uncreated Light (Amida-Christ) stand in relation to the world as a Creator to Its creation? If God exists outside of space-time, how can he causally relate to the world? Causality presupposes spatio-temporal relations — cause precedes effect in time; this thing here affects that thing there. These are piercing and essential questions — and they strike at the heart of what a progressive orthodoxy must grapple with: how to affirm God’s transcendence and immanence without falling back on metaphysical frameworks that no longer make sense in light of process thought, modern physics, or mystical experience.
If we apply our dialectical context-keeping approach not only to the Genesis narratives but to the very concept of creation itself, we are led to question whether the notion of “creation” must be taken literally at all. If the biblical creation story is a theological retelling of Mesopotamian myth, not a historical account, then perhaps “creation” is not a historical event and more a metaphor for emergence, becoming, or ongoing manifestation. The idea of God as a divine craftsman forming the cosmos ex nihilo reflects a spatial and temporal imagination — God “before” creation, then “acting” upon it. But if God is the Uncreated Light, the Amida-Christ beyond all duality and distinction, then this God cannot be said to cause the world in the same way one billiard ball causes another to move. Causality presupposes space and time (sequencing, directionality, spatial extension) yet God is beyond space-time. Thus, it may be more accurate to say that the world is not something God created in time but something God is eternally revealing. The world unfolds as the radiance of the Uncreated, like light from a flame, or the dream from the dreamer. In this light, creation is not a past act but a timeless relationship. The cosmos is not a product, but a theophany — a self-disclosure of divine being within the field of impermanence.
I asked, “Is God God?” Is the so-called Uncreated Light that we encounter during our deepest mystical experiences actually “God”? I think, on the one hand, one could say, “Of course It is! Why that is what we mean by ‘God.’” On the other hand, there is a sense in which this is not the case. Fairly often, when we refer to “God,” we have in mind the notion of a Creator. We assume that this concept of God-as-Creator is identical to the God-as-Encounter which we find through mystical practice. This, however, is not necessarily so. This is why St. Dionysius and others throughout Church history were so keen on apophatic theology and the insistence that any attempt to define God in positive terms amounts to heresy. The God of mystic experience is Absolutely Other — neither one nor many, neither male nor female, neither existent nor non-existent, neither Creator nor creation! To quote the Gnostic theologian Basilides, “Since, then, there was nothing — no matter, no substance, no nonsubstance, nothing simple, nothing complex, nothing not understood, nothing not sensed, no man, no angel, no God, not anything that is named or perceived through anything which can be defined more subtly than anything else — the nonexistent God wished, without intelligence, without sense, without will, without choice, without passion, without desire, to make a Universe.” Through such apophatics, we might approach a Christian atheology.
What, then, is God-as-Encountered by the mystic? The Creator? Hardly. A hallucination? Maybe. Some sort of cosmic or universal consciousness? Possibly. The Source of being? It sometimes seems to be but when mystics refer to it as “the Source,” that doesn’t necessarily mean the Creator. God in the purest apophatic form is akin to the undefinable Dao. All we can say definitively is that we have had an encounter and that what we have encountered is ineffable, beyond the ability of language to describe! And we ourselves don’t know exactly what It is.
I rather prefer to refer to it as the Dao and “the Source” rather than as God or Creator because those latter terms can be so misleading. The term “Creator” implies an Intelligent Designer, and everything I know about the world suggests that there is no intelligent design in it. Indeed, when we speak of the world as “created,” we risk importing the misleading imagery of an artisan deliberately crafting a universe for specific ends. But everything we observe — from the formation of galaxies to the intricate complexity of DNA — points not to design by intention, but to emergence through selection. The apparent order of the universe may itself be the product of what some theorists call universal selection, whereby only stable, law-governed universes persist in a broader multiversal field. Likewise, the design-like intricacy of living organisms does not require a conscious Designer, but is adequately explained by evolution through natural selection — the very blind, impersonal mechanism that Dawkins dubbed the “Blind Watchmaker.” In this view, what looks like intelligent design is an illusion produced by cumulative filtration over deep time. The logos of the universe is not imposed from above but emerges from below: order, pattern, and beauty arising out of chaos, filtered and stabilized through the sieve of survivability.
I’m an agnostic panpsychist; I’m not really convinced that panpsychism is correct. I actually suspect that what is really going on is likely so strange that no mind could ever conceive of it much less explain it to another. The God-as-Encountered, for some inexplicable reason, seems to the mystic to be the Source. But, again, Source does not imply Creator or Intelligent Designer. It could be rather more like a primordial substance from which things emerge or “bubble up,” though we ought not to conceive of this as a form of emanationism. At times It seems to be conscious. But it could be more like an unconscious mind dreaming uncontrollably than like a conscious entity planning things out. And it seems to be suggesting that we, as conscious entities, uniquely come from It. The Source in this framework is not a potter molding clay but an ever-unfolding process of relational becoming, almost like the world becoming self-aware and developing. Divine presence, then, is not revealed in a predetermined blueprint, but in the astonishing emergence of consciousness, compassion, and meaning from a cosmos that appears otherwise indifferent to their existence.
The Creator-Creature Distinction
In the preceding reflections, I have questioned the literal notion of God as a Creator in the artisan sense — rejecting the idea of a divine craftsman who imposes design upon the cosmos from without. Instead, I’ve proposed a vision of God as the Source: an ineffable ground from which the cosmos unfolds, not as a product of will or intent, but as a radiant and spontaneous manifestation. This God-as-Source is not a cause among causes but the ungraspable depth from which causality itself arises — more akin to the Dao than to the deity of traditional theology. Yet, within this new way of thinking about God, we can still affirm the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible.”
At first glance, such a vision appears to undermine two core theological distinctions in Orthodox Christianity: the Essence–Energies distinction and the Creator–creature distinction. Yet I want to suggest that these can be preserved.
The Essence–Energies distinction in Orthodox theology asserts that God’s essence (ousia) is utterly unknowable and transcendent, while God’s energies (energeiai) are the ways in which God becomes manifest and knowable in the world. When viewed through the lens of Source theology, this distinction can still hold. The essence of God becomes that which is utterly beyond comprehension, not because it is a hidden metaphysical core, but because it is not a thing at all. It is no-thingness, the infinite abyss or silence from which all being emerges, and into which all being dissolves. It is the background, the groundless ground, what mystics call the “Uncreated Light,” what Buddhists might name the formless Dharmakaya — this substance of pure apophasis is what the Church calls God.
The energies of God, then, are the patterns of divine emergence that shine forth in the unfolding cosmos. They are not separate from the Source, nor are they imposed upon the world from outside; rather, they are how the Source appears within the field of relationality. The emergence of consciousness, the surprising evolution of compassion, the mystical encounter with presence, the ecstatic sense of beauty — all of these can be seen as divine energies: manifestations of the Source within the finite, temporal world. These are theophanies — not because they break the natural order, but because they disclose the deeper relational unity that undergirds it.
Likewise, the Creator–creature distinction need not be discarded. Even without affirming God as a literal Craftsman or Designer, we can preserve the Creator-creature distinction. The Source is not merely another being among beings; it is Being-as-such, the mystery from which all beings arise and to which all return. In this sense, there remains an infinite qualitative distinction between the Source and any creaturely manifestation of it — not in the sense of hierarchy or power, but in the sense of ontological difference. We are not God; we are radiations of the divine, finite expressions of the infinite.
Thus, the Creator–creature distinction becomes not an assertion of divine dominance, but an invitation to reverence and participation. We are distinct from the Source, yet inseparable from it. Our finitude does not sever us from the divine, but makes us capable of relation — capable of perceiving, loving, and returning to the Source through the path of deification.
In this revised framework: Essence becomes the ineffable Source beyond all form and concept. Energies are the lived manifestations of the divine in time and relation. Creation is not a historical act but a timeless unfolding. Creatures are finite patterns through which the Source becomes self-aware.
By reinterpreting these classical Orthodox distinctions in light of process thought, panpsychist philosophy, and apophatic mysticism, we do not discard tradition — we deepen it. We allow its symbols to breathe again in a new age, where “Creator” no longer has to mean Designer, and where God is no longer imprisoned in the metaphysics of the past. Instead, we are invited to encounter the divine in the shimmering immanence of each moment, as the Source eternally giving rise to the dance of being.
