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