Theopedia

John Zizioulas

John Zizioulas (1931-2023) was a Greek Eastern Orthodox bishop and theologian, Metropolitan of Pergamon under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, best known for arguing that personhood, not substance, is the fundamental category of being: a person exists only in communion with other persons, and this is as true of God as of human beings.1 His major study, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, has been called “the most influential contemporary work on person as relationality.”1

Life and Ministry

Zizioulas was born on January 10, 1931, in Katafygio, Velventos, Greece.2 He studied at the Universities of Thessaloniki and Athens, taking his first degree in theology from Athens in 1955, then studied patristics under Georges Florovsky at Harvard Divinity School, receiving an M.T.S. in 1956, before completing a doctorate in theology at Athens in 1965.2 He went on to teach doctrinal theology at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow from 1970, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki from 1984, and at King’s College London from 1989.2 In 1986 he was ordained Metropolitan of Pergamon and served as a representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in inter-Christian dialogue; from 1993 he was a member of the Academy of Athens, becoming its president in 2002, the first cleric to hold that office.2 He died in February 2023, at age 92.2

Theological Contribution

Zizioulas’s central claim, developed most fully in Being as Communion (1985), is that the Cappadocian Fathers effected a decisive shift in Greek ontology by making person, not substance, the ultimate category of being. In his own words, “the being of God is a relational being, without the concept of communion it would not be possible to speak of the being of God,” and “the substance of God, ‘God’ has no ontological content, no true being, apart from communion.”3 He traces this to the Cappadocians’ introduction of “cause” (aitia) into trinitarian language:

This thesis of the Cappadocians that introduced [the use] of “cause” into the being of God assumed an incalculable importance. For it meant that the ultimate ontological category which makes something really be, is neither an impersonal and incommunicable “substance,” nor a structure of communion existing by itself or imposed by necessity, but rather the person.4

On this reading, the Father, as the one “cause” of the Son and the Spirit, is the ground of divine being, and being itself is constituted by personal relation rather than by an underlying substance the three persons merely share. Zizioulas extends the same category to human personhood: a person should not be understood as a static “personality,” composed of fixed natural, psychological, and moral attributes, but exists “only as it relates to” others.5

Zizioulas applied the same relational category to the historic East-West divide in trinitarian theology. He adopted “the well-known textbook thesis that the West began with the unity of God and then moved to the Trinity, while the East followed the opposite course,” beginning instead from the three persons.6 He shared this account, along with Christos Yannaras and John Romanides, of a West whose start in divine unity, traced to Augustine, subordinates the persons to an impersonal divine essence; some who hold this view call Augustine “the father of modern day atheism” on the ground that he divided God from creation.7

Historical Significance

Craig Carter, following Stephen Holmes’s survey of twentieth-century trinitarian theology, groups Zizioulas with Robert Jenson as one of the century’s influential revisers of the doctrine of God: Zizioulas, on this account, offers “a revisionist account of the fourth-century development of Nicene theology, which amounts to ‘a stress on the personal, volitional nature of God’s existence.’”8 Because Zizioulas uses the word “person” univocally of God and human beings, and treats personal freedom or will as God’s real essence, Carter classes him with theologians who depart from the older tradition’s analogical language about God and its confession of divine impassibility and immutability, under what Brian Davies calls “theistic personalism.”8

Zizioulas’s East-West thesis about the Cappadocians and Augustine has also drawn direct engagement from trinitarian scholars answering him by name: Keith Goad’s study of Gregory of Nazianzus takes Zizioulas’s own essay on the Cappadocian contribution as a primary statement of the position it examines and contests, alongside John Franke and John Feinberg’s use of the same East-West framework.9

Related Doctrines

External links

References

  1. Darron Thomas Chapman, “Contemporary Views of Person,” in “The Concept of Person in Christian Theology: An Exposition and Defense of a Classical Boethian/Thomistic Definition of Person” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2026), 21-22. ↩ ↩2

  2. Biographical details as reported in the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Permanent Delegation to the World Council of Churches memorial notice and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s tribute on Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon, both published following his death in February 2023. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Contemporary Greek Theologians, no. 4 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 17, quoted in Chapman, “Contemporary Views of Person,” 22. ↩

  4. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, quoted in Chapman, “Contemporary Views of Person,” 22-23. ↩

  5. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, quoted in Chapman, “Contemporary Views of Person,” 23. ↩

  6. John Zizioulas, “The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: The Significance of the Cappadocian Contribution,” in Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act, ed. Christopher Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 46, quoted in Keith Wesley Goad, “East and West Compared,” in “Trinitarian Grammars: A Comparison of Gregory of Nazianzus and Some Contemporary Models” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 174. ↩

  7. Goad, “East and West Compared,” 169. ↩

  8. Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩ ↩2

  9. Goad, “East and West Compared,” 174-175. ↩