Nicholas Bamford: Using Gregory Palamas' Energetic Theology to Address John Zizioulas' Existentialism

This paper will utilise Palamas’ energetic theology to answer John Zizioulas’ existential premise that being has no structure or condition in itself but is conditional to communion or the act of inter-relationality. While affirming that relationality is an important condition to being and expresses the differing modes of existing in relation to the differing types or expressions of life, it is incorrect to assert that being has no condition of itself. We can argue that in Patristic theology the notion of ontic Cause  manifests a condition of being which is fulfilled, especially in the energism of Palamas through hypostatic fulfilment or the participating activities relational to the Divine. The hypostatic operations manifests in koinonia a ‘higher’ a truer condition of being lived in a particular unique way, but koinonia in itself is not a hypostatic condition but is en-hypostatic. It is being which is the hypostatic condition of itself  and relational to hypostatic otherness, relationality does not condition being: it reflects the way being is lived especially in the context of apokatastasis (restoration). 

I will in this paper examine the nature of ecclesial existing as a mode of hypostatic existing in relation to hypostatic becoming in the fullest Palamite sense of deification where the operational flow of deifying theurgic rays allow for a change of being but not denying it.