Category Archives: Arius

The Triune Worshippers against the Eunomians and Classical Liberals

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Being a human coram Deo (before or in the presence of the living God), in regard to its telos or purposefulness, is underwritten by being a worshipper of the triune God rather than an as an idolater of a self-projected god of a unitarian and individualistic origination. So-called classical liberalism, much of which was in fact Teutonic or German in orientation, of the Enlightenment/ -post higher critical ilk, is of the latter instance. That is to say, higher critics of the New Testament so demythologized the NT of its reality in the Theandric person of Jesus Christ, that all that was left for Jesus to be, at best, was as an exemplar for others to find in themselves; in mimicry of Jesusā€™ example of what it meant to operate with a Father-God consciousness; in Schleiermacherā€™s zeitgeist, having a ā€œfeelingā€ of dependence upon a Father-God. To the point, the classical liberal was necessarily turned inward to the inward curvature of the soul, wherein all that was left to fill the gap between God and humanity, wasnā€™t the divine personhood of the Godman in Jesus Christ, but instead, the divine personhood resident in each human being as they cultivated the feeling they had for Godness; indeed, as that godness was resident within the environ of their own human being. In other words, once the classical liberal denuded Jesus of His eternal and triune deity, all they had left was some type of Arian-unitarian notion of God wherein the mediator between God and man, was a naked humanity purely predicated by being an abstract human enmeshed in the world processes of existential existence among the other animals alongside us.

James B. Torrance (brother of Thomas F. Torrance) describes this type of unitarian way, with reference to Adolf Von Harnack and John Hick:

Model 1: The Harnack (Hick) Model. The first model . . . is that of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, given classical expression by Adolf Harnack [sic] in his 1900 Berlin lectures Das Wesen des Christentums, or What is Christianity? Recently Professor John Hick has sought to revive it in an adapted form. According to this, the heart of religion is the soulā€™s immediate relationship to God. What God the Father was to Old Testament Israel, he was to Jesus, and what he was to Jesus, he was to Paul and still is the same to us and all men and women today. We, with Jesus, stand as men and women, as brothers and sisters, worshiping the one Father but not worshiping any incarnate Son. Jesus is the man but not God. We do not need any mediator, or ā€œmyth of God incarnate.ā€

In Harnackā€™s own words: ā€œThe Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son.ā€ Jesusā€™ purpose was to confront men and women with the Father, not with himself. He proclaimed the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of mankind, but not himself. ā€œThe Christian religion is something simple and sublime.ā€ It means ā€œGod and the soul, the soul and its Godā€ and this, he says, must be kept ā€œfree from the intrusion of any alien element.ā€ Nothing must come between the child and his heavenly Father, be it priest, or Bible, or law, or doctrine, or Jesus Christ himself! The major ā€œalien elementā€ which Harnack has in mind is belief in the incarnation, a doctrine which he regarded as emerging from the hellenizing of the simple message of Jesus.

This view is clearly unitarian and individualistic. The center of everything is our immediate relationship with God, our present-day experience. The Father-Son relationship is generic, not unique. With this interpretation, all the great dogma of the church disappear:

    • The doctrine of the Trinity. We are all sons and daughters of God and the Spirit is the spirit of brotherly love.
    • The incarnation. Jesus Christ is not ā€œhis only [unicus] Son, our Lord,ā€ but one of the class of creaturely sons of God. Sonship is not unique to Christ.
    • The doctrines of the Spirit, union with Christ, the Church as the body of Christ and the sacraments. Jesus did not found a church. He proclaimed the kingdom of God as a fellowship of love.

This liberal reconstruction made deep inroads and accounts in measure for the moralistic view of Christianityā€”where Jesus is the teacher of ethical principles, and where the religious life is our attempt to follow the example of Jesus, living by the golden rule, ā€œdoing to others as you would be done by.ā€ With this moralistic, individualistic understanding of God and the Christian life, the doctrine of the Trinity loses its meaning, in fact disappearsā€”and with it all doctrines of atonement and unconditional free grace, held out to us in Christ.[1]

For students of theological history what should be evident is the way that history repeats itself; albeit in different dress and grammar. At base, there is only so much space for the human wit to innovate ā€˜under the Sun.ā€™ In other words, the issues the Protestant or classical liberals presented the Enlightened and post-Enlightened world with were, by and large, the same issues the early church Fathers, like Athanasius, Irenaeus, Cyril et al. were faced with by the Arians, Eunomians, and the many other traditional heretics we know of today.

The key to genuine worship of the triune God is that first the person must confess the fact that there is a triune God. Once this confession has been made, not in abstraction, but from within the depths of Christā€™s vicarious confession for usā€”as He lamented with and worshipped the Father for us, in the breath of Holy Spiritā€”the potential worshipper can simply repose in the bosom of the Father, and worship from within the center of Godā€™s life as that is the Only Begotten. Once this move is understood, indeed as the move of God for the world in the Theandric person of the eternal Son, Jesus Christ, we are no longer thrown upon ourselves (as TFT was wont to phraseize), but upon the mercies and graciousness of the living God; indeed, the living God who truly is, Immanuel, God with us. The classical liberals were too taken by their own moment in history, indeed an Arianizing and Eunomianizing moment, and as such, like the Vienna Positivists, lived and breathed in a vacuous turmoil of their own making. To be sure, they would have had it no other way; that is, until they went to stand before the living God. Now like the Rich Man they gnash their teeth as they remember the poor man, Lazarus, and realize that he had found and been found by the narrow way of the living Godā€™s kingdom in the risen Christ.

All that is left for the unitarian, the Arian and Eunomian, the classical liberal worshipper of God is to first worship their own innards, and then attempt to project those onto the feelings they themselves discern as the Holy drip of Godā€™s Fatherly life built into the immanent frame of their own deified lives, as it were. What a tragedy indeed.

[1] James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic Press, 1996), 25ā€“6.

Craig Carter’s Arian God Versus Karl Barth’s Athanasian God

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Yesterday Craig Carter tweeted the following: ā€œThe days of revising & despising CT w/o challenge are over. I’ll be arguing that the proofs are missing from much recent theology b/c of “the Barthian gambit,”Ā i.e.Ā the attempt to do theology w/o metaphysics & ground it inĀ XologyĀ alone. My conclusion: the Barthian gambit failed.ā€1 I have had a couple exchanges in the past with Carter on Twitter, with reference to Barthā€™s theology. What stood out in those exchanges was that he is rather clueless about Barthā€™s theology; the newest tweet above continues to illustrate this. But Carter isnā€™t alone in his disregard, and even animus toward the Trinitarian theological revolution that Barth was a huge part of in the 20thĀ century; Katherine Sonderegger in herĀ Systematic Theology V1, also takes aim at Barthā€™s supposedly errant ā€˜Christomonismā€™ when it comes to doing Christian theology. The assumption, particularly as evinced in Carterā€™s mis-characterization of Barth, is that Barthā€™s mode is purely a modern aberration with no historical or paleo antecedents; as if nobody in the history of the Church operated with the sort of Christ concentration that Barth does in his theologizing. Carter et alia want to engage in a sort of subtraction process by claiming that Barth is simply representative of a modern method of erasing theĀ classicalĀ way of doing theology by way of imposing KantianĀ postmetaphysicsĀ on the whole antique gambit of theological reflection.Ā 

But does Carterā€™s misunderstanding withstand critical scrutiny; that is when he isnā€™t able to simplyĀ appeal to his people? What Carter doesnā€™t understand is that Barthā€™s whole program, particularly hisĀ Church Dogmatics, only ever took off when he got hold of theĀ PatristicĀ mechanism of an/ -enhypostasis. This gave Barth a way to engage in the sort of Christ concentration that would have made Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria quite proud. Indeed, and I will use this to prove my point about Barthā€™sĀ classicalĀ chops, one of Barthā€™s best Anglophone students, TF Torrance, developed what might be called anĀ Athanasian stratified knowledge of GodĀ that is in lockstep with Barthā€™s own theory of revelation. Hereā€™s a taste:Ā 

The economic Trinity might well be spoken of as theĀ evangelical TrinityĀ and the ontological Trinity as theĀ theological Trinity. ā€˜Evangelicalā€™ in this sense refers to the truth content of the Gospel as it is revealed to us through the incarnate or human economy (į¼” Ī±Ī½ĪøĻĻŽĻ€Ī¹Ī½Ī·Ā ĪæĪ¹ĪŗĪæĪ½ĪæĪ¼ĪÆĪ±) which Christ undertook toward us, in the midst of us, and for our sakes. . . ;Ā andā€™theologicalĀ in this sense refers to the truth of the eternal Being and Activity of God as he is in himself, the essential Deity . . . or ā€˜Theologyā€™ (Ī˜ĪµĪæĪ»ĪæĪ³ĪÆĪ±, which Athanasius equated with divine worship). While for AthanasiusĀ economyĀ andĀ theologyĀ (ĪæĪ¹ĪŗĪæĪ½ĪæĪ¼ĪÆĪ± andĀ Ī˜ĪµĪæĪ»ĪæĪ³ĪÆĪ±) must be clearly distinguished, they are not to be separated from each other. If the economic or evangelical Trinity and the ontological or theological Trinity were disparate, this would bring into question whetherĀ God himselfĀ was really in Jesus Christ reconciling the world to himself. That is the evangelical and epistemological significance of theĀ homoousionĀ (ā€˜consubstantialā€™, of one substance, or of one and the same being with the Father) formulated by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. If there is no real bondĀ in GodĀ between the economic Trinity and the ontological Trinity, the saving events proclaimed in the economy of the Gospel are without any divine validity and the doctrine of the Trinity is lacking in any ultimate divine truth. The trinitarian message of the Gospel tells us that the very contrary is the case, for in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit we really have to do with theĀ Lord God himselfĀ as our Saviour. Thus, as we shall see, the designation of Jesus as ā€˜Lordā€™,Ā ieĀ ĪšĻĻĪ¹ĪæĻ‚Ā = YHWH, is found more than a hundred times in the New Testament Scriptures.2Ā 

This is the sort of ā€œBarthian gambitā€ that Carter bombastically claims he will be defeating in the near term. Barth is part of the Athanasian tradition of Christ concentration, just as much as is his student: TF Torrance. When Carter refers to CT (classical theism) he clearly has something nearer in focus; oh yeah: Thomas [Aquinas], and theĀ Christian AristotelianismĀ that he thinks serves as a capstone for the classical theistic, so-called, tradition. But Iā€™m afraid that what he doesnā€™t seem to grasp, Carter that is, is thatĀ AthansiusĀ would have been on Barthā€™s and Torranceā€™s side, and not his. You see, Athanasius understood what a rankĀ HellenicĀ approach to God does to God. He understood that it didnā€™t actually get you to the God who is Father of the Son, but instead that it gets you to a notion ofĀ godnessĀ that is constrained by the rationalist projections of the philosophers and theologizers supposedly thinking this God. Here is how Athanasius would respond to the sort of unbridled and unevangelizedĀ HellenicĀ god that Carter believes classically reflects the true God:Ā 

ThereforeĀ it is moreĀ piousĀ and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call HimĀ Unoriginate.Ā For the latter title, as I have said, does nothing more than signify all the works, individually and collectively, which have come to be at theĀ willĀ ofĀ GodĀ through the Word; but the title Father has its significance andĀ itsĀ bearing only from the Son. And, whereas the Word surpasses things originated, by so much and more does calling God Father surpass the calling HimĀ Unoriginate. For the latter is unscriptural and suspicious, because it has various senses; so that, when a man is asked concerning it, his mind is carried aboutĀ toĀ many ideas; but the word Father is simple and scriptural, and more accurate, and only implies theĀ Son. And ‘Unoriginate’ is a word of the Greeks, whoĀ knowĀ not the Son; but ‘Father’ has been acknowledged and vouchsafed by our Lord. For He,Ā knowingĀ Himself whose Son He was, said, ‘I am in theĀ Father, and the Father is in Me;’ and, ‘He that has seen Me, has seen theĀ Father,’ and ‘I and the Father areĀ One ;’ but nowhere is He found to call the FatherĀ Unoriginate. Moreover, when He teaches us toĀ pray, He says not, ‘When youĀ pray, say, O GodĀ Unoriginate,’ but rather, ‘When youĀ pray, say, Our Father, which art in heavenĀ LukeĀ 11:2.’ And it was HisĀ willĀ that the Summary of ourĀ faithĀ should have the same bearing, in bidding us beĀ baptized, not into the name ofĀ UnoriginateĀ and originate, nor into the name of Creator and creature, but into the Name of Father, Son, andĀ Holy Ghost. For with such an initiation we too, being numbered among works, are made sons, and using the name of theĀ Father, acknowledge from that name the Word also in the Father Himself. A vain thing then is their argument about the term ‘Unoriginate,’ as is nowĀ proved, and nothing more than a fantasy.3Ā 

Is Carterā€™s God theĀ ArianĀ god? No. But not because of methodology, only because ofĀ Piety.Ā By way of methodology Carterā€™s God only gives us a god who is in turn aĀ monad; a singular essence from whence the Father, Son, and Holy SpiritĀ accidentlyĀ subsist. It is Barthā€™s and Torranceā€™s and Athanasiusā€™s God, the One known through theĀ SonĀ (grounded in ā€œXtologyĀ aloneā€) whom allows us to have actual ā€˜innerā€™ knowledge aboutĀ WhoĀ God is. The Athanasian tradition Barth thinks from doesnā€™t yield a monadic god, as Carterā€™s necessarily does; instead, it yields a knowledge of God wherein God is God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.Ā Ā 

Canā€™t wait to see how Carter defeats the Athanasian conception of God with his Arian methodology.Ā 

 

1Ā Craig Carter,Ā Twitter.

2Ā Thomas F. Torrance,Ā The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three PersonsĀ (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 7-8.Ā 

3Ā St. Athanasius,Ā ContraĀ ArianosĀ 1.9.34.Ā 

The Self-Communicating God of Athanasius Against the Mute God of Arius: God’s Being As Love Rather Than An Absolute Self

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The doctrines of old never really get old. The heresies of old never really get old, they just re-emerge in new language games per the periods those language games are played within. Aspects of what is known as Arianism continue to rear its ugly head into the 21st century. If you donā€™t know Arianism, at base, is the idea that ā€˜there was a time when the Son was notā€™; in other words, there was a time when the Son of God, who we now know as Jesus Christ, was non-existent, that he is a creature. This was the heresy that flowered early in the church through the teachings of Arius, and his followers, and which Athanasius argued against starting early at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. Ironically there are many, even today, who want to argue that the development of what became Nicene theology is really the result of overly imposing Hellenic categories upon God thus making God into a three-headed monster; or making God into a pantheon of persons seated above in the heavenlies. I say this is ironic because we do have a case of an over imposition of Greek categories upon the Christian God, but it isnā€™t from the Trinitarians (the Nicenes); it is from the Arian impulse to mold God into the monadic conception of godness that we can derive from the classical philosophers (e.g. the god of the philosophers). In fact it is the Trinitarians who refused to give into the seduction provided for by the intellectuals, and instead flipped the grammar they developed on its head by allowing the pressure of Godā€™s Self-revelation and Self-communication in Jesus Christ to reify such categories in such a way that the Revelation of God forged the categories Christians think God from. There is indeed a Greek impulse available in the Christian tradition, but it is resident with those who would identify with Arius and his followers rather than with Athanasius and his.

Arthur McGill, in a distilled and precise fashion, offers a fruitful line in regard to what Athanasius accomplished contra [mundum] Arius and the dead fruit he produced.

ATHANASIUS AND ARIUS: A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

Let us conclude this chapter by setting the Trinitarian God and the Arian God in the sharpest possible contrast so that all the issues may be clearly seen.

At one level, we are concerned with the question of Godā€™s essential being, of the quality that gives him his identity as God. According to Arius, the indispensable mark of divinity is unbegottenness, or what we might call absolute independence. God is divine because he exists wholly from within himself, wholly on his own. He needs nothing, he depends on nothing, he is in essence related to nothing. And this, according to the Trinitarian theologians, is precisely what the powerfulness disclosed in Jesus Christ discredits. For as these theologians read certain passages in the Gospel of John, the powerfulness in Jesus is characterized as fully and perfectly divine, and yet at the same time, as totally and continually derived.

In other words, as present in Jesus, Godā€™s powerfulness has a formā€”the form of dependenceā€”which Arius can only reject as quite unworthy of God. In place of self-contained and self-sufficient autonomy, what the Trinitarian theologians see as the defining mark of divinity is that totality of self-giving which proceeds between the Father and the Son. The Father gives all that he is to the Son; the Son obeys the Father and offers all that he is back to the Father. The Father and the Son are not divine, therefore, in terms of the richness of reality that they possess within themselves. They do not exist closed up within their own being. Rather, they are divine in terms of the richness of the reality that they communicate to the other. Against Ariusā€™ reverential awe of the absolute, Gregory of Nazianzus puts the alternative:

Thus much we for our part will be bold to say, that if it is a great thing for the Father to be unoriginate, it is no less a thing for the Son to have been begotten of such a Father. For not only would he share the glory of the unoriginate, since is of the unoriginate, but he has the added glory of his generation, a thing so great and august in the eyes of all those who are not altogether groveling and material in mind. (Theological Orations III. ii; Christology of the Later Fathers, p. 168.)

If Arius identifies Godā€™s divinity with his absolute independence, Gregory identifies it with his inner life of self-giving.

At a second level, we are faced with the question of how God exercises his divinity in relation to the world and to men. For Arius, Godā€™s complete self-sufficiency means that with the world he appears in the form of absolute domination. As God depends on nothing, everything else depends on him. As he is completely rich, everything else is completely poor. As he is completely powerful, everything else is completely weak, and is called to revere his power. And as he can affect other things without himself being affected, i.e., through an intermediary agent, everything else is its activity affects itself and other things, but not him.

According to the Trinitarian theologians, nothing could be more contrary to the power of God that men encounter in Jesus Christ than this Arian picture. Far from being a vessel of dominating mastery, Jesus is just the opposite. He does not come on clouds of glory. He does not stand over his followers, ordering them hither and yon to his bidding and vindicating his authority by unopposable acts of self-assertion. In the Epistle to Diognetus, and early Christian writing, the question is asked, Why did God send his Son?

To rule as a tyrant, to inspire terror and astonishment? No, he did not. No, he sent him in gentleness and mildness. To be sure, as a king sending his royal son, he sent him as God. But he sent him as to men, as saving and persuading them, and not as exercising force. For force is no attribute of God.

ā€œForce is no attribute of Godā€ā€”that is the basic principle for the Trinitarian theologians. Godā€™s divinity does not consist in his ability to push things around, to make and break, to impose his will from the security of some heavenly remoteness, and to sit in grandeur while all the world does his bidding. Far from staying above the world, he sends his own glory into it. Far from imposing, he invites and persuades. Far from demanding service from me in order to enhance himself, he gives his life in service to men for their enhancement. But God acts toward the world in this way because within himself he is a life of self-giving.[1]

Which conception of God are you being exposed to today in the Christian church? There is a major recovery movement taking place in and among evangelical Protestant theologians; they are attempting to recover the classical theistic conception of God that they believe is the church catholic conception of God. But we might want to ask ourselves if the God being recovered, the version of the classical theistic conception of God that is being recovered resembles the Athanasian or the Arian understanding more or less? Is the God being recovered for the church the relational and self-communicating God that Athanasius articulates, or are the impulses being recovered more in line with the Arian monadic conception of God wherein Godā€™s absolute independence, apart from relational emphases, is being emphasized? While a fully fledged Arianism may well not be being recovered, this does not mean the untextualized impulses of the Greek godness principles that Arius thought from canā€™t be attendant in some modulated form in the God being recovered for the evangelical churches.

More materially, as McGill distills Athanasius, what stands out is indeed the reality that God, at core, in se, is a God of onto-relation; a God who finds his being in subject-in-being relation such that the oneness of God (ousia) is shaped by the threeness of God (hypostaseis), and vice versa. That Godā€™s being is necessarily one of love, and that love is defined by his very activity of self-giveness as he is resplendently Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is within this anterior coinhering relations of God that we can begin to understand why God created to begin with; that the who of Godā€™s life precedes the what as that is revealed for us in the God for us in Jesus Christ. It is within this antecedent reality of Godā€™s life that our lives make sense, and that suffering itself takes upon new hues of bright and vibrant color; as we come to recognize the deep relationality of God, and the Self-relating dependence of God within himself, that we recognize how significant relationship is for us. God is able to reverse what the enemy intended for evil by using suffering and tragedy to recognize our deep need for him; that we can come to recognize that the ground and bases of our lives is an ecstatic one given to us as gift ever afresh and anew by the guarantee of the Holy Spirit sealed upon our hearts with the kiss of Jesus Christ.

I am sorely concerned for the churches. Iā€™m concerned that they are getting a more Arian-like conception of God that does not provide them with an adequate understanding of God which can only result in a deleterious spirituality that has nothing to do with who God really is in himself as revealed as the Son of the Father. Yes, the God of the schoolmen has certain qualities to him, but are they the actual realities that Athanasius could see? Yes, Athanasius used a similar grammar to the Greeks, and a similar grammar to the God of the classical theists, but he may well have used that grammar in equivocal ways from the way that say medieval classical theists used that grammar. These are big ideas, and big concerns; but they have real life and concrete iterations and implications in and for the people of the church of Jesus Christ.

[1] Arthur C. McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method (Eugene, OR: Wipf&Stock Publishers, 1982), 80-2.

Arius, ‘the good Greek’: And Miscellanies on the Greekification of God

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This is not going to be an extensive engagement with nor introduction to Ariusā€™s theology, in fact I will presume that those reading this will already have some sort of understanding of who, Arius was in the history of the church and what his heresy entails. But I wanted to highlight something I just read with reference to Arius; I thought the way the authors stated this was well put, and so would be beneficial for you all to read too. After we work through the quote from said authors (who you will meet in a moment) I will apply the ā€˜Greekā€™ link to a problem that has currently been being addressed online in regard to the John Frame and James Dolezal debate; albeit indirectly (since I will not address the actual debate in detail, but will only touch upon currents that are indeed related to the debate).

As we know Arius argued that Jesus, the Son of God, was a creation of God; that he shared a unity of will with his Creator God, but not a unity of being. Yes, for Arius the Son was indeed elevated to a level of degree over the rest of the created order, even functioning as a cipher through whom God created, but indeed the Son remained subordinate and a creature of God. Arius was driven to this conclusion because he was driven by his conviction that there could only be one actual infinite, one pure being; any division in that being, by definition, would render God to be no-God based upon the a priori definitional conviction that these were the requirements for God to be God. We can better appreciate, then, Ariusā€™s dilemma when confronted with Christian reality; he was attempting, based upon his servile conviction that God must be a monad in order to actually be God, to negotiate his way out of this dilemmaā€”an artificial dilemma of his own making.

The following quote, just like my last post, is taken from Cornelius van der Kooi and Gijsbert van den Brinkā€™s Christian Dogmatics: An Introduction. The way they characterize Arius is rather brilliant. They donā€™t antagonistically get after Arius, instead they simply and almost sympathetically contextualize Arius as the Greek thinker that he genuinely was:

10.5.1 Arius and Athanasius

Put most simply, Arius asked about the order to which Jesus, as the incarnate Word, belonged: to the order of God, or to that of created reality? Arius opted for the second and had some good arguments on his side. He read the Old Testament texts that speak of the unity of God: ā€œHear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one Lordā€ (Deut 6:4). If God, as the Father, is the first, then he must also be the only one, and besides him there can be only that which is created; thus Jesus belongs in that category. Nor can God exist in a double, a twofold (or threefold), manner, so Jesus is not a second God. The highest essence is not plural; God, as the only one, is by definition indivisible. This view does not so much make Arius a good Jew (as we mentioned earlier, Judaism in this era did not totally reject any plurality in God), but rather a good Greek. To the Greek mind, which is always in search of the unchanging primordial beginning (the arche), divisibility implies mutability.[1]

Arius was just being a good Pure Being theologian. He couldnā€™t figure out how to think the Son into the being of the eternal immutable God, on how the Greek mind thought that, and, as such he had to, of necessity, make the Son a creature and say: ā€˜there was a time when the Son was not.ā€™

Miscellanies on the Hellenization of God

In some ways this is should explain to you why I am so leery of ā€˜pure beingā€™ theology; of the sort that relies heavily say upon Aristotelian categories in order to provide a grammar for the Christian and Triune God. There is a basic incompatibility between the Greek conception of God, or pure being, and the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. This is why I am so leery of so called classical theism, because it relies so heavily upon a Greek mindset for thinking God. And yet, there is a revitalization of classical theism currently happening among Reformed and evangelical theologians in particular. My ā€˜fearā€™, in regard to classical theism and the overly Greek mind ostensibly behind it, was captured much more famously by Adolph von Harnackā€™s ā€˜hellenization thesis.ā€™ Michael Allen explains, in a nutshell, what that entails, and then goes on to illustrate how it is that people like Allen et al. are moving beyond the Harnackian thesis in order to retrieve what the past classical theists produced in regard to a grammar for thinking and speaking the Christian God:

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? For several decades in the twentieth century, the answer seemed to be overwhelmingly: ā€œToo much!ā€ The influence of Greek philosophy upon Christian faith and practice was viewed as excessive and uncritical. A century ago Adolf von Harnack proposed the ā€œHellenization thesis,ā€ the argument that the early church swallowed a bunch of Hellenistic fat that makes their theological approach difficult to digest today.Ā  Harnack proposed a radical revision to the faith whereby we seek to cut the fat out and get back to the message of Jesus himself, a proclamation unencumbered by the metaphysics of Greece and the dogmas of the later fathers. The influence of this model of history has been and continues to be remarkably widespread, accepted not only in more revisionist circles (e.g., JĆ¼rgen Moltmann) but also by those who wish to affirm orthodox theology (e.g., the late Colin Gunton). Its most deleterious application regards the character of God, that is, the doctrine of divine attributes. Numerous attributes were viewed as Greek accretions that ran not only away from, but directly against the grain of biblical teaching and Christ-centered theology.[2]

I am not necessarily endorsing, tout court, the Harnackian thesis, but I do think his is a good cautionary tale in regard to thinking about the influence that Greek categories had upon how Christians have thought God. I actually do think it is possible to ā€˜evangelizeā€™ certain types of metaphysics in the service of the Gospel and its articulationā€”not just Hellenism, but even Hegelianism, etc.ā€”but only in such a way that the categories present within such philosophical systems become so recontextualized by the pressure of Godā€™s Self-revelation in Christ that the corollary between the former philosophical context and the new Christian revelational context has been rent asunder to the point of no real contact. Note what Myk Habets writes in regard to the way that Patristic theologians, when hammering out a Doctrine of God and Christology, were able to achieve in their usage of Greek metaphysics:

I grant that patristic theology was tempted constantly by the thrust of Greek thought to change the concepts of impassibility and immutability in this direction, but it remained entrenched within the orbit of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the living God who moves himself, who through his free love created the universe, imparting to its dynamic order, and who through the outgoing of his love moves outside of himself in the incarnation.[3]

This is something of what I am referring to in regard to the way it is possible to engage with Greek metaphysics, but then convert them in such a way that they are resurrected with Christ which reorients their inability to actually get at the wonder of who the genuine Christian God is which is purely reliant upon Godā€™s own Self-exegesis in Christ.

There is always this dance, though. We must decide, at some point, how well a particular system of theology achieves the proper movements in this dance between its referral to something like pure being theology (of the sort that Arius was slavishly committed to), and how that may or may not be allowed to implicate the way Christians attempt to speak God. I personally think that something like the classical theist synthesis has failed at providing a conception of God that actually emphasizes the relationality of God, and instead offers a God who is too stilted by a kind of mechanical identity that is devoid of real passion, emotions, and that type of dynamism. Habets comments further on this reality (and with this weā€™ll close) as he reflects on the impact that pure being theology has had upon the development of Christian theology:

This freedom is also found in the very Being of God. When medieval theology adopted Aristotelian philosophy the Greek notion of God as impassible and immutable was also adopted. In this way Aristotleā€™s Unmoved Mover became associated with the God of the Scriptures. However, in Patristic theology immutability and impassibility, as applied to God, were not associated with these philosophical ideas but were actually a challenge to it. It is true that God is not moved by, and is not changed by, anything outside himself, and that he is not affected by anything or does not suffer from anything beyond himself. But this simply affirms the biblical fact that God is transcendent and the one who createdĀ ex nihilo. What the Fathers did not mean is that God does not move himself and is incapable of imparting motion to what he has made. It does not mean that God is devoid of passion, of love, mercy and wrath, and that he is impassibly and immutably related to our world of space and time in such a way that it is thrown back upon itself as a closed continuum of cause and effect.[4]

If we must speak of God in ways that diminish his revealed reality as relational, dynamic, and Triune love then we might be suffering from an Arian hangover. It would be best to repent of such drunkenness and think new ways, just as the patristic theologians did, to evangelize the metaphysics we use to think and speak God.

[1] Cornelius van der Kooi and Gijsbert van den Brink,Ā Christian Dogmatics: An IntroductionĀ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 404. [emphasis mine]

[2] Michael Allen, The Promise and Prospects of Retrieval: Recent Developments in the Divine Attributes, accessed 11-08-17.

[3] Myk Habets, Part I, A Realist Approach to Science and Theology, accessed 11-08-17.

[4] Ibid.