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The Trinity and Contextualization Trinity Contextualized? (Part 1) Apparently, it is rather commonly held that the traditional doctrine of the Trinity is an example of contextualization, with the result that it is an especially Greek formulation. This notion appears in various forms, the most extreme of which is stated rather saucily by John Hick.
The "Son of God" title, which was to become standard in the church's theology, probably began in the Old Testament and wider ancient Near Eastern usage in which it signified a special servant of God. In this sense, kings, emperors, pharaohs, great philosophers, miracles workers, and other holy men were commonly called son of God. But as the gospel went out beyond its Hebraic setting into the gentile world of the Roman Empire, this poetry was transformed into prose and the living metaphor congealed into a rigid and literal dogma. It was to accommodate this resulting metaphysical sonship that the church, after some three centuries of clashing debates, settled upon the theory that Jesus had two natures, one divine and the other human, being in one nature of one substance with God the Father and in the other human, being of one substance with humanity — a philosophical construction far removed from the thought world and teaching of Jesus Himself as is the in some ways parallel Mayahana [sic] Buddhist doctrine of the Trikaya from that of the historical Gautama.[16] On this view, the contextualization of the doctrine meant a complete distortion of the original teaching of Jesus and the apostles, a syncretizing of the teaching of the Bible with the philosophical presuppositions of the ancient world. Others take a more moderate view. Ogbonnaya believes that Tertullian's African communal perspective has been neglected because Christian theology has been dominated by a Eurocentric worldview in which Greek metaphysical and hierarchical thought combined Roman juri-pragmatic thought to produce an inadequate Trinitarianism.[17] For Miyahira, Tertullian, Augustine, and Barth employed "their own culturally loaded concepts to make the Trinity intelligible to those in their own cultural contexts."[18] Lee suggests that the change in our cultural context requires new statements of the doctrine of the Trinity that supplement the ancient creeds so that the doctrine will be meaningful for modern Christians, especially those who live outside the Western world.[19] The Greek statement of the doctrine was good for the ancient Church and is still useful, perhaps, in the context of Western Christianity, but, in Lee's words, "People in the Third World also seek the meaning of the Trinity in their own context."[20] In other words, for Miyahira and Lee, at least, modern theologians in Africa or Asia may be thought of as following the example of the early Church when they seek formulations of the doctrine of the Trinity that conform to their own particular time and culture. Before we can consider the question of whether or not this is a legitimate enterprise, we must answer historical questions like: Did the early Church state the doctrine of the Trinity in the language of Greek philosophy? Was it the intention of the Church fathers to communicate Biblical truth in contemporary philosophical language to facilitate communication? Did the church fathers, as Hick asserts, actually construct the doctrine of the Trinity in Greek philosophical terms in such a manner that they also fundamentally changed the worldview meaning of Biblical language? To state these questions differently, we are asking whether or not there was contextualization and, if there was, what sort of contextualization it was. A third question, whether or not the early Church engaged in anything that might be called de-contextualization, must also be considered. To properly evaluate John Hick's charge might require an entire volume — assertions are easier to make than to appraise! Briefly, however, consider his first assertion, the title son of God comes from the world of the Old Testament in which kings, prophets, and holy men are "commonly" called "son of God." We can only say that this usage is not "common" in the Old Testament, but even if it were, it would not necessarily mean that Jesus' use of the expression was not significantly different. When we consider the New Testament, for example, it is clear that the Jewish leaders understood him to be saying something more than "I am a prophet," or "I am a holy man." John reports,
Clearly, his own contemporaries understood Jesus to be making a peculiar claim, one with unmistakable metaphysical implications, which they considered to be blasphemous. Indeed, it was this claim by Christ that gave the Jewish leaders the excuse they needed to put Him to death.
But Jesus held his peace. And the high priest answered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy. What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death. (Mat. 26:63-66) We could multiply passages in which Jesus made claims about Himself or His special relationship to the Father which further emphasize the fact that even if we should grant that "son of God" also had a broader meaning in the ancient world, Jesus made extraordinary use of the expression. Nor are we reading into the expression some "Western" or "Gentile" meaning, since His own contemporaries — Jews all of them, both friends and enemies — understood Him to be "making Himself equal with God." The apostle Paul — though his preaching to Gentiles may disqualify him in the eyes of some modern thinkers — made the same sort of assertions about Christ. Statements such as those which claim that Jesus created the world (Col 1:16-17) and that He is Lord (1 Cor. 12:3), or the application to Jesus of Old Testament passages which refer clearly to Jehovah (Phil 2:9-11; etc.), all point to the fact that the apostle Paul — a first century Jew who had no intention of replacing the worldview of the Bible with an alien and "rigid literal dogma" — preached an ontologically pregnant Gospel. If there are no metaphysical implications intended, what can Paul mean, for example, when he declares, "For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily" (Col. 2:10)? What is even more unusual about Hick's view is that he focused on the doctrine of Christ's two natures. Now certainly, unless the early Church believed that Jesus were both God and man, they would not have come up with the Chalcedonian creed. But here, one would think, Hick might point out that as a matter of fact, it was common for men in the ancient world, Near East, Far East, and West alike, to believe in some sort of amalgamation of God and man. The pharaoh was the son of Ra, half god and half man. The emperor of Japan, too, was considered half god and half man until the end of World War II, when he had to de-divinize himself. A related prevalent idea in the ancient world was the notion of salvation as metaphysical promotion to some sort of divine, or at least, superhuman status. If the early Church fathers had asserted that Jesus was the child of a god and a woman, a half-god appearing in the form of a man, they would have been offering us a typical ancient notion, and to contend that that they were guilty of a syncretistic contextualization would be reasonable. But Hick has charged them with changing metaphor into dogma in the very area in which the dogma is contrary to the entire world of their day. Claims of cosmic significance for Apollo, Athena, Dionysius, Hermes, Heracles, Isis, and Mithras can all be found.[21] What made the doctrine of the early Church unique was the fact that Christ's Sonship was proclaimed in the alien religious and philosophical context of Hebraic and Biblical thought, not at all in conformity to the Gentile philosophy of the day. It was, rather, the opponents of the early Church whose doctrines were crude literal dogmas constructed to comply with the reigning cosmologies. For example, the Arian view that Jesus was created by God in the beginning and stood as a sort of metaphysical mediator between the transcendent Spirit and the world of matter clearly fits the ancient philosophical frame.[22] But the idea of a Person who is both God and man, but in whom the divine and the human are emphatically unmixed, uncompounded, and uncomposed, in which the two natures are separate and distinct, though united in the Person — this idea is unparalleled. The political and philosophical implications of this view, moreover, flew in the face of the mainstream movements of the day. For if Jesus is the one and only Person in whom deity and humanity unite, then the emperors, kings, and holy men of the day were mere creatures, under His supreme authority. This also implied that the revelation of the Word of God in Christ and in Scripture stands above all men.[23] This is hardly the kind of philosophy that enchants intellectuals or emperors! But the early Church did borrow the language of the philosophers, did it not? Terms like ousia, hypostasis, substantia, persona, homoousian, and the like are not found in the Bible. Does not the use of this sort of unbiblical language indicate a syncretistic contextualization, a combination of the worldview of the Bible with the worldview of the Greeks? This question might seem obvious, but Hanson notes that until recent times, the influence of Greek philosophy on the ancient Church was not considered important. Only with the work of the English scholar E. Hatch and the German A. von Harnack did this matter become a "burning issue."[24] On this question, there has been no scholarly consensus. Both extremes — that Greek philosophy had virtually no influence, and that Greek philosophical notions controlled the discussion of doctrine so thoroughly that they corrupted original Christianity — have been maintained.
[16] John Hick, op cit., p. 31. [17] Ogbonnaya, pp. xi-xii. [18] Miyahira, op cit., p. 3. [19] Lee, op cit., pp. 14 ff. [20] Op cit., p. 17. [21] See: Robert M. Grant, Gods and the One God (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1986), pp. 114-23. [22] It is also an example of heretics being less able to handle the metaphorical language of Scripture, according to R. P. C. Hanson, who writes, "[W]hen all else is said and done, it must be conceded that the Arians are less inclined to use allegory than the pro-Nicenes. This is not because their respective theologies drove them in that direction, but because the Arians were, with some exceptions such as Palladius and the author of the Opus Imperfectum, less intellectual and less sophisticated than the pro-Nicenes. We have seen this already in the case of the Macedonians requiring Scriptural proof. Prestige is near the mark when he says that the Arians had fallen into the pitfall of 'mistaking anthropomorphic language or physical metaphors for more than what they purported to be.'" The Search for the Christian God: the Arian Controversy, 318-381 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), p. 830. [23] See the extended discussion of the significance of the Chalcedonian creed in R. J. Rushdoony, The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1968). [24] Op cit., p. 856. Hatch published The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church in 1890 and just a few years prior to Harnack's famous History of Dogma.
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