Sunday, December 17, 2017

Dr. Wolfson from Harvard quotes

The Philosophy of the Church Fathers



p 142:
“Christianity did not substitute the belief in Jesus for the Jewish belief in the unity of God…and, inasmuch as Jews were wont to confess the belief in the unity of God twice daily and inasmuch as Jesus himself had declared [the Shema as] “the first of all commandments,” [Mar 12.29] it was only natural that the Christians should repeat that old confession of belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah. It is quite possible that among the early Jewish followers of Jesus the confession of belief in him as the promised Messiah was added to the recitation of the [Shema] but later, perhaps among the pagan converts to Christianity, this old traditional Jewish [creed] was rephrased and integrated with the new Cgristian confession of belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah.”


pp 306-07:
To Paul there was no inconsistency between calling Christ Lord or the Lord or God and the belief in the unity of God. With perfect ease he could proclaim that “there is no God but one,” [1Cor 8.4; cf. 8.5; Eph. 4.3-6] reechoing Jesus’ declaration that [the Shema] constituted the first of all commandments. And so also in the case of John [1.1] he did not necessarily mean to assert the divinity of the Logos…In the case of Philo, he himself explains that the name “God” which he interprets to mean the Logos is not the real God, who is usually called “the God,” [On Dreams, 39] and furthermore that the Logos is called God only “by catachresis” [ibid.]…In short, he would say that the Logos is called God only in the sense that it is “divine” [theion, On Abraham, 41]. This is also what John could have meant when he said that “the Logos was God.” [John 1.1] And so in the case of John, too, there is no conclusive evidence that he held the Logos to be God in the literal sense of the term and so he, too, saw no inconsistency between his assertion that the Logos was God and the established belief in the unity of God, which is reaffirmed by him in his report that Jesus addressed God as “the only true God.” [John 17.3] The very fact that as late as the 4th century there were those within Christianity who, despite their acceptance of the Epistles of Paul and the Gospel of John, still argued against the divinity of the preexistent Christ shows that there was nothing in these writing which could be taken as conclusive evidence of a belief on the part of Paul and John that the preexistent Christ was God in the literal sense of the term.

By the time of the Apologists, with the new harmonization of the Synoptics with the Epistles of Paul and the Fourth Gospel, when the Christian God had become the begetter of the earthly Christ, He also became the begetter of the preexistent Christ…he was generated by God after the analogy of the offspring of a human father…Philosophically minded Christ Fathers found support for this kind of reasoning in the philosophic principle that that which is generated must be of the same species as that which generates it, to which Aristotle have expression in his statement that “man begets man.” [Metaphysics 8, 7, 1032a, 23-24; cf. 9, 8, 1049b, 27-29; Augustine, Cont. Maximin. 2, 6] It was under this changed conception of the origin of the preexistent Christ that Paul’s declaration that Christ was “equal with God” and John’s declaration that “the Logos was God” began to be taken literally. The preexistent Christ, now identified with the Logos, was not merely divine, he was God. And similarly the Holy Spirit, now definitely distinguished from the preexistent Christ…was recognized as an object of worship and adoration by the side of God and the Logos. [J. Martyr, Apol. 1, 6]…the Fathers found themselves confronted with a new problem…how to reconcile their new Christian belief in three Gods with their inherited Jewish belief in one God.

pp 309-312:
The question as it posed to [the Apologists] was: How can three beings, each of them a God, constitute one God? To them, that was a mystery, which they tried, if not to solve, at least to free from the charge of its being self-contradictory and meaningless, and this by showing how philosophers in a variety of ways justify the common practice of designating the many by the term one…and if, therefore, they are still to be regarded as one, some new interpretation has to be given to the concept of the unity of God.
The new interpretation…is that God’s unity is not absolute but only relative. They boldly reject the Philonic conception of the unity of God as a God who is “alone” [monos, Leg. All. 2, 1, 2] and with whom nothing is combined as his “equal”…for “God is alone and one in virtue of himself, and like God there is nothing.” [ibid, 2, 1, 1; cf. Philo, 1, pp. 171-172]…Thus the Fathers in direct opposition to Philo maintain that the unity of God preached by Moses and reaffirmed by Jesus is not absolute unity but relative unity—a unity which would allow within it a combination of three distinct elements. From now on the search among the Fathers will be for a kind of relative unity that would be most suitable for the belief in the Trinity.

pp. 313-16.
An explanation of the mystery of triunity [to explain] the relative unity of God [as opposed to the absolute unity taught in the Bible], is based upon Aristotle’s discussion of unity. The term one, says Aristotle, is a relative term…He then proceeds to enumerate 5 types of unity [the fourth being] three species of beings, such as horse, man, and dog, may be called one, because they are all animals. This is called unity of genus…It is with this Aristotelian analysis…of relative unity in the back of their mind that the Fathers, we imagine, started on their search for an analogy of the relative unity in the Trinity…Aristotle calls one in “formula” or “essence,” that is, one in “species.” Sometimes the Greek term ousia is used…Sometimes the Latin term substantia is used, in which case it is a translation of the Greek ousia in the sense of “second ousia” and hence it means “species” or “genus” or it is a translation of the Greek hypostatis in the sense of hypokeimenon and hence it means “substratum.”

pp. 361-363
[The Church Fathers’ conception of the Trinity was] a combination of Jewish monotheism and pagan polytheism except that to them this combination was a good combination; in fact, it was to them an ideal combination of what is best in Jewish monotheism and of what is best in pagan polytheism, and consequently they gloried in it and pointed to it as evidence of their belief. We have on this the testimony of Gregory of Nyssa: “The truth passes in the mean between these two conceptions, destroying each heresy, and yet, accepting what is useful to it from each. The Jewish dogma is destroyed...while the polytheistic error of the Greek school is made to vanish by the unity of the nature abrogating this imagination of plurality” (Oratio Catechetica 3).
[And John of Damascus, the last of the Church Fathers, writes]: “On the one hand, of the Jewish idea we have the unity of God’s nature, and, on the other, of the Greek, we have the distinction of hypostases, and that only” (De Fide Orth. 1, 7).

pp 420-21:
Accordingly, when the Fathers speak of the perichoresis of two things into one another they mean thereby the same as when the Stoics speak of the mutual coextension (antiparektasis) of two things into one another at all points…[This] really means an attempt to explain it by the analogy of the Stoic “mixture” [John of Damascus, Dialect. 65, PG 94, 66a A.; and] the analogy of the Aristotelian “predominance”…

pp 578-579:
2. Heresies with Regard to the Preexistent Christ
The problems arising from the relation of the preexistent Christ to God had their origin in the two conflicting elements which orthodox Christianity tried to harmonize. On the one hand, there was the original Jewish [Shema] reaffirmed in the NT…On the other hand, there was the newly arisen belief that the Logos was God or that both the Logos and the Holy Spirit were Gods. Already by the time of Justin Martyr, with the very first attempts at the rationalization of Christian beliefs, this inconsistency became apparent and the search of a solution began.
The solution advanced by the orthodox Fathers…is a solution by harmonization, an attempt to combine, as Gregory of Nyssa characterizes it, the monotheism of the Jews [Shema] and the polytheism of the Greeks. The method…was to thin down [the Shema] as a concession to Greek polytheism. The unity of God was not to mean…absolute unity [see Philo]; it was to mean relative unity…

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