June 14

Gregory of Nyssa, Rowan Williams, and the USA's slide toward theocracy

Author

David Barnhart
June 14, 2025

Mosaic of a centaur holding a placard that says “Helpful God.” Tzipori National Park, Israel, 2019. Own photo.

Today is the feast day of Gregory of Nyssa, a bishop and important theologian in the early church, who died in 394. He was the first theologian to declare that slavery was incompatible with Christianity. He also argued both for Trinitarian theology and for universal salvation. 

Today is the birthday, in 1950, of Rowan Williams, author, theologian, church historian, and former Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Today in 1954, the phrase “under God” was added to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance. Many saw this as a way of addressing the threat of communism, though it was also an act of Christian supremacy and creeping White Christian Nationalism. As the photo above demonstrates, imperial powers like Rome have always recruited their gods’ support, and there is nothing particular Christ-like about it.

Reflection: 

Gregory of Nyssa wrote: 

“Evil will come to nought and will be completely destroyed. The divine, pure goodness will contain in itself every nature endowed with reason; nothing made by God is excluded from his kingdom once everything mixed with some elements of base material has been consumed by refinement in fire.”

and

“God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's?”

Rowan Williams wrote: 

“Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.”

and

“I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me—because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home.”

Prayer: Merciful God, all the problems I see out in the world, I also see in myself. Help me to live into your grace freely for myself so that I can accept the change you wish to bring about in the world. Amen.