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The Trinity and Contextualization Trinity Contextualized? (Part 2) According to Hanson, there have been two important breakthroughs in scholarship that shed light on the whole issue. First, the newly discovered Nag Hammadi documents and other studies in Gnosticism show that "though Christianity in the second and third centuries was not uninfluenced by Gnosticism, either by reaction or by absorption of some of its features, by the fourth century the Gnostic threat to the Christian faith was over and none of the many diverse forms of thought or belief which that term covers figured seriously as an influence on Christian thinking."[25] The other factor mentioned by Hanson is the growth of our knowledge of ancient Greek philosophy in the third to fifth centuries A.D. In contrast to the scholars of the 19th and early 20th century, who were thoroughly familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle, the early Christians of the third and fourth centuries lived at a time when it would have been rare to be so well acquainted with these Greek giants. Aristotle was still read, Hanson tells us, but "Aristotelianism as such scarcely existed." As for Plato, "Even the most intellectual theologians . . . are most unlikely to have read right through Plato, though all of them would probably have read the Timaeus and the Symposium at least."[26] With our present knowledge of the world of the early Church, it should be clear that the kind of wholesale syncretistic contextualization suggested by Hick is simply not true - if for not other reason simply because there is nothing so simple about the whole issue. For example, the influence of philosophy changes over time. Hanson notes that Origin synthesized Christian doctrine and Middle Platonic philosophy, mixed with some Stoicism. But, he adds, "There were no Origins in the fourth century and references to him were usually polite and wary rather than enthusiastic, except for those few who attacked him like Methodius, Eustathius of Antioch, and Epiphanius, and at the very end of the century, Jerome (that burnt child who dreaded the fire)."[27] Before the Cappadocians, Hanson reports, there are only two clear examples of theologians being "deeply influenced by Greek philosophy" but neither of them had any significant impact on Christian thought.[28] Also, these early theologians are not equally influenced or influenced in the same ways by the surrounding worldviews. Nor were they uncritical. Thus the more philosophically sophisticated theologians such as the Cappadocians who were relatively well-educated in Greek philosophy, though not uninfluenced, were critical of many basic Greek ideas and, on occasion, even belittled philosophy. Concerning the growth of Christian doctrine in the early centuries, Hanson concludes that, "It is equally incorrect to see this process as one of an Hellenization of an originally simple Christian gospel. The theologians of the fourth century were compelled by the very necessity of doing theology at all to use the terminology of Greek philosophy. We have seen that the truth gradually dawned upon the most intelligent of them (though it was never accepted by the Homoian Arians) that it is impossible to interpret the Bible simply in the words of the Bible. This being so, no alternative vocabulary was open to them than that of the late Greek philosophy. They used this vocabulary with a fine disregard for consistency and an eclectic method which ensured that they were wholly absorbed or captured by no single system, but used the materials provided by all. . . . Only if we define Christianity in such simplistic terms as those to which Harnack thought it should be reduced can we see the process as one of Hellenization."[29] Hanson, thus specifically repudiates the syncretistic contextualization sort of interpretation asserted by John Hick, suggesting, rather, a process that more accords with what we have called "linguistic contextualization." The questions being treated, the opposition of heretical ideas, the quest for understanding all combined to produce a new theological vocabulary which included words borrowed from the philosophical vocabulary of the day. But, as Hanson concludes, "the pro-Nicene theologians were responding properly and honestly, as properly and honestly as the circumstances of their age would allow, to a genuine compulsion. In spite of inadequate equipment for understanding the Bible, in spite of much semantic confusion which required protracted and elaborate clearing up, in spite of being compelled to work with philosophical terms and concepts widely different from those of the Bible, they found a satisfactory answer to the great question which had fired the search for the Christian doctrine of God . . ."[30] There is more, however, that needs to be said. The development of orthodox Christian Trinitarianism involved the rejection of the "traditional, centuries-old, much-used, one can almost say Catholic, concept of the pre-existent Christ as the link between an impassible Father and a transitory world, that which made of him a convenient philosophical device, the Logos-doctrine dear to the heart of many orthodox theologians in the past, was abandoned."[31] The pro-Nicene theologians, in other words, changed the doctrine of the Church and changed it radically.
To place this in the language of contextualization, we may say that the Apologists of the second century were in fact guilty of a degree of syncretistic contextualization. They had imbibed to a degree the dualistic ways of thought characteristic of the ancient world in general. Through the process of theological discussion and controversy, the Church pruned this false growth. The compromised Logos doctrine was eliminated. As T. F. Torrance explains, the Nicene fathers "realised that if they allowed the dualist ways of thought in the prevailing culture to cut the bond of being between Christ and God the Father, then the whole substance of the Christian Gospel would be lost."[33] Furthermore, the borrowed vocabulary of Greek philosophy, having been transplanted into the soil of the Biblical worldview, bore new fruit. According to Torrance,
It was through thinking out the inner relation of the incarnation to the creation that early Christian theology so transformed the foundations of Greek philosophy, science and culture, that it laid the original basis on which the great enterprise of empirico-theoretical science now rests.[34] With regard to the use of the philosophical term ousia, Torrance affirms that the Greek Fathers used it in a way very different way that of Greek philosophy. Athanasius did not "operate with a preconceived idea or definition of being in speaking of God's Being, but drew his understanding of the Being of God from the ever-living God himself as he speaks to us personally in his Word and reveals himself in his creative and saving activity."[35] One result of this utterly different approach to questions of being was the development of a new understanding of personhood also. The three Persons of the Trinity were understood to relate to one another in covenantal love. One God in Three Persons, thus, meant that "there developed out of the doctrine of the Trinity the new concept of person, unknown in human thought until then, according to which the relations between persons belong to what persons are."[36] The Christian doctrine of God as Three Persons existing in a relationship of covenant love involved a "radical transformation of the Greek concept of being (ousia), when used of God, from a pre-Christian impersonal to a profoundly personal sense."[37]
[25] Ibid., p. 856. [26] Ibid., p. 857. [27] Ibid., p. 859-60. [28] Ibid., p. 862-63. [29] Ibid., pp. 870-71. Note the similarity to John Hick. [30] Ibid., p. 875. [31] Ibid., p. 872. [32] Ibid., p. 872. [33] The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 7. [34] Ibid. [35] The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), p. 116. [36] Ibid., p. 102. [37] Ibid., p. 103. It should be noted that I have placed more emphasis here on the concept of the covenant than Torrance does, though it is by no means absent from his discussion. See, for example, pp. 120 ff. and 131 ff. Table of Contents
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