“I am the vine, you are the branches… for without Me you can do nothing.” – John 15:5
Abstract
God.
I say that not with the casual profanity that so easily slips from modern tongues, but with the shock, awe, and holy disquiet that descends when the Spirit opens my eyes before the coffee takes effect.
As I turn the page from John 14 to 15, I find myself entangled in a vineyard. I have known such a place before; when I was in rehabilitation, where spiritual vineyard work was part of the curriculum. The memory returns now with both reverence and trepidation. For in the vineyard one learns that pruning is not punishment; it is the painful art of life made fruitful.
When I accept both the fallibility of my humanness and the existential wonder of God’s nearness, the only fitting posture is that of the thief beside Jesus: “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.” I live suspended in that tension, aware that I deserve decay, yet daring to cry out for transcendence beyond entropy.
It sounds dramatic, but it, truthfully steeped in reality, is not.
As I read John 15, it strikes me with the weight of revelation: the best transcendence humanity can imagine is merely a refined form of dying. In a world enslaved to decay, even our loftiest ideals of self-actualisation end in dissolution. The highest human imagination, our “ivory transcendence,” can only exist if God exists. For only in Him does the impossible become inevitable: life that defies death.
The Human Ache for Transcendence
John 15 opens with a paradox. Trench observed that “John is sailing sky-high,” and yet Jesus’ words pull us to the earth: “Without Me you can do nothing.”¹ The tension between human aspiration and divine dependency captures the essence of transcendence. Humanity reaches upward, yet our reach ends in finitude.
The ache for transcendence is woven into human consciousness. Every art, philosophy, and religion attempts to articulate what philosopher Charles Taylor called the sense of “fullness.”² Yet even when the modern mind professes disbelief, it cannot extinguish the longing. We remain haunted by eternity, what C.S. Lewis described as “the inconsolable secret.”³
However, modernity’s epistemology is framed by naturalism, and therein lies the fracture. Naturalism, as Thomas Nagel notes, cannot account for the emergence of consciousness, reason, or value within a purely material system.⁴ It offers function, but not meaning; pattern, but not purpose. Within such a worldview, transcendence collapses into adaptation, the illusion of meaning crafted by neurons designed for survival.
If the universe is closed under entropy, then all human striving is, at best, the art of dying well. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is the scientific term for decay, the arrow of time that drives every system toward disorder. Within that system, “how to die best” becomes the highest wisdom: stoic acceptance of the inevitable heat death of all things.
Yet something within us revolts. As Iain McGilchrist argues, the human mind perceives wholeness, beauty, and meaning not as accidental byproducts but as self-evident realities.⁵ The very capacity to imagine eternity, to conceive of what outlives decay, defies the materialist frame. Thus, the longing for transcendence itself implies participation in something beyond the entropic horizon.
The Naturalist Crisis: Transcendence Bound by Decay
Naturalism can describe the world’s mechanics but cannot explain its metaphysics. Physicist Paul Davies acknowledges this tension that the universe seems rigged for life, yet destined for death, writing that:
“the universe settles into a stable state, became known as the “heat death.” It represents a state of maximum molecular disorder, or entropy. The fact that the universe has not yet so died—that is, it is still in a state of less-than-maximum entropy—implies that it cannot have endured for all eternity.”⁶
Evolutionary processes can account for adaptation but not adoration, for functionality but not worship.
Thomas Nagel famously admitted that “the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.”⁷ Consciousness, he argued, cannot be explained as an accidental product of matter. To be aware is already to transcend the material. Yet in a system ruled by entropy, awareness itself is a dying spark.
This exposes the epistemic limit of naturalism: it can never sustain the permanence its own categories require. Knowledge becomes temporary pattern recognition; morality becomes evolutionary convenience. In short, the naturalist world is coherent only if one accepts incoherence as ultimate truth.
Thus, we are left with the central axiom:
“Even if evolution were true and matter organised itself into consciousness, that transcendence could only exist within the limitation of entropy – how to die best.”
Without divine participation, all transcendence becomes tragedy, a flame aware of its own extinguishing.
The Ontology of the Vine: Transcendence as Participation
Against this backdrop, Jesus’ words in John 15 resound not as metaphor but as metaphysics: “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser… for without Me you can do nothing.”
The Greek text, χωρὶς ἐμοῦ οὐ δύνασθε ποιεῖν οὐδέν, literally reads, “Separated from Me, you have no power to bring anything into being.” The verb δύνασθε (dynasthe) shares its root with dynamis, meaning “power” or “potentiality.” Jesus is not issuing moral advice; He is declaring ontological dependency. Being itself is participatory.
For Augustine, this dependency was the beginning of conversion: “You were within me, but I was outside.”⁸ Human life apart from God is ontological exile; consciousness estranged from its source. Aquinas developed this further: God is causa essendi, the cause of being itself.⁹ To exist is to borrow existence.
In this sense, transcendence is not human ascent but divine descent, the Vine extending life into the branches. T. F. Torrance described this as “the kind of order that consumes entropy.”¹⁰ God’s rationality does not conform to natural decay but continually infuses order into creation.
This is what theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen calls “divine complexity”: God’s life introduces openness into closed systems, transforming decay into communion.¹¹ In Christ, transcendence becomes metabolic, divine energy animating human existence.
Thus, “Without Me you can do nothing” is both diagnosis and deliverance. Jesus identifies the futility of self-derived transcendence and offers the only coherent alternative: participation in divine life.
Negentropy and New Creation
The concept of negentropy, life’s resistance to disorder, offers a profound analogy for resurrection. Erwin Schrödinger coined the term to describe how living organisms import energy to maintain order.¹² Theologically, this is the logic of grace: life sustained by an energy not its own.
John Polkinghorne interprets the resurrection through this lens: the divine act reverses the direction of entropy.¹³ Where natural systems decay, the risen Christ inaugurates a cosmos of enduring order. Alister McGrath echoes this in A Fine-Tuned Universe, describing the resurrection as “the decisive interruption of entropy by divine creativity.”¹⁴
The cross thus becomes the meeting point of two laws: the second law of thermodynamics and the first law of grace. Sin introduces decay; Christ introduces divine negentropy.
In this light, abiding in the Vine means more than moral perseverance, it is metaphysical participation in the negentropic life of God. The believer becomes a conduit of resurrectional energy, bearing fruit that defies death.
The Logic of Divine Dependency
If naturalism’s final word is entropy, Christ’s final word is coherence. “Without Me you can do nothing” echoes through the cosmos as both critique and creation. As Paul declares, “In Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).
This is why Christian transcendence differs fundamentally from philosophical transcendence. In Platonism, the soul escapes the cave; in Christianity, the Light enters the cave. In Buddhism, the self dissolves into non-being; in Christianity, the self is reborn through divine being.
Transcendence, then, is not abstraction but incarnation. Jesus does not invite us to escape the world but to participate in its renewal. His indwelling Spirit is the negentropic force that reorders decay into beauty, death into life.
The vine and branches image encapsulates this paradox perfectly: rootedness and fruitfulness, dependence and dynamism. The more one abides, the more one transcends.
Conclusion: Abiding Beyond Entropy
In John 15, Jesus does not offer a metaphor for spiritual dependence; He unveils the structure of reality itself. Humanity, severed from the Vine, withers, not merely morally but ontologically.
Trench was right: John sails sky-high. Yet his altitude is not intellectual; it is incarnational. The Gospel dares to claim that the transcendent God has entered the entropic system to reverse its decay from within.
The modern world still yearns for transcendence but settles for simulation, mindfulness apps, curated virtue, performative authenticity. Yet each of these, however noble, ends in exhaustion, because they remain confined to entropy.
The call of Jesus, “Abide in Me,” is the only invitation that promises coherence beyond collapse. To abide is to live beyond entropy, to participate in a life that does not decay.
The best transcendence humans can imagine is how to die beautifully. But the Gospel offers something infinitely better:
to live beautifully, eternally – in the Vine who conquered decay.
Practical Application: Living Beyond Entropy
To abide in Christ is to resist spiritual entropy.
The modern believer lives in a culture of constant depletion, emotional burnout, information overload, and the fragmentation of meaning. The temptation is to survive rather than to abide. Yet Jesus’ words, “Without Me you can do nothing,” are not a restriction but an invitation to rest in divine power.
The call to “abide” (μένω) implies permanence, to remain, to dwell, to endure.
It is both a spiritual rhythm and an ethical response: to cultivate habits that draw energy from the Vine rather than from the world’s performance systems.
Practically, this means:
Daily dependence – approaching prayer, Scripture, and silence not as duties, but as breath for the soul.
Relational pruning – allowing God to cut away what bears no fruit: resentment, self-glory, needless distraction.
Creative fruitfulness – letting divine life manifest through vocation, art, compassion, and truth-telling.
Hopeful endurance – trusting that even in apparent decay, God is transforming entropy into resurrection.
To live “beyond entropy” is not to escape the world’s decay, but to let Christ’s negentropic life continually reorder your being from within. As T. F. Torrance wrote, divine order “consumes entropy.”¹⁵ The life of the believer becomes a small but radiant defiance of the world’s collapse, a living proof that resurrection begins now.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, True Vine and Living Word,
Teach me to abide when I want to strive, to draw life when I feel drained, to bloom where I am pruned.
Save me from performing transcendence, and let me live from the life that You give. Where I am entropic, tired, proud, or self-made, graft me again into Your eternal love.
Let my thoughts resist decay, my actions bear fruit that endures, and my heart be held together by Your divine coherence.
For without You, I can do nothing, but with You, death itself loses its power.
In Your Hy Name Lord Jesus,
Amen.
TRACK TO ENJOY:
Footnotes
1. R. C. Trench, Notes on the Miracles and Parables of Our Lord (London: Macmillan, 1862), 498.
2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5.
3. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 1949), 31.
4. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 4.
5. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), 47
6. Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 88.
7. Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 8.
8. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: OUP, 1998), X.27.38.
9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.44.1.
10. T. F. Torrance, The Christian Frame of Mind (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 72.
11. N. H. Gregersen, “God, Information, and Complexity: From Descriptive to Explorative Metaphysics,” Theology and Science 11, no. 4 (2013): 377–393.
12. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 71.
13. John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 112.
14. Alister McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 212.
15. Torrance, The Christian Frame, 72.
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