THE SYMBOL OF THE TRINITY 

In the early patristic period, with Justyn Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, the absolute aspect of God was unequivocally affirmed and regarded as designated by the traditional biblical symbol of the "Father," the utterly primordial, unoriginate, changeless, eternal , and unrelated source of all else.  The related aspect of God, equally central to the life and piety of Christian faith, was consequently expressed through the symbol of the "Son" or the Logos, the principle of divine outreach and self-manifestation (almost a "second God," or as Justin and Origen put it) through which the transcendent Father. changeless, and inactive, created the world, was revealed in it, and acted to redeem it.  The Holy Spirit completed the relationship by assuring the presence of the divine will in the community and in persons.  Thus at the outset of the philosophical career of the Christian God, the symbol of the Trinity served to provide conceptual expression for the dialectical polarity of the Christian God as at once the self-sufficient creator of all, transcendent to all t                                         finitude (Father), and as the active, revealing, loving redeemer (Son), present in grace and power to God's people (Holy Spirit)  Landon Gilkey "God."  Christian Theology: An Introduction To Its Traditions and Tasks.  Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994, p. pp. 93-94.

By the inexcusable and possibly ironic logic of events and ideas, however, the important mediatorial role of the symbol of the Trinity soon disintegrated.  As the doctrine of the Arians quickly made evident, a Son or Logos that genuinely mediates between the absolute  and the relative and that is related to the creaturely, the temporal, and the changing in time can be itself unregenerate, eternal, changeless, nor fully "God" if God is defined solely by the truths of a transcendent absolute. An original, related, mediating principle is by that token hardly God, but in monotheism such a subordinate, semiabsolute, and partly divine being, however, "good," is inadmissible and partly divine being as representing incipient polytheism.  Besides, if Jesus Christ is not fully God, how can He save? These unanswerable arguments of Athanasius pushed the conception of the entire divine Trinity in an absolutist direction; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were at Nicea and again later at Constantinople all defined as fully divine, that is, as essentially negating every creaturely attribute: temporality, potentiality, changeableness, relatedness, and dependence.  As a consequence, the Trinity  ceased to be the central symbolic expression of the polarity of divine relatedness.  To put this point more precisely, a distinction now appears in post-Nicean theology between the essential Trinity, (the "three-in-oneness" characteristic of the eternal God's inner life) and the economic Trinity (the "three-in-oneness" characteristic manifested and expressed externally in God's creative, revealing, and redemptive activity in relation to the world).  Clearly this distinction, in contrast to the pre-Nicean concept of the Trinity, where a "halfway absolute" Son mediated between the absolute Father and the world, covered over rather than resolved the fundamental problem or dialectic of the Christian concept;t of God, namely, how the absolute God can be related to the relative world.  Now in the new form the same old question arises: How can the essentially trinitarian God in whom Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are alike eternal, changeless, and impassive participate in all the actions and reactions in relation to changing temporality entailed in the economic Trinity (Ibid., pp. 94-95)?  

As pointed out previously, the Church was not advocating for a polytheistic doctrine, i.e. a doctrine of multiple gods.  Neither was the  Church advocating for a doctrine of semi-humans or semi-deities.  While the doctrine of the Trinity was not stated explicitly in the New Testament, the seeds of the doctrine was there in a latent way.  The doctrine of the Trinity was that God was  revealed in the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whether one wants to take these to mean that the three were distinct as to person while being fully divine, or distinct as to historical roles.  

As the appearance of the distinction makes plain, at no point did Christian theology allow itself to deny God's continual relatedness to and activity in the world of change.  How could it, since the entire corpus of Christian belief from creation to redemption, very aspect of its ritual of Word and Sacrament, its entire sacred law and its sanctions, and every facet of its piety of prayer, miracles, and special angelic and saintly powers depended on the reality in past, present, and future of that divine presence and divine activity?  Nevertheless, that a deep theological problem remained for the classical theological conception of God is also evident.  Once God was defined in theology as "pure actuality,"  "eternal being," "changeless," and thus quite void of potentiality, alterability, passivity, or temporality, it became virtually impossible, if not contradictory, to express intelligibly the obvious relatedness and mutuality of God to the changing world necessitated by the Scriptural witness and by the structures of the Christian religion itself (Gilkey, op. cit., p. 95). 

One of the major problems in theology relative to the person and work of God, is the inevitable use of anthropomorphic language, i.e. attributing human-like qualities to God.  In addition, the matter is complicated because of the fact that in the early stages of the construction of Christian theology, just like we previously encounter in Hebrew/Jewish theology, and subsequently in Islamic theology, God is spoken of in masculine terms, an issue which is challenged and questioned by feminist theology.  Moreover, the doctrine of God in Christian theology is complicated by the doctrine of the Trinity which on the surface, at least, appears to be an advocacy for polytheism, or at the very least, tritheism, i.e. the notion of three deities.  When we take into consideration the integration between Christian theology and Western philosophy (namely Greek philosophy), the problem is further compounded by the fact that God is depicted as detached from the world and totally unaffected by what goes on in the world.

Although with the Reformation the philosophical or metaphysical definition of God as absolute, changeless, eternal being or actuality radically receded in prominence in theology, the same problems remained.  In the "biblical" theology of the major reformers, God is conceived centrally through personal rather than metaphysical categories: as almighty or sovereign power, as righteous or holy will, as gracious and reconciling love.  The "ontological" concepts of self-sufficiency remain, but what now determines the shape of the doctrine of God in each reformer is the center of Reformation piety or religion, namely the new emphasis on the priority and sole sovereignty of divine grace in redemption;tion, on the utter unworthiness and inactivity of the recipient of grace, and finally on the absolute priority and decisiveness of divine election (Gilkey, op. cit. p. 95). 

What is here eternal and changeless is the divine decree destining, yes predestining, each creature to grace or to its opposite.  The first cause of being, that led Thomas to the concept of pure actuality has become the first "cause" of grace, leading to the concept of the eternal, and changeless divine decrees.  Thus for primarily religious rather than metaphysical reasons, the same paradox tending toward contradiction appears: an eternal, hidden, and yet all-sovereign divine electing will on the one hand, and the affirmation of the presence and activity of God in relation to a real and not sham sequence of historical events and of human decisions on the other hand.  Although it was Calvin especially who drew out most clearly the implications of this new paradox based on Reformation piety rather than on traditional philosophy, still the same paradox in this new form is evident and fundamental for the theologies of Luther and Zwingli as well (Ibid., pp. 95-96).

Like all other aspects of Christian theology, the doctrine of the Deity has its challenges, and difficulties.  Theology is an ongoing task, and the component of the doctrine of the divine, is a part and parcel of that task.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

 

HOW THE EARLY CHRISTIANS THOUGHT OF GOD 

We may inquire as to what the concept of God was in the Early Church.  In other words, we might pose the question as to what are the differences or the similarities in the way that the Early Church conceived of God in comparison to how God is thought of in contemporary Christianity.  Landon Gilkey invites us to explore this.

The origins of the understanding of God lie in the Hebrew and Christian religious traditions,  especially in their sacred scriptures.  In what we call the Old Testament, God or Yahweh is "undeniably," and "jealously" one, and  transcendent to all the limited and special forces and powers of our experience of nature, society, or self.  On the other hand, Yahweh's central characteristic or, better, mode of experienced being or self-manifestation is a concern for and relation to history and especially to a particular people in history-Israel.  Although God manifests power and glory throughout the vast scope of nature, the main area for the divine "works" is the particular sequence of historical events related to the calling, establishment, nurture, and protection of the chosen people.  In this activity in history, moreover, God is revealed as a moral or righteous God, the source of the law, and quick to punish those, even chosen ones, who defy this law.  Yahweh is, however, also a God of mercy, patience, faithfulness,  and grace, since according to the prophets, despite Israel's obvious unworthiness and continued betrayal of her covenant with God, God promises to redeem Israel in the future.  This God of history, covenant, judgment, and promised redemption is throughout assumed to be, and often clearly affirmed to be, the ruler of all events.  All agree that the divine purposes shape, reshape, and in the end will complete history.  Finally, by inevitable implication, this sovereign Lord of history is seen to be also the creator and ruler of the entire cosmos (Langdon Gilkey in "God." Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks, pp. 91-92).   

In essence, Gilkey's presentation of God in Church History is one of reflection of the conception of God in the Scriptures.  Whether the Hebrew/Jewish and Christian communities derived their conception of God from their Scriptures, or the Scriptures reflected their conception of God in the period of the oral tradition, is very debatable.  

These themes in the notion of God are continued, albeit with modifications in the New Testament: God is one God, a God concerned with history, judgment, and redemption, the God who is Creator, and Redeemer, Alpha and Omega.  Only now the central manifestation of  the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the "Son," Jesus of Nazareth, through whom the divine righteous and loving will for human beings is revealed, the divine judgments made known, the divine power to save even from death effected, and in whose speedy return God's sovereignty over all creation will be fully and visibly established.  The presence of God, moreover, is now less in the temple and in the law as in the Spirit, dwelling in the hearts and minds of the Christian community and in their witness and hopeful expectation.  Thus appears a new set of Christian symbols  helping to define "God," and the divine activity, not only creation, and redemption, covenant, law, and messianic promise, but now also Son/Logos, incarnation, atonement, Holy Spirit, Parousia, and, as a summation of these "new concepts, Trinity (Ibid., p 92).

The concept of "Trinity" should be clarified.  The Church was not adopting a polytheistic view of three deities, nor a view of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, running amok, each doing their own thing, but rather a view of God's self-disclosure coming in the notion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, being three different modes of being in the deity, each of which retained the divine nature.  

In briefly tracing the development of this complex notion from the beginning of the Christian era  to our own times, we should recall that once Western culture became Christian (A.D. 325), the concept of God became the symbolic center for every aspect of life and for the understanding of nature, society, and human existence generally.  Consequently, it became not only the object of  endless philosophical and theological speculation, but also the foundation for every special discipline of thought, every representative mode of action, and all important social institutions.  Thus, inevitably,  this notion and the modes of thinking that expressed it made union with the sciences, and ethical, legal, and political theories, and above all, with the philosophy of each epoch (Gilkey, op. cit., p. 92).

During the crucial formative centuries of Christendom, the dominant intellectual inheritance through which Western life understood itself and its world was that of Greco-Roman philosophy.  Thus it was natural that during this long period, the biblical notion of God outlined was given its main conceptual shape with help first of Platonism and Stoicism, and then during the High Middle  Ages, of Aristotelianism.  In this philosophical tradition, especially in its later Hellenistic stages (200 B.C.- A.D. 400), the sense of the reality, value, or meaning of the changing, temporal, material world, and of earthly human and historical life in time noticeably weakened.  Correspondingly, for this tradition, the divine was precisely that which infinitely transcends change, time, matter, flesh, and history (Ibid., pp. 92-93).

As a quite natural consequence, those transcendent and absolute aspects or implications of the biblical or implications of the biblical creator and ruler were, in the developing conceptualization of God from A.D. 150 to 400, enlarged and extended: God became eternal in the sense of utterly non-temporal, necessary in the sense of absolute non-contingency, self-sufficient in the sense of absolute independence, changeless in the sense of participating in and relating to no change, purely spiritual instead of in any fashion material, unaffected and thus seemingly unrelated and even unreliable to the world.  It would, however, be false to conclude that the absoluteness of the patristic conception of God stemmed entirely from Hellenistic philosophy, though it expressed in the latter's categories.  It also stemmed from the character of patristic piety.  Since that piety emphasized, as did most Hellenistic spirituality, the victory of the incorruptible, immortal, and changeless principle of deity over the corruptible, mortal, and passing character of creaturely life, the divine is and must be that which transcends and conquers the passingness of mortal flesh (Ibid, p. 93). 

En fin, we can see that the concept of God in Christianity, has undergone evolution.  It has gone, if I may say so, from the simple to the complex.  Only time will tell if it goes back to the simple.

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

  THE FORMULATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF GOD 

All doctrines and theological tenets must be examined in historical perspective.  By this I mean that we must inquire as to how the doctrines or dogmas of the Church came into existence, who were the key players, and what were the reasons and circumstances surrounding their development.  

Historically speaking, humankind has always had a notion of the divine.  Those notions come from observation of nature, from oral traditions, and from inscripturated documents and texts.  In this essay, we set out to examine the historical development of the notion of God within the framework of Christian theology.  

I must say that the notion of God in Christian theology is not monolithic by any stretch of the imagination.  There have been, and are, if I may say so, a variety of notions and perspectives concerning the person of God.  In other words, in spite of the belief in the "unity" of God, Christians have expressed a variety of opinions and views concerning how they see God.  

In this essay, we continue to examine the formulation of the doctrine of God as presented by Langdon Gilkey, a retired Professor of Theology at the Duke Divinity School.  Dr. Gilkey lays out the development of this doctrine in a historical/sequential manner. 

The General Idea of God

In Western culture, dominated as it has been by the Jewish and Christian traditions, the word or symbol "God" has generally referred to one supreme, or holy being, the unity of ultimate reality, and ultimate goodness.  So conceived, God is believed to have created the entire universe, to rule over it, and to intend to bring it to its fulfillment or realization, to "save" it.  Thus, as a functioning word, in our own cultural world, God in the first instance, refers to the central and sole object of religious existence, commitment, devotion, dependence, fear, trust, love, and belief-and to the center of worship, prayer, and religious meditation.  Secondarily, "God" has been the object of religious and philosophical reflection, the supreme object of theology, and of most (though not all) forms of speculative metaphysics (Langdon Gilkey in "God."  Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks.  Fortress Press, 1994, pp. 89-90).

So understood, God represents a puzzling and elusive notion by no  means easy to define, as the traditions of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious thoughts have been clearly recognized.  As the supreme being or ground of being, the Creator and ruler of all, God transcends (exceeds or goes beyond) all creaturely limits and and distinctions, all creaturely characteristics; the reason is that the divine, so conceived, is the source and therefore, not simply one more example of those limits, distinctions, and characteristics.  As Creator of time and space, God is not in either time or space as is all else; dependent and vulnerable as is every other creature, in time and passing as we are, or mortal as is all life-lest the divine be a mere contingent creature and thus not "God."  For these reasons the concept of God inevitably tends toward that of the transcendent absolute of much speculative philosophy: necessary, impersonal, unrelated, independent, changeless, eternal.  And for these reasons as well as others, the customary reference to God as "He" is now seen to be extremely problematical (Ibid., p. 90). 

On the other hand, as we shall see, God in Jewish and Christian witness, piety, and experience is also in some way personal, righteous, or moral, the ground or  base in actuality of value, concerned with all creatures, with people and their lives, impelled and guided by important purposes for them individually and collectively, and deeply related to and active within the natural world and the course of history.  The reflective problems in the concept of God, illustrated by debates throughout Western history, therefore have a dual source: in the fact that God, however described, is unlike ordinary things of which we can easily and clearly speak, and in the fact that inherent in the religious reality itself, and in its reflected concepts are certain dialectical tensions or paradoxes-absolute related, impersonal-eternal-temporal, changeless-changing, actual yet potential, self-sufficient or necessary and yet in some manner dependent.  Such dialectical tensions stretch, if they do not defy, our ordinary powers of speech, definition, and precise comprehension.  However, one may approach the divine, religiously or philosophically, therefore, one first encounters "mystery," and with that encounter appear, among other things, special procedures and special forms or rules of speech-a characteristic as old as religion itself (Ibid., pp. 90-91).

Gilkey challenges us to determine as to whether our concept of God is philosophical/speculative, or theological/faith-based.  He also stimulates us to determine if we think of God as an abstract entity or as an entity with personal characteristics akin to ours.  The issue of anthropomorphic language (attributing human-like characteristics to the deity) comes into play here.  For example, do we think of God as someone who in addition to being compassionate and loving, is also one who is prone to have tantrums and get "all bent and out of shape" because of our wrong-doing?  

Another important consideration for us is the issue of thinking theologically in a "Western" mode.  Is the Christian concept of God rooted in Western culture, or should we examine this concept (or concepts) from the standpoint of the Asian/African roots of Christian theology?  As we continue to follow Gilkey's layout of the formulation of the doctrine of God in Christianity, we will expand our search of how God has been conceived of throughout the history of Christian theology.  

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary