This builds on my last post, and continues to reference Helmut Thielicke. As we had occasion to notice in the last post, Thielicke helped us understand how the New Testament writers, and early Christian theologians (at their best) ‘used’ Greek philosophical grammar in order to help articulate the invisible God made visible in the mystery of the Incarnation. We came to a better understanding, I hope, of just how world-breaking and category smashing the sui generis nature of the Incarnation was (and is) for the world’s trajectory and telos at large. We came to understand how the profane categories of the pagan world could be utilized in a way, under the recreative pressure of God become human, that reifies or redefines the original meaning of said categories and words to the point that they now have a heavenly rather than secular meaning. If we are to think from the analogy of the Incarnation, and we should, it would be something like this: people often confuse Jesus as a simple man (and not the God-man) because He clearly was and is a man; so He looks profane like the rest of us. But He clearly is not profane; He is Holy God come in the flesh. He has made what was once sub-human, human, by re-conciling profane humanity with His Holy resurrected humanity; the sort of humanity that now can eternally and fully abide in peace with God. Likewise, this sort of thing happens with profane language. It can be ‘resurrected’ under the pressurized meaning that comes from ‘above’ in God’s Self-revelation, such that the profane language, say of the philosophers, can be commandeered, and given a completely new context and referent point for its meaning.

Thielicke, sticking with his previous example of the Stoic concept of Logos found reanimated in the Gospel of John 1.1 writes this:

before the Johannine Prologue could formulate the statement that the Word was made flesh, Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism, had played with the logos concept and given it cosmological significance as world reason or the subjective ratio that is analogous to the cosmic logos. When the Prologue adopts the term to describe the mystery of the incarnation, John strips it of its ideological content and uses it as an empty shell, as mere synonym for the Word of God. He thus avoids defining the phenomenon of Christ by the Stoic concept and in this way integrating Christ into the sphere of Greek thought. The reverse happens. What Logos means in John’s Gospel is defined by Christ, i.e., by what follows in the ensuing chapters. In second-century Apologists like Justin Martyr, however, we find the very opposite. To make Christianity understandable to those stamped by the Greek tradition, to bring it closer to them, an attempt was made to show that the Greek philosophers were in a sense precursors of Christ. What they said about the logos contained serious particles of truth and indications of what Christ would reveal in fulness and perfection as the manifestation of the world logos. The apologetic aim was that those influenced by Greek thought should not find in Christ something absolutely new and hence scandalous and offensive (1 Cor. 1:23), but a confirmation of their own thinking and a transcending and completing of their own fragmentary knowledge. This missionary view presupposed the need to accommodate the Christian message to Greek thought and hence to define Christ by the Greek logos, in contradistinction from John’s Gospel. Clearly, many essentials of the gospel, e.g., the folly of the cross (1 Cor. 1:18; 2:6ff) or miracles, fell by the wayside with this procedure. The logos concept loses its servant role as a conceptual instrument and takes on a normative and governing role. Christ is subsumed under the concept and becomes a mere illustration. We thus have here a classical example of the revolt of the conceptual means. In such cases it is impossible to extract the mere form of the term and cast off the material intention. The form becomes the content. This is the hermeneutical difficulty we constantly encounter.[1]

This reality, what Helmut is referring us to, is pretty much what has animated me for my whole blogging career. People’s failure to properly reify theological language and conceptuality UNDER God’s Self-revelation results in the sort of example Thielicke gives us with reference to the imposition of the Greek over the Revelation. I believe much of classical theism’s heritage, particularly the kind that developed in the Aristotelian mediaeval period, and what was unloaded into much of so called classical Calvinism (post reformed orthodoxy) [and Arminianism, and much of Lutheranism] went awry at just the point where this ‘translation’ process has unfortunately favored the Greek over the Revelation of God. The intention, in the best of cases, has been to not allow the Greek undo weight; but the reality is that the Greek has often been given undo weight. When the theologian’s conversation about God has language like simplicity, impassibility, immutability, eternality so on and so forth constantly attending and framing it—before language like Father-Son, triune Love, Incarnation etc.—we know almost immediately that we have fallen prey to what Thielicke identifies as a negative.

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Modern Faith & Thought, trans. by Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), 11-12.