In Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future, James B. Jordan lays out a very compelling theology of history. The Church (from the time of Adam until the end of the world) is Daughter Zion, the Daughter of God, who is to grow up over the course of history and eventually marry the Son of God, united through the Holy Spirit.
Throughout the book, Jordan lays out various schemata for how to organize the theology of history. I wish to compare some of these to schemata of the structure of history provided by past theologians, in particular St. Bonaventure and Charles Journet. In the end, I will turn to the question of the usefulness of schema.
I. St. Bonaventure
Jordan suggests a division of history into three stages: the Age of the Father (from Adam to Moses), the Age of the Son (from Moses to Christ), and the Ages of the Spirit (from Christ’s first coming to His second). These ages are themselves fractal. For example, within the Age of the Son, there are ages of the Father (Moses to David), Son (David to Exile), and Spirit (Exile to Christ).
Jordan’s division of history is very ancient, although under a different name. The Fathers and medievals frequently spoke of an Age of Nature, an Age of the Law, and an Age of Grace. Jordan’s extension of this framework in a fractal way is quite helpful. The fundamental Trinitarian pattern of Father-Son-Spirit is reflected throughout all of creation in various ways.
Jordan’s triadic understanding of reality has a close affinity to St. Bonaventure. Bonaventure likewise sees all of reality as structured triadically. The human mind, made in the image of the Trinitarian God, has a triadic structure of memory-intellect-will. The mind is perfected through the triadic theological virtues of hope (purifying the memory of earthly sorrow), faith (giving the intellect knowledge of God), and charity (enabling the will to love God and neighbor). Being has the triadic properties of one-true-good. The Aristotelian sciences are triadic through natural philosophy-logic-ethics. The Aristotelian sciences even have a fractal pattern, such as the division of natural philosophy into physics-mathematics-metaphysics. These triads so thoroughly permeate Bonaventure’s thought that there is hardly a single thing he discusses anywhere that he does not describe in terms of a triad.
Bonaventure also adopts a fractal understanding of history. He proposes a number of different frameworks for classifying the ages of history but ultimately settles near the end of his Collationes in Hexaemeron on Church history as a recapitulation of the Old Testament. Whereas St. Augustine thought that Christ’s first coming was near the end of history, this was much less plausible in the thirteenth century. Instead, Bonaventure suggested that Christ came in the middle of history. The age of the Church is a recapitulation of the time before Christ. Mirroring the creation week, Bonaventure divided both the time before Christ and the time after Christ into seven stages. The stages of the Church history recapitulate the stages of history described in the Old Testament. Interestingly, Bonaventure adopts a postmillennial vision of the seventh age of Church history, describing how the prophecies of Ezekiel of a golden age of history would come true literally and the gospel would finally reach the whole world. This would mirror the restoration from Babylon which occurs at the end of the Old Testament narrative.
While Bonaventure’s division of Church history has turned out to be a bit premature as he thought he was in the sixth age, Jordan’s further fractalization of history provides a helpful way to build upon Bonaventure. Jordan points out how the seven church in Revelation match the seven ages of biblical history. Since the seven churches each struggle with different sins, later ages of Christians can look at what sins their age is struggling with and discover which stage of biblical history is being recapitulated. Thus, one does not need to commit to how much longer Church history will go until Christ returns in order to notice the patterns playing out in the present. These patterns recapitulate throughout history and so are always relevant.
II. Charles Journet
Bonaventure does not describe his divisions of history in terms of the Trinity. However, this terminology can be found in the 20th century Catholic theologian Charles Journet.1 Like Jordan, Journet divided history into the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the Age of the Holy Spirit. However, his division is slightly different. Like Jordan, he agrees the Age of the Holy Spirit begins at Pentecost. However, he puts the transition from the Age of the Father to the Age of the Son at the Fall, rather than at Sinai as Jordan does.
Journet makes his divisions based on the visible missions of the persons of the Trinity. He adopts the Thomistic position that the Son only became incarnate on account of the Fall. Thus, before the Fall, Adam received grace without any mediation through Christ, and had Adam persevered, there would be no visible mission of any divine person. After the Fall, God promises to send a redeemer (Genesis 3:15), and this begins the Age of the Son. The rest of the Old Testament is about God preparing the world for the Incarnation, by which the Son would become visible.
With the Incarnation and the earthly ministry of Christ, the Age of the Son is complete. The Son has not taken on visible flesh and accomplished His work here on Earth. He then sends the Holy Spirit to build up the Church. This inaugurates the Age of the Holy Spirit. While the Holy Spirit does not become literally incarnate as the Son does, He becomes the soul of the Church, and so the whole Church is the visible mission of the Holy Spirit. Through their lives, Christians manifest the fruits of the Spirit and thus show to the world that the Holy Spirit is truly active in the world.
Journet and Jordan give mutually illuminating accounts of these ages. Journet brings in a systematic-theological perspective. The various ways grace is mediated and manifested throughout history can be appropriated to each of the persons of the Trinity. Jordan gives a biblical-theological perspective, showing how this is reflected in the pages of sacred scripture. Both also see history as about the wedding of the Son and the Daughter. Journet provides a helpful systematic-theological account of this through his understanding of the visible missions of the Son and Spirit.
Nonetheless, there still remains some disagreement about when to start the Age of the Son. Journet is correct that, with the prophecy of Christ in Genesis 3:15, a new age of history begins. Nonetheless, when God takes the nation of Israel for his own, it becomes a special image of the Son. Indeed, Journet himself says that “the Church uses the ethnic unity of Israel to begin to make herself visible to the eyes of men.”2 With the Tabernacle, God also opens up for all mankind, through the mediation of Israel, a way to enter the presence of God that it could not since the Fall. Thus, the way in which Sinai changes God’s relationship with mankind cannot be downplayed at all. This is why the Fathers distinguished the Age of Nature from the Age of the Law. Journet sees both nature and the law as intended to prepare the world for Christ though, and so he considers both of these as stages in the Age of the Son. In the end, either of these schemata seem to grab something of God’s working in history, so is there really a way to resolve this?
III. Can History Be Schematized?
Given that when there might be a transition from the “Age of the Father” to the “Age of the Son” seems so unclear, a first reaction might be to throw schemata of history out altogether. Perhaps Journet and Jordan are just trying too hard to fit everything into predesigned schemata rather than just using the language of scripture itself. Likewise, Bonaventure’s attempt to schematize history led to him making seemingly incorrect predictions about what would happen in his future. Bonaventure himself ran through many different models for schematizing history and could never settle on one for long. Are theological schemata of history useless then?
Bonaventure, Journet, and Jordan all see the metanarrative of scripture as being the same: God is raising up humanity through the Church to be the bride of the Son of God. Thus, the story of human history is the story of one woman, the human family, as she grows up from infancy and matures until she eventually unites with her husband on their wedding day, bringing the story to close. Thus, we can think of all of history in terms of the life of a person.
When exactly does a person cease to be a baby and start being a toddler? When do they go from being a child to an adolescent? Different people provide different cut-off points. This does not mean though that categories like “baby” and “toddler” are useless though. They are extremely helpful categorizations. We use these stages to mark human development because people think and act differently at different stages of development. Nonetheless, there is no perfect outline that captures human development perfectly.
The same is true of the human family as a whole. Schemata of history, whether from Bonaventure, Journet, Jordan, or other theologians, are quite helpful. Jordan provides other helpful schemata in Crisis too, such as his schema for the development of nations. All of these are very helpful tools for thinking about the theology of history. However, the map is not the territory. These schemata should be used as they are intended, as tools. They are useful insofar as they help us to think about history but should never be confused with actual history and how God really works in the life of the human family.
Gideon is the coordinator for the St. Basil Institute for the Theology of Creation, editor of the Creation Theology Fellowship, and runs the Byzantine Scotist YouTube channel. He got a BA from CUA and is an MA theology student at BCS.
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