Tag Archives: Christian theology

The Holy Spirit and the Trinity

24 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Faith

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St Gregory of Nazianzus

St Gregory of Nazianzus

Although Nicaea gave us the basis of the Creed which bears its name, it failed to say much about the Holy Spirit. It was left to St. Basil and St. Gregory Nazianzus to show that the Spirit, too, was of the same Substance as the Father and the Son. Their greatest achievement, however, was to make sense of the One-ness and the Three-ness of the Trinity.

The Trinity was of the same Substance: the Father was God, the Son was God and the Holy Spirit was God – but the Father was not the Son, neither was either of those two Persons the Holy Spirit, although they are what the Father is in Substance. They came up with the word hypostasis to express the difference. The Son and the Spirit are what the Father is (God) but they are not who the Father is. They relate to each other as Persons in a communion of love which is not to be explained.

The relationship between Father and Son is that the former begets the latter. This mode of eternal filial origination is the distinct hypostatic character of the Son – His Sonship lies in that He is begotten of the Father (before all worlds, God of God, True light of True light, begotten not made).

How has he been begotten? I re-utter the question with loathing. God’s begetting ought to have the tribute of our reverent silence. The important point is for you to learn that he has been begotten. As to the way it happens, we shall not concede that even angels, much less you, know that. Shall I tell you the way? It is a way known only to the begetting Father and the begotten Son. Anything beyond this fact is hidden by a cloud and escapes your dull vision. [Oration 29.8 6]

The Spirt issues perennially from the Father, and this mode of eternal spiration is the distinct hypostatic character of the Spirit, who, however, proceeds from the Father through the Son. The Spirit’s mode of origin – spiration, is what distinguishes the Third Person of the Trinity from the Second.

What, then, is “proceeding”? You explain the ingeneracy of the Father and I will give you a biological account of the Son’s begetting and the Spirit’s proceeding – and let us go mad the pair of us for prying into God’s secrets. What competence have we here? We cannot understand what lies under our feet, cannot count the sand in the sea, “the drops of rain or the days of this world,” much less enter into the “depths of God” and render a verbal account of a nature so mysterious, so much beyond words. [Oration 31.8]

So, all Three Persons are God, but each in a distinct, hypostatic realisation. The Divine Nature is not a common property of three different entities, it is, as St. Gregory showed, a personal being (that of the Father) that is hypostatically realised by the Son and the Spirit as they each derive from and relate back to the Father. The Father is the dynamic cause of the Trinity – Three Persons, One Substance.

This I give you to share, and to defend all your life, the One Godhead and Power, found in the Three in Unity, and comprising the Three separately, not unequal, in substances or natures, neither increased nor diminished by superiorities or inferiorities; in every respect equal, in every respect the same;
Just as the beauty and the greatness of the heavens is one; the infinite conjunction of Three Infinite Ones, Each God when considered in Himself; as the Father so the Son, as the Son so the Holy Ghost; the Three One God when contemplated together; Each God because Consubstantial; One God because of the Monarchia.
No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One. [Oration 40.41]

St. Gregory himself, rightly warns us that to engage too much in theological reflection led to the danger of dazzling the mind by speaking about mysteries that even the angels cannot comprehend. After that little excursion – something upon which we can all agree.

Defining the Trinity

23 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Faith

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Sometimes commentators ask why Bosco is not banned? There is a simple answer, which is that I care about his immortal soul and the souls of others, and what he, and they confess, when they say they need no religion, just a simple walk with Christ, is a commonly held position. After all, one might reasonably ask, “why does all this stuff about the Trinity matter anyway, can’t I be a Christian without an advanced degree in theology – and anyway, no one really understands it?”  The answer is that we are not the first to encounter Christ, and that those who walked the earth with Him thought it vital that the tradition they passed on be held by all followers; St Paul did not merely receive a revelation and declare himself authorised to teach as he liked. What applies to Paul applies to all of us. Christians have known that orthodox belief matters because it defines, as far as we can, who Christ is – and if we fail to grasp that, we can’t have any sort of relationship with Him.

The New Testament talks much about Father and Son, and about the Holy Ghost, but as the last post outlined, understanding the relationship between between the three was a problem. Christians, after all, were Monotheists – believers in One God – and yet their sacred scriptures and their tradition seemed to contain three entities.

By the fourth century it was clear that the notion that this did not mean One God acting three parts – it would make no sort of sense, even as a deep mystery, to have Jesus praying to Himself at Gethsemane, or asking Himself to let the cup pass Him by. But the nature of the relationship between Father and Son (at this point little attention had been paid to the Holy Spirit) was thrown into question by an Alexandrian priest, Arius.

Quoting John 17:3 , along with Colossians 1:15 and Proverbs 8:22 he argued that the Son was not God, but the first-born of creation – a creature, not the Creator. His bishop, Alexander, condemned him, but, as is so often the way, Arius quoted these lines of Scripture and argued that there was a ‘time when the Son was not’, defying his bishop to do anything about it. Arius was not the first, and will not be the last, clever man to think himself illuminated in a way denied to lesser intellects.

Arius posed a problem for Bishop Alexander, and so popular was his reading of Scripture, that it soon posed a problem for Bishops elsewhere. What the confrontation with Arius did was to force men who had not thought through the beliefs they confessed to do so. So what was it the Bishops held? They held that Jesus was God, in the beginning with God – a notion to make the head spin, but one which accorded with John’s Gospel and which made sense of Jesus being Divine. But Jesus was also human, so how could He be both? The Arians argued that this made no sense, and that they were more logical – Jesus was a created being sent by God to create the world and redeem mankind – but He was not God, as there was only One God. This was easily comprehensible by everyone – hence its popularity.

In order to combat this heresy, orthodox theologians, the most eminent of them being a deacon of Alexander’s, Athanasius (who succeeded him as Patriarch of Alexandria), were forced to think through how God could be both One and Three. The notion that God existed in three modes, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was a common one, but did that mean that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were somehow less than the Father? Athanasius argued that He existed in Three Persons, that Father, Son and Holy Spirit were equal and yet one. The word he used to express this concept was the Greek homoousios – that expressed the view that the Son was of “one substance” with the Father. It was from this formula that the Nicene Creed developed in 325.

The Nicene Creed answers Arianism directly, saying of Jesus that he is:

the Son of God, only-begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten, not made, one in substance [homoousios] with the Father …

So, God was Father, the Generator of all things, but Himself ungenerate (that is He was before, above and beyond our concepts of Time), and Jesus was generated of the Father ‘before all worlds’. The manner in which this has happened was a mystery beyond our comprehension, but it firmly established that Father and Son, and also Holy Spirit, were of the same substance (consubstantial) and therefore both one and three – for which the new word, Trinity, was coined.

The Council of Nicaea in 325 established this as Christian orthodox belief. But, as Athanasius himself was aware, the place of the Holy Spirit in this triad whilst established, had hardly been discussed. This will be the subject of the final part of this series.

Misunderstanding the Trinity

22 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Early Church, Faith, Reading the BIble

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I suggested yesterday that it is clear that Christians have developed their understanding of Scripture from the earliest times; that tradition, oral and written to which Paul refers in his second letter to the Thessalonians, has been preserved and studied. One of the distinctive features of Christianity is that it sees God in Three Persons, the Blessed Trinity. We like to say that it is inherent in Scripture, and indeed Father, Son and Holy Ghost are all found there; but the relation between the Three has not always been clear, and if the early history of Christianity shows us anything, it is that left to themselves, even learned men can be led, and lead others, astray. In this short series I want to examine the developing understanding of ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ in the early Church.

Strictly speaking heresy is only rightly so called when it appears in opposition to orthodoxy, and it is often the case in the early Church that beliefs which were, when enunciated debatable, later became classified as heretical, and it is well to say upfront that in the long debate over this matter, heresy has played a useful part in forcing the Church to be clearer about what is and is not orthodox belief; another reason, of course, why absent authority, chaos is not far away. Most Trinitarians accept a definition arrived at by the Church and guaranteed by it, even if they cannot accept the Church which gave that guarantee.

 

One common early reading, which is still present in some Pentecostal churches is called ‘Modalism’.  Modalism is the belief that God, rather than being three persons, is one person who reveals himself in three “modes,” much as an actor might play three roles in a movie. It is also called Sabellianism or monarchianism. Modalism is associated with two notable early church figures, Praxeas and Sabellius, both of whom gained a large following in the church in the late 2nd (Praxeas) and early 3rd centuries (Sabellius). The size of their following and an explanation for it is given by Tertullian in A.D. 200:

The simple, indeed, (I will not call them unwise and unlearned), who always constitute the majority of believers, are startled at the dispensation [of the Trinity], on the ground that their very rule of faith withdraws them from the world’s plurality of gods to the one only true God.
   They fail to understand that, although he is the one only God, He must yet be believed in with his own order. The numerical order and distribution of the Trinity they assume to be a division of the Unity, whereas the Unity which derives the Trinity out of its own self is so far from being destroyed, that it is actually supported by it.
   They are constantly throwing out against us that we are preachers of two gods and three gods, while they take to themselves the preeminent credit of being worshippers of the one God, as if the Unity itself with irrational deductions did not produce heresy, and the Trinity rationally considered constitute the truth. (Against Praxeas 3)

There is not One Divine Person, there are Three. The earliest definition of Our Faith is to be found in St. Irenaeus:

The Church, though dispersed through our the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith:

[She believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them.

And in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation

And in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Tertullian shows us the problems the early Fathers had:

Before all things God was alone … He was alone because there was nothing external to him but himself. Yet even then was he not alone, for he had with him that which he possessed in himself—that is to say, his own Reason.

    … Although God had not yet sent out his Word, he still had him within himself …

   I may therefore without rashness establish that even then, before the creation of the universe, God was not alone, since he had within himself both Reason, and, inherent in Reason, his Word, which he made second to himself by agitating it within Himself.

It is easy to see from this how Arius could conclude: “there was a time when the Son did not exist.”

The early church answer was that there was a time when the Son was not separate from the Father, but there was never a time when he did not exist. Before He was separate from the Father, He was already the Logos inside of God. There was a term for this: homoousios (of the same substance). It was so important that it was inserted in the Nicene Creed twice.

The second part of this series will explain why this word was so important. But already we have, I think, established that left to themselves, there is no guarantee that theologians or ordinary Christians, will come to an orthodox understanding of who God is.

Heidelberg and Hobbiton: Theology of the Cross in Middle-earth

16 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in Faith, Lutheranism, Persecution, Tolkien

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hobbits-lotr-640wideJess’ last paragraph Saturday caught my attention when she said this.

“The search for respectability often becomes a search for being accepted by a society whose values are not ours – and as, for example, the development of views on homosexuality shows, what was once not only respectable but mandatory under law, can become the opposite very quickly. Best build on Christ, who is love, and leave society to its ever-changing ways.”

It reminded me of something I had read recently, this

HEIDELBERG AND HOBBITON:

THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS IN MIDDLE-EARTH

 God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; 
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

1 Corinthians 1:27

What does Martin Luther have in common with Frodo, and Samwise? I assure you, it’s more than enjoying the company of friends and family, joyous hospitality, and of course, a good ale.

On April 26th, 1518 Martin Luther delivered his famous Heidelberg Disputation before the General Chapter of the Augustinian order.

On December 25th, 3018 (Shire reckoning) four hobbits, two men, one elf, one dwarf, and one wizard left Rivendell to destroy the Ring of Power in the fire of Mt. Doom.

To be sure, these are two different events from two different worlds, one history and the other epic fantasy. Yet, something fundamental to the Christian faith ties both stories together.

[snip]

“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Cor 2:1-5)

Like St. Paul, Luther learned to rejoice in weakness rather than boast the confidence of human works. For in our weakness we see the great strength of God displayed in Jesus who though he was strong, yet for our sakes became weak. Jesus entered Jerusalem, not on a conquering warhorse like the Caesars of Rome, but on a humble donkey as a suffering servant. For Luther, the theology of glory and the theology of the cross was as different as death and life, blindness and sight, boasting in man’s glory and boasting in the glory of Christ Crucified for sinners.

Like Luther, Frodo and Samwise were also on a journey. Their departure from Rivendell (and the Shire before) marked the beginning of the long road to Mordor, a journey in which we see the hobbits grow in wisdom and stature before men and elves.

As the story unfolds we see Luther’s Heidelberg theses on display, even before the Fellowship leaves Rivendell. Gimli’s axe cannot destroy the One Ring. And Boromir’s desire to wield it against the dark lord, Sauron is foolish and ruinous. Tolkien’s point is clear. The brute strength of dwarfs and the stout hearts of men are no match for evil. Something smaller and unexpected is needed, a humble hobbit.

“I will take the Ring, Frodo said, “though I do not know the way.”

Here Heidelberg meets Hobbiton. A theology of glory is turned aside by a hobbit, small in stature, and unnoticed by the men of Middle-earth and even Sauron himself. Frodo reveals himself to be a theologian of the cross, choosing to bear the One Ring with all its seething, restless evil, and take it to its destruction at great cost to himself and his companions.

via Heidelberg and Hobbiton: Theology of the Cross in Middle-earth | BLOG | 1517. The Legacy Project

I don’t have much to add to this, except that perhaps we should listen a bit better to Christ. He said it often enough. Here, for example, in Mathew 5, He says:

5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.