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…
