Jesus, God? A Few Notes on Early Divine Christology Scholarship
Enjoy!
I. Nicaea, Constantine, and the “Corruption” of the Church?
A. Jesus’ Deity:
“Constantine did call the Council of Nicaea, and one of the issues involved Jesus’ divinity. But this was not a council that met to decide whether or not Jesus was divine … Quite the contrary: everyone at the Council—in fact, just about every Christian everywhere—already agreed that Jesus was divine, the Son of God. The question being debated was how to understand Jesus’ divinity in light of the circumstance that he was also human. Moreover, how could both Jesus and God be God if there is only one God? Those were the issues that were addressed at Nicaea, not whether Jesus was divine. This was already a matter of common knowledge among Christians, and had been from the early years of the religion.” (Bart Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know About Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14-15.
A.i. Major Point: It should be noted that the debate was about Jesus’ pre-incarnate divinity, not whether he became divine post-ascension or anything of that sort. So-called “Adoptionist” or “Dynamic Monarchian” Christologies were sporadic and localized disputes ultimately declared heretical by the end of the 2ndcentury and officially denied through anathematizing the figure of Paul of Samosata at the Council of Antioch in 264 AD. Whatever the diversity of views all were “incarnational” in the sense of needing to reconcile the descent/ascent of a divine being and clarifying the nature of that divine being in relation to the Father. In other words there was nothing on offer in these debates that approximates the Mormon view today.
There are thus (at least) two necessary moments in a hypothetical Mormon argument. The first is that the onus is on them to demonstrate that Fourth century trinitarianism on all sides represents a break with previous, earlier thought. As part of this, they need to demonstrate that the breaks are relevant to the points they want to make, because of course there are going to be any number of discontinuities, from idiom, location, style, background, intended audience, current controversy, rhetorical flourish, and on and on. Second, if discontinuity is established it needs to also be established that something like the Mormon position is on offer before the discontinuity occurred. It of course amounts little to nothing to say the Fourth century represents a discontinuity with what came before if no one before the fourth century held Mormon-like beliefs and interpretations. The next section deals with early claims to Christ’s divinity.
A.ii. Details: Apart from particulars, a major problem with any narrative that involve what is sometimes referred to as “declension” and “return to purity” is that they inject false teleologies into history that use later standards as anachronistic guideposts to judge what went before. Both “decline” and “ascent” or “return” assume certain metaphorically “topologically fixed” points in history that serve as anchors by which to judge the shape of things. In other words something can’t be a descent if one hasn’t assumed a previous high point (or vice versa). Let’s take a Christian example. Aloys Grillmeier has written a series of brilliant and lengthy books on Christology in the church. One flaw however is that he constantly narrates the story using Chalcedon as the inevitable termination point of earlier debates and controversy. As such, a typology is produced for those who are loosely proto-Chalcedonian in the concepts they set forward, those who diverge from this standard, and those who represent false-starts according to later Chalcedonian standards, and so on. While this is to vastly simplify Grillmeier’s work, which in many ways is extremely helpful because it does pick out themes of continuity and discontinuity, Grillmeier also foists upon these historical actors goals and standards that are artificial in relationship to the goals they had for themselves.
For example, Origin is often described as a “subordinationist” in the sense that his argument leads him to hold that the Son is not wholly equal to the Father, or not wholly continuous with the essence/being of the Father. While there may be some truth in this if one judges Origin based on later Nicene and pro-Nicene thinking, it completely overlooks that, as Jon Robertson argues, “contrary to much current opinion,” Origen actually wanted to stress “an ‘essential’ link of nature between God the Father and God the son. This ‘continuity of nature’ had a strong positive effect on how Origen envisioned our knowing God through the Son, both before the Incarnation as well as during ‘the economy according to the flesh.’” (Jon Robertson, Christ as Mediator: A Study in the Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Athanasius of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13.)
The language of “break” used to separate Nicaea’s theology and Christology from what came before assumes that Nicaea was somehow uniquely causative of doctrinal changes. It was not. “The church of the fourth century [this includes all sides] inherited a tradition of Trinitarian discourse that was pervasively embedded in its worship and proclamation, even if it was lacking in conceptual definition.” (Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 15). These fourth-century debates heavily involved scripture (despite the frequent misrepresentation of their Greek-philosophical nature doing the heavy lifting, this was not the case as these terms and concepts were in service to scriptural reading for better or worse) and the inherited tradition of worship, practice, and theology. Here is R.P.C. Hanson:
The defenders of the creed of Nicaea were in fact fighting on behalf of the tradition, not in the sense that they were defending what had been already determined to be the doctrine of the church, but in the sense that they were themselves engaged in forming dogma, in working out a form of one of the most capital and crucial doctrines not only of the Bible but of the very spirit and genius of Christianity itself. They only came gradually to realize this. It was in fact only the Cappadocian fathers who faced fully the fact that they were contributing to the formation of dogma, and they did so only reluctantly. It was only very slowly, for instance, that any pro-Nicenes recognized that in forming their doctrine of God they could not possibly confine themselves to the words of Scripture, because the debate was about the meaning of the Bible, and any attempt to answer this problem in purely scriptural terms inevitably leaves still unanswered ‘but what does the Bible mean?’ … the Arians and Macedonians never realized this truth. This ultimately explains their failure to establish themselves permanently. (R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318-381 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 878).
Moreover, Nicaea really only attained authority retroactively as debates over the meaning and usage of terms continued among pro- and anti- Nicene theologians until the NIceno-Constantinopolitan Creed was penned in 381. And even then, that Creed became a standard-bearer primarily retroactively as well when it was reaffirmed at Chalcedon in 451 (see: Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85-267). All of this is to say the centuries leading to Nicaea contain no clear before/after descent/ascent patterns by which one could claim a radical Nicene break. The complex, confusing, and often convoluted discussions and disputes were a scripture-heavy and traditioned process of trial and error, emerging interpretations waxing and waning, combining and flowing, and yes some breaking off to either die or start their own churches (like the later Monophysites). The use of a “break” or the “Constantinian corruption of the church” is a useful historiographical lever to pivot history to one’s use, but does not conform to the extreme complexity of the data on the ground.
II. Pre-Nicene Acclamations of Christ’s Deity
A.i.The Emerging NT Consensus: While it has been and will remain a point of contention, there is an emerging consensus that Christ is represented in the NT as divine, part of YHWH’s identity, God incarnate on earth. It should be noted that of course in part a Mormon would have no trouble with this—Christ is surely divine, or became divine (as I understand Mormon doctrine). But this consensus indicates that the divinity ascribed is pre-incarnate, not earned, not achieved, not given in time.
“This new consensus has been achieved in particular by the endeavors of the late Martin Hengel …, Larry W. Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, and others who have developed arguments that they have put forward. Hengel argued that a fully high Christology must have been formed within eighteen years of Christ’s death and, in all probability, within four or five years. … Hurtado has pushed back the origins of the Christian transformation of Jewish monotheism much further; to perhaps even the first months of the new movement. At the very earliest phase of the post-Easter church Jesus’ followers worshipped their master in ways that, as good orthodox Jews, they had previously reserved exclusively for the one God of Israel. [It is increasingly clear among scholars] that early high Christology is present throughout the NT …” (Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism - Volume 1: Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond(Eugene: Cascade Books, 2015), 4.)
This early high Christology extends to a number of overlooked items, as Simon Gathercole has recently argued for example the "sent" and "I have come" language of Christ in the synoptics is a strong case for Christ's preexistence (see: Gathercole, The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2006).
For a great survey of 20th century scholarship on divine Christology specifically in Pauline studies, see: Chris Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2015), 11-35.
Another good work to use that provides a strong counter-claim to the notion that the earliest Christologies were exaltationist or adoptionist, see: Michael Bird, Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christologies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2017).
Moreover, as Wesley Hill as recently persuasively argued, what is often overlooked in the high/low Christology debates is how “monotheism” was something of a late academic construct that dictates our perception of who Christ is by relating him to a previously established monotheism, locating him high on the vertical axis as part of this established monotheistic identity (high Christology) or lower (low Christology). Hill however argues that the very notion of who the Father is for Paul is implicated by the Son and Spirit (and vice-versa):
“The main task [of this book] … is to suggest a way of discussing Paul’s theology and Christology that does not begin with the ‘vertical’ question—has Jesus been elevated all the way up the axis to God’s level?—but rather with the question of relations. The conceptuality of a ‘low’ or ‘high’ Christology threatens to obscure the way in which, for Paul, the identities of God, Jesus, and the Spirit are constituted by their relationswith one another. … [Paul’s Christology] frustrates any attempt to identify one of the trinitarian persons … in a way that does not implicate the other two.” (Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 25, 43 (page break after first ellipses)).
The importance of this position is that Hill rightly calls our attention to the fact that the question of whether or not Jesus is God (and, by extension, the Holy Spirit) is not a question merely of “in” or “out”, nor one merely of definition for the Son, but has relational implications. In other words “divine,” “divinity” “God” are all terms of relation among the three agents of the Trinity. “God” is as such not a genus of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (and potentially many others) are particular instances (as Aquinas says, “Deus non est in genere” or the term “God” does not reference a member of any class is but sui generis no matter how many times it is “instantiated.” See: Aquinas, Summa Theologia I.III.5; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 (T&T Clark), 310 et. al.). Rather “God” in the NT is defined and referenced as the coordinates of relation between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In this sense Hill rightly calls our attention to the fact that the supposed divide between “nascent” trinitarianism in the NT and Nicaea is exaggerated by artificial scholarly constructs such as “monotheism” that arbitrarily restrict the discussion.
In addition, the charge of “allegory” used against the Fathers to undermine their claims is decidedly exaggerated. See: Christopher R. Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture (Louisville: Westminster John-Knox, 2001) who demonstrates the Patristic “rule of faith” and typology is grounded in the NT itself and is only infrequently rightly called “allegory”.
A helpful companion that looks at the NT use of the OT, as well as early church exegesis of the OT, see: Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and the Spirit in New Testament & Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Bates calls attention to the fact that post-NT interpretations of the OT, such as the Psalms, relies on precedent set in the NT itself where the Psalms (e.g.) are often represented as intra-trinitarian conversation (such as “the LORD says to my Lord” in Ps. 110:1 among a huge host of other examples). Again this relatives the arbitrary division often created between scripture and later trinitarian development. It is precisely this sort of exegesis that Irenaeus (notably pre-Nicene) uses against the gnostics (see Bates, 175-203).
“This book as a whole seeks to show that this [Nicene] augmentation [of Trinitarian discourse], inasmuch as it sought to add precision to the previously established person metaphor, was primarily a reaffirmation and extension along the ‘person’ trajectory already embedded in a fixed by prosopological exegesis as it was practiced in the New Testament and the early church. … [P]rosopological exegesis informed emerging metaphysical models of unity and distinction with respect to God, and these together resulted in the full-orbed Trinitarianism of the third and fourth centuries and beyond (Bates, Birth of the Trinity, 39).”
A.ii. Post-NT, Pre-Nicene Invocation of Christ’s Deity
Note: There are way more passages affirming Christ’s divinity and his relation to the Father. I am in part selecting passages that affirm Christ’s pre-incarnate divinity and even equality with the Father in order to avoid the potential Mormon rebuttal that these verses are referring merely to the post-resurrected Christ, now God. Again, there are certainly a lot of “subordinationist” elements. But what we take now to be subordinationist language based on Nicene criteria were originally meant to emphasize the continuity of the Son with the Father, however much we may judge these attempts today as deficient and in need of correction.
Ignatius of Antioch (AD 115)– Jesus is referred as “theos” fourteen times, such as “the will of the Father, and Jesus Christ, our God” (Ign. Letter to the Ephesians1.1). Or “God Himself was manifested in human form for the renewal of eternal life” (Letter to the Ephesians 19.3), and again referring to Christ: “There is one Physician who is possessed of both flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in the flesh” (Letter to the Ephesians 7.2). And in his Letter to Polycarp: “Look for him who is above all time, eternal and invisible, yet who became visible for our sakes; impalpable and impassible [as the Father], yet who became passible [in the flesh] on our account; and who in every kind of way suffered for our sakes” (ch.3).
Aristides (AD 125): “The Christians, then, trace the beginning of their religion from Jesus the Messiah; and he is named the Son of God Most High. And it is said that God came down from heaven, and from a Hebrew virgin assumed and clothed himself with flesh; and the Son of God lived in a daughter of man. …” (Apology of Aristides, ch.2)
Epistle to Diognetus: This epistle is dated as early as AD 130, but is more often seen as contemporary with Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis, and Athenagoris.
“God Himself, who is almighty, the Creator of all things, and invisible, has sent from heaven, and placed among men the truth, and the holy and incomprehensible Word, and has firmly established Him in their hearts. He did not, as one might have imagined, send to men any servant, or angel, or ruler, or any one of those who bear sway over earthly things … but the very Creator and Fashioner of all things—by Whom He made the Heavens … As a king sends his son, who is also a king, so sent He Him; as God he sent Him [as God]; as to men he sent him [as man] … seeking to persuade, not compel us; for violence has no place in the character of God.” (ch. 7)
Justin Martyr (both his First Apology and Dialogue with Trypho were written around AD 150-160): Like Origin above, there is a “subordinationist” element in Justin if we hold him to later post-Nicene elaborations. As J.N.D. Kelly puts it, however, Christ is eternal as the logos endiathetos or the immanent word or mind of the Father, who then proceeds forth as logos prophorikos or the sent Word (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London: Black, 1958), 97-101). Justin exhorts that we should recognize Christ “as God coming forth from above, the man living among men” (Dialogue with Trypho 64). So again, while not “fully Nicene” so to speak, Justin is certainly not “Mormon” or proto-Mormon in how he conceives his Christology.
Melito of Sardis (around AD 170): There are some adoptionist-sounding and modalist-sounding phrases in Melito (e.g. “he was slain as lamb but resurrected as God”) but if one takes his work as a whole Melito clearly emphasizes the pre-incarnate divinity of Christ: “He who fastened the universe has been fastened to a tree; the Sovereign has been insulted; the God [ho theos, notably with the article] has been murdered” (Melito, On the Passover, 96.) He also clearly distinguishes Father and Son at times, though at other times he unites them in ways that would, again according to full Nicene criteria, make Athanasius (e.g.) uncomfortable. One can see many of the enigmas later to be tackled by the Fourth century debates in Melito, the tension between the identity and distinction of Christ with his Father being most prominent among them. Even if he is considered modalist (an uncharitable, even anachronistic stretch, to be sure) this is not friendly to Mormon interpretations who have discrete divinities.
Athenagoras (AD 178): While he does not use the Greek triados which is still rare at that point in time(and “Trinity” was not coined until Tertullian a few decades later in the Latin West) nonetheless Athenagoras says Christians acknowledge “One God, uncreated, eternal, invisible, impassible, incomprehensible, illimitable, who is apprehended by the understanding only and the reason … the Son being in the Father and the Father in the Son, [Christians acknowledge] the oneness and power of Spirit” (Embassy for Christians 10). So too Christians know “what is the oneness of the Son with the Father, what is the communion of the Father with the Son, what is the Spirit, what is the unity of these three“ (Embassy 2) so that Christians “speak of God the Father, and of God the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Embassy 10)
Irenaeus of Lyon (AD 130-202): “Christ himself, therefore, together with the Father, is the God of the living, who spoke to Moses, and who was manifested to the fathers” (Against Heresies, 4.5.2). And: “He received testimony from all that He was very man, and that He was very God, from the Father ,from the Spirit, from angels, from the creation itself …” (Against Heresies 4.6.7).
And so on…….
III. Early Use of John 1
A.i. Athanasius: “All things became by Him and without Him came nothing into being” (John 1.3) How then could the Artificer be someone different, other than the Father of Christ [arguing against the Gnostics] … it was not from pre-existent matter, but out of nothing and out of non-existence absolute and utter God brought it into being through the Word. He says as much in Genesis: “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” … For God is good—or rather, of all goodness, He is Fountainhead … Grudging existence to none therefore He made all things out of nothing through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ” (On the Incarnation 2-3).
The implication of the above quote being that Christ was not himself created but is Creator.
“It would be more godly and true to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him Unoriginate … He who calls God Father, signifies him from the son, being well aware that, since there is a Son, it is of necessity through the Son that all things have come into being that were created. When they call [the Father] Unoriginate, they name him only from his works, and do not know the Son any more than the Greeks. But he who calls him Father, names him from his Word, and knowing the Word, acknowledges him to be the Maker of all, and understands that through him all things have come into being.” (Contra Arians, 1.33-34).
So, T.F. Torrance:
“Thus for Athanasius the concept of God as Creator is wholly governed by the coinherent relation between the Father and the Son and the inseparable activity in which they are engaged. Since the Father is never without the Son, any more than the Son is ever without the Father, all that the Father does is done in and through the Son and all that the Son does is identical to what the Father does. … Of paramount importance, of course, for Athanasius and all the Nicene theologians were the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel and of the Epistles to the Colossians, and the Hebrews, in which a Christ-centered and Word-centered doctrine of creation was presented.” (T.F. Torrance, Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Faith(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 77.)
Comments