(A Very Brief) History of the Trinity and the Argument from Design (Part Two)
Trinity and Creation.
In many ways, the notion of “cause”
resided at the heart of the Fourth Century debates regarding the Trinity, and
this in two related senses. In one sense
the question of cause regarded God’s causal relation to the world and creation ex nihilo. In the second sense the question of cause
related to the Logos, that is,
Christ. Was He also created? How? If not, what does this mean for God’s
“internal relations,” as it were? As
Anatolios notes, the “emerging clarity on the radical difference between God
and the world” was one of the flashpoints that caused a “break in pre-Nicene”
Christian experience and catalyzed future debates.[1] We must proceed very cautiously regarding how
we characterize the distinctive and organizing lines of the Nicene debates, as
false steps can both create false allegiances and false distinctions.[2] Indeed, such is the active nature of reconstruction
regarding earlier paradigms for understanding theology leading up to the Nicene
era and just beyond, that Sarah Coakley consoles the reader by saying in some
sense their vertigo is to be expected.[3] There was, for example, recently a symposium
of responses to a recent and powerful proposal by Lewis Ayres in his Nicaea and Its Legacy in which the
experts did not even agree amongst themselves.[4] And while we will only tread amongst these
giants with caution, it seems in one sense that many of their categorizations
are missing the more primordial goal of the early debates: that of mediation—that
is: how does Christ mediate God’s salvific presence?
As Robertson argues, this is, in fact, a
“stated primary concern” of the parties involved.[5] It also cuts through many of the binaries
that cloud early discussion, like the distinction between functional and ontic
Christology. In particular Robertson
deconstructs Joseph Lienhard’s categories at length to show how something so
apparently innocent as the creation of heuristic categories can so badly
confuse the issue.[6] Technical points aside, for our purposes
Robertson’s recalibration of our attention to the issue of Christ’s mediation
of God’s presence also allows us to bring to the fore our own topic. For if the primary purpose of Trinitarian
doctrine is to understand how Christ mediates God’s presence as the incarnate Logos, then this clues us in to the fact
that when there are fluctuations in understanding the Trinity, concomitant
changes in our pictures of the world are sure to also appear.[7] But first let us return to Anatolios’ point
that “emerging clarity on the radical difference between God and the world” was
one of the flashpoints that caused a “break in pre-Nicene” Christian experience
and catalyzed future Trinitarian debates, so we can see what this means. To do se we need to look at the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, that is, creation from nothing.
It has been said that the perennial
philosophical question is “why is there something, why not nothing?”[8]
but this is not strictly speaking, true.
To be sure, wonderment regarding origins has always existed, but this
particular form of the question is taken from the distinctly Christian legacy
of ex nihilo creation—“When God
reveals himself, then man experiences his existence and the being of his world
as a being which has been plucked from nothingness.”[9] For the Greeks, to the contrary, the world
always existed in some sense.
Parmenides’ dictum “from nothing, nothing comes” was taken as axiomatic
by all Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle.
The question they would ask is not “why something, why not nothing?” but
“why this order?” “If there is one belief Greek thinkers
shared,” says Louis Dupré, “it must be the conviction that both the essence of
the real and our knowledge of it consists ultimately of form. Basically this means
that it belongs to the essence of the real to appear, rather than to hide, and to appear in an orderly way.”[10] Thus they spoke of the ordered whole of the
world as kosmos. Dupré cautions modern translators who might
be tempted to utilize the phrase “physical nature” as an approximation for kosmos—for it was not just physical
meaning, but theological and anthropic as well.[11] Even the gods, despite their power, were a
part of, and ultimately subservient to, the cosmic ordered-whole.[12]
The ancient Near-Eastern context of the
opening chapters of Genesis makes it plausible that they, too, countenance a
sort of eternal existence besides God. At any rate, the interpretation of
creation ex nihilo only emerged over
time.[13] It perhaps appears hinted at in the
second-century work 2 Maccabees, in 7:28.
There, a tormented mother who has lost all but one of her sons,
addresses the last son by saying “observe heaven and earth, consider all that
is in them and acknowledge that YHWH made them out of what did not exist.” There is, however, some dispute about exactly
how this phrase is to be interpreted, as the “primal (unformed) matter” of
Aristotle, or the concepts of “Chaos” in the Ancient Near-East, could be understood
as a sort of “quasi-nonbeing,” in themselves.
They are “nothing” insofar as they have no definite, ordered form. In
fact, as historical quirks go a particularly strange one appears when Ernan
McMullin records that as far as we can tell the first explicit doctrine of ex
nihilo creation occurred precisely where we would not expect it: that is,
in the Gnostic writings of Basilides.[14]
Regardless, as the Judeo-Christian
doctrine of creation ex nihilo emerged
it emphasized that God, as Creator, did not rely on prior material to bring the
cosmos into existence.[15] This meant several things, especially in the
theological environment of the day. One
meaning, for example, was that matter is intrinsically good, and the defects we
see in the world cannot be attributed to an Artisan God doing His best working
with a pre-existing, recalcitrant medium.
But for our purposes ex nihilo creation
meant God could not be in “competition”[16]
with secondary causes, because He is the initiator and sustainer of their very
being in its entirety. In a particularly
picturesque example, Rabbi Gamaliel II (c. 90/110) is in dialogue with a
philosopher who notes “Your God was indeed a great artist, but surely He found
good pigments which assist him.” To
which Rabbi Gamaliel replies, “God made the colors too!”[17] God, in His transcendence, is the only
self-existent thing—all other things, as contingent upon His act of creation
and subsequent sustenance “are not their own existence but share in Existence
itself” (Aquinas, Summa Theologia,
I.3.4). God was neither compelled to
create, nor constrained by prior circumstances.
The consequence of this is that God is not in competition with “natural”
causal sequences since He is the foundation of causal order itself. God stands in a radical and free relation to
creation, and just so He is intimate to it in a way no element of the created
order could be:
God’s
creative agency must be said to found created being in whatever mechanical
causality, animate working, or self-determining agency it might evidence. A created cause can be said to bring about a
certain created effect by its own power, or a created agency can be talked
about as freely intending the object of its rational volition, only if God is
said to found that causality or agency directly and in toto—in power, exercise, manner of activity and effect.[18]
The reason this discussion plays
into Anatolios’ remark that newfound understanding of God’s transcendence
catalyzed the Trinitarian debates is that since all things came into being from
nothing, at the behest of God alone, a newly sharpened line was drawn: you were
either a creature, however exalted, or God.
What then, was Jesus? Was He too created,
as Arius thought with his famous remark “there was once when he [the Logos] was
not”?
The vexingly technical discussion of
what transpired around these questions need not trouble us here. What is important is to realize that within
the theological ambit regarding whether Christ was, or was not, part of God’s
identity was also a decision regarding how Christ mediated God’s presence, and
so—by extension—how God was related to the world:
For Athanasius, nature was continually declaring God’s handiwork and presence. … [from a quote by the Eusebians it] would seem to indicate that the Arian’s felt completely the opposite, at least with regard to creation. We can see that Athanasus would have seen here a direct threat, not only to what he felt to be the orthodox view of Christ, but also to what he understood to be the Christian view of the world. … While this is a well known facet of Athanasius’ thought, it has not always been sufficiently appreciated in the context of his polemic against the Arians. He attacked the creatio ex nihilo as it applied to the Son because it ran counter to his understanding of the deeper narrative of creation and redemption. It the Son were ex ouk ontwn then he would have no ability to give eternal existence to others. … Athanasius’ opponents were content to state that the Word was both son and a work … to the contrary, the dichotomy that Athanasius posited between ‘son’ and ‘work’ was a very real one for him. The Father-Son relationship necessitated a much more intimate connection than that between a Maker and his work. … Because of this ‘essential’ (kat’ ousian) unity, the divine mediation through the Word in creation was t obe considered the direct activity nd manifestation of God. This mediation is God manifesting himself ‘immediately’ through his Word in creation. It is not something that intervenes between God and his creation … rather, it is God … himself.[19]
The “Arians” (to continue to use the
term for the sake of convenience) felt that God did not manifest Himself
immediately in creation, and this was expressed and reinforced by their
Christology: Christ was, however exalted, not God but a creature. And in fact, He was seen as a necessary meson between God and the world, for the world
could not bear God’s “direct touch.”
Athanasius rightly pointed out that this made no sense: if the world as
creature could not bear God, then Christ as creature could not either. Another mediator between Christ and God would
be needed, and another again between that new mediator and God, ad infinitum. “We shall invent a vast crowd of accumulating
mediators,” complains Athanasius, in what seems to surely be a joke leveled at
the Arians.[20]
The point of all this is that when
the Logos was seen as internal to the identity of God, God could no longer be
seen as a distant landlord, so to speak, nor as some Lord over the mountains
passing law by sheer act of will upon an exterior object like a rather extra large
human judge in a courtroom. Rather this
God—who was never without His Widsom, a God, we might say, Who was never
without His own Expression of Himself—was intimately present to creation
because creation was in a sense “contained” in this self-expression that was
Christ. More on this in the next
section. For now, it behooves us to
quote David Bentley Hart’s excellent summary at length:
Another way of saying this is that the dogmatic definitions of the fourth century ultimately forced Christian thought, even if only tacitly, toward a recognition of the full mystery—the full transcendence—of Being within beings. All at once the hierarchy of hypostases mediating between the world and its ultimate or absolute principle had disappeared. Herein lies the great ‘discovery’ of the Christian metaphysical tradition: the true nature of transcendence, transcendence understood not as mere dialectical supremacy, and not as ontic absence, but as the truly transcendent and therefore utterly immediate act of God, in his own infinity, giving being to beings. In affirming the consubstantiality and equality of the persons of the Trinity, Christian thought had also affirmed that it is the transcendence of God alone who makes creation to be, not through a necessary diminishment of his own presence, and not by way of an economic reduction of his power in lesser principles [or, we might add, not by necessarily interfering with natures own principles], but as the infinite God. In this way, he is revealed as at once superior summon meo and interior intimo meo: not merely the supreme being set atop the summit of beings, but the one who is transcendently present in all beings, the ever more inward act within each finite act. This does not, of course, mean that there can be no metaphysical structure of reality, through whose agencies God acts; but it does mean that, whatever the structure might be, God is not located within it, but creates it, and does not require its mechanisms to act upon lower things. As the immediate source of the being of the whole, he is nearer to every moment within the whole than it is to itself, and is at the same time infinitely beyond the reach of the whole, even in its most exalted principles. … One consequence of all this for the first generations of Nicaean theologians was that a new conceptual language had to be formed, one that could do justice not only to the Trinitarian mystery, nor even only to the relation between this mystery and finite creation, but to our knowledge of the God thus revealed. For in a sense, the God described by the dogmas of Nicaea and Constantinople was at once more radically immanent within and more radically transcendent of creation than the God of the old subordinationist metaphysics had ever been. He was immediately active in all things; but he occupied no station within the hierarchy of the real.[21]
[1] Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 39.
[2] 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), 4f.
[3] Sarah Coakley,
“Introduction: Disputed Questions in Patristic Trinitarianism,” Harvard Theological Review vol. 100 no.2
(2007): 125-138.
[4] Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth
Century Trinitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). On the symposium cf. the special issue of the
Harvard Theological Review vol. 100
no.2 (2007), where John Behr, Khaled Anatolios, Sarah Coakley, and Lewis Ayres
all participate.
[5] Robertson, Christ as Mediator, 5.
[6] Ibid., 159-162.
[7] I do not necessary mean
this causally. I am calling our
attention to potential correlation between changes in one or the other.
[8] Gottfried Leibniz,
“Principles of Nature and Grace, Founded on Reason,” in M. Morris, trans. Lebiniz: Philosophical Writings (New
York: Dutton, 1968), 25.
[9] Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the
Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism
and Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1983), 33. Cf. 31-35.
[10] Louis Dupré, The Passage to Modernity: An Essay on the
Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale, 1993), 18.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., 22-23.
[13] Cf. Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing,
2002), 194: “The general consensus among philosophers until around 200 A.D. was
that matter is coexistent with God.”
[14] Ernan McMullin,
“Creation ex nihilo: Early History,”
in David Burrell and Carlo Cogliati et. al., eds., Creation and the God of Abraham(Cambridge: Cambridge University,
2010), 18.
[15] On the early history of
the doctrine, cf. Gerhard May, Creation
Ex Nihilo (New York: T&T Clark, 1994); for more general historical,
theological, and philosophical surveys, cf. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation Out of Nothing: A Biblical,
Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,
2004).
[16] On the concepts of
“contrastive” and “non-contrastive” transcendence, see: Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), esp. 81-120.
[17] Quoted in May, Creation Ex Nihilo, 23.
[18] Tanner, God and Creation, 88.
[19] Robertson, Christ as Mediator, 172, 183, 185, 194.
[20] Quoted in Robertson, Christ as Mediator, 172-173.
[21] David Bentley Hart,
“The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics After Nicaea,” in Aristotle
Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos, eds., Orthodox Readings of Augustine (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 2008), 204-206.
[22] Tanner, God and Creation, 88.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Aquinas, Summa Theologia Tertium Pars q.2. a.7.
[25] Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis, 4.12.
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