Chapter Four Augustine: Understanding the Doctrine
Augustine of Hippo had a profound influence on the development of Latin trinitarian theology. Appealing to the text from Isaiah that "unless you believe, you will not understand" (Is 7:9), Augustine believes so that he can understand (credo ut intelligam). He accepts without question the doctrine that there is one God in whom Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are at once distinct and consubstantial. His concern is not with proof but with understanding the unity and equality of the Three and their real distinction.
His book The Trinity is his most significant work on this subject. Unlike his Greek counterparts, Augustine does not begin with the three Persons as they function in history for our salvation and then work backwards towards the unity of God. He begins rather with the one divine nature itself and tries to understand how the three Persons share in that nature without dividing it. Subordinationism of every kind is rejected. Whatever is affirmed of God is affirmed equally of each of the Persons. Each divine person is identical to the other two persons with respect to Godhead. The equality of the three persons is due to their sharing the same substance.
Augustine argues against the notion that the substance of the Trinity is anything other than the Father, Son, and Spirit. He distinguished between the visible (incarnation and Pentecost) and invisible missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. With great insight, he recognized that the missions reveal the processions; in other words, the missions are the processions revealed in time. He distinguished between mission and procession, in terms of temporal and eternal, ad extra and ad intra.
Relations
In the Trinity all things are one except what is differentiated by reason of an opposition of relations (e.g., the Father, who is unbegotten, is not the Son, who is begotten). Augustine opposed the Arian notion that distinctions within God are either substantial (in which case there are three separate gods) or accidental (in which case God is purely monad). Threeness in God, therefore, is not rooted in threeness of substance or threeness of accidents but in threeness of relations: of begetting, of being begotten, and of proceeding.
Person
Augustine settled somehow reluctantly for the term "person" for the three hypostates, recognizing the need to say something in response to the question of what to call the Three. In God, to be and to be a person are identical. When two subjects are in relation to each other, such as master to servant, one can differentiate between the master in him/herself, and the master in relation to the servant. In this sense essence precedes relation. Applied to God, one can differentiate between the Father in the Father’s self and the Father in relation to the Son; similarly, the divine essence in some sense precedes relation. Augustine means that to be God and to be the Father (or Son or Spirit) are one and the same. Canons of logic inevitably fall short of reconciling these two statements: “to be and to be a Person are identical in God” and “a divine person subsists in relation to another”
Distinction
In the economy, Persons differ by what they do with respect to our salvation. On intradivine grounds, Persons are distinguished by their immanent processions. Processions found the relations. Father begets the Son. Son is begotten by the Father. The Spirit poses a special problem; to what other person is the Spirit opposed? In Augustine’s view the Holy Spirit is a person because, by its procession as Gift, the Spirit is opposed to the Giver (Father and Son together).
The Works of the Trinity ad extra Are One
According to the Greek theologians, God’s activity in creation originates with the Father, passes through the Son, and is perfected in the Spirit. Thus the Father creates, redeems, and divinizes through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Greek formulation displays the biblical and creedal sense of God the Father who comes to us in Christ and the Spirit. In Augustine’s theology, on the other hand, God’s activity in creation is the work of the Trinity, that is, of the one divine nature which exists in three Persons. Strictly speaking, the Trinity creates, the Trinity redeems, the Trinity sanctifies. For Augustine, the Trinity is present in all theophanies in the Hebrew as well as Christian Scriptures. He recognised that this principle, strictly applied, would contradict Scripture, or at least make for some strange assertions about the economy.
The Doctrine of Appropriations
According to Augustine, God and Father are not synonyms, as in the biblical, creedal, and Greek sense of ho theos. God means Godhead, the divine essence shared equally by three persons. Augustine’s departure from the biblical and patristic doctrine of the monarchy of the Father determined new ways of speaking about God. Both person and essence are absolute in God, but in some sense nature or essence precedes person; the three persons are divine because they share the same divine nature. Since the three share the same essence, their activity or operation must also be one. He recognized that the unity of the one God requires that all the works of the Trinity ad extra are indivisible, as from one principle. He maintained, however, that each of the divine persons possesses the divine nature in a particular manner and, thus, in the operation of the Godhead ad extra, it is proper to attribute to each of the Three a role that is appropriate to the particular divine person, by virtue of the trinitarian origin of that person. Creation is appropriated to the Father, redemption to the Son, and sanctification to the Holy Spirit.
While the Father, Son, and Spirit together are one God, not three gods, and works of the Trinity ad extra are one, Augustine explains that this does not mean that the Trinity was born of Mary, crucified, and buried, then rose and ascended into heaven. Against the obvious objection that he is destroying the several roles of the three Persons, Augustine argued that, even though it was the Son and not the Father who was born, suffered, and died, the Father cooperated fully with the Son in bringing about the incarnation, the passion, and the resurrection. It is fitting, however, for the Son to have been manifested and made visible in those events, since each of the divine Persons possesses the divine nature in a particular manner and since, in the external operation of God, roles which are appropriate to a particular Person in view of that Person’s origin within God are fittingly attributed to that Person. And yet all three Persons are always fully involved as one in every external action.
Once the Augustinian axiom that “works of the Trinity ad extra are one” is affirmed, and the economy no longer gives access to the distinctions of persons, then the corrective of a doctrine of appropriations is needed in order to restore a distinctiveness to each divine person. So, the doctrine of appropriations is a compensating strategy within Latin theology that tries to reconnect the specific details of salvation history to specific persons. Every appropriation is to be made on the basis of Scripture insofar as it indicates that a name or activity is proper to one of the divine persons. Some of the attributes for God now apply to divine persons but not to the divine essence (Begetter, Begotten, Proceeding), while others apply to the divine essence but not to the persons except by appropriation (Creator). In contrast to this, it is clear that if a theology were to begin from and center itself on the economy, all the while presupposing the essential unity of economy and ‘theology’, it would have no need for a doctrine of appropriations.
The Analogies
What is perhaps Augustine’s most original contribution to Trinitarian theology is his use of analogies drawn from human consciousness to explain the inner life of God. Augustine’s premise is that the soul is created in the image and the likeness of God (Gen. 1:26-27). Thus if God is a Trinity, then the soul must resemble that which it images. Augustine’s Trinitarian theology drew support from the way the NT hints that the generation of the Son (Mt 1 1:27 - “No one knows the Son except the Father”) and the procession of the Spirit (Rom 5:5 - “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us”) are somehow mirrored in or paralleled by the two basic activities of the human spirit: knowing and loving. In every process of perception, he points out, there are three distinct elements: the external object, the mind’s sensible representation of the object, and the act of focusing the mind. When the external object is removed, we rise to an even higher trinitarian level, superior to the first because the process occurs entirely now within the mind and is therefore “of one and the same substance,” namely, the memory impression, the internal memory image, and the focusing of the will. In the consubstantial, coequal, really distinct dynamic acts of the inner self-remembering, understanding, and loving God, Augustine finds the image of the triune God in the human person. The procession of the Son corresponds to that of understanding (intelligentia) from the mind (mens) or memory (memoria), while the procession of the Holy Spirit corresponds to the procession of love (amor). Still, Augustine was realistic about the limitations of this analogical approach. Analogies, as the saying goes, always limp. They tell us how things are like other things, but they warn us at the same time that the things being compared are also unlike one another.
The analogies are imperfect because in the soul the image of the Trinity is not identical with human nature, whereas in God the Trinity is the same as God. In the soul the three faculties of memory, understanding, and will operate separately, whereas in God the three persons work inseparably. In God there are three Persons whereas in each human being there is only one person. Augustine’s analogy of self-presence, self-knowledge, and self-love pre-emptively avoids any risk of tritheism but might seem to encourage a monopersonal, modalist view of God.
The Procession of the Spirit
Augustine wrestled with the question of how to distinguish the procession of the Holy Spirit from the procession of the Son by generation or begetting from the Father. He concluded that the procession of the Holy Spirit is only able to be distinguished from the Son if we say that he proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque, meaning "and the Son"), in a common spiration, as from one source or principle (De Trinitate 5.15). Augustine himself wrote of the Father endowing the Son with the capacity to produce the Spirit. Hence, in an original sense the Spirit proceeds from the Father.
Conclusion
Augustine’s theology begins from doctrine and tries to establish the correspondence between doctrine and the economy attested in Scripture. He separates the historical missions from the intradivine processions and explores the internal structure of the processions apart from the missions. He emphasises the unity of the divine essence, rather than monarchy of the Father; he makes reference to a divine essence that is prior to the divine persons; he attributes predicates to the divine essence and others to divine persons by appropriation. His theology precludes any ontological subordinationism. But it reoriented trinitarian theology in a direction that ultimately bore the fruit in scholastic theology of bypassing the oikonomia as the basis of a trinitarian theologia.
The matters that are decisive in Augustine’s theology are the following:
1 Augustine’s emphasis on the unity of the divine substance as prior to the plurality of persons tends to blur any real distinctions among the divine persons. If divine substance rather than the person of the Father is made the highest ontological principle, then God and everything else is, finally, impersonal.
2. The ontological distinction between mission and processions results in the Trinity losing its function by minimising the relationship between the divine persons and the economy of redemption.
3. The anthropological starting point is a valid point of entry into salvation history: However, God’s economy of redemption and sanctification transpires within the soul of each individual. So, Augustine has radically relocated the locus of God’s economy and, in the process, has altered the theoretical basis for that economy. If the soul of every human being contains the vestiges of the Trinity, then we need only look within ourselves to discover God and God’s Oikonomia. If it is possible to know the Trinity without Christ, then the economy is not really essential to a theology of God.
4 Augustine’s idea of God leads to the conception that there is one unique God, thinking himself and loving himself, as a great egoist. But Augustine did not altogether abandon a point of intersection between God and creature. If humanity is created in the image of God, it seems natural, as Augustine did, to look for the image of God in our humanity. However, in the usual presentation of Augustine’s theology, God and the soul are alike in that they are both self-enclosed, self-related. His thought becomes a theology and anthropology of self-contained relationality and lacks a communal dimension. To some degree Augustine’s theo-psychology fails to come to terms with the fact that the relationality of the triune God is not self-contained but is poured out in the historical economy of creation, redemption, consummation.
5. His relocation of the economy within the human soul, away from the events of saving history, his preoccupation with processions over missions, and also his starting point within the unity of divine essence rather than the plurality of divine persons within the economy, contribute to the rupture between theologia and oikonomia.
6. Moreover, Augustine’s theology gave rise to the view in scholastic theology that any one of the divine persons could have become incarnate. This position ruptures God’s being from what is revealed of God in the economy of creation and redemption. Once it is assumed that the Trinity is present in every instance where Scripture refers to God, and once the principle that the Trinity acts as one is in place, no longer, it seems, is there any need for the plurality of divine persons in the economy.
7. By sundering God’s relationship to us in Christ and in the Spirit from God’s self-relatedness at the level of intradivine being, his theology indicated that the relationship of God to us in the economy is not constitutive of what God is as Trinity, a view which became prominent in scholastic theology.
8. His relative isolation of the economy and his preference for thinking and speaking of God as Trinity rather than as God (Father) who comes to us in Christ and the Spirit, takes away from the biblical and creedal ways of speaking of God.
9. Augustine’s theology is often represented as a circle or triangle, where the circle or triangle represents the common essence. This is in contrast to the ‘emanationist’ scheme of the Cappadocians, often pictured as linear: God the Father ® Son ® Holy Spirit ® world. The basic difference between Greek and Latin theology is often said to be that Greek theology emphasises person over nature, trinity over unity, whereas Latin theology emphasises nature over person, unity over trinity. Still, Augustine understood their unity in a perichoretic way. As he explains, they are "each in each, and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one" (De Trinitate 6.12).
10 Augustine’s influence on subsequent Christian belief and theology is, to be sure, enormous. Apart from Boethius, no one competes with him for theological impact on later centuries. The so-called Athanasian Creed (Quicumque) of the late fifth century clearly bore the stamp of Augustinian thought.
Boethius (d. ca. 524)
Through his definitions, Boethius affected all subsequent trinitarian doctrine in the West. He defined nature as “the specific difference informing anything” and person as “an individual substance of a rational nature” (incommunicable). This influential account of person highlighted the individuality and rationality of the reality that is the center of action and attribution.
Anselm
Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) greatest contribution to the Christian understanding of God is to present the principle that in God everything is one except for the opposition of relationships among the three Persons.
Chapter Five Deepening and Developing the Tradition
Thomas Aquinas: God is Perfection of Being
In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas, concerned for systematic intelligibility of the sacred mysteries in a way that was never part of Augustine’s intention, reverses Augustine's more historical order of approach, which begins with the missions of Son and Spirit, and instead begins his explication of the mystery of the Trinity with a consideration of the processions, then moves to the relationships of the divine persons ad intra, and finally to their missions ad extra. For Aquinas, God is Esse, the perfection of "being" or "is-ness." (The Latin esse, "to be," is a verb, not a noun.) He rests his case on the Exodus text (3:14) wherein Yahweh “responds” to Moses’ question: “I am who I am.” For Aquinas, this is the most suitable name for God.
Aquinas’s understanding of the Being and action of God is consistent with his famous “five ways” to prove the existence of God: the arguments from motion, causality necessity, gradation or exemplarity, and design. All of the arguments are reducible to one: the argument from causality. No one argument “proves” the existence of God. They are simply ways in which the believer can begin to “make sense” of his or her belief in God after the fact.
Indeed God is Ipsum Esse, sheer actuality, sheer being, in which we participate to a limited degree. This sheer liveliness of God in God is expressed in terms of insight and joy or delight. The fullness of insight naturally expresses itself in a word that is intelligible to itself, and sheer joy or bliss issues lovingly from the delight in that word. Aquinas then transposes Augustine's psychological analogy into a metaphysical understanding of God as the perfection of spiritual being, Pure Act. The immanent act of self-understanding issues in the inner word, the verbum – thus, the first procession whereby the Father conceived the Word or generates the Son. Secondly, we know from our experience that knowledge is not disinterested or without affectivity; the intellect takes delight in its understanding. The emanation of the Word is thus followed by the procession of Love. This, then, is the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God loving God; God's self-love. Thus, in the generation of the Word, God knows Himself and, in the procession of the Holy Spirit, God loves himself.
These processions produce, in turn, four real relations: paternity, filiation, spiration, and procession, but only three of them are really distinct from one another by reason of their mutual opposition: paternity, filiation, and (passive) spiration. And so there are three Persons, and only three, in God. These necessary events in the divine life, of generation and spiration, do not either divide an existing substance and yet are distinct since paternity and filiation (and breathing and being breathed in the case of the Holy Spirit) are distinct.
The Augustinian-Thomistic analogy of human understanding and loving for explaining the mystery of the Trinity as three coequal, consubstantial (same substance) divine persons, so co-inhering in each other as to be one fits well with the biblical teaching that the human person is created in the image of God and therefore reflects in a preeminent way the mystery of God's being. It resonates strongly with the scriptural references to the revealed processions of God's Word and Love. It acknowledges God as the perfection of consciousness and intentionality. It accords with an understanding of human being as participating, in limited degree, in the divine consciousness. It comes closer than any analogy to the mystery of the divine perichoresis (the mutual indwelling or co-inhering of the Three). It became the most privileged way of explaining the mystery of the Trinity for centuries, almost to the point of dogma! It was, for example, affirmed in the catechism of the Council of Trent and in a number of papal documents, and served, unchallenged, as common doctrine until relatively recently.
Summary Aquinas’s trinitarian theology: There is one divine nature, substance, or essence. There are two processions, although it is preferable to speak of the generation of the Son and the spiration/breathing of the Spirit. There are three persons: hypostases or subjects. There are four (subsistent) relations, or orderings of the divine persons among themselves that constitute them three persons in one God: paternity, filiation, active spiration, and passive spiration. There are five notions which are: inascibility or ingenerateness, paternity, filiation, spiration, procession. Four of the five describe relations; inascibility is the absence of relation. Three of these relations are ‘person constituting’, paternity, filiation and spiration. The composition of relations is derived from the two processions, being begotten and being spirated. “There are five notions, four relations, three persons, two processions, one nature, and no proof”.
Aquinas did not accept the move from human love to what we can say about God’s triune life, but he endorsed the loving interconnectedness (circumincession) of the three divine persons, something better expressed in Greek as their perichoresis, or reciprocal presence and interpenetration. Their innermost life is infinitely close relationship with one another in the utter reciprocity of love. However, the theology of Aquinas led to the marginalization of the doctrine of the Trinity, something he assuredly would have protested vigorously as contrary to his intention and to his own religious experience. The treatise on the Trinity became of quite diminished importance except as a formal treatment of processions, persons, relations. In post-baroque Catholicism, if the topic of the Trinity was covered at all in seminary and theological education, this often went no further than requiring students to memorise the 5-4-3-2-1-0 formula. Furthermore, the method of Aquinas not only conceals the economy of redemption but is also at odds with the typical patterns of Christian prayer and worship in which prayer is addressed to God the Father through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Beyond Aquinas
1 Philosophy: In a style that is more conceptual than experiential and historical, the God of philosophers has turned up in theological writing.
2 Devotion: From the time of Anselm, devotion to Jesus underwent a sea-change as it became more personal and mystical. Fresh developments in liturgy, painting, sculpture, and architecture furthered a deep sense of Jesus in his suffering, loving, human existence. Parallel to this fresh sense of the human, suffering Jesus, one also finds a new sensibility to his divinity and place in the Trinity. The strong Christ of trinitarian life belongs to a renewed appreciation of the tripersonal God that began in the tenth century and reached its climax with the institution of the Feast of the Holy Trinity in 1334.
Richard of St. Victor: God as Trinity of Love
One of the analogies that Augustine presented for consideration is the analogy of interpersonal love: the trinity of love that comprises the loving subject (the lover), the object loved (the beloved), and the relation or bond of love, the love which unites them. However, it risked a tendency to tritheism, depersonalised the Holy Spirit and leads to holding that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Yet, the Scriptures attest that God is love. So Richard of St. Victor emerges to retrieve the analogy of interpersonal love. His exploration of the mystery of the Trinity begins with the notion that God is the fullness and perfection of all goodness. Of all things that are good, charity is the greatest good, for nothing exceeds charity in goodness. God must therefore possess charity in the highest degree. An analysis of charity, as the supreme form of the good, then serves in Richard of St Victor's trinitarian theology to demonstrate – indeed almost to prove – that there must be a plurality of persons in the Godhead.
Richard argues that charity necessarily involves another, apart from oneself. Indeed, the greatest charity is self-transcending love for another person, who is one's coequal. Hence, he argues, there must be self-transcending love for another coequal person within God. Moreover, the lover and beloved wish to share their love. Mutual love, to be perfect, must be shared with a third; therein lies its consummation and perfection. In Richard's hands the analogy shifts from the triad of lover, beloved, and their mutual love to a triad of symmetrical and consubstantial interpersonal relations between coequals, where there is no hierarchy and where each person is at once lover and beloved. Given that it speaks deeply to and from human experience, it is hardly surprising that Richard of St. Victor's psychological analogy of interpersonal love has enjoyed considerable appeal in modern attempts to reinvigorate an understanding and appreciation of the mystery of the Trinity.
Richard of St. Victor defined person as “the incommunicable existence of an intelligent nature”. The divine persons are three incommunicable existents. The Father exists but is not the Son or the Spirit: the Son exists but is not the Father or the Spirit; the Spirit exists but is not the Father or the Son.
Richard offers us a model of God as community, a community, however, which is not - static but, full or the dynamic interplay of persons in relation. In his view of divine community there is both the highest degree of differentiation as well as the highest degree of harmony. He affirms that God is not only supreme charity but also supreme Beauty. However, the Beauty which God’s Being is, is precisely the dynamic, creative Beauty of persons in a relationship of love. Even though Richard places the accent on the polarity of persons in God in contrast to the Augustinian tradition where the unity of God is grounded in the divine nature, his stress on the harmony of relations, grounded in God’s Being as love, enables him to guarantee the unity of the trinitarian life. Hence Richard’s model allows him to exploit fully the classical tradition which he inherited that God’s Being is the relationships, interpreting the relationships of the three persons as relations of love. Thus theology is able to do justice to the biblical affirmation that God is love (1 Jn 4:8, 16).
However the first part of his argument does not yield a Trinity but only a binitarian God. Secondly, although Richard can show why love requires a plurality of persons and indeed why love between two persons does not do adequate justice to the full meaning of love, his approach does not show why the community of persons in the Trinity has three and only three persons nor does this approach indicate the order of the processions. These limits reveal that the community model taken alone is insufficient to illumine the total reality of the Trinity. What is needed is rather a complementarity of approaches.
In summary, Richard begins with person rather than nature, looking to the unselfish love of human friendship as the reflection of the unselfish love of divine friendship (since we are, after all, made in the image of God). In God there is one infinite love and three infinite lovers: lover produces beloved, and lover and beloved are the productive principle of an equal co-beloved.
Bonaventure: God is God and Goodness in Self-Diffusive
Inspired by Francis of Assisi, who through his experience of Christ had emphasized the nature of God as good and loving, and by the New Testament, which attests to goodness as the proper name of God: "No one is good but God alone.” (Lk 18.19, Mt 19.17), Bonaventure’s (ca. 1221-1274) trinitarian theology begins with the notion of God as good. Bonaventure, like Aquinas, then draws on the Augustinian inheritance, but, unlike Aquinas, he also draws on the Pseudo-Dionysian view that goodness, which is naturally and necessarily self-diffusive is the pre-eminent attribute of God. Since God is good, and since goodness is by its very nature self-diffusive and fecund, God is necessarily self-communicative and fecund (luxuriantly fruitful). For Bonaventure, this provides the metaphysical basis for the first emanation or procession in God (the Son/Word). The first person, the Father, is "the fountain of plenitude," "the first principle," from whom all comes. The first procession emanates as a natural emanation, which necessarily and naturally flows from the dynamic fecundity of the divine nature. Augustine and Aquinas, by way of contrast, envisage the first procession by way of intellect. Bonaventure then turns to Richard of St. Victor's reflections on love to understand the emanation or procession of the Spirit by way of love (by way of will). Bonaventure thus brings together a notion of goodness and the concept of love in his trinitarian theology.
The notion of primacy emerges strongly in Bonaventure's trinitarian theology: the Father is the first and ultimate source of all being; the fullness of divine fecundity resides in him. The Son or Word or Image is the inner self-expression of God and proceeds from the Father by way of exemplarity. His theology also includes creation in an inspiring way. Creation is another aspect of the self-expressiveness of the goodness that is God. Bonaventure recognizes that the cosmos emanates, in and through the Word, from the trinitarian exemplar and itself reflects the trinitarian order at various levels and degrees. The Trinity, as source of all, necessarily leaves its stamp on all creation. Thus, the world as a whole is a vast symbol of the Trinity. It is like a book that reflects its trinitarian author at each and every turn. Bonaventure suggests that it reflects its trinitarian Creator at three levels: as vestige (expressing the Trinity in a distant and unclear way); as image (reflecting the Trinity in a closer and more distinct way); and as similitude (that most intense reflection, which is found in the rational spirit that is conformed to God through grace).
This notion of the cosmos as the artwork of its trinitarian Creator has profound implications for our understanding of our relationship to and responsibility regarding the cosmos and provides a rich resource for an ecologically attuned theology in later developments of trinitarian theology.
The Filioque Crisis
The filioque controversy refers to the tragic dispute concerning the question of the procession of the Holy Spirit, which contributed to the Great Schism in the eleventh century, a separation of the Eastern Orthodox Churches from the Western Roman Catholic Churches. The Council of Constantinople (381) solemnly proclaimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The West, however, unilaterally inserted an addition into the creed and proclaimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). The Eastern remained faithful to Constantinople, asserting that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (through the Son). While the schism is usually dated at 1054, the separation was the culmination of a gradual estrangement over the preceding centuries and cannot really be dated so precisely.
Generally the distinctions between Eastern and Western styles of trinitarian theology are focused on the terms of Western essentialism and Eastern personalism, whereby Eastern trinitarian theology is said to proceed from the plurality of the persons, while Western trinitarian theology, following Augustine, proceeds from the divine unity. The loss of political unity and the establishment of the second imperial capital at Constantinople in the fourth century contributed to the gradual separation of the church in the East and the West and to the deepening of linguistic, cultural, and ecclesiological differences between them. The Church in the East, where political authority was strongly vested in the emperor, enjoyed an essentially spiritual authority, and that authority was expressed by the bishops acting collegially, a practice that was grounded in an understanding of the equality of bishops in the apostolic tradition. On the other hand, the church in the West, because of the vacuum of political authority there, assumed a political authority that was unknown in the East. Moreover, unlike the churches of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem in the East, the Church of Rome exercised jurisdiction over a vast terrain and tended to interpret and express its authority in more universal and less collegial terms. Finally, in the West, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed is regarded primarily as a doctrinal statement, even in the setting of liturgy, whereas the Orthodox venerate creeds as having almost the same status as the Scriptures.
The insertion of filioque into the creed emerged in the West, where it was used to counter the reemergence of Arianism that surfaced in Spain in the fifth century, and to affirm the equality of the Son with the Father. The insertion was as much a christological issue as a trinitarian one. The use of the interpolated Creed spread through the Western church, though not in Rome. There, the papacy, while not denying the orthodoxy of the filioque, resisted its insertion in the creed and, indeed, the recitation of the creed in the Mass. It remains unclear precisely when the filioque found its way into the creed at Rome. Tradition has it that it finally adopted in Rome in 1014, when it was used by the Pope Benedict VIII (1012-1024) in a eucharistic liturgy at the coronation of Henry II. Once adopted by Rome, however, the interpolated creed became standard throughout the church in the West, its usage now justified by claims to papal primacy. At this point, the interpolation emerged as a very serious doctrinal issue between Constantinople and Rome.
From the perspective of the East, the insertion of the filioque was effrontery in the extreme. First, it was an illegitimate insertion into the creed, which had been promulgated by an ecumenical council. Second, but no less important, it was theologically incorrect. The notion of the double procession violated the monarchy of the Father, as source of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Many in the East would admit the statement, through the Son, per filium, but not filioque. The claim to primacy in the West together with the Christian Crusades from the West further aggravated the tension and, with the pillage of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, the relations between East and West were irrevocably severed.
The Latin West was uncompromising. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1438-39 all affirmed the filioque. So the dialogue failed and the filioque question remained unresolved. The Ottoman conquest followed in 1453. Dialogue ceased and, with its demise, the hope of reunion was extinguished. The opposition in the East to the filioque and to papal primacy continued unabated.
A range of opinions currently exists in regard to the situation. Some in the West argue for the removal of the filioque from the creed (as happened at the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion in 1978) and a return to the original Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Some perceive that the substance of the teachings in the East and in the West in regard to the procession of the Holy Spirit (per filium, through the Son, and filioque, and the Son) are in fact different perspectives on the one divine reality and essentially identical. Though the scars of the previous centuries no doubt remain, the church today would seem to be freer than ever before to consider the filioque question anew, free of the political tensions and the acrimony of the past, free to move to a new and gracious space of authentic dialogue and discernment.
The Fourth Lateran Council (1215)
This Council promulgated two documents that are significant for the interpretation of Trinitarian faith. The first is the solemn Creed composed for the occasion containing the basic truths about the Holy Trinity. The second document is a special statement against Abbot Joachim de Fiore (ob. 1202), who exaggerated the distinction of the divine persons. The Council condemns his teaching and sanctions the doctrine which became the basis of the Trinitarian speculation of most scholastics. Moreover, the Council states that: “Between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying a greater dissimilitude,” (ND 30, DS 806).
This last statement is utilised by Elizabeth Johnson to support her approach to trinitarian theology from a feminist liberation perspective. She analyses the heart of the strategy of analogy in theology, as long understood in the tradition. First, in the strategy of analogy, we proceed from truths known naturally to the mysteries. Second, negation is inherent in our analogical language about God, as the Fourth Lateran Council highlighted. Third, no words can fully encapsulate and express the divine mystery. God remains ineffable, incomprehensible, ever beyond our language and concepts. Thereby, Johnson relativizes all of our God talk and relativizes the use of male imagery to represent and name God. God is not male! The Church community should therefore insist on engaging a much augmented field of metaphors with which to speak rightly of God. God is neither male nor female. When we use masculinist imagery we are speaking analogically, not univocally (one meaning). The Fourth Lateran Council reiterates that the dissimilarity exceeds the similarity in our analogy. So Johnson claims that since woman is just as much imago Dei as is man, then God is just as truly She Who Is as He Who Is (Ex 3:14). She sees that orthopraxis requires a radical reappraisal of the role and standing of women in the church and in society; and because orthodoxy has served to legitimate the oppression of women, its classical expression requires a reappraisal.
Chapter Six Contemporary Approaches to Trinitarian Theology
After Aquinas, theology developed into proving a doctrinal point, with Scripture being reduced to proof texts. Moreover, our modern world thinks differently from that of Aquinas and the medieval theologians with their emphasis on classical metaphysics. Our culture instead demands that the teachings of Christianity be expressed in more experiential and existentially meaningful terms. We, also, live in a culture where belief in God is simply not a deeply determining feature in the way that it was in Aquinas's time. Indeed, in some cultures, a sense of the absence of God is a deeply determining feature and the very question of the existence of God is itself problematic. Hence the emergence of a great dissatisfaction with the psychological analogy and a need for developing a new theological way for making sense of Christian truths.
The German theologian Karl Rahner SJ (1904-1984), observed that, in the textbook trinitarian theology of his times, the doctrine of the Trinity was effectively isolated from the other major tracts of systematic theology and, moreover, that it was also remote from the actual events of salvation history, with the unity of God treated prior to the tri-unity of God, and in essentially metaphysical terms and categories, resulting in a seemingly arcane doctrine with little or no practical significance for Christian life. Rahner particularly lamented the separation and the ordering of the tracts treating the doctrine of God and the doctrine of the Trinity in classical trinitarian theology, a sequencing that makes it seem that the doctrine of the Trinity is mere supplement to the former. He was also critical of psychological speculation in classical trinitarian theology, arguing that it neglects the experience of the Trinity in the economy of salvation in favor of a seemingly almost gnostic speculation about what goes on in the inner life of God. In the process it really forgets that the self-communication of God in history presents the very being of God as he is in himself, and must be if indeed the divine self-communication is the communication of God in his own self to us.
God is known where God has revealed himself, and that is as manifest in the life of the Word incarnate, the Word existing as the man, Jesus Christ. God's self-communication is truly a real self-communication. Rahner insists that the economic Trinity reveals the immanent Trinity. In deed, in his famous Grundaxiom (basic axiom), Rahner insisted that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa.
Rahner analyzes the conditions for the possibility of incarnation and grace. He recognized that creation, the creation of what is other than God, is the condition for the possibility, the necessary presupposition, of God's divine self-communication to what is other than God. Indeed, creation itself is a moment in the divine self-communication. He argues that the incarnation of the Word requires that creation is ordered to the possible incarnation of the Word. Creation of the cosmos is the beginning of trinitarian self-revelation and from its beginning the cosmos exists in the order of grace. He perceives that the human person is ordered to the possibility of the incarnation and to personal union with the indwelling Trinity. In grace the human person encounters not simply something but Someone, nothing less than God’s triune self. God does not merely indirectly give his creature some share of himself by creating and giving us created and finite realities, but the grace God gives is primarily uncreated grace, the indwelling of the three divine persons in the graced human person. The world and the human person come into being as the condition for the possibility of God's self-communication.
The Paschal Mystery as Icon of the Trinity
Christ, not the human person or community as such, is the preeminent and unsurpassable image of God. “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation... all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:15-16). Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) asserts that God reveals himself in the person of Jesus, preeminently in the paschal mystery of his death, descent into hell, and resurrection. He also urges "a kneeling theology," a theology that is mediated by prayer and adoration and imbued with a sense of the sheer glory of God. Faith is first of all a seeing and a beholding and, indeed, an adoring, long before it is an act of seeking understanding.
Balthasar recognizes that the trinitarian mystery is especially revealed at the midpoint of the Easter Triduum, in Jesus' descent into hell, (1 Pet. 3:19; 4:6a). There in the descent, he argues, the glory of the Lord is principally revealed, the glory that is the love that God is (1 Jn 4:8). "It is 'glory' in the uttermost opposite of 'glory,' because it is at the same time blind obedience, that must obey the Father at the point where the last trace of God seems lost (in pure sin), together with every other communication (in pure solitariness)." Balthasar sees God's being, not in terms of absolute and perfect being, but rather in terms of the self-emptying, self-sacrificing, and intrinsically dynamic nature of love. The cross is the revelation of God's glory, albeit a hidden glory, but the glory of inner-trinitarian love.
Balthasar recognizes that the descent represents Jesus' solidarity with the sinner in his/her death, in his/her radical separation from God, in his/her hellish desolation and utter loneliness as a being-only-for-oneself, and in his/her complete powerlessness to redeem oneself. The essential mystery of the descent into hell is that God himself (in the person of the incarnate Son) experiences God-forsakenness and God-estrangement. It is this that constitutes the mystery of our salvation and indeed the glory of the Lord. For this God-forsakenness, this abandonment of the Son by the Father in the descent, is possible only because, at this their point of greatest separation, Father and Son are united in undying love by the Holy Spirit. In the resurrection, the revelation of the Trinity is decisive. It reveals that, even in that moment of their extreme and utmost separation, Father and Son are united. The soteriological "for us" of the paschal mystery is grounded in the self-giving self-yielding love of the divine persons of the Trinity. The paschal mystery reveals that the nature of our triune God is positively constituted by this eternal kenotic self-giving and receiving between the divine persons.
Jurgen Moltmann, a German Protestant theologian, reminds theology that God is where God is self-revealed, and that is in Jesus' paschal mystery, particularly Jesus' death on the cross. Moltmann, a prisoner of war in World War II, wrestles with the question of suffering and of theodicy. The event of the cross can be understood only in trinitarian terms: “If a person once feels the infinite passion of God’s love that finds expression here, then he understands the mystery of the triune God. God suffers with us – God suffers from us – God suffers for us; it is this experience of God that reveals the triune God. The cross takes place in the history between the Father and Son. It is "the concrete history of God," the event of the love of the Son and the grief of the Father, from which issues the Spirit, who opens up the future and creates life. The event of the cross-the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son, and the power of the Spirit-is taken up into the very being of the triune God, where it is constitutive of God's triune being and history. Moltmann persuades us that God is this trinitarian event, the event of the cross: the Father who delivers up his Son, the Son who is abandoned, and the Holy Spirit who is the bond of union between them.
An understanding of the cross as a trinitarian event leads Moltmann to an understanding of the trinitarian history of God wherein God affects and is affected by history and experiences a history with the world. The goal of the history of God is the unity of all things in God and with God, when all will be "all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28). The eschaton is thus God's future, the consummation of the trinitarian history of God, as well as that of creation. To show God's transcendence and independence from the world, Moltmann asserts that the Trinity is the object of our worship and praise.
Sebastian Moore: The Conversion Experience of the Trinity
The disciples of Jesus were strict monotheists. So, clearly a remarkably dramatic change of consciousness led them to proclaim that Jesus was Lord and God. Moore describes the radical change in the disciples' religious consciousness as a result of their encounter with the risen Jesus in terms of "resurrection shock waves." The first resurrection shock wave erupts with the appearance of the risen Jesus and the disciples’ spontaneous confession that Jesus is Lord and God. He has, after all, done what only God can do. He is risen from the dead. Consider, for example, the experience of Thomas, as presented in John 20. Thomas exclaims: "My Lord and my God!" In this first resurrection shock wave, the disciples recognize that Jesus is God. The second resurrection shock wave in their consciousness comes with the experience and recognition of another divine one, the one whom Jesus himself called Abba/Father, as the one who is the author of this great event, this sending of Jesus to us, for us and for our salvation. The disciples, albeit strict monotheists, recognize that divinity resides in both Jesus and the Father. Third, there occurs another resurrection shock wave: the experience of the presence of God as Spirit, mysteriously in their midst, animating and inspiring the community, Spirit of Jesus, Spirit of love, Spirit of unity. With this, the pattern becomes cyclic, a system, a flow of life between .Father and Son through the Spirit. The three stages of shock-waves of the Resurrection encounter are thus these: displacement, extension, cyclic life-flow. Thus the matrix of the images of the divine persons is the "infinite connection” as it undergoes the transformation of the encounter with the risen Jesus. The pre-religious concentration of divine energy takes, under the pressure of this encounter, the shape of Father, Son and Spirit. Moore explains: "The bottom line of Nicaea was that Jesus had done for us what only God could do, had given us what only God could give, and therefore had to be God, whatever the awesome problems created by such an equation in the intellectual world.” In summary, the paschal mystery emerges as the dynamic by means of which our consciousness is radically transformed and we enter into a trinitarian God-consciousness and ultimately into the trinitarian communion.
Francois-Xavier Durrwell & the Mystery of the Resurrection
The resurrection of Jesus lies at the core of Christian faith, (Rom. 4:25, 1 Cor. 15:14). Durrwell recognizes that Jesus' death and resurrection constitute essentially complementary dimensions of the one mystery, "two aspects of the one Paschal Mystery.” From the moment of the resurrection, Jesus is established in the fullness, plenitude and perfection of glory. The resurrection, in Jesus, knows no tomorrow. The risen Christ remains forever in the eternal (that is, ever present) actuality of the one single eternal moment of this plenitude and perfection, (Heb. 13:8). The resurrection enacts, in the realm of creation, the inner-trinitarian begetting of the Son by the Father, the eternal generation, for the whole being of Christ is raised to the glory of sonship. The eternal trinitarian movement of God ad intra is realized ad extra.
Moreover, Jesus, the incarnate Son, in his whole being is risen, risen in his humanity as well as his divinity. God, in the resurrection, takes Jesus, in his humanity, into the fullness of the eternal begetting of the Son. This is the mystery that, as we confess in the creed, is “for us and for our salvation.” That Jesus, in his humanity, is taken into the mystery of the Trinity, means that we, in our humanity, in union with Christ are incorporated into the same divine generation. Raised with him, we too are born of God in the Holy Spirit, and share fully in the divine birth that is Christ’s. And, not just humankind but all creation is involved in this divine begetting. In Christ, all creation becomes filial, entering into the mystery of the eternal generation of the Son. Henceforth the eternal begetting of the Son in the Spirit is immanent within the world: the world is steeped in the eternal trinitarian movement.”
In the mystery of the resurrection, the stigmata of Jesus' suffering and death remain. The risen Lord is forever the Slain Lamb (Rev. 5:12). Death emerges not as means of reparation or redemption of a debt but as the necessary passage or passover to resurrection and to life in communion with the triune God. Since the resurrection is the eschatological event, the Holy Spirit emerges as the eschatological gift. In summary, the paschal mystery reveals both the means and the meaning of salvation (our redemption) and the trinitarian reality of God who saves (revelation of the triune God). The paschal mystery expresses the eternal trinitarian exchange.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Assignments
Assignments
1 The veneration of the ancestors in Africa is compatible with the worship of a tripersonal God. Discuss.
2 Compare the God of the Koran with the God of the New Testament.
3 Explore the connections between the divinities of African Traditional Religion and the Triune God.
4 Communal living in African traditional societies presents us with an image of inner trinitarian life. Consider and explore.
1 The veneration of the ancestors in Africa is compatible with the worship of a tripersonal God. Discuss.
2 Compare the God of the Koran with the God of the New Testament.
3 Explore the connections between the divinities of African Traditional Religion and the Triune God.
4 Communal living in African traditional societies presents us with an image of inner trinitarian life. Consider and explore.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Wisdom & Logos
Divine Agency in Old Testament: Wisdom and Logos.
When the Jewish people returned after their exile in 538 BC, their faith and devotion began to accept various heavenly figures who were, then, described as participating in some way in God’s rule of the world and bringing his salvation to his people. We see that the writings of Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, many of the Psalms, Job, Ezra, Nehemiah, Jonah, Tobit and Daniel contain many references to heavenly figures. In particular, these figures are described as occupying a position second only to God and acting on God’s behalf in some major capacity. It is these figures which are very relevant for understanding the historical origins of the cultic devotional veneration of Jesus. The references to these particular figures all reflect an interest in what may be termed “divine agency”. It is true that the motives behind the interest varied and the interest manifested itself in a variety of forms. The use of “divine agency” is an attempt to label the basic conception that lies behind the description of the various figures in question, in which a chief agent is associated with God in a unique capacity in the manifestation of his sovereignty. Scholars have often focused their attention on specific examples of divine agency figures, for example Wisdom and Logos.
Both in the history of Israel and beyond, the OT understood Wisdom and Word to serve as personified agents of divine activity. As personifications that were not yet formally recognised as persons, they operated with personal characteristics, and this was particularly so in the case of Wisdom. Hokmah, or wisdom (as noun, adjective, or verb) occurs 318 times in the OT, and nearly 75 percent of these occurrences turn up in Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth), Sirach, and Wisdom. Wise counsels are also found elsewhere: for example, Tobit 4:3-21: 12:6-13; and Baruch 3:9-4:4. Wisdom enjoys a very distinctive “face” and also engages in dialogue with God (Sir 24:8).
Personified Wisdom or Sophia becomes increasingly related to the divine work of creation, providence, and salvation and grows in dignity and power along with OT sapiential thinking. So Wisdom (sophia) is described as the “fashioner of all things”, the one who “reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other” and who “orders all things well”, who is “an associate in his works”. Like Wisdom, the Word is with God and is powerfully creative from the beginning (Gn 1:1-2:4). To cite the classical passage from Isaiah: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout. giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth: it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Is 55:10-11). The psalms celebrate the creative and conserving Word of God: “Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Ps 33:8-9; see Ps 148:5). Sirach also appreciates how the divine Word operates to conserve creation: by God’s “Word all things hold together” (Sir 43:26), a sentiment that will be applied to Christ by Col 1:17. At times, the OT scriptures set word in parallelism with spirit or breath as instruments of creation: “The Word of the Lord created the heavens; all the host of heaven was formed by the Breath of his mouth” (Ps 33:6); “Let all your creatures serve you, for you spoke, and they were made. You sent forth your Spirit, and it formed them” (Jdt 16:14). Solomon’s famous prayer takes word and wisdom as synonymous agents of divine creation: “God of my fathers and Lord of mercy, you made all things by your Word, and by your Wisdom fashioned humankind” (Wis 9:1-2).
Word also personified the divine activity in the story of the chosen people’s deliverance from Egypt, at least when death came to the firstborn of the Egyptians. In a vivid personification of Word, the Book of Wisdom declares: “Your all-powerful Word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed; a stern warrior, carrying a sharp sword of your authentic command, he stood and filled all things with death” (Wis 18:15-16). Word also repeatedly expressed God’s historical and saving revelation mediated in a special way through the OT prophets. The Word of the Lord comes to them; hence they can communicate divine oracles and declare, “Thus says the Lord.” The prophets convey divine words of judgement over the people along with indications of God’s will for them.
Summary
1. The literature of Judaism after the exile shows an interest in various figures who are each described as holding a position next to God in honour and power, and behind the interest in these various figures was what we designate “divine agency.’
2 This concept may have been important in giving early Jewish Christians a conceptual framework into which to begin fitting the exalted Jesus, their religious experiences having communicated the conviction that Jesus had been given a position “at the right hand” of God.
3 Although the concept that God had a chief agent seems to have been widely shared in the Judaism of this period, the variation in the names and descriptions of the figures placed in this position shows that Jews employed the concept to serve a variety of religious interests. Such figures had an exalted position but the interest in them did not amount to a fundamental changing of the nature of Jewish monotheistic faith. In contrast, in early Christian devotion the exalted Jesus was made chief agent of all God’s activities.
When the Jewish people returned after their exile in 538 BC, their faith and devotion began to accept various heavenly figures who were, then, described as participating in some way in God’s rule of the world and bringing his salvation to his people. We see that the writings of Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, many of the Psalms, Job, Ezra, Nehemiah, Jonah, Tobit and Daniel contain many references to heavenly figures. In particular, these figures are described as occupying a position second only to God and acting on God’s behalf in some major capacity. It is these figures which are very relevant for understanding the historical origins of the cultic devotional veneration of Jesus. The references to these particular figures all reflect an interest in what may be termed “divine agency”. It is true that the motives behind the interest varied and the interest manifested itself in a variety of forms. The use of “divine agency” is an attempt to label the basic conception that lies behind the description of the various figures in question, in which a chief agent is associated with God in a unique capacity in the manifestation of his sovereignty. Scholars have often focused their attention on specific examples of divine agency figures, for example Wisdom and Logos.
Both in the history of Israel and beyond, the OT understood Wisdom and Word to serve as personified agents of divine activity. As personifications that were not yet formally recognised as persons, they operated with personal characteristics, and this was particularly so in the case of Wisdom. Hokmah, or wisdom (as noun, adjective, or verb) occurs 318 times in the OT, and nearly 75 percent of these occurrences turn up in Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth), Sirach, and Wisdom. Wise counsels are also found elsewhere: for example, Tobit 4:3-21: 12:6-13; and Baruch 3:9-4:4. Wisdom enjoys a very distinctive “face” and also engages in dialogue with God (Sir 24:8).
Personified Wisdom or Sophia becomes increasingly related to the divine work of creation, providence, and salvation and grows in dignity and power along with OT sapiential thinking. So Wisdom (sophia) is described as the “fashioner of all things”, the one who “reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other” and who “orders all things well”, who is “an associate in his works”. Like Wisdom, the Word is with God and is powerfully creative from the beginning (Gn 1:1-2:4). To cite the classical passage from Isaiah: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout. giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth: it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Is 55:10-11). The psalms celebrate the creative and conserving Word of God: “Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Ps 33:8-9; see Ps 148:5). Sirach also appreciates how the divine Word operates to conserve creation: by God’s “Word all things hold together” (Sir 43:26), a sentiment that will be applied to Christ by Col 1:17. At times, the OT scriptures set word in parallelism with spirit or breath as instruments of creation: “The Word of the Lord created the heavens; all the host of heaven was formed by the Breath of his mouth” (Ps 33:6); “Let all your creatures serve you, for you spoke, and they were made. You sent forth your Spirit, and it formed them” (Jdt 16:14). Solomon’s famous prayer takes word and wisdom as synonymous agents of divine creation: “God of my fathers and Lord of mercy, you made all things by your Word, and by your Wisdom fashioned humankind” (Wis 9:1-2).
Word also personified the divine activity in the story of the chosen people’s deliverance from Egypt, at least when death came to the firstborn of the Egyptians. In a vivid personification of Word, the Book of Wisdom declares: “Your all-powerful Word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed; a stern warrior, carrying a sharp sword of your authentic command, he stood and filled all things with death” (Wis 18:15-16). Word also repeatedly expressed God’s historical and saving revelation mediated in a special way through the OT prophets. The Word of the Lord comes to them; hence they can communicate divine oracles and declare, “Thus says the Lord.” The prophets convey divine words of judgement over the people along with indications of God’s will for them.
Summary
1. The literature of Judaism after the exile shows an interest in various figures who are each described as holding a position next to God in honour and power, and behind the interest in these various figures was what we designate “divine agency.’
2 This concept may have been important in giving early Jewish Christians a conceptual framework into which to begin fitting the exalted Jesus, their religious experiences having communicated the conviction that Jesus had been given a position “at the right hand” of God.
3 Although the concept that God had a chief agent seems to have been widely shared in the Judaism of this period, the variation in the names and descriptions of the figures placed in this position shows that Jews employed the concept to serve a variety of religious interests. Such figures had an exalted position but the interest in them did not amount to a fundamental changing of the nature of Jewish monotheistic faith. In contrast, in early Christian devotion the exalted Jesus was made chief agent of all God’s activities.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Son of God & Son of Man
Son of God
Reginald Fuller
Harper’s Biblical Dictionary
Son of God. a person or a people with a special relationship to God.
In the OT: In the OT and pre-Christian Judaism there are four notable uses of the term" Son of God." First, it is predicated of Israel constituted as a nation through the Exodus (e.g. Hos. 11:1). Second, it is a title given to the monarch at the time of enthronement (e.g., Ps. 2:7, a coronation psalm). Third, the angels are called "sons of God" (e.g., Job 38:7). Fourth, in the deuterocanonical book The Wisdom of Solomon it is applied to the righteous individual (Wisd. of Sol 2:18). Primarily, it denotes not physical filiation but a divine call to obedience in a predestined role in salvation history.
It is a matter of dispute whether the term "Son of God" was already current in pre-Christian Judaism as a messianic title as Mark 14:61 would seem to suggest. But in view of the discovery of Psalm 2:7 in a messianic application in the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QFlor. 10-14), it is probably safe to conclude that it was just coming into use in this context during the period of Christian origins.
In the NT: The pre-Easter Jesus undoubtedly had a unique experience of God as his Abba ("Father"). He addressed God with this intimate appellation, normally reserved for an earthly father (e.g., Mark 14:36) Although the synoptic tradition contains two sayings in which Jesus refers to himself as "son" in relation to God as his Father (Mark 13:32; Matt. 11:27 IQ)), the authenticity of these sayings is widely questioned, and it remains uncertain whether Jesus actually called himself "son" in relation to God as Father. The most we can be certain of is that, since his use of Abba implies a unique filial consciousness, it implies the idea that he is "son"
The use of "Son of God" as a christological title should be clearly distinguished from the Father/Son language. The evidence suggests that in spite of its presence in the synoptic Gospels, the title did not come into use until after Easter. At his resurrection/exaltation Jesus was appointed "Son of God" (Rom. 1:4). This belief seems to have arisen through the application of the coronation psalm, already interpreted messianic ally at Qumran, to the Risen One (Acts 13: 33: cf., Heb. 5:5). The use of the word "appointed" in Rom. 1:4 indicates that "Son of Cod" at this stage in the history of Christian thought denoted an office or function, rather than a metaphysical quality as in later dogmatics. This usage is in accord with OT and Jewish practice. Christology of this type is sometimes designated "adoptionist," but it is not adoptionism in the later, heretical sense, according to which Jesus, having been initially purely human, later became divine. It means that at his resurrection/exaltation Jesus embarked upon a new role in salvation history as the mediator of Cod's final offer of salvation.
In the course of time the moment at which Jesus was appointed "Son of God" in this functional sense was pushed back to his baptism as is indicated by the voice from heaven (Mark 1: 111 At that moment Jesus was marked out for his messianic role. This process of retrojection does not entail the christologizing of a life that had been previously unmessianic, for from the earliest time after Easter the community had recognized that God had been at work in Jesus (Acts 2:22: 10:38) and such terms as "prophet" or “servant" were used to indicate that in his earthly lifetime Jesus had appeared as God's agent (prophet, Luke 24:19; servant, Acts 3:13). “Son of God" simply takes over the duty of these earlier titles. It has also been suggested that the Son of God christology was first pushed back only to the moment of the transfiguration (Mark 9:7), but this is unlikely for the voice at the transfiguration seems rather to have been modelled on the voice at the baptism. Once this process of retrojection had shifted the crucial christological moment to baptism, the title "Son of God" could be used occasionally by others, e.g., the demons (Mark 3:11). It is noteworthy, however, that Jesus never claims for himself the title "Son of God." While he is represented as accepting it in Mark 1461-62, both Matthew (27:64) and Luke (22: 67) are at pains to tone down Jesus' acceptance of the title as though what he says to the High Priest is. "It-like the title 'messiah'-is your word, not mine." The ejaculation of the crowd, “For he said he was the son of God" (Matt. 27:43) is clearly secondary, as a comparison with the Markan parallel shows.
A connected development with the foregoing process of retrojection is the idea of the sending of the Son. This appears in a formula exhibiting a constant pattern: God as subject: a verb of sending or its equivalent: the Son as object; and d statement of God's saving purpose in sending the Son (see Gal. 4:4-5; Rom. 8:3-4; John 3:17). In the parable of the wicked husbandmen (Mark 12:6) a similar image occurs, though without an explicit statement of the saving purpose. The roots of this sending formula probably lie in the earlier designation of Jesus as "prophet," which in turn originates in his own self-understanding. Jesus had a strong consciousness of his sending (cf., Mark 9:37), a consciousness that was shared by the OT prophets, on whom it was patterned
(e.g., Is. 6:8). When "Son of God" took over from "prophet" the sending of the Son formula was born.
A related formula is the "handing over" formula (Mark 14:21: Rom. 4:25; John 3:16). This in turn could have its roots in the earlier designation of Jesus as "servant of God," for the term "handed over" or "delivered" occurs in the Servant Song of Isaiah 53 (as found in the Septuagint version).
It is sometimes held that the sending formula was designed to express a preexistence Christology, according to which sending refers to the incarnation of the preexistent Son. The origin of the preexistence Christology is probably to be dated later than the sending formulas, for the latter almost certainly antedates the writings in which they occur. Thus, Gal. 4:4 is widely held to be pre-Pauline and John 3:16-17 to be pre-Johannine. However, Paul may have understood and John certainly understood these formulas in light of their own preexistence theologies.
In the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke the title "Son of God" is shifted back to the conception, birth, or infancy of Jesus (Mat. 2:15: Luke 1:35). However, this also does not imply a preexistence and incarnational Christology or a divine sonship in the metaphysical sense. Rather, it implies his predestination from the womb for a messianic role in salvation history. This functional sense of the divine sonship is made particularly clear in Luke 1:32-33.
There is a growing consensus among scholars that the preexistence Christology originated not with the title "Son of God," but with the identification of Jesus as the personal incarnation of the divine Wisdom. This identification underlies the development of preexistence Christology in the wisdom hymns of the NT (Phil. 2: 6-11, though the presence of preexistence in this hymn is sometimes questioned; Col. 1:1520: Heb. 1:2-3: John 1:1-18). This identification leads to an expansion of the meaning of "Son of God." The preexistent Wisdom or Word of God is as such also the eternal Son of God, who was with God from all eternity as the agent of creation, revelation, and redemption. That identification has already taken place in the Logos hymn of John 1 (see v. 14: also v. 18, if "Son" rather than "God" is the correct text).
The traditional dogmatic Christology of Nicea (A.D. 325) and Chalcedon (A.D. 451) and of Christian orthodoxy since that time rests upon the Johannine development from a functional to a metaphysical Christology. See also Incarnation: Jesus Christ; Wisdom.
Bibliography
Dunn. J. D. G. Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation. Philadelphia: Westminster. 1980. Pp. 12-64.163-250.
Fuller, R. and P. Perkins. Who Is This Christ? Gospel Christology and Contemporary Faith. Philadelphia: Fortress. 1983. Pp. 41-66. 96-108, 121-34.
Hengel, M. The Son of God. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. R.H.F
Son of Man
Reginald Fuller
Harper’s Biblical Dictionary
Son of man, a term with a variety of meanings in the Bible. The NT usage of the term "Son of man" is at first sight simple enough. With one exception (Acts 7:56) and apart from the citation of Ps. 8:4 in Heb. 2:6 and an allusion to Dan. 7: 13 in Rev. 2:13, the term is used exclusively by the earthly Jesus in reference to himself. It is usual to classify these occurrences in the synoptic Gospels under three headings: sayings in which Jesus refers to his present activity during his earthly ministry (e.g. Mark 2:12 and parallels; 2:24 and parallels; also Matt. 8:20 IQI and 11:19 [QJ); sayings in which Jesus refers to his impending passion and/or resurrection (Mark 8: 31 and parallels; 9:9 and parallels; 9:31 and parallels; 10:33 and parallels); and sayings in which he refers to his future activity as judge and Saviour at the end (e.g., Mark 8:38; d. Luke 12:8 [Q]; Mark 13:26 and parallels; 14:62 and parallels). In John "Son of man" as a self-referent of Jesus has a more varied usage, the most characteristic being those sayings that speak of the exaltation of the Son of man, an expression that makes a double allusion to the cross and exaltation (John 3:14; 8:28;12:34). John 1:51 looks like an original Parousia saying (third category above) transferred to the present ministry (first category). John 6:53 speaks of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of man, and John 9:35 (if the text is correct) of believing in the Son of man.
The difficulties begin when one asks the origin of the term. Is it authentic to Jesus? If so, in what sense did he use it? Regarding the origin of the term, it is widely held, especially among German scholars, that the term "Son of man" was already current in pre-Christian, Jewish apocalyptic writings (Dan 7:14; The Similitudes of Enoch). Here already the Son of man appears as God's end-time agent of salvation and judgment. British scholars, in particular, often argue that the only pre-Christian example is Daniel, but that there the "Son of man" stands for Israel as a corporate entity. The Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37-71) do not appear in early versions of Enoch.
It has therefore been argued by some British scholars that there was no pre-Christian, apocalyptic concept of a "Son of man," and that therefore no light is cast by such sources on the way Jesus used that phrase. Jesus must have used "Son of man" as a simple self-designation, perhaps as a self-effacing way of referring to himself simply as a human being (cf., Ps 8 4). This usage could account for both the present and suffering references. Sometimes in this view, the future sayings are explained as post-Easter developments under the influence of Dan. 7:14.
Those who accept the view that there was a pre-Christian apocalyptic concept of a "Son of man" sometimes argue that Jesus used it of a transcendental figure other than himself (see esp. Mark 8:38: Luke 128 [Q], where Jesus appears to distinguish between himself and the coming Son of man). This coming Son of man will vindicate Jesus' present offer of final salvation to his contemporaries. After Easter and the rise of an explicit christological faith in Jesus, it is held his followers saw in him his own vindicator and therefore identified him with the apocalyptic Son of man.
Yet another current view is that Jesus dic1 not use the term "Son of man" at all, either as a self-designation or in reference to a coming figure distinct from himself. It was in this view the post-Easter community that first introduced the term "Son of man" to the Jesus tradition in the apocalyptic sense. In both the last mentioned views the present and suffering savings must have developed out of the future savings by retrojecting the title into Jesus' earthly life. As this survey indicates, there is no unanimity among scholars at present either as to the origin or the exact meaning of the title "Son of man."
Bibliography
Dunn, J. D. G. Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation. Philadelphia: Westminster 1980. Pp. 65-97.
Fitzmyer, J. A "The New Testament Title Son of Man' Philologically Considered." In A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays Missoula, MT: Scholars Press. 1979. Pp. 143-60.
R H F
Reginald Fuller
Harper’s Biblical Dictionary
Son of God. a person or a people with a special relationship to God.
In the OT: In the OT and pre-Christian Judaism there are four notable uses of the term" Son of God." First, it is predicated of Israel constituted as a nation through the Exodus (e.g. Hos. 11:1). Second, it is a title given to the monarch at the time of enthronement (e.g., Ps. 2:7, a coronation psalm). Third, the angels are called "sons of God" (e.g., Job 38:7). Fourth, in the deuterocanonical book The Wisdom of Solomon it is applied to the righteous individual (Wisd. of Sol 2:18). Primarily, it denotes not physical filiation but a divine call to obedience in a predestined role in salvation history.
It is a matter of dispute whether the term "Son of God" was already current in pre-Christian Judaism as a messianic title as Mark 14:61 would seem to suggest. But in view of the discovery of Psalm 2:7 in a messianic application in the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QFlor. 10-14), it is probably safe to conclude that it was just coming into use in this context during the period of Christian origins.
In the NT: The pre-Easter Jesus undoubtedly had a unique experience of God as his Abba ("Father"). He addressed God with this intimate appellation, normally reserved for an earthly father (e.g., Mark 14:36) Although the synoptic tradition contains two sayings in which Jesus refers to himself as "son" in relation to God as his Father (Mark 13:32; Matt. 11:27 IQ)), the authenticity of these sayings is widely questioned, and it remains uncertain whether Jesus actually called himself "son" in relation to God as Father. The most we can be certain of is that, since his use of Abba implies a unique filial consciousness, it implies the idea that he is "son"
The use of "Son of God" as a christological title should be clearly distinguished from the Father/Son language. The evidence suggests that in spite of its presence in the synoptic Gospels, the title did not come into use until after Easter. At his resurrection/exaltation Jesus was appointed "Son of God" (Rom. 1:4). This belief seems to have arisen through the application of the coronation psalm, already interpreted messianic ally at Qumran, to the Risen One (Acts 13: 33: cf., Heb. 5:5). The use of the word "appointed" in Rom. 1:4 indicates that "Son of Cod" at this stage in the history of Christian thought denoted an office or function, rather than a metaphysical quality as in later dogmatics. This usage is in accord with OT and Jewish practice. Christology of this type is sometimes designated "adoptionist," but it is not adoptionism in the later, heretical sense, according to which Jesus, having been initially purely human, later became divine. It means that at his resurrection/exaltation Jesus embarked upon a new role in salvation history as the mediator of Cod's final offer of salvation.
In the course of time the moment at which Jesus was appointed "Son of God" in this functional sense was pushed back to his baptism as is indicated by the voice from heaven (Mark 1: 111 At that moment Jesus was marked out for his messianic role. This process of retrojection does not entail the christologizing of a life that had been previously unmessianic, for from the earliest time after Easter the community had recognized that God had been at work in Jesus (Acts 2:22: 10:38) and such terms as "prophet" or “servant" were used to indicate that in his earthly lifetime Jesus had appeared as God's agent (prophet, Luke 24:19; servant, Acts 3:13). “Son of God" simply takes over the duty of these earlier titles. It has also been suggested that the Son of God christology was first pushed back only to the moment of the transfiguration (Mark 9:7), but this is unlikely for the voice at the transfiguration seems rather to have been modelled on the voice at the baptism. Once this process of retrojection had shifted the crucial christological moment to baptism, the title "Son of God" could be used occasionally by others, e.g., the demons (Mark 3:11). It is noteworthy, however, that Jesus never claims for himself the title "Son of God." While he is represented as accepting it in Mark 1461-62, both Matthew (27:64) and Luke (22: 67) are at pains to tone down Jesus' acceptance of the title as though what he says to the High Priest is. "It-like the title 'messiah'-is your word, not mine." The ejaculation of the crowd, “For he said he was the son of God" (Matt. 27:43) is clearly secondary, as a comparison with the Markan parallel shows.
A connected development with the foregoing process of retrojection is the idea of the sending of the Son. This appears in a formula exhibiting a constant pattern: God as subject: a verb of sending or its equivalent: the Son as object; and d statement of God's saving purpose in sending the Son (see Gal. 4:4-5; Rom. 8:3-4; John 3:17). In the parable of the wicked husbandmen (Mark 12:6) a similar image occurs, though without an explicit statement of the saving purpose. The roots of this sending formula probably lie in the earlier designation of Jesus as "prophet," which in turn originates in his own self-understanding. Jesus had a strong consciousness of his sending (cf., Mark 9:37), a consciousness that was shared by the OT prophets, on whom it was patterned
(e.g., Is. 6:8). When "Son of God" took over from "prophet" the sending of the Son formula was born.
A related formula is the "handing over" formula (Mark 14:21: Rom. 4:25; John 3:16). This in turn could have its roots in the earlier designation of Jesus as "servant of God," for the term "handed over" or "delivered" occurs in the Servant Song of Isaiah 53 (as found in the Septuagint version).
It is sometimes held that the sending formula was designed to express a preexistence Christology, according to which sending refers to the incarnation of the preexistent Son. The origin of the preexistence Christology is probably to be dated later than the sending formulas, for the latter almost certainly antedates the writings in which they occur. Thus, Gal. 4:4 is widely held to be pre-Pauline and John 3:16-17 to be pre-Johannine. However, Paul may have understood and John certainly understood these formulas in light of their own preexistence theologies.
In the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke the title "Son of God" is shifted back to the conception, birth, or infancy of Jesus (Mat. 2:15: Luke 1:35). However, this also does not imply a preexistence and incarnational Christology or a divine sonship in the metaphysical sense. Rather, it implies his predestination from the womb for a messianic role in salvation history. This functional sense of the divine sonship is made particularly clear in Luke 1:32-33.
There is a growing consensus among scholars that the preexistence Christology originated not with the title "Son of God," but with the identification of Jesus as the personal incarnation of the divine Wisdom. This identification underlies the development of preexistence Christology in the wisdom hymns of the NT (Phil. 2: 6-11, though the presence of preexistence in this hymn is sometimes questioned; Col. 1:1520: Heb. 1:2-3: John 1:1-18). This identification leads to an expansion of the meaning of "Son of God." The preexistent Wisdom or Word of God is as such also the eternal Son of God, who was with God from all eternity as the agent of creation, revelation, and redemption. That identification has already taken place in the Logos hymn of John 1 (see v. 14: also v. 18, if "Son" rather than "God" is the correct text).
The traditional dogmatic Christology of Nicea (A.D. 325) and Chalcedon (A.D. 451) and of Christian orthodoxy since that time rests upon the Johannine development from a functional to a metaphysical Christology. See also Incarnation: Jesus Christ; Wisdom.
Bibliography
Dunn. J. D. G. Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation. Philadelphia: Westminster. 1980. Pp. 12-64.163-250.
Fuller, R. and P. Perkins. Who Is This Christ? Gospel Christology and Contemporary Faith. Philadelphia: Fortress. 1983. Pp. 41-66. 96-108, 121-34.
Hengel, M. The Son of God. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. R.H.F
Son of Man
Reginald Fuller
Harper’s Biblical Dictionary
Son of man, a term with a variety of meanings in the Bible. The NT usage of the term "Son of man" is at first sight simple enough. With one exception (Acts 7:56) and apart from the citation of Ps. 8:4 in Heb. 2:6 and an allusion to Dan. 7: 13 in Rev. 2:13, the term is used exclusively by the earthly Jesus in reference to himself. It is usual to classify these occurrences in the synoptic Gospels under three headings: sayings in which Jesus refers to his present activity during his earthly ministry (e.g. Mark 2:12 and parallels; 2:24 and parallels; also Matt. 8:20 IQI and 11:19 [QJ); sayings in which Jesus refers to his impending passion and/or resurrection (Mark 8: 31 and parallels; 9:9 and parallels; 9:31 and parallels; 10:33 and parallels); and sayings in which he refers to his future activity as judge and Saviour at the end (e.g., Mark 8:38; d. Luke 12:8 [Q]; Mark 13:26 and parallels; 14:62 and parallels). In John "Son of man" as a self-referent of Jesus has a more varied usage, the most characteristic being those sayings that speak of the exaltation of the Son of man, an expression that makes a double allusion to the cross and exaltation (John 3:14; 8:28;12:34). John 1:51 looks like an original Parousia saying (third category above) transferred to the present ministry (first category). John 6:53 speaks of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of man, and John 9:35 (if the text is correct) of believing in the Son of man.
The difficulties begin when one asks the origin of the term. Is it authentic to Jesus? If so, in what sense did he use it? Regarding the origin of the term, it is widely held, especially among German scholars, that the term "Son of man" was already current in pre-Christian, Jewish apocalyptic writings (Dan 7:14; The Similitudes of Enoch). Here already the Son of man appears as God's end-time agent of salvation and judgment. British scholars, in particular, often argue that the only pre-Christian example is Daniel, but that there the "Son of man" stands for Israel as a corporate entity. The Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37-71) do not appear in early versions of Enoch.
It has therefore been argued by some British scholars that there was no pre-Christian, apocalyptic concept of a "Son of man," and that therefore no light is cast by such sources on the way Jesus used that phrase. Jesus must have used "Son of man" as a simple self-designation, perhaps as a self-effacing way of referring to himself simply as a human being (cf., Ps 8 4). This usage could account for both the present and suffering references. Sometimes in this view, the future sayings are explained as post-Easter developments under the influence of Dan. 7:14.
Those who accept the view that there was a pre-Christian apocalyptic concept of a "Son of man" sometimes argue that Jesus used it of a transcendental figure other than himself (see esp. Mark 8:38: Luke 128 [Q], where Jesus appears to distinguish between himself and the coming Son of man). This coming Son of man will vindicate Jesus' present offer of final salvation to his contemporaries. After Easter and the rise of an explicit christological faith in Jesus, it is held his followers saw in him his own vindicator and therefore identified him with the apocalyptic Son of man.
Yet another current view is that Jesus dic1 not use the term "Son of man" at all, either as a self-designation or in reference to a coming figure distinct from himself. It was in this view the post-Easter community that first introduced the term "Son of man" to the Jesus tradition in the apocalyptic sense. In both the last mentioned views the present and suffering savings must have developed out of the future savings by retrojecting the title into Jesus' earthly life. As this survey indicates, there is no unanimity among scholars at present either as to the origin or the exact meaning of the title "Son of man."
Bibliography
Dunn, J. D. G. Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation. Philadelphia: Westminster 1980. Pp. 65-97.
Fitzmyer, J. A "The New Testament Title Son of Man' Philologically Considered." In A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays Missoula, MT: Scholars Press. 1979. Pp. 143-60.
R H F
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Notes for Students
Tangaza College, Nairobi.
Self-Revelation of the Triune God
1st Semester, 2008, Class 2B
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boff, Leonardo, Trinity and Society. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988.
Congar, Yves, 1 Believe in the Holy Spirit. 3 vols. New York: Seabury Press, 1983.
The Word and the Spirit, London: Chapman, 1986.
Hunt, Anne, What they are saying about the Trinity, Paulist, New York, 1998
Moltmann, Jurgen, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God. London: SCM Press, 1981.
O’Collins, Gerald, The Tripersonal God, New York, Paulist, 1999.
O’Donnell, John, The Mystery of the Triune God, London, Sheed and Ward, 1988.
Chapter One
Old Testament Monotheistic Faith with anticipations of Trinitarian Belief
The core of Jewish faith is that there is one unique God. The prophet Isaiah states: “God is unique; there are no other gods besides him”, (Is 44:6), (Dt 6:4-5, Neh 9:6, Is 45:22-24, Mk 12:29-30). While the religion of Israel was a declaration of monotheistic faith, it developed from the polytheistic faith of the contemporaries of Abraham. Then it was normal for everybody to have their gods including Abraham. (Gen 12, 51:19-35) The Old Testament nevertheless provides a framework and terminology with which to speak of plurality in God.
FATHER
There are six contexts in which the people of Israel refer to God as Father.
1 Creator: Dt 32:6 states, “Is this the return you make to Yahweh? Is he not your father, who gave you being, who made you, by whom you subsist?’ (Mal 2:10, Wis 14:3).
2 Father of People. The fidelity of God as the Father of his people is asserted many times in the Scriptures. (Dt 32:6). The people are called God’s firstborn son (Ex 4:22-23; Hos 11:1) & God’s “sons and daughters” (Dt 32:19; Is 1:2; 30:1), (Dt 32:18).
An ideal father, Dt 1:31, Jer 3:4, 19; 2:27; 31:9, Is 40:3-4; 42:16; 43:19-20), (Is 63:l5ff., 64:6-8).
3 Father of King: 2 Sam 7:12-14, Ps 2:7; 89: 26-28. (Ps 2:6).
4 Compassion: “When Israel was young, I loved him; I called my son out of Egypt. It was I who taught him to walk, I who had taken him in my arms... I led them with reins of kindness, with leading strings of love. I was to them like one who lifts a little infant close against the cheek, stooping down to him, I gave him his food (Hos 11:1-4) (Jer 31:20, 2 Sam 7-14, Ps 68:4-6, Is 66:13, Is 49:15, Sirach 4:10).
5 Leader: God has the authority and power of a Father and so must be respected and followed. (Mal 1:2, 6, Ps 123:2, Dt 8:5, Wis 11:9-10, Prov 3:12).
6 Cultic: The two words “Our Father” are found in Jewish prayers used in Liturgy (The Eighteen Benedictions, New Year and Day of Atonement Liturgies, Tobit 13:4). This prayer of praise discloses a very personal attitude toward God and anticipates the NT’s prayerful relationship to God as “our Father.”
Conclusion: Naming God Father expressed God’s deep involvement in the story of Israel. As the Catechism writes: “By calling God "Father," the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children” CCC 239.
SON
The Old Testament also speaks of the Son of God, at first in reference to the people as a whole (Hos 11:1) and sometimes in reference to a king (Ps 2:7) or an upright Jew (Wis 2:18). Primarily, it indicates not physical filiation, but a divine call to fulfill a particular task in salvation history. The Old Testament also speaks of the Word (Jdt 16:14, Wis 9:1-2, 18:15-16) and the Wisdom of God (Sir 24:8), but without personification. In other words, Word and Wisdom in the Old Testament do not refer to personal divine beings as such. While they personify a divine activity, neither Word nor Wisdom is a person to be addressed. They do not connote any kind of plurality in the Godhead. Nor is there evidence of paternity and filiation within the Godhead in the Old Testament. There are presentations on the Son of God, Son of Man, Messiah, Wisdom and Word in trinitytangaza08.blogspot.com.
SPIRIT
1 Creation
It is the “ruah elohim” that brings forth the world out of the primeval waste. He creates the world. Nothing comes into existence except through the power of God’s creative Spirit. He is the agent of creation as well as of life, Genesis 1:2; 2:7, Psalm 104:30.
New creation (Is 43:19, Ez 36:27; 37:1-14).
The end-time will be the “golden age of the Spirit” (Is 44:3; Zc 6:1-8 and Joel 2:23-30; 3:1-3). First, the “one who comes” is characterised as a man of the Spirit” (Is 11:2; 42:1; 61:1). Secondly, the age to come is inaugurated by the outpouring of the Spirit on all people (Is 32:15; 44:3; Ez 39:29; 11 2:28). Thirdly, this age of the Spirit is marked by a new Covenant (Is 59:21; Jr31:31-34; 32:37-40, Ez 36:27).
2 Prophecy and Revelation
The Spirit takes possession of prophets to empower them to speak God’s word, (Ez 2:2ff; 3:24; 11:4-5). Moses - Nb 11:17, 25; Is 63:11.
Joel 3:1-2, Jer 31:31-34, Ez 36:24-28; 37:19-21 and 36:26-27).”
3. Messiah
The Messiah is perceived as prophetic (Dt 18:15), as a charismatic leader (Is 11:1-10) and as a glorious supernatural person of divine qualities (Dn 7:l3ff).
Isaiah 11:1ff.
4. Link with Wisdom and Word
There exists very intimate links between word, wisdom and spirit in pre-Christian Judaism (Ps 33:6; Ps 147:18, Jdt 16:14; Ps 104:29-30)
Wis 9:17: see 1:4-5; 7:7, 22, 25.
Dt 34:9; Jb 32:8-9; Is 11:2.
Conclusion
While the Old Testament evinces no sense of plurality in the Godhead, what it does provide is, first, a climate within which plurality was later conceivable and, second, a terminology with which to express that plurality.
Chapter Two
Jesus Christ: Revelation of the Triune God.
If the reality of Jesus Christ is a myth, then the Trinity is a myth. Now we will explore the witness to the divinity of Jesus.
I Spouse of Israel
A Yahweh as Spouse: In Hosea, God’s relationship with Israel is described in terms of marriage. The wedding imagery of God’s love for his people is taken up by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and the Song of Songs. Isaiah says, ‘For now, your creator will be your husband, his name, Yahweh Sabaoth’, Is 54:5. (Hos 1:2; Ez 16; Jer 2:2 Is 62:4-5). So in the centuries before Jesus Christ was born, Yahweh was perceived as the Spouse of Israel.
B Jesus as Spouse.
1. Mark 2:18-19
2. Matthew 22:1-13; 19:10-12; 25:1-13.
3. Luke 12:35-40; 19:28-38; 14:8.
4. Paul. - Eph 5:21-32.
5. John 3:29; 2:1-12; Rev 21.
We have found five very strong communities and other possible references to Jesus as Bridegroom. This means that it must be traced back to Jesus himself; that Jesus regarded himself as the Spouse of Israel. The implication is that Jesus saw himself as Yahweh.
II Mark
The Gospel of Mark is said to be Low Christological Gospel. Still, there is an implicit narrative statement in his Gospel that Jesus is God, as the following texts show.
1. Mk 10:17-18: ‘Why do you call me good?’
2. Mk 2:5-12: The Healing of the Paralytic. ‘Who can forgive sins but God alone?’
3. Mk 2:23-3:5: The Disciples plucking ears of grain; ‘The Son of Man is master even of the Sabbath’.
4. Mk 12:35-37: “The Lord said to my Lord”.
5. There are many other incidents in the Gospels in which the divinity of Jesus is portrayed; Mk 9:2-8 - The Transfiguration.
6. Jesus walking on the water, (Mk 6:45-52).
III THE WORD
The evangelist develops the theme of the Son of God as the Revealer who brings the divine self-revelation (Jn 1:18). The Johannine Word presented rich trinitarian possibilities.
· Identification and distinction.
· God has been uttering the divine word always.
· John can move smoothly from the language of the Word to focus on “God the only Son who has made the Father known.”
· Opens up dialogue with non-Christian thinkers.
· By maintaining that the whole world was created through the divine Wisdom and Word (Jn 1:3, 10; 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:16; Heb 1:2) the early Christians interpreted Jesus as the divine agent of all creation.
Jesus and the Father
1 Father
The New Testament refers 421 times to God. 183 (43 per-cent) of these references refer to God as “Father.” The use of the word, ‘Father’, denotes in most instances the special relationship of Jesus to God.
2 Abba
What has been discovered in all four gospel traditions is that they report unanimously and without any hesitation that Jesus constantly addressed God as “My Father” (except Mk 15:34), and show that in so doing he used the Aramaic form “Abba.”
Father – Lk 10:21; Jn 11:41. God – Mk 15:34.
The term ‘Abba’ occurs three times in the New Testament: Mk 14:36; Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6.
Father meaning Abba – Mt 6:9; 11:25-26; 16:17; Lk 11:2.
3 Son of God
Mk 1:1, 11; 15:39.
Mt 3:14-17; 4:1-11; 27:39, 54; 16:16.
The title Son of Man is associated with the power to forgive sins and with power over the Sabbath.
The title Lord is only rarely applied to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Note Acts 7:59-60.
1. Mt 11:25-30; Lk 10:21-22.
2. Mk 13:32; Mt 24:36.
3. Mk 12:1-12 par.
Yet neither here nor elsewhere in the synoptic Gospels does Jesus ever come out into the open and say, “I am the Son of God.” (Mt 27:43)
Jesus applied the language of divine sonship individually (to himself), filling it with a meaning that lifted “Son (of God)” beyond the level of his merely being either a man made like Adam in the divine image (Lk 3:38), or someone perfectly sensitive to the Holy Spirit (Lk 4:1,14,18), or someone bringing God’s peace (Lk 1; 14; 10:5-6) albeit in his own way (Mt 10:34; par. in Lk 12:51), or even a Davidic king (Lk 1:33). Implicitly, Jesus claimed an essential, “ontological” relationship of sonship toward God that provided the grounds for his functions as revealer, lawgiver, forgiver of and agent of the final kingdom. Those functions (his “doing”) depended on his ontological relationship as Son of God (his “being”).
In Paul's letters, God (ho theos) is Father and Jesus is Our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul would seem to be reluctant to call Jesus God, preferring the title Lord, presenting a soteriological function rather than an ontological reference. Paul is, at times subordinationist, but the Son is never a creature in Paul's witness. John clearly calls Jesus God in John 1:18 and John 20:20. But the Johannine text "the Father is greater than I" (Jn 14:28) will later be used to justify subordination.
CCC 240.
So, in his identity and ministry as Son, Jesus is the divine Revealer of God the Father.
4 The Sending and Coming of Jesus.
At times, Jesus expressed his mission as one who had been sent by God. Mk 9:36-37 par; Mk 12:6 par, (cf. Mt 15:24). But on other occasions Jesus went beyond the normal prophetic “I was sent” to say, “I came,” Mk 2:17 par; Lk 12:49, 51; Mt 10:34-35. Mk 10:45 par.
Paul: sending - Rom 8:3 and initiative - 2 Cor 8:9, emptying himself Ph 2:7.
John: sending - 3:17, 34; 20:21 and descending from heaven - Jn 3:13. “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me” (Jn 6:38).
This ‘sending and coming’ motif presents Jesus as a divine being coming from God the Father, intimates an equality and unity between the Son and the Father and leads to the ‘begotten’ or the ‘generated’ status of the Son.
5 The Virginal Conception
The major value of the virginal conception has been to express Jesus’ divine origin and identity, without, at the same time, denying his true humanity. Gal 4:4.
Holy Spirit (Lk 24:49; Jn 14:26) had been actively present in the whole of Jesus’ life (Lk 3:22; 4:1, 14, 18) even back at his conception (Mt 1:20; Lk 1:35).
Virginal conception: from the beginning to the end, the story of Jesus Christ reveals a God who is triune.
6 Easter Mystery
“God (the Father) who raised Jesus (from the dead),”
1 Th 1:9-10; Gal 1:1; 1 Cor 6:14; Rom 4:24; 8:11; 10:9; 6:4; 1 Cor 6:14; 2 Cor 13:4; Rom 4:25; 6:9; 1 Cor 15:4, 13; Acts 3:15; 4:10
Jesus and the Holy Spirit
In the New Testament, the experience of the Spirit is intrinsically bound up with the historical Jesus. Luke’s designation of the divine spirit as the Holy Spirit has become standard for all Christians. Luke in his Gospel and Acts refers 54 times to the Holy Spirit. Perhaps this usage aims principally at expressing the central purpose of the Spirit’s mission - to be the source of holiness by reproducing the characteristics of divine holiness and so creating truly holy men and women. Paul closely associates Christ and the Holy Spirit in the work of sanctification, but without identifying them and without articulating their relationship. (Gal. 4:4-6). In John’s Gospel, the person of the Holy Spirit emerges in the Paraclete passages (14:16, 17, 26; 15:26-27; 16:7-15), and John attests to a distinctly personal reality more explicitly than anywhere else in the New Testament. The Holy Spirit is the Paraclete, the Consoler, the Advocate, and the Intercessor.
1. The Annunciation Story: Luke1:35.
2. The Baptism of Jesus: Mark 1:10-11.
Although Jesus already possessed the Spirit by virtue of his unique conception, this special bestowal of the Holy Spirit is necessary if Jesus is to fulfil his role as initiator of the age to come.
3. The Public Ministry of Jesus.
Mark 1:12
Healings: Mt 12:28; Lk 4:36; 5:17; 6:19; 8:54; 13:32.
Prayer: Lk 3:21; 5:16; 6:12; 9:18; 11:1; 22:32; 23:34-46.
Jesus was aware of being empowered by the Spirit, Mk 3:22-30. But he never unambiguously pointed to his deeds as signs of the Spirit’s power. Jesus is never credited with an awareness of the Spirit that had anything like the same intensity as his consciousness of the God whom he called “Abba.” It took Jesus’ resurrection and exaltation to initiate a new, characteristically Christian manner of thinking about the Spirit and the relationship of Jesus to the Spirit.
4 Paschal Mystery
The resurrection of Jesus is also seen in Scripture as the work of the Holy Spirit: Rom 8:11; Eph 1:19-20; 1 Cor 6:14; 2 Cor 13:4; Acts 2:33, (Jn 13:1-21:25).
5 The Sending of the Spirit
The NT writers understand the relationship between Jesus and the Spirit to be transformed by the resurrection. The exalted Jesus is now seen to share in God’s prerogative as Sender or Giver of the divine Spirit. (Jn 7:39; 15:26; 19:30, 34; 20:22). John also talks about the Father giving the Spirit (Jn 14:16-17) and sending the Spirit (Jn 14:26), and the Spirit proceeding from the Father (Jn 15.26). Even if the coming of the Spirit (Jn 14:16-17, 25) seems to merge with the return of Jesus himself (Jn 14:3, 18, 23, 28), in John’s Gospel the Spirit is not equated with Jesus but enjoys some individual identity.
Luke talks of Christ as co-sending the Spirit. (Acts 2:33; Lk 24:49). Paul never quite says that Christ has sent or will send the Spirit, (1 Cor 15:45?; Gal 4:6; Rom 5:5; 1 Cor 12:7, 8, 12; Gal 3:2).
6. Jesus and the Spirit in the Church
The Spirit “in us” (Rom 5:5; 8:9,11,16; Gal 4:6) is nearly synonymous with talk about our being “in Christ” (Rom 6:3,11,23; 16:11; 1 Cor 1:30; 3:1; 4:15; Phil 3:1; 4:1-2). This near functional identity implies not only that for Paul the Spirit is the medium for Christ in his relating to human beings but even that “no distinction can be detected in the believer’s experience” between the exalted Christ and the Spirit of God.
Trinitarian Expressions
1 The Synoptics and Acts
There are a number of scriptural events that witness to an experience of the Three: the infancy narrative, the baptismal theophany, the story of Jesus' temptations, the transfiguration, the farewell discourses, the ascension, Peter's speech at Pentecost, the martyrdom of Stephen, and most importantly, of course, the narrative of Jesus' paschal mystery of death and resurrection. But there are in fact very few texts that make reference to the three persons in the one text. Moreover, if we define "trinitarian" to refer to the existence of three coequal persons in the Godhead, there is no trinitarian witness as such in the Synoptics and Acts. There are, however, undoubtedly traces of what we could call triadic patterns that attest to a sense of three persons in God.
· Matt. 28:19.
2 Paul
The Pauline letters yield a number of triadic formulas and other triadic passages about God, (Rom 1:3-4; 1 Cor 6:14; Rom 15:16). At the end of 2 Corinthians, as happens also in Rom 5:1-11, Paul emphasises the soteriological functions of the Trinity or the Trinity “for us,” (2 Cor 13:13).
1 Cor 12:4-7 and Gal 4:4-6. The salvation, initiated by God (2 Cor 13:13), is effected by Christ through his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection (Rom 4:25), and appropriated by participating in the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:1-5).
Finally, let us note four triadic formulas in Ephesians, 2:18; 3:14-17; 4:4-6 and 5:18-20.
Paul witnesses to a soteriological view of the tripersonal God, from whom comes our initial adoption, ongoing guidance and future inheritance, Rom 8:14-17. Salvation takes place because we are loved by the Lord Jesus, elected by God the Father, and sanctified by the Spirit (2 Th 2:13; 1 Th 1:4-6).
Conclusion
The New Testament writers do not even ordinarily speak of Jesus as “God” (except in the rarest of cases, e.g., the Prologue of John’s Gospel), since this would be for them an identification of Jesus with the Father. On the other hand, the New Testament recognises the divinity of the Son. More clearly than any other writer, John presents an understanding of the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit as person. The New Testament does not specify the terms of the relationship between Father and Son, nor among Father and Son and Holy Spirit. It assumes only that there is some relationship (Mt 11:27; Jn 1:1; 8:38; 10:38; 1 Cor 2:10). But no text expresses a theology of the Trinity as such. Still even though we certainly do not find in the NT anything like the eventual, full-blown doctrine of God as three in one and one in three (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), nevertheless, the NT witnesses provide a foundation and a starting point for that doctrinal development. While the Scriptures do not give an explicit doctrine of the Trinity, however, they do more than simply pave the way for it: they attest to the vibrant lived experience in the early Christian community of the threefold structure of God’s self-revelation, they witness to the threefoldness of God as expressed in liturgical and sacramental practice; they provide clear intimations of a trinitarian pattern; they establish a rhetoric for the expression of trinitarian faith; and they provide the basis for later development of trinitarian doctrine.
Chapter Three Athanasius: Formulating the Doctrine
Arius (d. ca. 336), a presbyter from Alexandria living in the early fourth century, denied the full divinity of the Son. Arius, concerned to protect the divine unity, immutability, and impassibility, reasoned that the Word, while preexistent in regard to the world, is a created intermediary, a kind of demi-god, (half-size or imperfect god), neither fully God nor fully human. “There was when he was not,” Arius argued. He adopted a subordinationist stance in regard to the question of the divinity of Jesus.
Nicea, 325
Is the Son truly God or is that designation merely a courtesy title? The issue was brought to a head when pressed to its soteriological consequences: Are we really and truly saved or are we not? If Christ is not truly divine, then he is a creature like us and has no special standing before God. We are still in our sins. The Council resolved that the Son is truly God and replied in response to the Arian slogan, "there was not when he was not." He was the eternally begotten Son of God. He was not a creature of the Creator. The resolution was articulated in the Creed of Nicaea, which used the word, homoousios, "from the same being/substance," to state that the Son is truly, fully, equally and eternally God, as the Father is God.
Aftermath of Nicea
Greek theology - “economic Trinity” - the one God is God the Father, and that the Son and the Spirit share with Him His divine life (subordinationism).
Latin theology - “immanent Trinity” - God is the one divine substance, comprising Father, Son and Spirit (modalism).
Homoousios and homoiousios (of like substance).
Where Irenaeus’s image of the Son and Spirit as “the two hands of God” might encourage the notion that the Son and Spirit could operate separately, if not independently, the former in the work of creation and the latter in that of divinization or re-creation, Athanasius underlined the unity in trinitarian activity: “The Father does all things through the Word in the Holy Spirit. Thus the unity of the holy Triad is preserved.” Yet the more Athanasius and others were to insist on the unity of divine operations ad extra, the more problematic it becomes for us to distinguish the eternal existence of three distinct divine persons ad intro.
Tertullian introduced the expression tres personae in una substantia (three persons in one substance) to define the unity and triplicity of the Christian God. 'Person' here is a label for whatever accounts for the distinctive identity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Cappadocians
Ousia and hypostasis, both of which refer to something that subsists, an essential characteristic.
The Cappadocians – Basil of Caesarea (d. 379), his brother Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394), and sister Macrina (d. 379), and friend Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390). They used the term ousia to denote the triune God's one same nature, what God is – life, truth, being and goodness – and the term hypostasis to denote who the Father, Son and Spirit are as distinct.
Challenge of terminology - Person and substance: Hypostasis and ousia.
Gregory of Nazianzus explains: “God is three in regard to distinctive properties, or subsistences [hypostases], or, if you like, persons [prosopa]: for we shall not quarrel about the names, as long as the terms lead to the same conception. He is one in respect of the category of substance, that is, of godhead... We must avoid any notion of superiority or inferiority between the Persons; nor must we turn the union into a confusion, nor the distinction into a difference of natures.” (Oratio 39.11). So, thanks in large measure to the Cappadocians, hypostasis (person) gradually emerged as the term with which to refer to the Three in their distinction from each other within the One God, while ousia (substance) came to be the term to refer to the Oneness of God.
Arians challenge – tritheists or monarchianists.
The divine persons are distinguished by their mutual relations to one another What the Father, Son and Spirit are is the one divine nature which is to be life and goodness itself. But who each person is, is sheer relation to each other, in a way absolutely unknown to our own experience. The divine persons thus are not separate substances; neither, however, are they simply "accidental" qualities of or names for the Father who alone is God. They are unique persons distinguished precisely by their unique relation to one another. The Father alone is the first person, God unbegotten, source without source. The Son alone is second person, God eternally begotten from the Father in perfect equality. And the Spirit alone is third person, God eternally proceeding from the Father in perfect equality.
The function of homoousios is to establish that there can be a sharing in being. The Arians claimed that God cannot be one God if he is Son as well as Father. By insisting that God is eternally Son as well as Father, the Nicene theologians introduced a note of relationality into the being of God: God's being is defined as being in relation. God is being in communion. This was a theological revolution, a revolution in the way in which the word God was to be understood. God is no more than what Father, Son and Spirit give to and receive from each other in the inseparable communion that is the outcome of their love. There is no 'being' of God other than this dynamic of persons in relation.
At the heart of the doctrine that being is communion are four central concepts: person, relation, otherness and freedom. To think of persons is to think in terms of relations: Father, Son and Spirit are the particular persons they are by virtue of their relations with each other. Personal relations are those which constitute the other person as other, as truly particular. Persons are those whose relations with others are free relations.
The Cappadocians never tired of repeating that we cannot know what God is, but we know God from God’s “operations”. The biblical, credal, and anaphoral use of Father as a synonym for God was amplified in emerging trinitarian doctrine. “God the Father” now had two meanings: (1) the one who comes from nothing, from nowhere, from no one, principle without principle, and (2) the one who eternally begets the Son. The Cappadocians distinguished between the Three in terms of their origin and mutual relations: the Father is font or cause; the Son is begotten of the Father; and the Holy Spirit proceeds from Father. Each of the divine hypostases, or Persons, is the ousia or essence of God; these Persons are distinguished from one another only by their relationships to one another, and those relationships are determined, in turn, by their origins. The divine persons are persons in different ways because of distinct immanent events within the divine life, with the Father eternally “generating” the Son and “breathing” the Spirit, the Son being “generated” (and in some sense being involved in the “breathing” of the Spirit), and the Spirit being “breathed.”
To counter the charge of tritheism, they explained the mystery of the unity of the three hypostases in the one divine ousia in terms of the notion of co inherence in each other. So, the expanded meaning of divine fatherhood forced an adjustment in the understanding of the “monarchy” of the Father. While the Father is the principle of unity, the unity of God was more and more understood to reside in the perichoresis (mutual interdependence) of three persons in each other. In the eighth century, John Damascene would speak in terms of perichoresis. The Council of Florence (1438-1445) later articulated the doctrine of the perichoresis, or circumincession, the coinherence or mutual indwelling of the persons, as an explication of the true identity of substance in the Trinity.
The Holy Spirit
Meanwhile the question of the divinity of the Holy Spirit had also emerged as an issue of dispute. A challenge from the “Tropici” led Athanasius to claim that to call the Spirit a creature was to be “guilty of a direct impiety against the Son himself.” According to Athanasius, being truly divine, the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father and is “given” by the Son. It is through the Son that the Spirit is in and from the Father. To counter the charge that the Spirit and the Word would be “two brothers,” the uniqueness of the Son as only begotten was stressed. To counter the suggestion that the Spirit is of the Son, the distinctive characteristic of the Father as being principle of the divine life that is in the Son and the Spirit was emphasised. For Basil, the Spirit issues from God not by way of generation (as in the case of the Son) but “as from the breath of (God’s) mouth,” (Jn 3:8). Nazianzus insisted that the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father, as John’s Gospel has it (Jn 15:26)
Constantinople, 381
This Council clarified that the Holy Spirit was also truly, really, and fully God. Athanasius explained: “If, by participation in the Spirit, we are made 'sharers in the divine nature,' we should be mad to say that the Spirit has a created nature and not the nature of God. For it is on this account that those in whom he is are made divine. If he makes men divine, it is not to be doubted that his nature is of God.”
The use of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed gradually spread through East and West from the late fifth century, but it was not adopted in Rome until 1014. The bishops of Constantinople accepted a creed that was already available, probably the Baptismal Creed of Jerusalem. At this point then, in 381, the trinitarian faith of the church was distilled and proclaimed in what came to be called the Nicene Creed, which Christians, both East and West, continue to recite today as the symbol par excellence of our faith and is recited today in every Sunday Mass throughout the Catholic world. Trinitarian doctrine was effectively settled. The task of meaning-making and interpretation remained, however, as indeed it does for every generation. Theology at this stage moves from a dogmatic stage, wherein doctrine is formulated and promulgated, into what we might describe as a more properly theological stage, wherein our faith seeks understanding of the mysteries we proclaim.
Self-Revelation of the Triune God
1st Semester, 2008, Class 2B
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boff, Leonardo, Trinity and Society. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988.
Congar, Yves, 1 Believe in the Holy Spirit. 3 vols. New York: Seabury Press, 1983.
The Word and the Spirit, London: Chapman, 1986.
Hunt, Anne, What they are saying about the Trinity, Paulist, New York, 1998
Moltmann, Jurgen, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God. London: SCM Press, 1981.
O’Collins, Gerald, The Tripersonal God, New York, Paulist, 1999.
O’Donnell, John, The Mystery of the Triune God, London, Sheed and Ward, 1988.
Chapter One
Old Testament Monotheistic Faith with anticipations of Trinitarian Belief
The core of Jewish faith is that there is one unique God. The prophet Isaiah states: “God is unique; there are no other gods besides him”, (Is 44:6), (Dt 6:4-5, Neh 9:6, Is 45:22-24, Mk 12:29-30). While the religion of Israel was a declaration of monotheistic faith, it developed from the polytheistic faith of the contemporaries of Abraham. Then it was normal for everybody to have their gods including Abraham. (Gen 12, 51:19-35) The Old Testament nevertheless provides a framework and terminology with which to speak of plurality in God.
FATHER
There are six contexts in which the people of Israel refer to God as Father.
1 Creator: Dt 32:6 states, “Is this the return you make to Yahweh? Is he not your father, who gave you being, who made you, by whom you subsist?’ (Mal 2:10, Wis 14:3).
2 Father of People. The fidelity of God as the Father of his people is asserted many times in the Scriptures. (Dt 32:6). The people are called God’s firstborn son (Ex 4:22-23; Hos 11:1) & God’s “sons and daughters” (Dt 32:19; Is 1:2; 30:1), (Dt 32:18).
An ideal father, Dt 1:31, Jer 3:4, 19; 2:27; 31:9, Is 40:3-4; 42:16; 43:19-20), (Is 63:l5ff., 64:6-8).
3 Father of King: 2 Sam 7:12-14, Ps 2:7; 89: 26-28. (Ps 2:6).
4 Compassion: “When Israel was young, I loved him; I called my son out of Egypt. It was I who taught him to walk, I who had taken him in my arms... I led them with reins of kindness, with leading strings of love. I was to them like one who lifts a little infant close against the cheek, stooping down to him, I gave him his food (Hos 11:1-4) (Jer 31:20, 2 Sam 7-14, Ps 68:4-6, Is 66:13, Is 49:15, Sirach 4:10).
5 Leader: God has the authority and power of a Father and so must be respected and followed. (Mal 1:2, 6, Ps 123:2, Dt 8:5, Wis 11:9-10, Prov 3:12).
6 Cultic: The two words “Our Father” are found in Jewish prayers used in Liturgy (The Eighteen Benedictions, New Year and Day of Atonement Liturgies, Tobit 13:4). This prayer of praise discloses a very personal attitude toward God and anticipates the NT’s prayerful relationship to God as “our Father.”
Conclusion: Naming God Father expressed God’s deep involvement in the story of Israel. As the Catechism writes: “By calling God "Father," the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children” CCC 239.
SON
The Old Testament also speaks of the Son of God, at first in reference to the people as a whole (Hos 11:1) and sometimes in reference to a king (Ps 2:7) or an upright Jew (Wis 2:18). Primarily, it indicates not physical filiation, but a divine call to fulfill a particular task in salvation history. The Old Testament also speaks of the Word (Jdt 16:14, Wis 9:1-2, 18:15-16) and the Wisdom of God (Sir 24:8), but without personification. In other words, Word and Wisdom in the Old Testament do not refer to personal divine beings as such. While they personify a divine activity, neither Word nor Wisdom is a person to be addressed. They do not connote any kind of plurality in the Godhead. Nor is there evidence of paternity and filiation within the Godhead in the Old Testament. There are presentations on the Son of God, Son of Man, Messiah, Wisdom and Word in trinitytangaza08.blogspot.com.
SPIRIT
1 Creation
It is the “ruah elohim” that brings forth the world out of the primeval waste. He creates the world. Nothing comes into existence except through the power of God’s creative Spirit. He is the agent of creation as well as of life, Genesis 1:2; 2:7, Psalm 104:30.
New creation (Is 43:19, Ez 36:27; 37:1-14).
The end-time will be the “golden age of the Spirit” (Is 44:3; Zc 6:1-8 and Joel 2:23-30; 3:1-3). First, the “one who comes” is characterised as a man of the Spirit” (Is 11:2; 42:1; 61:1). Secondly, the age to come is inaugurated by the outpouring of the Spirit on all people (Is 32:15; 44:3; Ez 39:29; 11 2:28). Thirdly, this age of the Spirit is marked by a new Covenant (Is 59:21; Jr31:31-34; 32:37-40, Ez 36:27).
2 Prophecy and Revelation
The Spirit takes possession of prophets to empower them to speak God’s word, (Ez 2:2ff; 3:24; 11:4-5). Moses - Nb 11:17, 25; Is 63:11.
Joel 3:1-2, Jer 31:31-34, Ez 36:24-28; 37:19-21 and 36:26-27).”
3. Messiah
The Messiah is perceived as prophetic (Dt 18:15), as a charismatic leader (Is 11:1-10) and as a glorious supernatural person of divine qualities (Dn 7:l3ff).
Isaiah 11:1ff.
4. Link with Wisdom and Word
There exists very intimate links between word, wisdom and spirit in pre-Christian Judaism (Ps 33:6; Ps 147:18, Jdt 16:14; Ps 104:29-30)
Wis 9:17: see 1:4-5; 7:7, 22, 25.
Dt 34:9; Jb 32:8-9; Is 11:2.
Conclusion
While the Old Testament evinces no sense of plurality in the Godhead, what it does provide is, first, a climate within which plurality was later conceivable and, second, a terminology with which to express that plurality.
Chapter Two
Jesus Christ: Revelation of the Triune God.
If the reality of Jesus Christ is a myth, then the Trinity is a myth. Now we will explore the witness to the divinity of Jesus.
I Spouse of Israel
A Yahweh as Spouse: In Hosea, God’s relationship with Israel is described in terms of marriage. The wedding imagery of God’s love for his people is taken up by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and the Song of Songs. Isaiah says, ‘For now, your creator will be your husband, his name, Yahweh Sabaoth’, Is 54:5. (Hos 1:2; Ez 16; Jer 2:2 Is 62:4-5). So in the centuries before Jesus Christ was born, Yahweh was perceived as the Spouse of Israel.
B Jesus as Spouse.
1. Mark 2:18-19
2. Matthew 22:1-13; 19:10-12; 25:1-13.
3. Luke 12:35-40; 19:28-38; 14:8.
4. Paul. - Eph 5:21-32.
5. John 3:29; 2:1-12; Rev 21.
We have found five very strong communities and other possible references to Jesus as Bridegroom. This means that it must be traced back to Jesus himself; that Jesus regarded himself as the Spouse of Israel. The implication is that Jesus saw himself as Yahweh.
II Mark
The Gospel of Mark is said to be Low Christological Gospel. Still, there is an implicit narrative statement in his Gospel that Jesus is God, as the following texts show.
1. Mk 10:17-18: ‘Why do you call me good?’
2. Mk 2:5-12: The Healing of the Paralytic. ‘Who can forgive sins but God alone?’
3. Mk 2:23-3:5: The Disciples plucking ears of grain; ‘The Son of Man is master even of the Sabbath’.
4. Mk 12:35-37: “The Lord said to my Lord”.
5. There are many other incidents in the Gospels in which the divinity of Jesus is portrayed; Mk 9:2-8 - The Transfiguration.
6. Jesus walking on the water, (Mk 6:45-52).
III THE WORD
The evangelist develops the theme of the Son of God as the Revealer who brings the divine self-revelation (Jn 1:18). The Johannine Word presented rich trinitarian possibilities.
· Identification and distinction.
· God has been uttering the divine word always.
· John can move smoothly from the language of the Word to focus on “God the only Son who has made the Father known.”
· Opens up dialogue with non-Christian thinkers.
· By maintaining that the whole world was created through the divine Wisdom and Word (Jn 1:3, 10; 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:16; Heb 1:2) the early Christians interpreted Jesus as the divine agent of all creation.
Jesus and the Father
1 Father
The New Testament refers 421 times to God. 183 (43 per-cent) of these references refer to God as “Father.” The use of the word, ‘Father’, denotes in most instances the special relationship of Jesus to God.
2 Abba
What has been discovered in all four gospel traditions is that they report unanimously and without any hesitation that Jesus constantly addressed God as “My Father” (except Mk 15:34), and show that in so doing he used the Aramaic form “Abba.”
Father – Lk 10:21; Jn 11:41. God – Mk 15:34.
The term ‘Abba’ occurs three times in the New Testament: Mk 14:36; Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6.
Father meaning Abba – Mt 6:9; 11:25-26; 16:17; Lk 11:2.
3 Son of God
Mk 1:1, 11; 15:39.
Mt 3:14-17; 4:1-11; 27:39, 54; 16:16.
The title Son of Man is associated with the power to forgive sins and with power over the Sabbath.
The title Lord is only rarely applied to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Note Acts 7:59-60.
1. Mt 11:25-30; Lk 10:21-22.
2. Mk 13:32; Mt 24:36.
3. Mk 12:1-12 par.
Yet neither here nor elsewhere in the synoptic Gospels does Jesus ever come out into the open and say, “I am the Son of God.” (Mt 27:43)
Jesus applied the language of divine sonship individually (to himself), filling it with a meaning that lifted “Son (of God)” beyond the level of his merely being either a man made like Adam in the divine image (Lk 3:38), or someone perfectly sensitive to the Holy Spirit (Lk 4:1,14,18), or someone bringing God’s peace (Lk 1; 14; 10:5-6) albeit in his own way (Mt 10:34; par. in Lk 12:51), or even a Davidic king (Lk 1:33). Implicitly, Jesus claimed an essential, “ontological” relationship of sonship toward God that provided the grounds for his functions as revealer, lawgiver, forgiver of and agent of the final kingdom. Those functions (his “doing”) depended on his ontological relationship as Son of God (his “being”).
In Paul's letters, God (ho theos) is Father and Jesus is Our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul would seem to be reluctant to call Jesus God, preferring the title Lord, presenting a soteriological function rather than an ontological reference. Paul is, at times subordinationist, but the Son is never a creature in Paul's witness. John clearly calls Jesus God in John 1:18 and John 20:20. But the Johannine text "the Father is greater than I" (Jn 14:28) will later be used to justify subordination.
CCC 240.
So, in his identity and ministry as Son, Jesus is the divine Revealer of God the Father.
4 The Sending and Coming of Jesus.
At times, Jesus expressed his mission as one who had been sent by God. Mk 9:36-37 par; Mk 12:6 par, (cf. Mt 15:24). But on other occasions Jesus went beyond the normal prophetic “I was sent” to say, “I came,” Mk 2:17 par; Lk 12:49, 51; Mt 10:34-35. Mk 10:45 par.
Paul: sending - Rom 8:3 and initiative - 2 Cor 8:9, emptying himself Ph 2:7.
John: sending - 3:17, 34; 20:21 and descending from heaven - Jn 3:13. “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me” (Jn 6:38).
This ‘sending and coming’ motif presents Jesus as a divine being coming from God the Father, intimates an equality and unity between the Son and the Father and leads to the ‘begotten’ or the ‘generated’ status of the Son.
5 The Virginal Conception
The major value of the virginal conception has been to express Jesus’ divine origin and identity, without, at the same time, denying his true humanity. Gal 4:4.
Holy Spirit (Lk 24:49; Jn 14:26) had been actively present in the whole of Jesus’ life (Lk 3:22; 4:1, 14, 18) even back at his conception (Mt 1:20; Lk 1:35).
Virginal conception: from the beginning to the end, the story of Jesus Christ reveals a God who is triune.
6 Easter Mystery
“God (the Father) who raised Jesus (from the dead),”
1 Th 1:9-10; Gal 1:1; 1 Cor 6:14; Rom 4:24; 8:11; 10:9; 6:4; 1 Cor 6:14; 2 Cor 13:4; Rom 4:25; 6:9; 1 Cor 15:4, 13; Acts 3:15; 4:10
Jesus and the Holy Spirit
In the New Testament, the experience of the Spirit is intrinsically bound up with the historical Jesus. Luke’s designation of the divine spirit as the Holy Spirit has become standard for all Christians. Luke in his Gospel and Acts refers 54 times to the Holy Spirit. Perhaps this usage aims principally at expressing the central purpose of the Spirit’s mission - to be the source of holiness by reproducing the characteristics of divine holiness and so creating truly holy men and women. Paul closely associates Christ and the Holy Spirit in the work of sanctification, but without identifying them and without articulating their relationship. (Gal. 4:4-6). In John’s Gospel, the person of the Holy Spirit emerges in the Paraclete passages (14:16, 17, 26; 15:26-27; 16:7-15), and John attests to a distinctly personal reality more explicitly than anywhere else in the New Testament. The Holy Spirit is the Paraclete, the Consoler, the Advocate, and the Intercessor.
1. The Annunciation Story: Luke1:35.
2. The Baptism of Jesus: Mark 1:10-11.
Although Jesus already possessed the Spirit by virtue of his unique conception, this special bestowal of the Holy Spirit is necessary if Jesus is to fulfil his role as initiator of the age to come.
3. The Public Ministry of Jesus.
Mark 1:12
Healings: Mt 12:28; Lk 4:36; 5:17; 6:19; 8:54; 13:32.
Prayer: Lk 3:21; 5:16; 6:12; 9:18; 11:1; 22:32; 23:34-46.
Jesus was aware of being empowered by the Spirit, Mk 3:22-30. But he never unambiguously pointed to his deeds as signs of the Spirit’s power. Jesus is never credited with an awareness of the Spirit that had anything like the same intensity as his consciousness of the God whom he called “Abba.” It took Jesus’ resurrection and exaltation to initiate a new, characteristically Christian manner of thinking about the Spirit and the relationship of Jesus to the Spirit.
4 Paschal Mystery
The resurrection of Jesus is also seen in Scripture as the work of the Holy Spirit: Rom 8:11; Eph 1:19-20; 1 Cor 6:14; 2 Cor 13:4; Acts 2:33, (Jn 13:1-21:25).
5 The Sending of the Spirit
The NT writers understand the relationship between Jesus and the Spirit to be transformed by the resurrection. The exalted Jesus is now seen to share in God’s prerogative as Sender or Giver of the divine Spirit. (Jn 7:39; 15:26; 19:30, 34; 20:22). John also talks about the Father giving the Spirit (Jn 14:16-17) and sending the Spirit (Jn 14:26), and the Spirit proceeding from the Father (Jn 15.26). Even if the coming of the Spirit (Jn 14:16-17, 25) seems to merge with the return of Jesus himself (Jn 14:3, 18, 23, 28), in John’s Gospel the Spirit is not equated with Jesus but enjoys some individual identity.
Luke talks of Christ as co-sending the Spirit. (Acts 2:33; Lk 24:49). Paul never quite says that Christ has sent or will send the Spirit, (1 Cor 15:45?; Gal 4:6; Rom 5:5; 1 Cor 12:7, 8, 12; Gal 3:2).
6. Jesus and the Spirit in the Church
The Spirit “in us” (Rom 5:5; 8:9,11,16; Gal 4:6) is nearly synonymous with talk about our being “in Christ” (Rom 6:3,11,23; 16:11; 1 Cor 1:30; 3:1; 4:15; Phil 3:1; 4:1-2). This near functional identity implies not only that for Paul the Spirit is the medium for Christ in his relating to human beings but even that “no distinction can be detected in the believer’s experience” between the exalted Christ and the Spirit of God.
Trinitarian Expressions
1 The Synoptics and Acts
There are a number of scriptural events that witness to an experience of the Three: the infancy narrative, the baptismal theophany, the story of Jesus' temptations, the transfiguration, the farewell discourses, the ascension, Peter's speech at Pentecost, the martyrdom of Stephen, and most importantly, of course, the narrative of Jesus' paschal mystery of death and resurrection. But there are in fact very few texts that make reference to the three persons in the one text. Moreover, if we define "trinitarian" to refer to the existence of three coequal persons in the Godhead, there is no trinitarian witness as such in the Synoptics and Acts. There are, however, undoubtedly traces of what we could call triadic patterns that attest to a sense of three persons in God.
· Matt. 28:19.
2 Paul
The Pauline letters yield a number of triadic formulas and other triadic passages about God, (Rom 1:3-4; 1 Cor 6:14; Rom 15:16). At the end of 2 Corinthians, as happens also in Rom 5:1-11, Paul emphasises the soteriological functions of the Trinity or the Trinity “for us,” (2 Cor 13:13).
1 Cor 12:4-7 and Gal 4:4-6. The salvation, initiated by God (2 Cor 13:13), is effected by Christ through his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection (Rom 4:25), and appropriated by participating in the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:1-5).
Finally, let us note four triadic formulas in Ephesians, 2:18; 3:14-17; 4:4-6 and 5:18-20.
Paul witnesses to a soteriological view of the tripersonal God, from whom comes our initial adoption, ongoing guidance and future inheritance, Rom 8:14-17. Salvation takes place because we are loved by the Lord Jesus, elected by God the Father, and sanctified by the Spirit (2 Th 2:13; 1 Th 1:4-6).
Conclusion
The New Testament writers do not even ordinarily speak of Jesus as “God” (except in the rarest of cases, e.g., the Prologue of John’s Gospel), since this would be for them an identification of Jesus with the Father. On the other hand, the New Testament recognises the divinity of the Son. More clearly than any other writer, John presents an understanding of the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit as person. The New Testament does not specify the terms of the relationship between Father and Son, nor among Father and Son and Holy Spirit. It assumes only that there is some relationship (Mt 11:27; Jn 1:1; 8:38; 10:38; 1 Cor 2:10). But no text expresses a theology of the Trinity as such. Still even though we certainly do not find in the NT anything like the eventual, full-blown doctrine of God as three in one and one in three (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), nevertheless, the NT witnesses provide a foundation and a starting point for that doctrinal development. While the Scriptures do not give an explicit doctrine of the Trinity, however, they do more than simply pave the way for it: they attest to the vibrant lived experience in the early Christian community of the threefold structure of God’s self-revelation, they witness to the threefoldness of God as expressed in liturgical and sacramental practice; they provide clear intimations of a trinitarian pattern; they establish a rhetoric for the expression of trinitarian faith; and they provide the basis for later development of trinitarian doctrine.
Chapter Three Athanasius: Formulating the Doctrine
Arius (d. ca. 336), a presbyter from Alexandria living in the early fourth century, denied the full divinity of the Son. Arius, concerned to protect the divine unity, immutability, and impassibility, reasoned that the Word, while preexistent in regard to the world, is a created intermediary, a kind of demi-god, (half-size or imperfect god), neither fully God nor fully human. “There was when he was not,” Arius argued. He adopted a subordinationist stance in regard to the question of the divinity of Jesus.
Nicea, 325
Is the Son truly God or is that designation merely a courtesy title? The issue was brought to a head when pressed to its soteriological consequences: Are we really and truly saved or are we not? If Christ is not truly divine, then he is a creature like us and has no special standing before God. We are still in our sins. The Council resolved that the Son is truly God and replied in response to the Arian slogan, "there was not when he was not." He was the eternally begotten Son of God. He was not a creature of the Creator. The resolution was articulated in the Creed of Nicaea, which used the word, homoousios, "from the same being/substance," to state that the Son is truly, fully, equally and eternally God, as the Father is God.
Aftermath of Nicea
Greek theology - “economic Trinity” - the one God is God the Father, and that the Son and the Spirit share with Him His divine life (subordinationism).
Latin theology - “immanent Trinity” - God is the one divine substance, comprising Father, Son and Spirit (modalism).
Homoousios and homoiousios (of like substance).
Where Irenaeus’s image of the Son and Spirit as “the two hands of God” might encourage the notion that the Son and Spirit could operate separately, if not independently, the former in the work of creation and the latter in that of divinization or re-creation, Athanasius underlined the unity in trinitarian activity: “The Father does all things through the Word in the Holy Spirit. Thus the unity of the holy Triad is preserved.” Yet the more Athanasius and others were to insist on the unity of divine operations ad extra, the more problematic it becomes for us to distinguish the eternal existence of three distinct divine persons ad intro.
Tertullian introduced the expression tres personae in una substantia (three persons in one substance) to define the unity and triplicity of the Christian God. 'Person' here is a label for whatever accounts for the distinctive identity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Cappadocians
Ousia and hypostasis, both of which refer to something that subsists, an essential characteristic.
The Cappadocians – Basil of Caesarea (d. 379), his brother Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394), and sister Macrina (d. 379), and friend Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390). They used the term ousia to denote the triune God's one same nature, what God is – life, truth, being and goodness – and the term hypostasis to denote who the Father, Son and Spirit are as distinct.
Challenge of terminology - Person and substance: Hypostasis and ousia.
Gregory of Nazianzus explains: “God is three in regard to distinctive properties, or subsistences [hypostases], or, if you like, persons [prosopa]: for we shall not quarrel about the names, as long as the terms lead to the same conception. He is one in respect of the category of substance, that is, of godhead... We must avoid any notion of superiority or inferiority between the Persons; nor must we turn the union into a confusion, nor the distinction into a difference of natures.” (Oratio 39.11). So, thanks in large measure to the Cappadocians, hypostasis (person) gradually emerged as the term with which to refer to the Three in their distinction from each other within the One God, while ousia (substance) came to be the term to refer to the Oneness of God.
Arians challenge – tritheists or monarchianists.
The divine persons are distinguished by their mutual relations to one another What the Father, Son and Spirit are is the one divine nature which is to be life and goodness itself. But who each person is, is sheer relation to each other, in a way absolutely unknown to our own experience. The divine persons thus are not separate substances; neither, however, are they simply "accidental" qualities of or names for the Father who alone is God. They are unique persons distinguished precisely by their unique relation to one another. The Father alone is the first person, God unbegotten, source without source. The Son alone is second person, God eternally begotten from the Father in perfect equality. And the Spirit alone is third person, God eternally proceeding from the Father in perfect equality.
The function of homoousios is to establish that there can be a sharing in being. The Arians claimed that God cannot be one God if he is Son as well as Father. By insisting that God is eternally Son as well as Father, the Nicene theologians introduced a note of relationality into the being of God: God's being is defined as being in relation. God is being in communion. This was a theological revolution, a revolution in the way in which the word God was to be understood. God is no more than what Father, Son and Spirit give to and receive from each other in the inseparable communion that is the outcome of their love. There is no 'being' of God other than this dynamic of persons in relation.
At the heart of the doctrine that being is communion are four central concepts: person, relation, otherness and freedom. To think of persons is to think in terms of relations: Father, Son and Spirit are the particular persons they are by virtue of their relations with each other. Personal relations are those which constitute the other person as other, as truly particular. Persons are those whose relations with others are free relations.
The Cappadocians never tired of repeating that we cannot know what God is, but we know God from God’s “operations”. The biblical, credal, and anaphoral use of Father as a synonym for God was amplified in emerging trinitarian doctrine. “God the Father” now had two meanings: (1) the one who comes from nothing, from nowhere, from no one, principle without principle, and (2) the one who eternally begets the Son. The Cappadocians distinguished between the Three in terms of their origin and mutual relations: the Father is font or cause; the Son is begotten of the Father; and the Holy Spirit proceeds from Father. Each of the divine hypostases, or Persons, is the ousia or essence of God; these Persons are distinguished from one another only by their relationships to one another, and those relationships are determined, in turn, by their origins. The divine persons are persons in different ways because of distinct immanent events within the divine life, with the Father eternally “generating” the Son and “breathing” the Spirit, the Son being “generated” (and in some sense being involved in the “breathing” of the Spirit), and the Spirit being “breathed.”
To counter the charge of tritheism, they explained the mystery of the unity of the three hypostases in the one divine ousia in terms of the notion of co inherence in each other. So, the expanded meaning of divine fatherhood forced an adjustment in the understanding of the “monarchy” of the Father. While the Father is the principle of unity, the unity of God was more and more understood to reside in the perichoresis (mutual interdependence) of three persons in each other. In the eighth century, John Damascene would speak in terms of perichoresis. The Council of Florence (1438-1445) later articulated the doctrine of the perichoresis, or circumincession, the coinherence or mutual indwelling of the persons, as an explication of the true identity of substance in the Trinity.
The Holy Spirit
Meanwhile the question of the divinity of the Holy Spirit had also emerged as an issue of dispute. A challenge from the “Tropici” led Athanasius to claim that to call the Spirit a creature was to be “guilty of a direct impiety against the Son himself.” According to Athanasius, being truly divine, the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father and is “given” by the Son. It is through the Son that the Spirit is in and from the Father. To counter the charge that the Spirit and the Word would be “two brothers,” the uniqueness of the Son as only begotten was stressed. To counter the suggestion that the Spirit is of the Son, the distinctive characteristic of the Father as being principle of the divine life that is in the Son and the Spirit was emphasised. For Basil, the Spirit issues from God not by way of generation (as in the case of the Son) but “as from the breath of (God’s) mouth,” (Jn 3:8). Nazianzus insisted that the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father, as John’s Gospel has it (Jn 15:26)
Constantinople, 381
This Council clarified that the Holy Spirit was also truly, really, and fully God. Athanasius explained: “If, by participation in the Spirit, we are made 'sharers in the divine nature,' we should be mad to say that the Spirit has a created nature and not the nature of God. For it is on this account that those in whom he is are made divine. If he makes men divine, it is not to be doubted that his nature is of God.”
The use of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed gradually spread through East and West from the late fifth century, but it was not adopted in Rome until 1014. The bishops of Constantinople accepted a creed that was already available, probably the Baptismal Creed of Jerusalem. At this point then, in 381, the trinitarian faith of the church was distilled and proclaimed in what came to be called the Nicene Creed, which Christians, both East and West, continue to recite today as the symbol par excellence of our faith and is recited today in every Sunday Mass throughout the Catholic world. Trinitarian doctrine was effectively settled. The task of meaning-making and interpretation remained, however, as indeed it does for every generation. Theology at this stage moves from a dogmatic stage, wherein doctrine is formulated and promulgated, into what we might describe as a more properly theological stage, wherein our faith seeks understanding of the mysteries we proclaim.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Glossary
GLOSSARY
Adoptionists – All those who hold that Christ was a mere man who was adopted by God at the baptism or resurrection.
Arians – Those who followed Arius of Alexandria in asserting that God’s Son did not always exist and hence was not divine by nature but only first among creatures.
Deists – Those in modern times who accept the existence of the Creator but reject in principle any special divine revelation or activity. The Deist ‘God’ leaves nature and human history to unfold according to their own laws.
Macedonians – Fourth century heretics who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit; they drew their name from Macedonius, a Bishop of Constantinople, deposed in 360.
Modalists – Those who stress the unity of the ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ that they deny any personal distinction within God; they understand the three divine names to refer merely to the modes, or manners, in which the monopersonal God acts and is revealed.
Monarchians – Those who stressed the one principle (arche) in God, sometimes to the point of denying any personal distinctions within the divinity.
Nature – The essential properties that characterise some individual living being and that are expressed in its activity.
Patripassians – ‘Father sufferers’ or those early third century monarchian modalists who elaborated the consequences of their heresy – the Father becomes incarnate, suffered the passion and died on the cross.
Person – A distinct individual with the power to know, love, and act freely in relationship with other human beings and their world.
Pneumatomachians – ‘Spirit fighters’ or those early fourth century heretics who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
Sabellians – Followers of Sabellius (3rd Century); they belonged among the modalist monarchians by denying the distinct persons in God.
Substance – That which ‘stands under,’ or the essential characteristics shared in common with those of the same nature.
Tritheism – The belief in three separate gods who choose to exist and function together. This belief differs sharply from orthodo trinitarian faith in three divine persons who constitute one God.
Unitarians – Those who accept only one divine person.
The definitions of these terms are taken from ‘The Tripersonal God’ by Gerald O’Collins (Paulist, New York, 1999), pp. 204-207.
Adoptionists – All those who hold that Christ was a mere man who was adopted by God at the baptism or resurrection.
Arians – Those who followed Arius of Alexandria in asserting that God’s Son did not always exist and hence was not divine by nature but only first among creatures.
Deists – Those in modern times who accept the existence of the Creator but reject in principle any special divine revelation or activity. The Deist ‘God’ leaves nature and human history to unfold according to their own laws.
Macedonians – Fourth century heretics who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit; they drew their name from Macedonius, a Bishop of Constantinople, deposed in 360.
Modalists – Those who stress the unity of the ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ that they deny any personal distinction within God; they understand the three divine names to refer merely to the modes, or manners, in which the monopersonal God acts and is revealed.
Monarchians – Those who stressed the one principle (arche) in God, sometimes to the point of denying any personal distinctions within the divinity.
Nature – The essential properties that characterise some individual living being and that are expressed in its activity.
Patripassians – ‘Father sufferers’ or those early third century monarchian modalists who elaborated the consequences of their heresy – the Father becomes incarnate, suffered the passion and died on the cross.
Person – A distinct individual with the power to know, love, and act freely in relationship with other human beings and their world.
Pneumatomachians – ‘Spirit fighters’ or those early fourth century heretics who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
Sabellians – Followers of Sabellius (3rd Century); they belonged among the modalist monarchians by denying the distinct persons in God.
Substance – That which ‘stands under,’ or the essential characteristics shared in common with those of the same nature.
Tritheism – The belief in three separate gods who choose to exist and function together. This belief differs sharply from orthodo trinitarian faith in three divine persons who constitute one God.
Unitarians – Those who accept only one divine person.
The definitions of these terms are taken from ‘The Tripersonal God’ by Gerald O’Collins (Paulist, New York, 1999), pp. 204-207.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Messiah
Messiah
Pheme Parkins
Harpers Bible Dictionary
Messiah (from the Heb. mashiab, "anointed one"), a term that could be applied to any person "anointed" and sent by God.
Early Usage: In the political sphere, it referred to the kings who would come to continue the Davidic dynasty (Pss. 18:50; 89:20, 38, 51; 132: 10,17). "Anointed" might also refer to a priest (ef. Lev. 4:3, 5). "Messiah" could refer to anyone divinely appointed to a task that affected the destiny of the chosen people. Since the Davidic king is the chosen ruler of God (2 Sam. 7:8-16), "messiah" is often associated with the prophetic expectation that God would raise up an ideal Davidic ruler to occupy the throne of Israel (e.g., Jer. 33:15; Ezek. 37:23-24). However, none of the prophetic books use "messiah" for the future king. In Is 45:1 "anointed" refers to Cyrus as God's agent. In Hab. 3:13 "messiah" refers either to the reigning king or to Israel as a nation.
Dan. 9:25 associates the renewal of Jerusalem with a coming "anointed one," a prince. However, Daniel does not contain any further speculation about "the anointed." Similar caution must be exercised in regard to the claim that the "king from the sun" in Sib. Or. 3:652-56 represents a future "messianic king" of Israel. The author appears to be referring to the seventh king in the Ptolemaic line as one who would bring great peace. Such expectations are similar to those associated with Cyrus. We find a more firmly established expectation of a future Davidic king, described as God's "anointed," in the Psalms of Solomon 17-18. This "ideal king" reflects opposition to the non-Davidic Hasmonean dynasty. He is a human ruler, though endowed with special gifts of wisdom and righteousness (17:23, 35, 41-42, 46-47).
A more complex picture of the "anointed one" emerges in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Christian editing of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs makes it difficult to trace the development of its images of the "messiah." Levi and Judah are the priestly and kingly rulers of the people (T. Simeon 7:2; T. Joseph 19:6). T. Judah 21:2 states that God made kingship subordinate to priesthood, a reflection of the predominate role of the chief priest in the postexilic period. Since royal characteristics are also attributed ta Levi, some scholars hold that the dual "messiahship" was a later development, perhaps in opposition to the combination of priestly and kingly power by the Hasmonean kings. The Dead Sea Scrolls also contain passages referring to tha coming of two figures, a priestly "anointed" of Aaron, and a kingly "anointed" of Israel (e.g., 1QS 9:11; 1QSa 2:14, 20; CD 20:1; 4QPBless 2: 4; 4QFlor 1:11-13). The material so far published shows little interest in the persons of the "anointed ones" as though they were "savior figures." Parallels between the conduct of the "messianic meal" eaten by the community with the "messiahs" (lQSa 2:11-22), and the meal celebrated by the sect (lQS 6:4) suggest that what is said of the future "messiahs" can also be experienced as part of the daily life of the community.
The Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37-71), probably from the mid-first century A.D., link the day of judgment with a heavenly figure, the "Son of man," who is also referred to as "messiah" (1 Enoch 48:10; 52:4). However, exploration of the Danielic image "Son of man" is the real focus of attention in this work. These exam. pies are sufficient to show that "messiah" had no fixed, technical meaning in Jesus' time. In some circles, it denoted a political or priestly agent sent from God as part of the triumphant establishment of God's power.
Jesus as Messiah: Similar ambiguities surround the application in the NT of the expression "anointed" (Gk. christos) to Jesus. "Messiah" was evidently not a role that a person might simply assume by identifying himself with it. "Messiah" is missing from the sayings of Jesus in "Q," an early source used by Matthew and Luke. The Gospels consistently show Jesus' reluctance to accept the designation "messiah" without qualification. Peter's confession (Mark 8:29; an independent version of this tradition is preserved in John 6:67-69) is immediately "cor. rected" by the announcement that Jesus is the suffering Son of man (8:30-31). In Mark 14:62 Jesus admits to being "messiah" before the Sanhedrin, although in Matt. 26:64 and Luke 22:67 the wording of this passage is changed. Evidently, the possibility of misunderstanding the Christian use of "anointed" for Jesus still had to be avoided. Such misinterpretation would seem to have been linked to the use of "messiah" in connection with a future king of Israel.
Although "messiah" did not unambiguously denote a person who would claim the political position of "king of Israel," Jesus' execution as "King of the Jews" (Mark 15:2, 26) makes that association with the title probable (see the mockery scene, Mark 15:32). Luke preserves the Jewish expression "God's anointed" at several points (Luke 2:26; 9:20; 23:35; Acts 3:18). In other places "messiah/christ" is provided with some explication using other phrases or titles, especially "Son of God" (Matt. 16:16; 26:63; Mark 14:61; Luke 23:35). Matt. 1:16 and 27:17, 22 refer to Jesus "who is called 'the Christ.'" Such passages may represent an early tradition that Jesus was at first "called 'messiah’" by others. That designation might well have been more like an epithet than a formal title or designation of political or religious office. It could easily have emerged in response to those words and deeds of Jesus that were seen to carry with them the authority of divine commissioning. John 6:15 preserves a tradition in which the people react to the feeding of the multitude by seeking to make Jesus "king." In John 6:14 the miracle is treated as a sign that Jesus was the Mosaic prophet of the last days (cf., Deut. 18:15, 18). In the Dead Sea Scrolls an anointed "prophet" is to accompany the "messiahs" though his function is not clear (lQS 9:10-11; 4QTestim 5-8). The Johannine trial narrative takes great pains to explain that the ‘kingship" attributed to Jesus is not to be defined in political terms (John 18:33-37; 19:12-15). Other episodes in which Jesus arouses expectations that he is to be identified with a future "deliverer" of the people are the entry into Jerusalem (Mark 11:1-10 and parallels) and the cleansing of the Temple (Mark 11:15-19 and parallels). In the Gospel tradition both episodes have been explicated as the fulfilment of prophecies (cf. Matt. 21:4; John 12:15-16; Matt. 21:10--17; John 2:13-22). Matt. 21:10-11 links the two episodes with the crowd's identification of Jesus as "the prophet from Galilee." Such "prophetic" actions may have provided the foundation for some to refer to Jesus as “anointed of God" without presuming that Jesus, himself, sought a political revolution in which he would be established as the "anointed" Davidic "king of Israel."
Christian Usage: After the death and resurrection of Jesus, "messiah" takes on a specifically Christian meaning as a "title" that refers only to Jesus. The "messiah" Jesus is the crucified agent of God, who has died "for our sins" (1 Cor. 15:3). Acts 2:36 speaks of God having made Jesus “both Lord and Christ" at his resurrection/exaltation into heaven. In such a context "messiah" denotes Jesus' vindication and exaltation by God. Luke 2:11 links "messiah" with the christological titles "Lord," commonly associated with the risen/exalted Jesus (cf. Rom. 1:4b; Phil. 2.11), and "Savior" in the announcement of Jesus' birth. Acts 3:19-22 preserves yet another early Christian use of "messiah" for Jesus. It describes his return at the Parousia, a function elsewhere ascribed to him as "Lord" (1 Thess. 4.17, 1 Cor. 11:26; 16:22).
None of the uses of "messiah" in Jewish writings of the period points toward the suffering or death of the person so designated. The juxtaposition of the confession that Jesus is "messiah" with the prediction of the suffering Son of man in Mark 8:27-33 brings out this difficulty. The "suffering servant" of God (Isa. 52: 13-53:12) provided Christians with powerful images of Jesus' vocation to suffering. However, the "servant" is not "the anointed of God." Explicit acknowledgment of the theme of the "suffering messiah" occurs in the Lucan writings. The messiah, according to Scripture, was to suffer before entering his glory (Luke 24: 26,46; also see Acts 3:18; 17:3; 26:23). Paul can also speak of the paradox of "Christ" crucified (1 Cor. 1:23; 2:2; Gal. 3:1), but concern with the expression "messiah/christ" is not part of that reflection. In Paul, as in much of the rest of the NT, "Christ" is frequently used as part of Jesus' name (see also such passages as Acts 4:10; 8: 12).
The Christian confession that Jesus is "messiah" played its primary role in Christian debates with Judaism. This role is evident in the speeches of Acts (Acts 2:31-32; 3:18; 5:42; 8:5; 17:3; 18:5, 28). It is also evident in the Fourth Gospel. John 1:41 preserves the Aramaic "messiah," with a translation for the Greek-speaking reader, in Andrew's summons to Peter. Other passages in the Fourth Gospel represent debates between Johannine Christians and their Jewish opponents over the claim that Jesus is messiah. Jesus' origins are said to disqualify him by those who do not recognize that his true origin is "from God" (John 7:41-42). Jesus' death is said to disqualify him because the messiah was to have "remained forever" (John 12:34). An uncertain crowd wonders whether Jesus might be "messiah" (7:26-31; 10:24). Finally, "messiah" is spoken as a confession of faith in Jesus as Son of God and Savior by those who are believers (4: 29; 11:27; 17:3; 20:31). When Johannine Christians were excommunicated from the Jewish synagogue for their faith in Jesus, the confession "Jesus is messiah" became an identifying mark of the true Christian (9:22). It retains this function in the struggle against dissident Christians reflected in the Johannine Letters (1 John 2:22; 5:1). Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho provides a mid-second-century example of the use of "messiah" in Christian debate with Judaism (35.7; 39.6; 43.8; 47.4; 48.4; 108.2). See also Jesus Christ; Son of God; Son of Man.
Bibliography
Collins, J.J. The Apocalyptic Imagination. New York: Crossroad, 1984. Dunn, J.D.G. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977. Schiirer, E. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ. Revised and edited by G. Vermes, F. Millar, M. Black. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1979.P.P.
Pheme Parkins
Harpers Bible Dictionary
Messiah (from the Heb. mashiab, "anointed one"), a term that could be applied to any person "anointed" and sent by God.
Early Usage: In the political sphere, it referred to the kings who would come to continue the Davidic dynasty (Pss. 18:50; 89:20, 38, 51; 132: 10,17). "Anointed" might also refer to a priest (ef. Lev. 4:3, 5). "Messiah" could refer to anyone divinely appointed to a task that affected the destiny of the chosen people. Since the Davidic king is the chosen ruler of God (2 Sam. 7:8-16), "messiah" is often associated with the prophetic expectation that God would raise up an ideal Davidic ruler to occupy the throne of Israel (e.g., Jer. 33:15; Ezek. 37:23-24). However, none of the prophetic books use "messiah" for the future king. In Is 45:1 "anointed" refers to Cyrus as God's agent. In Hab. 3:13 "messiah" refers either to the reigning king or to Israel as a nation.
Dan. 9:25 associates the renewal of Jerusalem with a coming "anointed one," a prince. However, Daniel does not contain any further speculation about "the anointed." Similar caution must be exercised in regard to the claim that the "king from the sun" in Sib. Or. 3:652-56 represents a future "messianic king" of Israel. The author appears to be referring to the seventh king in the Ptolemaic line as one who would bring great peace. Such expectations are similar to those associated with Cyrus. We find a more firmly established expectation of a future Davidic king, described as God's "anointed," in the Psalms of Solomon 17-18. This "ideal king" reflects opposition to the non-Davidic Hasmonean dynasty. He is a human ruler, though endowed with special gifts of wisdom and righteousness (17:23, 35, 41-42, 46-47).
A more complex picture of the "anointed one" emerges in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Christian editing of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs makes it difficult to trace the development of its images of the "messiah." Levi and Judah are the priestly and kingly rulers of the people (T. Simeon 7:2; T. Joseph 19:6). T. Judah 21:2 states that God made kingship subordinate to priesthood, a reflection of the predominate role of the chief priest in the postexilic period. Since royal characteristics are also attributed ta Levi, some scholars hold that the dual "messiahship" was a later development, perhaps in opposition to the combination of priestly and kingly power by the Hasmonean kings. The Dead Sea Scrolls also contain passages referring to tha coming of two figures, a priestly "anointed" of Aaron, and a kingly "anointed" of Israel (e.g., 1QS 9:11; 1QSa 2:14, 20; CD 20:1; 4QPBless 2: 4; 4QFlor 1:11-13). The material so far published shows little interest in the persons of the "anointed ones" as though they were "savior figures." Parallels between the conduct of the "messianic meal" eaten by the community with the "messiahs" (lQSa 2:11-22), and the meal celebrated by the sect (lQS 6:4) suggest that what is said of the future "messiahs" can also be experienced as part of the daily life of the community.
The Similitudes of Enoch (1 Enoch 37-71), probably from the mid-first century A.D., link the day of judgment with a heavenly figure, the "Son of man," who is also referred to as "messiah" (1 Enoch 48:10; 52:4). However, exploration of the Danielic image "Son of man" is the real focus of attention in this work. These exam. pies are sufficient to show that "messiah" had no fixed, technical meaning in Jesus' time. In some circles, it denoted a political or priestly agent sent from God as part of the triumphant establishment of God's power.
Jesus as Messiah: Similar ambiguities surround the application in the NT of the expression "anointed" (Gk. christos) to Jesus. "Messiah" was evidently not a role that a person might simply assume by identifying himself with it. "Messiah" is missing from the sayings of Jesus in "Q," an early source used by Matthew and Luke. The Gospels consistently show Jesus' reluctance to accept the designation "messiah" without qualification. Peter's confession (Mark 8:29; an independent version of this tradition is preserved in John 6:67-69) is immediately "cor. rected" by the announcement that Jesus is the suffering Son of man (8:30-31). In Mark 14:62 Jesus admits to being "messiah" before the Sanhedrin, although in Matt. 26:64 and Luke 22:67 the wording of this passage is changed. Evidently, the possibility of misunderstanding the Christian use of "anointed" for Jesus still had to be avoided. Such misinterpretation would seem to have been linked to the use of "messiah" in connection with a future king of Israel.
Although "messiah" did not unambiguously denote a person who would claim the political position of "king of Israel," Jesus' execution as "King of the Jews" (Mark 15:2, 26) makes that association with the title probable (see the mockery scene, Mark 15:32). Luke preserves the Jewish expression "God's anointed" at several points (Luke 2:26; 9:20; 23:35; Acts 3:18). In other places "messiah/christ" is provided with some explication using other phrases or titles, especially "Son of God" (Matt. 16:16; 26:63; Mark 14:61; Luke 23:35). Matt. 1:16 and 27:17, 22 refer to Jesus "who is called 'the Christ.'" Such passages may represent an early tradition that Jesus was at first "called 'messiah’" by others. That designation might well have been more like an epithet than a formal title or designation of political or religious office. It could easily have emerged in response to those words and deeds of Jesus that were seen to carry with them the authority of divine commissioning. John 6:15 preserves a tradition in which the people react to the feeding of the multitude by seeking to make Jesus "king." In John 6:14 the miracle is treated as a sign that Jesus was the Mosaic prophet of the last days (cf., Deut. 18:15, 18). In the Dead Sea Scrolls an anointed "prophet" is to accompany the "messiahs" though his function is not clear (lQS 9:10-11; 4QTestim 5-8). The Johannine trial narrative takes great pains to explain that the ‘kingship" attributed to Jesus is not to be defined in political terms (John 18:33-37; 19:12-15). Other episodes in which Jesus arouses expectations that he is to be identified with a future "deliverer" of the people are the entry into Jerusalem (Mark 11:1-10 and parallels) and the cleansing of the Temple (Mark 11:15-19 and parallels). In the Gospel tradition both episodes have been explicated as the fulfilment of prophecies (cf. Matt. 21:4; John 12:15-16; Matt. 21:10--17; John 2:13-22). Matt. 21:10-11 links the two episodes with the crowd's identification of Jesus as "the prophet from Galilee." Such "prophetic" actions may have provided the foundation for some to refer to Jesus as “anointed of God" without presuming that Jesus, himself, sought a political revolution in which he would be established as the "anointed" Davidic "king of Israel."
Christian Usage: After the death and resurrection of Jesus, "messiah" takes on a specifically Christian meaning as a "title" that refers only to Jesus. The "messiah" Jesus is the crucified agent of God, who has died "for our sins" (1 Cor. 15:3). Acts 2:36 speaks of God having made Jesus “both Lord and Christ" at his resurrection/exaltation into heaven. In such a context "messiah" denotes Jesus' vindication and exaltation by God. Luke 2:11 links "messiah" with the christological titles "Lord," commonly associated with the risen/exalted Jesus (cf. Rom. 1:4b; Phil. 2.11), and "Savior" in the announcement of Jesus' birth. Acts 3:19-22 preserves yet another early Christian use of "messiah" for Jesus. It describes his return at the Parousia, a function elsewhere ascribed to him as "Lord" (1 Thess. 4.17, 1 Cor. 11:26; 16:22).
None of the uses of "messiah" in Jewish writings of the period points toward the suffering or death of the person so designated. The juxtaposition of the confession that Jesus is "messiah" with the prediction of the suffering Son of man in Mark 8:27-33 brings out this difficulty. The "suffering servant" of God (Isa. 52: 13-53:12) provided Christians with powerful images of Jesus' vocation to suffering. However, the "servant" is not "the anointed of God." Explicit acknowledgment of the theme of the "suffering messiah" occurs in the Lucan writings. The messiah, according to Scripture, was to suffer before entering his glory (Luke 24: 26,46; also see Acts 3:18; 17:3; 26:23). Paul can also speak of the paradox of "Christ" crucified (1 Cor. 1:23; 2:2; Gal. 3:1), but concern with the expression "messiah/christ" is not part of that reflection. In Paul, as in much of the rest of the NT, "Christ" is frequently used as part of Jesus' name (see also such passages as Acts 4:10; 8: 12).
The Christian confession that Jesus is "messiah" played its primary role in Christian debates with Judaism. This role is evident in the speeches of Acts (Acts 2:31-32; 3:18; 5:42; 8:5; 17:3; 18:5, 28). It is also evident in the Fourth Gospel. John 1:41 preserves the Aramaic "messiah," with a translation for the Greek-speaking reader, in Andrew's summons to Peter. Other passages in the Fourth Gospel represent debates between Johannine Christians and their Jewish opponents over the claim that Jesus is messiah. Jesus' origins are said to disqualify him by those who do not recognize that his true origin is "from God" (John 7:41-42). Jesus' death is said to disqualify him because the messiah was to have "remained forever" (John 12:34). An uncertain crowd wonders whether Jesus might be "messiah" (7:26-31; 10:24). Finally, "messiah" is spoken as a confession of faith in Jesus as Son of God and Savior by those who are believers (4: 29; 11:27; 17:3; 20:31). When Johannine Christians were excommunicated from the Jewish synagogue for their faith in Jesus, the confession "Jesus is messiah" became an identifying mark of the true Christian (9:22). It retains this function in the struggle against dissident Christians reflected in the Johannine Letters (1 John 2:22; 5:1). Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho provides a mid-second-century example of the use of "messiah" in Christian debate with Judaism (35.7; 39.6; 43.8; 47.4; 48.4; 108.2). See also Jesus Christ; Son of God; Son of Man.
Bibliography
Collins, J.J. The Apocalyptic Imagination. New York: Crossroad, 1984. Dunn, J.D.G. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977. Schiirer, E. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ. Revised and edited by G. Vermes, F. Millar, M. Black. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1979.P.P.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)