Contemporary Trinitarianism Part Four (Excursus A): The Hellenization Thesis

In the past few posts Ive tried to go over a few particular "declension" narratives that contemporary Trinitarianism uses which were fairly specific: Augustine, who is the great (great great...) grandfather of Western thought, is also often identified as the progenitor of the current malaise in Trinitarian thought which, as many like Colin Gunton have argued, also means that in order to overcome the malaise, other "non-infected" sources and traditions must be called upon. This meant (as it was outlined more in part three) that Eastern Trinitarianism, often seen as exemplified in the Cappadocians (and Athanasius, Irenaeus, and others are sometimes thrown in) is typified as the salve to soothe our modern aches. This narrative, of course, as was pointed out in particular in the last post, has not gone undisputed, and many quite notable Patristic and contemporary theologians have taken arms against it. This is not a mere quibble over obscure academic minutia of historical detailing either, as noted earlier in a quote from Michael Hanby, these narratives are often representations of how Modernity (and post-modernity) are themselves understood and so are essentially philosophical and theological topographies of how to understand our own current positions in history. Contained within contemporary Trinitarianism, so to speak, are enormous constellations of interpretation regarding how we are to relate to God, humanity, world, and history, and this not even primarily within their positive theological judgments, but lingering within their entire narration of history up until the present moment. In this post I want to move into some more generalized trajectories (beyond specific theologians like Augustine or the Cappadocians) which constitute some general themes of the "declension narrative" strategy within Contemporary Trinitarianism. In particular these declension narratives are often stories about how things which should not have been combined were conflated (in particular, Hellenistic philosophy with a supposedly pure "biblical" theology) or that which should not have been separated, became disjoined (in particular, the immanent and economic Trinity, or the treatises "on the one God" and "on the Triune God.") Given the somewhat different nature of each of these "unions and separations" I decided not to lump them into one giant post (as I am too often wont to do) but treat them separately, most especially for the ease of the reader (if I have any left after the length of the prior posts in this series).

HELLENIZATION

Perhaps the most (in)famous declension narrative of any that we have, or will, deal with (and one that is by no means limited to the area of Trinitarian thought), is the so-called “Hellenization,” of Christianity which, while passing more and more into disfavor, still litters the landscape of contemporary theology. We could begin by noting that this thesis is really an inherently Protestant phenomenon (though it has often spilled over into other traditions). Though, of course, the charge that Christian theology has not been faithful to itself because it has incorporated alien elements into its own self understanding is not new--Hippolytus of Rome identified 'heretics' precisely by such a vehicle, and then there is Tertullian's famous query "what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem" (ironic perhaps, given how much Tertullian himself was influenced by Stoic ideas), and, of course Martin Luther's untiring attack on what he perceived as the "Babylonian captivity" of the Aristotelianism of his many opponents--nonetheless Lewis Ayres notes that in its present form the Hellenization thesis is this traditional Christian polemic accelerated by a general post-Enlightenment suspicion regarding metaphysics and a general pietist and pragmatist attitude regarding what was perceived as the fundamentally "practical" or "ethical" nature of religion (Nicaea and Its Legacy p.388ff).

On the other hand it can be linked especially to the Protestant consciousness of freedom in relation to tradition, emphasis on “scientific” or systematic methodology for reading scripture and doing theology (with the specific idea that proper methodology and emphasis allows one the possibility to consequently turn this reading against traditioned readings deemed inadequate). Thus for example the complaint of the Socinians and other extreme "biblicists" that the doctrine of the Trinity could not be found in scripture, and thus must be discarded, is based on a disposition to treat the text so woodenly on the literal level as to not allow any type of theoretical exposition to help exegesis. In this way Claude Welch, in In This Name: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Contemporary Theology p.3 notes that two of the major reasons for the eclipse of Trinitarian doctrine come from higher critical methods of scriptural interpretation, and the theology of Friedrich Schliermacher. The first half of his book is essentially a descriptive outworking of this idea, tracing its influences up until Karl Barth right before the first edition of his Commentary on Romans. The two are not unrelated. Wolfhart Pannenberg notes in his Basic Questions in Theology vol.1 pp.1-18 notes how the rise of the Protestant sola scriptura principle demanded that the proper understanding of the bible must be understood not from preestablished dogma, but from the historical context of the original authorship. Hence in the words of Samuel M. Powell The Trinity in German Thought p.4:

“We should…note that this was a peculiarly Protestant problem; no Christian had ever questioned whether the doctrine of the Trinity [in whatever form] could be drawn from the Bible until Luther and Melanchthon proposed a view of the Bible and of theological authority largely at odds with the medieval view….their understanding of authority compelled them to justify everything by means of a direct appeal to the Bible. But, as all could plainly see, the doctrine in its technical formulation is absent from the Bible; the most that could be accomplished would be to show that it is implied by Scripture.”

The increased emphasis on sola scriptura, and the concept of the perspicuitas of scripture, Pannenberg notes (Basic Questions p.6ff) implied an exponentially increasing awareness of proper critical method to ascertain the true meaning—that is to say the Higher Critical sciences arose as a natural development of the inner logic of sola scriptura and perspicuitas or the clarity of scripture, once the two-fold tension of understanding the text for itself arose: namely the distance between now and the original thought-world of the author, and the second distance between the text (and its interpretation) and the “objective” history that it, to varying degrees of perspicuity, represented. (c.f. the analysis of Hans Frei The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics pp.54ff). The Higher Critical method then began to notice supposed inconsistencies, stratum of redaction, “theological,” additions to “objective” history, etc…culminating, as Welch notes (In This Name, p.4) in the rejection of key texts for Trinitarianism (e.g. the Gospel of John) and “the abandonment of piecemeal deduction [of doctrine] from verbally inspired scripture.”

Coinciding with this Protestant scripture principle came also the theologian of Albrecht Ritschl, and the "Left-Wing" Ritschlians like Adolph von Harnack who is perhaps most famous for propounding the idea that most of Christian theological history represents an adulteration of the originally "pure" biblical message under the veil of Hellenistic philosophical speculation. Ritschl for example, in a period in which both theology and philosophy were in retreat from the advance of a scientifically oriented positivism, wanted to preserve a special sphere of religious experience which could remain essentially quiescent against the ever advancing field of the sciences. Thus precisely in the name of religious experience which was not to be confused with the business of "world apprehension" (the business of the sciences, now) Ritschl and his followers sought to expunge the metaphysical elements of Christianity which to them represented a perversion of the natural religious essence, which had nothing to do with cosmological architecture or a general conception of the world. In this way Ritschl perceived his own work as carrying forward Luther's attack upon the "tyranny of scholasticism" but also especially that of Schliermacher.

A very famous "pivot" in the standard declension narratives of contemporary Trinitarianism (for standard accounts of his "place" c.f.: Stanley Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology pp.16-27 though Grenz is fairly generous to Schliermacher; Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives p.55f; Robert Letham The Holy Trinity pp.272f) Schleiermacher is generally painted as providing an alternative method for the securing of doctrine, which organized theology around a single principle relatively independent from a foundational reliance upon scripture (namely a Romanticist-Pietist revision of the Kantian transcendental categories into “the feeling of absolute dependence,” represented by Schliermacher as the Christian’s awareness of absolute dependence on Christ for redemption) which, given the implicit demand of Schliermacher for the “organic character” of theology where every doctrine had to be justified to every other via the central principle of the system, left the Trinity as an unneeded appendage at the end of Schliermachers The Christian Faith. This demand of formal logical consistency is the positive demand of the negative devaluation of inspired scripture—once scripture was no longer thought of as authoritative doctrines could no longer be dealt with in a textual-positivist fashion which had previously allowed Protestant doctrines to be defended in isolation from one another, justified based upon their sporadic occurrence within the Biblical text. Now that Scripture was no longer the foundational organizing structure, the “feeling of absolute dependence on Christ,” allowed Trinitarianism to be, at best, a last-order synthetic combination of statements regarding God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which had been previously established per Schliermacher’s method. Coupled with Schliermacher’s insistence of divine simplicity, this led, at best, to an affirmation of Modalism (which Schliermacher himself noted a fondness for—c.f. In This Name p.8).

Though not necessarily with this same type of specificity, the fall of Christian theology into Hellenistic philosophy undergirds many contemporary attempts at liberating the Trinity from such bondage. In evangelical circles for example, both Clark Pinnock, The Most-Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness pp.65ff and Gregory Boyd God of the Possible e.g. p.24 unquestioningly use this standard historiography in order to bolster their own creative proposals often labeled "Free will" or "Open" theism. Particularly blatant is the thesis of R.B. Edwards in an older essay:

The problem is, where did Anselm, Aquinas, and all the rest get the criterion by which they decide that the scriptures are speaking literally when they deny change in God and merely figuratively or metaphorically when they attribute change?...The truth of the matter is that the criterion was derived from greek ideas of perfection which were superimposed upon the interpretation of Biblical religion first by Philo, the Jewish theologian of Alexandria...who created the conceptually unstable supernaturalistic theology by fusing (or confusing) Greek with Hebraic notions of divine perfections, then by many early Chruch Fathers such as Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Ambrose, etc. who uncritically accepted Philo's position. By the time of Augustine Philo's belief in the utter unchangeability of God had been crystallized into infallible, unquestioned dogma. ("The Pagan Dogma of the Absolute Unchangeableness of God' p.308)

In a particularly fascinating section of God as the Mystery of the World (pp.105-225) Eberhard Jüngel traces the rise of modern philosophical atheism from the thought of Descartes through Fichte, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche. Though Jüngel's thought is much too nuanced and complicated to go through here (and I hesitate to compare his thesis to the "Hellenization" thesis at large, there are nonetheless more than merely superficial similarities which make his inclusion, to my mind, helpful). As he noted earlier in the book: "[In the tradition of Augustine] what the word 'God' provides or our thinking is then basically impossible to think through, cannot be grasped by thinking, and thus can be grasped only as something incomprehensible." (p.8) But "not to be able to think God means...that thinking would be discredited if it ever thought of a divine essence, and thus this divine essence as well as its existence, a God would have to be declared unthinkable...the destruction of the thought of God is now clearly perceived to be an act of the [thinking] ego...the last certainty of modern metaphysics is that of the factual inconceivability of God. Atheism could now become a foregone conclusion." (p.152) And this is seen as derived via the tradition from Anselm of Canterbury, whom Jüngel takes to be a precursor of Descartes and what he sees as the "destruction of the metaphysically based certainty of God." (p.110) And his purpose of this genealogical analysis of Descartes, Fichte, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche (and earlier, with Hegel) is resolutely clear: "we should incorporate this criticism of the metaphysical concept of God into the questioning process of faith as it understands itself, so that, through the modern crisis of the metaphysical idea of God, God will be thinkable in a new way..." [i.e. as otherwise than in the Western metaphysical tradition from Augustine to Descartes] (110).

Others are less certain of the connections of Hellenization being drawn between these numerous scholars. More detail will be given in the next post (on God's relation to the world and Rahner's Rule) but, for example, Wolfhart Pannenberg in his lengthy essay "The Appropriation of the Philosophical Concept of God as a Dogmatic Problem of the Early Christian Theology" (in Basic Questions in Theology vol. 2 pp.119-183) argues that despite some defects, the philosophical doctrine of God could have hardly constituted either a "Hellenizing" or a necessary adulteration of the faith. Lewis Ayres writes skeptically:

In fact the opposition Greek and Hebrew, or Greek philosophy and Christian theology, is one of the most important exampes of a wider narrative trope that relies on oppositions between idelized thought forms. Some versions of this trope are of course one of the more lamentable aspects of early Christian heresiology, but it is also important to note that a particular version of engagement via typification has been important within modern theological thought. Relating the history of a doctrinal theme as the story of two competing and abstract ideas has enabled systematicians to invoke the history of Christian thought without the need for deep textual and contextual engagement...this involves subtle strategies regarding assumptions about the nature and function of philosophy and about the appropriate use of the text of Scripture. this strategy presents philosophies as self enclosed systems of thought that frequently overcome theologians who attempt to appropriate them and that are only naively used ipecemeal to expand on and explore the plain sense of Scripture...it is thus only a short step for theologians to assume as a working model that the history of Christian thought presents them with a history of accomodations to particular philosophies, or negotiations between self-enclosed philosophies and the Gospel. (Nicaea and Its Legacy pp.390-391)

This echoes what Pannenberg has written elsewhere:

In the history of ideas absolutely nothing is clarified and understood by the phrase: this or that has ‘influenced’ something or other. Thus even the remolding of the Christian message into a form that was understandable and attractive to Hellenistic thought may not be attributed only to a Hellenistic ‘influence,’ or to an infiltration of alien elements into what was originally Christian…the history of ideas is not a chemistry of concepts that have been arbitrarily stirred together and are then neatly separated again by the modern historian. In order for an ‘influence’ of alien concepts to be absorbed, a situation must have previously emerged within which these concepts could be greeted as an aid for the expression of a problem already present. ( Jesus: God and Man 2nd ed. p.153f)

Thus Pannenberg and Ayres, at least in this respect would seem to agree with Aloys Grillmeier, who writes in his massive Christ in Christian Tradition "These philosophoumena, these techinical concepts and formulae (though their technical character should not be exaggerated) are not an end to themselves. They are intended to preserve the Christ of the gospels and the apostolic age for the faith of posterity." He goes on to state somewhat startlingly that on a closer inspection it is not Christian orthodoxy, despite its technical formulas like homoousios which has given in to Hellenistic philosophy, but rather "on closer inspection the christological heresies turn out to be a compromise between the original message...and the understanding of it in Hellenism and paganism. [In contrast] the formulas of the church...represent the lectio difficilior [the more difficult reading] of the gospel, and maintain the demand for faith and the stumbling block which Christ puts before men." (pp.555-556) In other words the various heresies (Samosatism, Arianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, etc...) all attempt to do away with portions of the robust picture of the Gospel by cutting off the portions they see as violating the canons of this or that philosophical sensibility; it is orthodoxy which preserves all elements of the difficult reading, utilizing philosophical terminology to more precisely delineate what the mystery is (three persons, one essence; consubstantiality; perichoresis etc..) instead violating the mystery by collapsing one side or the other into neat codification.

Following this line of thought it seems safe to say we must keep in mind three things: the first is, as Gavrilyuk has argued at length, and one which "has not been recognized by the proponents of the theory of theologys fall into hellenistic philosophy, is that there is no one unified account ...advocated by major Hellenistic schools of philosophy, let alone the Hellenistic religions at large." (The Suffering of the Impassible God pp.21-22) hence "the Fathers could not possibly agree with the philosophers [in the abstract] simply because the philosophers did not agree among themselves." (p.36) thus already to speak of "Hellenizing" in the abstract is fairly dubious and must be intensely clarified. Second, as both Pannenberg and Ayres pointed out, we need to do some serious rethinking regarding how thought-forms interact, or if "thought-form" is even an adequate description, since it is hardly adequate to merely treat differing trajectories of thought as merely extrinsic to one another, or as representing two (or more) self contained spectrums of thought which can only interact through dilution of purity and displacement of other ideas. Finally we would do well to pay attention to the fact that, in Grillmeier's words "The Christian problems burst the bounds of any one system." (Christ in Christian Tradition p.107) and as such it is difficult to speak of wholesale "Hellenization" at any given point for the simple fact that no Hellenization could account for all the details of the system. In this respect we have at least give an audience to some of the Eastern Orthodox theologians (Valdmir Lossky The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church; John Zizioulas Communion and Otherness; David Bentley Hart The Beauty of the Infinite) who never tire of speaking of how Christian theology transformed the philosophical environment it found itself in as it found need.