God-Human Development (Evolution)
By St. Justin Popovich
Letter to a Student (Nov. 19, 1968)
By St. Justin Popovich
Letter to a Student (Nov. 19, 1968)
My most precious child in the Lord. You wish me to tell you what questions the “Theological Circle” concerns itself with. Here they are: can the scientific understanding of the evolution of the world be reconciled with the Orthodox feeling and consciousness founded on Divine Revelation? How did the Holy Fathers speak about this? Is there any need at all for such a reconciliation?
Briefly. New Testament anthropology is inseparable from Old Testament anthropology. The good news of the Old Testament is this: man is the image of God. The good news of the New Testament is this: the God-man is the image of man. The heavenly, divine, immortal, eternal, and unchangeable human element in man is the image of God: the God-likeness. This God-likeness of the human being has been disfigured by voluntary human sin, by his union with the devil through sin and its consequence — death. God therefore became man “in order to renew once again His own image, which had been corrupted by passions.” God therefore became man, and remained in the human world as the God-man, as the Church, in order to give man — the image of God — all the necessary means: the Holy Mysteries and the holy virtues, by which the disfigured yet God-like human being, within the God-Human Body of the Church, might grow into a perfect man, into the measure of the full stature of Christ (the fullness of Christ). This is God-human development (evolution) of man; this is God-human anthropology.
The goal of the God-like human being is gradually to become “perfect, as God” the Father, to become “god by grace,” a god-man by grace, to attain deification, God-humanization, union with Christ, and trinitization. The Holy Fathers say: “God becomes man so that man might become God.”
Meanwhile, so-called “scientific” anthropologies do not acknowledge at all the God-likeness of the human being. By doing so, they deny in advance the God-human development of this being. If man is not the image of God, then the God-man and His Holy Gospel are unnatural for such a man; they are then unrealizable and take on merely a mechanical character. Then the God-man Christ is like a modern robot creating robots; then the God-man is a violator, because He forcibly wishes to make of man a being “perfect as God.” In reality, this is a legalistic utopia, an illusion, an unrealizable “ideal.” Ultimately, it is a legend, a fairy tale. Moreover, if man is not a God-like being, then the God-man Himself is unnecessary. For scientific evolutions recognize neither sin nor a Savior from sin. In this earthly world of “evolution” everything is natural, and there is no place for sin. Therefore, it is superfluous even to speak of a Savior and salvation from sin. In ultima linea, everything is natural: sin, evil, and death. For if everything comes to man and is given to him through evolution, then what is there to save in him, if there is nothing immortal and incorruptible in him, but everything is from the earth, earthly, material, and as such transitory, corruptible, mortal?
In such a world of “evolution,” there is no place for the Church either, which is the Body of the God-man Christ. That theology which bases its anthropology on the theory of “scientific” evolution is nothing other than a contradictio in adjecto. In reality, it is a theology without God and an anthropology without man. If man is not the immortal, eternal, and God-human image of God, then all theologies and anthropologies are nothing other than tragic absurdities.
Your father,
Justin
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
