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The Trinity and Contextualization Conclusion More could be added, I believe, but what we have seen so far is that the early Fathers were so far from adopting wholesale the Hellenistic worldview around them, so far from transforming Biblical metaphor into rigid and literal dogma according to Greek modes of thought that what they actually did was to redefine Greek terms to make them serviceable to the expression of the Biblical worldview.[38] In the process, they carefully rejected non-Biblical elements that had inadvertently been introduced into the Church's tradition and laid the foundations for a much broader and fuller expression of the Biblical worldview. This kind of activity goes beyond the notion of linguistic contextualization. We can see in the Church Fathers the kind of self-examination and self-judgment that Conn refers to as de-contextualization. They purged themselves of anti-Christian elements in their thought and created a whole new theological language out of borrowed words. Thus the Trinitarian theology of the early Church does offer us a theological model. We may say that there is an element of linguistic contextualization, though the term is not altogether appropriate since it is not at all evident that communication was the central concern of the theologians of the early centuries. They seem far more occupied with stating the truth accurately than with questions of communicating to Greco-Roman culture. But they clearly engaged in the kind of deep cultural criticism that involved a re-examination of the tradition of the Church and the rejection of elements that were found not to accord with Scripture. They consciously sought to eliminate the pernicious influences of the culture around them so that they could faithfully express the Truth of God's word. That was their example for us: faithfulness to the truth, not strict adherence to a particular vocabulary. As Torrance points out concerning Athanasius,
Here as elsewhere he retained his freedom to vary the sense of these words in accordance with the nature of the realities which they were intended to signify so that they might be allowed to show through the language being used. That is why Athanasius hesitated to commit himself to a fixed formalization of the terms ousia and hypostasis for all contexts which would have gone against his conviction that it is not the words themselves that mattered so much as the truths of divine revelation which they were meant to serve and indicate.[39]
[38] This is not to say that there was no compromise with Hellenistic thought in the Church's doctrine of God. The point is that the Trinity cannot rightly be called a syncretistic transformation of the Gospel into the forms of Greek thought. Other ideas about God, such as the denial that God can have feelings, are indeed overly influenced by ancient thought. However, no one recommends this sort of compromise as an example of theological wisdom! [39] T. F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), pp. 128-29. Torrance's books on the Trinity contain many other statements to the same effect, giving substantial emphasis to the fact that the work of the Nicene fathers was set firmly against the dualism of the Hellenistic world.
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