Doctrine of the Trinity ST506 LESSON 08 of 24 Peter Toon, DPhil Cliff College Oxford University King s College University of London Liverpool University This is the eighth lecture in the series on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. We begin with a prayer. It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty that we should, at all times and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord, Almighty, Everlasting God, who art one God, one Lord not one only person, but three persons in one substance. For that which we believe of the glory of the Father, the same we believe of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, without any difference or inequality. Therefore, with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name, evermore praising thee and saying Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord, God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Glory be to thee, O Lord most high, Amen. In this lecture, we shall begin our reflection upon what we may describe as the patristic development of the doctrine leading to the dogma of the Holy Trinity. May I mention several books which you may want to obtain or borrow? Here they are. The first two are written by J. N. D. Kelly. I used to sit next to him or near him in the Bodleian Library when he was working on these books, when I was at Oxford. The first one is J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, and that has been through several editions; and second, J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, and that also has been through several editions. And then by an American translator and editor, in a series called Sources of Early Christian Thought, with the specific title, The Trinitarian Controversy, volume translator and editor William G. Rusch. And then, finally, the first in that series of books written by Jaroslav Pelikan on the Christian tradition, volume 1 of The Christian Tradition, which deals with the first five centuries of doctrinal development. As we begin this reflection, I invite you to think about this matter. We ourselves, in the twentieth century, are the inheritors of what we may call doctrinal development; that is, we live on this side of those doctrinal formulations which were made in the seven ecumenical councils of the early Christian church. We also live on 1 of 10
this side of the doctrinal developments found in the confessions of faith produced in the sixteenth century in the Protestant Reformation. If we ve done any church history or if we ve read generally, then our mind is necessarily affected by and may include within it the basic teaching of the seven ecumenical councils and the Reformation confessions. That is good, and that is right, and that is appropriate for thinking Christians of today. However, when we are seeking to understand the doctrinal development in the first four centuries, beginning from the period immediately following the death of the apostles and leading to the time of the emperor Constantine the Great, we ve somehow got to make the intellectual and the mental effort to put ourselves in the sandals or sometimes, no doubt, bare feet of the early leaders of the church, the early bishops, as they were called; the early thinkers; the apologists; the theologians of the church. Because if we don t, when we read the works of the early apologists and the early theologians, we may judge them as being somewhat naive and somewhat foolish. What we must truly attempt to do is to realize that, while they received the canon of Holy Scripture and believed it wholeheartedly, they did not have that mental framework of reference, that later mindset which was developed by that doctrinal development which, as I said, is found in the formulations of the early ecumenical councils, and in other areas as developed by the confessions of faith of the Reformation. If we can come to the writings of the apologists and early theologians with this type of attitude that I m encouraging, then we shall find in them a tremendous attempt, a tremendous grappling by them to put into terms which can be understood and into explanations that make sense the truth concerning who is Jesus, that is, what is the real truth about Jesus, and what is the real truth about the living God? So going back to that period, we have to then bear in mind that, on one level, they are repeating the scriptural the New Testament specifically biblical language. They are speaking in what we may call the basic, common-sense terms; howbeit, Hebrew and religious common-sense terms of Holy Scripture. And therefore, for example, if we read the earliest examples of the baptismal service, we shall find that it is, in a very simple form, Trinitarian. This is what we would expect, because the command of our Lord was to baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. So the early baptismal confessions or creeds are usually in three paragraphs or have three aspects to 2 of 10
them in which there is, first of all, the reference to the identity of the Father; second, to the identity of the Son; and, third, to the identity of the Holy Spirit. But there s no sophisticated if you like theological, philosophical explanation. It s done in dynamic, common-sense, biblical type of terminology and expression. But for all that, it is very vital; and it is believable, which, of course, is the important thing. Likewise, if you ll turn to the earliest records of the Sunday services in the early church, you will also find this basic Trinitarianism. What we have to bear in mind is that the early Christians met on the Lord s Day at the Lord s Table to hear the Lord s Word and to receive the Lord s body and blood in what they called the Holy Eucharist. We need not be afraid of this Greek word Eucharist. It is a biblical word. It s the verb to give thanks, and the Sunday morning service of the Christians was Eucharist. It was a giving thanks to God the Father because of the redeeming work of God the Son for His life and ministry; for, specifically, His death and His resurrection and exaltation. And the Eucharistic service is praise of, adoration of, magnifying of the Father through the Mediator, Jesus Christ, in the presence and by the power of the Holy Spirit. So, while there s no developed Trinitarian doctrine in those early examples of the Eucharistic service for example, you can read a description of what they call the Eucharist in the works of Hippolytus Romanus. He was living in Rome at the beginning of the third century, and he has left behind careful descriptions of both baptism and of the Sunday service, the Eucharist. And you ll find, as I said, that in both cases it s biblically Trinitarian, without having what we may call the later theological and philosophical exactness. Over and above the services of the church and within the fellowship of the church, the individual Christians were always encouraged to pray and to confess their faith. They prayed the Our Father. They addressed their prayers to the Father, their Father, who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They sought to live for and confess the name of Jesus Christ in their living, and they were aware of their continuing need of being in-filled by and guided by the Holy Spirit. So the manner of Christian living in the early church was, again, Trinitarian in this straightforward, biblical, common-sense way, without their being any sophisticated at this stage explanations in terms of the later classic Trinitarian understanding. 3 of 10
With those words of caution and of introduction, what I want to do now is to give you what I may call a bird s-eye view of the development of the doctrine leading to the dogma of the Holy Trinity in the first three or so centuries. If you want to get precision in this area, I ve already named several books which will give you both a carefully technical description and presentation and, through many footnotes, lead you to the original sources. But what I want to do is necessarily limited, in the sense that it is a bird s-eye view. It s to give you a general understanding, so that you may, within any part of it, take what I call a depth charge and investigate that particular area in depth. So let us now go back, then, to the period which follows the closing of the events that are recorded in the New Testament and after the death of the apostles into the postapostolic period. First of all, let us note what happened in Jewish Christianity. In Jewish Christianity there was, obviously, thought concerning the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And because it was Jewish, and because therefore it came out of that Jewish understanding, that Jewish concentration on the Lord our God is one Lord, there was an attempt to make sense of what we later call the Holy Trinity in terms of the Old Testament. And this is where there was a use of that incident which we looked at in an earlier lecture the story of the visit of the three beings, or the Lord and the two angels you remember in Genesis 18. There was a use of this to seek to show how in the Old Testament the Trinity of God was in some way anticipated. And then there was also the use of that vision of Isaiah, from which already I have quoted this morning in my opening prayer, in which the holy angels, the seraphim, cry out Holy, holy, holy. And, of course, this was seen as being Holy is the Father, Holy is the Son, and Holy is the Holy Spirit. But while this thinking went on and our knowledge of it, by the way, is now fragmentary it seems not to have been able to break away from what we may call a subordinationist approach; that is, that the Father is number one, and slightly inferior to the Father is the Son, and then inferior to both is the Holy Spirit. So, this particular Jewish way of thinking was not developed, because, as you know, Jewish Christianity did not flourish and grow as did Gentile Christianity. Yet, to the Gentile-speaking Christians, there was bequeathed these ways of reading the Old Testament and, particularly, the incident in Genesis 18 concerning the three beings and the Trisagion, the Thrice Holy of Isaiah 6. 4 of 10
As I noted earlier, these have been very influential, first of all, in Christian art; and, second, in the typological and the allegorical reading by Gentile Christians of the Old Testament. So that particular approach, although it gave certain basic concepts to the general stream of Christian tradition, the Jewish Christian approach just did not go very far. And, in contrast to it, those whom we now call the apologists you may have done early church history and therefore you are familiar with the apologists; but if you re not, let me give you their basic names: Aristides, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tatian, and Theophilus of Antioch. They, in their different ways, sought in the Greco-Roman culture of their day to defend Christianity against a charge of atheism. Now, according to the apologists, Christ is the Logos, and this was one of the important words, Logos or Word. And they saw Christ as the Logos, as preexistent before the historical incarnation, as being the Father s mind or the Father s thought. In Christ, as it were, the Logos became incarnate, but the incarnation was not the beginning of His being. As revealed in the creation and the redemption of the world, Christ is the Father s expression or even, you may say, the Father s extrapolation. So by this concept of the Logos, the apologists were able to maintain both the pretemporal unity of Jesus Christ with the Father and the Son s manifestation in space and in time. And to this end they found the Stoic distinction between the immanent Logos and the expressed Logos helpful in this regard, and they even used this particular terminology. This particular approach was used by the apologists, but the net effect of it was that Jesus as the Son, or Jesus as the Son incarnate, was very much seen or in some cases tended to be seen as a deuteros theos, that is, as a second or secondary God. And when this was done, then the Holy Spirit was seen as subservient to, as a servant of the Logos. And so, while there was a tremendous effort by these early apologists to make sense in terms of Greek thinking of Hellenistic thinking, what they in fact did was to bequeath this dangerous tendency of what we may call a Hellenizing reductionism, wherein the Father and the Son and the Spirit were located in a kind of hierarchically descending pattern of being. 5 of 10
So no real major advance came from either the initial Jewish Christianity or from the early work of the apologists. And therefore we have to look for the development of the doctrine of the Trinity to two other phases or two other aspects. They are these: The first phase or aspect is in the conflict with Gnosticism in the third century. We shall come to that in a moment, but in that conflict with Gnosticism in the third century, the Christian church, through its philosophical theologians and its thinkers, had to come to terms with the whole theme of emanation and the relation, therefore, of the Son and the Spirit to the Father. And then, second, the second phase in the conflict with Hellenistic philosophy. So in these two phases the early church through, if you like, external pressures, had to think through and present, first of all to itself, before it could say to the world what it really meant and what it really believed and what its rule of faith and what its creed were all about when it confessed that it baptized those who came in from paganism and those who came in from Judaism in the name the one name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Bearing that in mind, what we now must do is to notice, first of all, what is Gnosticism; and then, on the basis of that, to see what was the response within that context of the Christian thinkers and theologians. So let us begin, then, with Gnosticism. Here again we need a word of caution, because the word Gnosticism is thrown around today in a rather careless way and used of all kinds of contemporary movements and contemporary expressions of pseudo-christian faith. So I encourage you, in order to understand what the early fathers of the church were combatting, to set aside your usage of Gnosticism of contemporary movements, and go back and look at the sources I mentioned for a more exact presentation of Gnosticism as it was found in the period of the early church. The actual origins of and the background to Gnosticism in the period of the early church has been the subject of many learned monographs and much learned research. And still there is debate about its full origin and full nature. But what we do know is that Gnosticism arose in that period out of the collapse of the thinking of antiquity, which we may describe as cosmos oriented, that is, a total vision of the cosmos, a total understanding of reality. With the collapse of that, there came rushing in these alternatives and this great variety of alternatives. And Gnosticism, in the main, is a generic concept used to describe those. 6 of 10
The men and women of late antiquity no longer experienced the world as a cosmos or as an ordered universe but somehow felt themselves to be estranged from the world, even as they lived in it. Because of this, the divine, the sense of God, as a result, became for them the totally other, that is, an inconceivable and an indescribable, ineffable absolute. In this context where people had their previously ordered universe shattered, felt themselves estranged from the world in which they lived, and had placed God totally outside as the totally other, the ineffable absolute how did they conceive of communication between God and the world? They solved this by this concept or theory of emanation. And by this very fundamental concept and term, they meant that from the primal source by reason of a necessity internal to God as the ineffable absolute reality flows forth in a series of descending steps. And each of the steps is more tenuous in character than the one before. So this gradation of descent is the means by which they located the coming together of the absolute ineffable Deity and the world of space and time. With the help of such speculations as these, the Gnostics believed that they had attained, and they held a superior grasp of, religion than did the Christians. Thus they used the Jewish and the Christian faith as a means of expressing this concept of emanation. You don t need much imagination to see how if you have this concept, this theory of emanation, then you can so easily think of the Father as the supreme Godhead, the supreme absolute, the ineffable one. And then you think of the person of Jesus Christ as being an emanation from the Father, and then the Spirit being an emanation from the Son, and then the superior angels being emanations from the Spirit, and so on and so forth. But to those who were schooled in the Christian church in Holy Scripture and who had received the rule of faith and the creed that was confessed in baptism and the ordered sense of the relation of the Father through the Son in the Spirit in Christian worship, they, of course, could not accept this Gnostic approach. But I think we need to realize just how attractive and just how powerful was this Gnostic approach in the second century. With that background, it is possible to begin, I think, to appreciate the great struggle that the fathers of the church, or the apologists, or the leading bishops of the church, believed themselves to be in. We are, in the providence of God, fortunate to have materials left behind by probably the most decisive figure at the end of the second century in this battle with Gnosticism and with 7 of 10
the Christian attempt to state its rule of faith free from these Gnostic teachings. And that decisive figure is Irenaeus of Lyon. For Irenaeus, true gnosis you know, the noun gnosis means knowledge true gnosis is the teaching of the apostles, first and foremost; and the ancient that is, the traditional doctrinal structure of the church, which is contained in its rule of faith in its baptismal creed. Therefore, in his apologetic work over against gnosis as gnosis was understood in Gnosticism he sets the rule of faith. That is the apostolic faith which had been attested in the church; which spoke of the one God who is the Almighty Father, the Creator of heaven and earth; which spoke of the one Jesus Christ who is God s Son; and which spoke of the one Holy Spirit who dwells in the people of God. So over against the gnosis of Gnosticism, he set the gnosis of the apostles, the gnosis the knowledge within the rule of faith. Not only did he set what we may call the Christian answer over against Gnosticism, but also he attempted, by intellectual analysis and reasoning, to show the internal contradictions in the Gnostic doctrine of emanation. And we cannot here go into the reasoning in which he involves himself in order to show that one can think about the relation of the Son to the Father, and the Spirit to the Father and the Son one can think about those relations in such a way that one is not driven into the emanationist approach of the Gnostics. I must leave you if you are interested--to follow out the themes and the argumentations of Irenaeus of Lyon. But I bring him to you as one who made this most important contribution, in terms of showing that by understanding God not in the materialistic way that the Gnostics did but by understanding God to be pure Spirit. God is spirit, you ll remember, said Jesus. By understanding God to be pure Spirit, Irenaeus preserved the unity and the simplicity of God and was able to speak of the relation of the Son to the Father and the Spirit to the Father that excluded any divisibility and which excluded any subordinationism of the type found in Gnosticism. So that is the work of Irenaeus. Before I move on to look at the important work of Tertullian and Origen, I want to bring in here one answer to the Gnostic approach, which you ll find in the third century and which, in one way or another, has been present in the church ever since; and, I believe, in a very modern way is present in much Christianity today. It is called either monarchianism or modalism, or you can call it modalistic monarchianism. We re talking now about the third century there were those who wanted very much to preserve the unity of the Godhead. And, as we know from 8 of 10
our reading of the Old Testament, the unity of the Godhead is absolutely fundamental. The LORD our God is one LORD. But this modalistic monarchianism, as we may call it or modalism this got round the problem of speaking of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit by saying that there is one Godhead which can be designated indifferently as either the Father or the Son or also the Holy Spirit. In other words, modalistic monarchianism did not accept that there were any essential distinctions within God as God, but rather the names of the Father and the Son were names applied to God at different times from the human perspective. That is, God was a monad; there were no numerical distinctions within the monad. The simplest position in this modalistic monarchianism was taught by Noetus of Smyrna at the end of the second century. But on a more astute and a more philosophical level and a much more, therefore, dangerous level, this monarchianism or modalism was expounded by Sabellius, who lived in Rome in the early years of the third century. And it s Sabellianistic monarchianism, which I referred to earlier as being a great danger and a form of heresy, which seems to be always coming back in every generation. What did Sabellius teach? Sabellius taught that God was a monad a single unity but a monad expressing itself in three operations; that is, the Father projected Himself first as Son and then as Spirit. One form of this teaching was that in the Old Testament we get God perceived as, and revealing God as, Father. In the New Testament we get God revealing God as Son. And then, from the day of Pentecost and the life of the church onwards, we get God revealing God as Spirit. Therefore, God as God is a simple monad, but from the experience of human beings of God, it is possible in God s intention to appreciate God, to know God, to relate to God as the Father and as the Son and as the Holy Spirit. But in God, there are no such distinctions. God is one and one only. God is a mathematical unity. God is a monad. This approach, wherein we talk of the single person of God, and God having three names, and God revealing God in three ways through three names this, as I said, was attractive, because it took you away from the problems of Gnosticism. It took you away from the mathematical problem, as it were, of how can three be one and one be three? In fact, it offers, in a rather simple and some may say an attractive way, the unity of God and, at least, in a preliminary way, it offers you what seems to be the Trinity of God. 9 of 10
So that was there and was much appreciated, I think, by many in the early church. And so those who wanted to develop the Christian understanding of God, who followed after Irenaeus, had to take into account not only the Gnosticism which was prevalent, but also how to take into account the fact that, within the church, there was this attractive presentation called monarchianism or modalism or, after its Roman teacher, Sabellianism. In the next lecture, we shall be turning to look briefly at the contributions of Tertullian, the Latin theologian, and Origen, the Greek theologian, before we move on to the first ecumenical council which was called to respond to the teaching of Arius, who was a presbyter from the church in Alexandria and who expressed the Christian Trinity in what we may call Hellenistic terminology through Hellenistic concepts. It is much said today and I fear that too many evangelicals say this they say that the Creed of Nicea, and especially the use of that Greek word homoousios is a sign that the early church capitulated to Greek philosophy. In fact, some of you may know that the great German historian of doctrine, Adolf von Harnack, in his History of Dogma says that the dogma of the Council of Nicea is the growth of the gospel in Hellenistic soil. I want to reject and I shall reject that approach. I want to try to show in the next lecture and the one that follows it that while there is a change of language and a change of emphasis, what we get in the Creed of Nicea is the statement of the truth; that is, the very truth to which the Scriptures witness, the very truth that the apologists were seeking to understand and convey, the very truth concerning who is Jesus and what is His precise relation to the Father? So that is what I ll be trying to achieve in the next lectures, as we continue to ponder and to think about the development of doctrine in the early church. Some of you may recall that I myself published a book from William B. Eerdmans a few years ago on the development of doctrine in the church. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 10 of 10