For Metropolitan John Zizioulas, Christology is the sole starting point for a Christian understanding of the truth of God. Christ’s claim to be the truth (John 14:6) constitutes a fundamental presupposition for Christian theology. Zizioulas locates the purpose of Incarnation in the Holy Trinity. The mystery of Christ is being initiated by the Father who actually sends the Son in order to fulfill and realize the eternal design of the Holy Trinity to draw man and creation to participation in God’s very life. In this understanding of Christology, Christ cannot be isolated from the Holy Spirit in whom he was born of the Virgin (Matt 1:20; Luke 1:35); in whom he became able to minister on earth (Luke 4:13), in whom finally he can now minister to this pre-eternal plan of God for creation in or rather as the Church.
The One of the Trinity and the God-man
Zizioulas recognizes that Patristic theology regarded the following points as the indispensable elements of Christology: a) The identification of the person of Christ with the hypostasis of the Son of the Holy Trinity. b) The hypostatic union of the two natures—divine and human—in Christ. As we will see below, discussing the Christological view of the Metropolitan of Pergamon, his main concern remains the guarding of the dogmatic belief that the (ontological) identity of Jesus Christ is the Son and Logos—that the “I” of Christ is the second person of the Trinity—and the relationship above all that constitutes the identity of Jesus Christ is none other than his close relationship with God and his Father.
There is no doubt that this “relation” (“schesis”) which is constitutive of Christ’s particular being is the filial relationship between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, and in this sense Christ’s person can be called "divine person." For this reason, he holds, God gives the world not simply his energies, but mainly his Son and his Spirit, with whom we know the Father through filiation. Zizioulas warns that the employment of the energy language should not obscure the importance of personal communion in God’s relationship with us in the Economy.
But this fundamental point cannot be understood without clarifying further the idea of causation in God’s being which was developed in the 4th century and elucidated by Zizioulas. The Eunomians argued against the divinity of the Son by logically identifying the notions of “Father”—the only ἀγέννητος—and ousia: if the two are identical, then it follows that whatever is not “Father” (in this case the Son) falls outside God’s ousia and is not ὁμοούσιος with the Father. Zizioulas recognized how the Cappadocians faced this argument by attacking the logic that identified the Father with this substance and by making the Father and not the divine substance the unoriginated originator of the Son. In another study Zizioulas argued that in the patristic understanding of the person, the three Persons are distinguished from each other because (and while) they coexist. This coexistence, being eternal (the Father has the Son eternally, etc.), makes the existence of one Person without the other Persons inconceivable. Thus, what is “common,” the essence, is not in contrast with the personal otherness.With the Cappadocian theological endeavor, the biblical identification of God with the Father is secured (“the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”). Because God is par excellence the Father, and vice versa, this notion of God is inconceivable apart from the Person of the Son who is revealed to us in the Economy.
These remarks, which can be derived from Zizioulas’ study of the fourth century Greek Fathers, offer an explanation for the way in which the being of God links to the being of creation. It is therefore obvious that for our theologian the Incarnation and thus the involvement in history constitute the distinctive role of Jesus Christ in the plan of the divine Economy. He appreciates especially the theology of the Council of Chalcedon (451) which for him stands out as the normative position on this matter: in Christ divine nature and human nature are united with each other “without confusion,” i.e., without a transgressing of their natural boundaries. The real issue, he holds, between Antiochene and Alexandrian Christology in the early Church must be seen against the background of the question: can human personhood be true personhood if taken in itself? “The Alexandrians would reject an autonomous humanity in Christ precisely because they would not conceive of man—in his true humanity realized in Christ—apart from communion with God. The key issue, therefore, was personhood (as the capacity for communion).”
Here Metropolitan John encapsulates a central tenet of theology: the revelation of the one true God is the person of Christ given to us. And since revelation is always personal—God revealed himself to Abraham, Moses, the Apostles, the Fathers and so on—consequently, “we have no new revelation and no addition to the revelation of Jesus Christ given in Scripture.”
Pneumatological Christology
However, Zizioulas constantly emphasized that “Christology is pneumatologically conditioned in its very roots.” His approach can be summarized as this: Pneumatology is not to be added to Christology; it is constitutive of it. This is because Christ’s birth as a human being involves the activity of the Spirit (Mt 1:18; Lk 1:35) and so does his resurrection (Rom 8:11) and, indeed, all of his earthly ministry with its teaching (Lk 4:18), miracles (Mt 12:28), etc. It is the Spirit who makes Christ “the last Adam” (1 Cor 15:45), an eschatological being “dwelling” in history.
Zizioulas holds that in the New Testament writings we come across both the view that the Spirit is given by Christ, particularly the risen and ascended Christ (“there was no Spirit yet, for Christ had not yet been glorified”—John 7:39); and the view that there is, so to say, no Christ until the Spirit is at work, not only as a forerunner announcing his coming, but also as the one who constitutes his very identity as Christ, either at his baptism (Mark) or at his very biological conception (Matthew and Luke). Both views co-exist in one and the same Biblical writing, as is evident from a study of Luke (Gospel and Acts), John’s Gospel, etc.
In Being as Communion Zizioulas stressed the fact that while Christ becomes history, the Spirit transcends it. The Spirit brings the last days into history (Acts 2:18), and this applies also to the Incarnation: the very term “Christ” signifies the one anointed by the Spirit, and so also the very identity of Chris contains the Spirit. “We are not saved because Christ became history, but because in Christ as the bearer of the Spirit history has been eschatologized,” writes Zizioulas in his last book, Remembering the Future.
Therefore, Christology is either pneumatological or it is no Christology at all. “Man can approach God only through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. An ecclesiology that uses the notion of the ‘image of God’ cannot be founded simply on Trinitarian theology. The fact that man in the Church is an ‘image of God’ is due to the Economy of the Holy Trinity, in other words, the work of Christ and the Spirit in history.”
Economy of salvation and Incarnation
Zizioulas holds that the incarnate Christ is so identical to the ultimate will of God’s love, that the meaning of created being and the purpose of history are simply—the incarnate Christ. He says that “all things were made with Christ in mind, or rather at heart, and for this reason irrespective of the fall of man, the incarnation would have occurred.” He also repeatedly states that since God knows created beings as the realizations of His will, it is not being itself but the ultimate will of God’s love which unifies beings and points to the meaning of being. And precisely here is the role of the incarnation. For that reason, “we have no new revelation and no addition to the revelation of Jesus Christ given in Scripture.” Zizioulas believes that Christology is founded upon the assertion that only the Trinity can offer to created being the genuine base for personhood and hence salvation. Thus, “this means that Christ has to be God in order to be savior, but it also means something more: He must be not an individual but a true person. It is impossible within our experience of individualized existence to find any analogy whatsoever with an entity who is fully and ontologically personal.” This leads to an ecclesiological Christology.
Ecclesiological Christology
Through such an understanding of the hypostatic union, Zizioulas is able to shed light on another aspect of the Christological mystery: Christ as the “catholic” man or as the “one” who is at the same time “many.” In view of what has just been said about Christ’s personhood, Christ is “one” in his own hypostasis, that is, as he relates eternally to the Father, but he is also at the same time “many” in that the same schesis (relation) becomes now the constitutive element—the hypostases—of all those whose particularity and uniqueness and therefore ultimate being are constituted through the same filial relationship which constitutes Christ’s being. The biblical notion of the “body of Christ” acquires in this way its ontological significance in all the variations in which this notion appears in the Bible: the anthropological (Adam—first and last), eschatological, ecclesiological, eucharistic, and so on.”
Here Metropolitan John is touching on an intricate theological topic concerning the interplay between Christology and ecclesiology (the church’s structure and practices). What does lead him to an understanding of Christology in terms of ecclesiology? For Zizioulas, by being the initiator of personhood for humanity, Christ acquires a body, and not only that but he can only be spoken of in terms of this body (Acts 9:5; 1 Cor. 12:12; etc.). In a reciprocal relationship, man, in relating to Christ in and through personhood, affirms his existence only in communion, in the Body of Christ and in the koinonia of the Spirit. Thus, the totus Christus stipulates the theological force for a claim that—since the presence of Christ in a eucharistic gathering means the presence of the whole Christ—the local Church of a particular place gathered together to celebrate the Eucharist is the catholic Church. In his Lectures in Christian Dogmatics Zizioulas develops the idea that “the divine Eucharist is the complete revelation of Him ‘whom our hands have touched’ and direct communion with God in personal and tangible form. Every revelation of God, in whatever form it comes, manifests Christ. As John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite insisted, it is the incarnation of Christ that makes the icons revelations of Christ.”
But this is not all. Zizioulas’ ecclesiological study, rooted in detailed liturgical scholarship, goes even further: “the Eucharist as 'communion of the last times' reveals to us that the whole of creation is destined by God’s love to be set free at last from corruption and death and to live 'unto ages of ages'. This is possible thanks to the head of the Church, the “last Adam,” who made a reality what the “first Adam” refused and failed to realize: the communion of what is created with God. This analogy illuminates our understanding of the salvation, which is best presented in the teaching of the Fourth Ecumenical council. In the person of Christ, the created and the uncreated have been united 'without division,' in a way that admits no division, but equally 'without confusion,' that is to say without losing their identity and their own particularity.” This is crucial for the main problem of creation, which is death.
Christology of the Resurrection
By connecting the Son with the very nature of God and man, Patristic thought demonstrated that Christ incarnates the free union of the created and the uncreated as the way of transcending death. “If the created-uncreated relationship is not indivisible, death is not overcome. Every ‘distance’ between God and man brings death, says Chrysostom. Overcoming death presupposes union between the created and the uncreated. That is the meaning of ‘without division’.”
We shall have to devote a few lines to this problem as it represents basic aspect of Christology. According to John Zizioulas, Christ is presented at Chalcedon as savior of the world “not because he brought a model of morality or a teaching for humanity; it is because he himself incarnates the overcoming of death, because, in his own person, the created from now on lives eternally.” The New Testament suggests that the dominion over all “powers” and the judgement of the world are given to Christ in connection with his Resurrection (Mt 28:18; cf. Acts 10:42 and 17:31): the risen Christ as the “leader” (ἀπαρχὴ) of the universal resurrection subjects under his feet all evil powers including, above all, the “enemy” par excellence, death. The reason why death is regarded by the Christian faith as an ontological problem, according to Zizioulas, lies in the fact that “it turns ‘beings’ into ‘non-beings’ (Rom 4, 17), while in the resurrection God, by raising the dead ‘calls non-beings to be beings.’” This in itself is very significant, for it means that with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, Zizioulas holds, not only sin is washed away but also human mortality. Here Zizioulas insightfully remarks that the Resurrection was not a successive stage in Christ’s life following upon his Cross and his Burial; it was already present in Christ’s death, as the factor that made this death ontologically significant.
“Unless there is resurrection, history is bound to collapse,” writes John Zizioulas in his last book Remembering the Future, adding “if history’s ontology is protological it cannot provide a future that grants it being.”
The consequences of this appear clearly when one considers the problem of the future general resurrection. Because, as Zizioulas holds, it makes no sense for Christ to rise if our own death is not defeated. “The Resurrection of Christ is a prerequisite for our own resurrection,” he writes. As the Apostle Paul says, “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen” (1 Cor 15:13). Here we are dealing with an eschatological Christology.
Eschatological Christology
Metropolitan John explains that the two resurrections formed an unbreakable unity: just as the Son of Man or the Servant of God could not be conceived without the community surrounding him, in the same way the risen Christ is the “head of the body … the first-born of the dead” (Col 1:17), the head of the eschatological community, the Church (Col 1:17,24). It will suffice to quote here a passage of Zizioulas’ last book. “This corporate character of Christ’s risen body (which is so dominant in 1 Corinthians) is extended in Colossians from the realm of anthropology to that of ecclesiology and from that to cosmology, making the risen Christ’s body inclusive of 'all creation' (Col 1:15) by the abolition of death (1 Cor 15:25) so that in the end 'God may be all in all' (1 Cor 15:28).”
Another consequence of the Resurrection is displayed in the encounter of the risen Christ with his disciples in his appearances after the Resurrection. “Had it not been for these encounters we would have neither the historical Christ of the New Testament nor Christian worship as we know it,” says Zizioulas and laconically concludes: “Take away these post-Easter encounters and the entire biblical Christology of Christ’s divinity—indeed the whole content of the Gospels—collapses together with Christian worship as a whole.”
This reflects Zizioulas’ belief that Christology is not merely a matter of redemption from sin, but of something more than that. However, he holds that there are two aspects of Christology, one negative (redemption from the fallen state) and another positive (fulfillment of man’s full communion with God; what the Greek Fathers have called theosis). That’s why he concludes that “only if the two are taken together, can Christology reveal human destiny in its fulness.”
Cosmic Christology: One Logos and many logoi
According to Athanasius (De Incarn. 14), God meets man “from underneath” (ἐκ τῶν κάτω); significance of this for space and time hardly needs to be stressed. Namely, a truly Christian doctrine of creation cannot be expressed adequately in the statement “the world was created by God” or simply by “God created the world.” According to Zizioulas, who is inspired by St. Maximus the Confessor, God did not create simply a world but a Christo-centric-world, a world embodied in his Son. In his last magnum opus, Remembering the Future, Zizioulas advocatas that, “speaking ontologically, there is no such an entity called 'creation' to which Christ is added logically afterwards. The very definition of 'creation' has to include Christ: creation has a head, and its definition, its ontology, is not possible until its 'recapitulation' in this head, Christ, at the end.”
From this point, Zizioulas discusses St. Maximus' view on the nature of the universe and its purpose. According to him, the universe, being a product of divine will, isn't static but dynamic. However, this dynamism is not to be understood in the Neoplatonic sense, which posits an emanation from a higher to a lower state of being, or a downward movement. Instead, St. Maximus suggests that the universe is in a state of continuous progression or movement towards a certain end or purpose, referred to as “the Will’s forward thrust.” Maximus further elaborates this in his response to question 60 to Thalassius, by referring to an eschatological (relating to the end times or final destiny of humanity) recapitulation of all in Christ. This he considers “the great hidden mystery … the blessed end for which everything has been constituted … (the end) for the sake of which everything exists but which does not owe its existence to anything else.”
Zizioulas highly regards the uniqueness of Maximus’ theology, which rests in his successful development of a Christological synthesis that organically interlinks history and creation. This achievement was made possible by his audacious retrieval of the logos concept, which had fallen into disuse due to the risks associated with it: Christ is the logos of creation and one must find in him all the logoi of created beings. In this theological framework, God perceives created beings as manifestations of His will, meaning that it is not the essence of being itself, but the ultimate will of God's love that unifies and gives meaning to all beings. “Since God knows created beings as the realizations of His will, it is not being itself but the ultimate will of God’s love which unifies beings and points to the meaning of being,” says Zizioulas. The incarnate Christ (God made flesh) is the perfect embodiment of the ultimate will of God’s love. Therefore, the meaning of existence and the purpose of history are intrinsically tied to the incarnate Christ. Maximus’ passage suggests that all things were created with Christ at the heart, implying that the incarnation would have happened regardless of the fall of man. In this view, Christ, specifically the incarnate Christ, represents truth, as he is the ultimate embodiment of the unending will of God’s ecstatic love.
Christological anthropology
Based on this, Metropolitan John asserts that Jesus Christ’s title of Savior is not simply because he brought a beautiful revelation or a sublime teaching about the person to the world. Instead, his title is justified because he actualizes the quintessence of personhood in human history.
Salvation in Christ means participation in the unique relationship between the Son (Jesus Christ) and the Father (God), which links created beings with the divine, thereby preserving their existence. Deification, or theosis, which is the process of a human becoming divine or godlike, is considered in this context to not just refer to a general union with “God,” but specifically with the Son, i.e., Christ. Finally, Zizioulas underlines the notion that all humanity exists within Christ, suggesting a fundamental unity of all people in the divine through Christ. This represents a core belief within Christian theology, asserting that all of humanity is interconnected and shares in the divine nature through their unity with Christ.
Metropolitan John argues that if we consider Christ as the paramount example of humanity (“the Man par excellence”), it inevitably leads to a high regard for humanity within theological studies. The Latin phrase “simul iustus et peccator” (translates to “at the same time righteous and a sinner”), often used within Reformation theology, in Zizioulas’ view, is insufficient from a theological perspective when considering Christ as the perfect exemplar of humanity. John Zizioulas seems to argue that an anthropology that is illuminated by Christology transcends the dialectic of the fallen human state—that is, it moves beyond the contradiction of being simultaneously sinful and righteous, and points towards a more exalted view of humanity that reflects Christ’s perfection. “Christ does not simply stand vis-à-vis each man, but constitutes the ontological ground of every man. This is what it means for anthropology that Christ does not represent an individualized and fragmented human nature, but man as a whole.”
