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| URL: | https://www.bible.ca/...rinity-history-apostolic-fathers.htm |
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| Title: | Commentary on what the early Christians believed about the Trinity |
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| Body: | Commentary on what the early Christians believed about the Trinity: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, Nicene Era, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen Apostolic Fathers B. Old Testament.-The early Fathers were persuaded that indications of the doctrine of the Trinity must exist in the Old Testament and they found such indications in not a few passages. Many of them not merely believed that the Prophets had testified of it, they held that it had been made known even to the Patriarchs. ... Some of these, however, admitted that a knowledge of the mystery was granted to the Prophets and Saints of the Old Dispensation ...The matter seems to be correctly summed up by Epiphanius, when he says: "The One Godhead is above all declared by Moses, and the twofold personality (of Father and Son) is strenuously asserted by the Prophets. The Trinity is made known by the Gospel" (The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1912, Vol. 15, p 47-49) "The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not taught in the OT. ...In many places of the OT, however, expressions are used in which some of the Fathers of the Church saw references or foreshadowings of the Trinity. ... The revelation of the truth of the triune life of God was first made in the NT, where the earliest references to it are in the Pauline epistles. The doctrine is most easily seen in St. Paul's recurrent use of the terms God, Lord, and Spirit. (New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1965, "Trinity, in the Bible", p306) The Apostolic Fathers were witnesses to the Biblical data and the traditional faith rather than theologians, but they furnished useful insights into the lines along which the Church's unconscious theology was developing. Most of them indicated quite clearly a belief in the divinity of Christ, less clearly a belief in the distinct personality and divinity of the Holy Spirit. They gave solid evidence of a belief in three pre-existent 'beings,' but they furnished no trinitarian doctrine, no awareness of a trinitarian problem. ... Apostolic Fathers: Summary: ... All, except perhaps Hermas, subscribe to the divinity of Christ. I Clement coordinates Christ with the Father and the Holy Spirit in an oath. Ignatius calls Christ God 14 times. ... The Apostolic Fathers maintained that there was only one God. They affirmed the divinity and distinct personality of Christ quite clearly and that of the Holy Spirit less clearly. They offered no trinitarian doctrine and saw no trinitarian problem. (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, introduction, p.xv, p43, p59-61) The Apostolic Fathers: The Apostolic Fathers wrote between A.D. 90 and 140. Their discussion of the person of Jesus Christ simply repeated the teaching of the New Testament. None of the Apostolic Fathers presented a definite doctrine on this point. In this respect the New Testament, the Apostolic Fathers, and the Apostles' Creed stand in one line. (A Short History of the Early Church, Harry R. Boer, p108-110) The early Fathers were persuaded that indications of the doctrine of the Trinity must exist in the Old Testament and they found such indications in not a few passages. Many of them not merely believed that the Prophets had testified of it, they held that it had been made known even to the Patriarchs. (The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1912, Vol. 15, p 47-49) In many places of the OT, however, expressions are used in which some of the Fathers of the Church saw references or foreshadowings of the Trinity. ... The revelation of the truth of the triune life of God was first made in the NT, where the earliest references to it are in the Pauline epistles. The doctrine is most easily seen in St. Paul's recurrent use of the terms God, Lord, and Spirit. (New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1965, "Trinity, in the Bible", p306) "To End of 2d Century. Among the Apostolic Fathers, Clement of Rome, for instance, writing to the Church of Corinth in the final decade of the 1st century, bears witness to God the Father, to the Son, to the Spirit, and mentions all three together ... Yet, neither Clement nor Ignatius nor any other writer of this most ancient period raises the question that would turn out to be decisive: precisely how are Son and Spirit related to the Godhead? ... Nevertheless, if, as Justin notes (I Apol. 13), Christians worship Christ in the second place and the Spirit in the third place, there is still no inconsistency; for Word and Spirit are not to be separated from the unique Godhead of the Father. But why not? The Apologists at least attempted a reply. For Justin, the Godhead was very clearly a Triad, though it was Theophilus (Ad Autol. 2.15) who first introduced this expression. ... Justin pictures the preexistent Word as the Father's rational consciousness (I Apol. 46; 2 Apol. 13), as emerging, therefore, from the inferiority of the Godhead while nevertheless remaining inseparable from the Godhead. ... In the last analysis, the 2d century theological achievement was limited. The Trinitarian problem may have been clear: the relation of the Son and (at least nebulously) Spirit to the Godhead. But a Trinitarian solution was still in the future. (New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1965, Trinity, p296) Apologists The Apologists were, in a sense, the Church's first theologians ... They identified Christ with God, with the Logos, with the Son of God, but they seemed to count His Sonship not from eternity but from the moment of his pre-creational generation. In thus using a two-stage theory of a pre-existent Logos to explain the Son's divine status and His relation to the Father. They Probably did not realize that this theory had a built-in 'inferiorizing principle' that would win for them the accusation of 'subordinationism.' (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, introduction, p.xv) The Apologists: Summary: In the Apologists we see a belief in the unity of God and in a trinity of divine 'persons.' Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, although there is as yet no distinct conception of divine person and divine nature. There is an identification of Christ with the Son of God. with the Logos and with God. To the Logos they ascribe a divine pre-existence that is not only pre-creational but also strictly eternal. (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, p43) The Apologists do not take the Sabellian road of a merely nominal trinity of persons but hold to a real distinction of the three, a distinction that is not in name only, not only in thought but in number. They base their distinction on rank or order. They realize there is a trinitarian problem and try to solve it for the Son in terms of an eternal Logos, for the Holy Spirit in terms of 'an effluence of God.' (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, p50-52) The Apologists went further. They affirmed that God is one but also triadic. To Christ they ascribed divinity and personality explicitly, to the Holy Spirit only implicitly. (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, p59-61) If God must have His Logos from eternity, must He also have His Son? Later theology and dogma will say yes unequivocally. But the Apologists are not quite clear on this point and rather seem to say no. For them. if the origination of the Logos from God is eternal, the generation of the Logos as Son seems rather to be pre-creational but not eternal, and it is effected by the will of the Father. This view. if compared with later theology and dogma, will smack of a sub-ordination or 'minoration' of the Son of God. This subordination of the Son was not precisely the formal intent of the Apologists. Their problem was how to reconcile monotheism with their belief in the divinity of Christ and with a concept of His divine sonship that they derived from the Old Testament. (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, p43) "What the Apologists had to say about the Holy Spirit was much more meagre, scarcely deserving the name of scientific theology. This is understandable, for the problem which principally exercised them was the relation of Christ to the Godhead. Nevertheless, being loyal churchmen, they made it their business to proclaim the Church's faith, the pattern of which was of course triadic. [ie. trinitarian] (Early Christian Doctrines, J.N.D. Kelly, p. 101) "Yet, as compared with their thought about the Logos, the Apologists appear to have been extremely vague as to the exact status and role of the Spirit. His essential function in their eyes would seem to have been the inspiration of the prophets. Developing this, Justin interprets Is. 11, 2 ('The Spirit of God shall rest upon him') as indicating that with the coming of Christ prophecy would cease among the Jews; henceforth the Spirit would be Christ's Spirit, and would bestow His gifts and graces upon Christians. Hence it is He Who is the source of the illumination which makes Christianity the supreme philosophy., There are passages, however, where he attributes the inspiration of the prophets to the Logos; and Theophilus, too, suggests that it was the Logos Who, being divine spirit, illuminated their minds. There can be no doubt that the Apologists' thought was highly confused; they were very far from having worked the threefold pattern of the Church's faith into a coherent scheme. In this connection it is noteworthy that Justin did not assign the Holy Spirit any role in the incarnation. Like other pre-Nicene fathers, he understood the divine Spirit and 'power of the Most High' mentioned in Luke 1, 3 5, not as the Holy Spirit, but as the Logos, Whom he envisaged as entering the womb of the Blessed Virgin and acting as the agent of His own incarnation. In spite of incoherencies, however, the lineaments of a Trinitarian doctrine are clearly discernible in the Apologists. The Spirit was for them the Spirit of God; like the Word, He shared the divine nature, being (in Athenagoras's words) an 'effluence' from the Deity. Although much of Justin's language about Him has a sub-personal ring, it becomes more personal when he speaks of 'the prophetic Spirit'; and there is no escaping the personal implications contained in his pleas that Plato borrowed his conception of a third One from Moses, and that the pagan custom of erecting statues of Kore at springs was inspired by the Scriptural picture of the Spirit moving upon the waters. As regards the relation of the Three, there is little to be gleaned from Justin beyond his statement that Christians venerate Christ and the Spirit in the second and the third ranks respectively. Athenagoras echoes this idea when he inveighs [a verbal attack] against labeling as atheists 'men who acknowledge God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit, and declare both Their power in union and Their distinction in order'. This order, however, was not intended to suggest degrees of subordination within the Godhead; it belonged to the Triad as manifested in creation and revelation." (Early Christian Doctrines, J.N.D. Kelly, p 102) Nicene Era "There is no theologian in the Eastern or the Western Church before the outbreak of the Arian Controversy [in the fourth century], who does not in some sense regard the Son as subordinate to the Father." (The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, R. P. C. Hanson, as quoted by Anti-Trinitarians) Thus the New Testament writers were not adoptionists, although in a few passages they can seem to point in this direction. ... Nor were they subordinationists in intention or words, if subordinationist is understood in the later Arian sense of the word; for they did not make the Son a creature but always put Him on the side of the creator. The New Testament writers do not witness to the Holy Spirit as fully and clearly as they do to the Son. (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, p30-33) The one divine Logos-Son of the Church's teaching and the many gods of the Gnostic Plerotna had three fundamental characteristics in common: they had come forth from the Father by generation; they, accordingly, stood to the Father in a relationship of Subordination; they represented the means of mediation between the transcendent God the Father and the terrestrial world. In this connection there must be recalled the fact, established earlier (p. 125), that every significant theologian of the Church, in the pre-Nicene period, had actually represented a Subordinationist Christology. (The Formation of Christian Dogma, An Historical Study of its Problems; Martin Werner, p234, Werner is a modernist who also advocates angel-Christology.) In the New Testament affirmations about the Son were largely functional and soteriological, and stressed what the Son is to us. Arians willingly recited these affirmations but read into them their own meaning. To preclude this Arian abuse of the Scripture affirmations Nicea transposed these Biblical affirmations into ontological formulas, and gathered the multiplicity of scriptural affirmations, titles, symbols, images, and predicates about the Son into a single affirmation that the Son is not made but born of the Father, true God from true God, and consubstantial with the Father. (The Triune God, Edmund J. Fortman, p 66-70) Ignatius "We have seen that the Watchtower has been dishonest in dealing with the issue of authenticity with regards to Ignatius' writings. We have seen that the author of this article *never* cites the actual writings of Ignatius, but relies solely on materials that his sources clearly indicate are later writings. Further, the writer passes over in silence citation after citation that deals a death blow to his entire thesis, compounding his error by misleading his readers into thinking that Ignatius but once identifies the Lord as "God the Word." It is obvious to any semi-impartial reader that the Watchtower is not the least bit interested in what Ignatius *actually* believed about Jesus Christ. It is their purpose to make Ignatius into one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Just as the Watchtower Society has smuggled their doctrines into the Bible by mistranslating numerous passages (John 1:1, 8:58, Colossians 1:16-17, 2:9, Titus 2:13, 2 Peter 1:1, Revelation 3:14, etc. and etc.), so they show a willingness to grossly misrepresent an early Father of the Christian Church regarding his belief in the deity of Christ. We cannot possibly accept any excuses for this kind of deceptive writing--poor scholarship is one thing, but this goes far beyond simply poor scholarship. This article shows definite, pre-meditated deception. It's purpose is to misrepresent Ignatius' beliefs, and in so doing confirm millions of Jehovah's Witnesses world-wide in their beliefs. When we think of the fact that the vast majority of those individuals do not have recourse to Ignatius' actual writings, so as to discover the truth for themselves, the grave responsibility that lies upon the shoulders of the Watchtower Society for this deception becomes clear. The venerable bishop of Antioch at the turn of the first century of the Christian era believed heartily in the deity of Jesus Christ. As he often confessed Christ to be His God, he was but following the Apostolic example seen in Thomas (John 20:28), John (John 1:1), Paul (Titus 2:13) and Peter (2 Peter 1:1). No amount of misrepresentation can hide the truth of the Christian belief summarized so well by Paul, "For in Him dwells all the fullness of Deity in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). (Historical Dishonesty and the Watchtower Society, A Review of the Watchtower's Comments Concerning the View of Ignatius of Antioch and the Deity of Christ, By James White) Irenaeus "Naturally the Son is fully divine: 'the Father is God, and the Son is God, for whatever is begotten of God is God'. The Spirit, too, although Irenaeus nowhere expressly designates Him God, clearly ranked as divine in his eyes, for He was God's Spirit, ever welling up from His being. Thus we have Irenaeus's vision of the Godhead, the most complete, and also most explicitly Trinitarian, to be met with before Tertullian. Its second-century traits stand out clearly, particularly its representation of the Triad by the imagery, not of three coequal persons (this was the analogy to be employed by the post-Nicene fathers), but rather of a single personage, the Father Who is the Godhead itself, with His mind, or rationality, and His wisdom. The motive for this approach, common to all Christian thinkers of this period, was their intense concern for the fundamental tenet of monotheism, but its unavoidable corollary was a certain obscuring of the position of the Son and the Spirit as 'Persons' (to use the jargon of later theology) prior to their generation or emission. Because of its emphasis on the 'economy', this type of thought has been given the label 'economic Trinitarianism'. The description is apt and convenient so long as it is not assumed that Irenaeus's recognition of, and preoccupation with, the Trinity revealed in the 'economy' prevented him from recognizing also the mysterious three-in-oneness of the inner life of the Godhead. The whole point of the great illustrative image which he, like his predecessors, employed, that of a man with his intellectual and spiritual functions, was to bring out, however inadequately, the fact that there are real distinctions in the immanent being of the unique, indivisible Father, and that while these were only fully manifested in the 'economy', they were actually there from all eternity." (J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p 107) Justin Martyr Boer, therefore is saying that the faith of Justin Martyr that Jesus is a "created divine being" originated with Greek mythology and not the New Testament! In other words, Boer is saying that Justin's view of Jesus being a created agent to do God's work was of pagan origin! We believe that Subordinationism is taught in the New Testament. Interesting that Boer also claims that Constantine's son, Constantius, used his role as emperor to enforce Arianism, to exile pro-Nicene opponents and influence theology towards Arius. Hence the argument that Constantine is the catalyst of trinity doctrine is no stronger than the argument that Constantius is the catalyst of Arian doctrine. But Justin describes this Logos as a second God, one who proceeded from the Father before creation in the manner of word or fire or spring water. "The Father of the Universe has a Son, who also, being the first-born Logos of God, is God." Tatian too has a Logos doctrine but speaks of Christ as "the God who suffered." Similarly, Clement refers to Christ as God. In spite of these points, the Christology of the apologies, like that of the New Testament, is essentially subordinationist. The Son is always subordinate to the Father, who is the one God of the Old Testament. (Gods and the One God, Robert M. Grant, p109) "This lack of a formulated doctrine of the Trinity reflects the theological thought of the second century. In the works of Justin Martyr, who wrote in about 150 A.D., the preexistence of the Son is stressed, yet in relation to the Father He is spoken of as 'in the second place.'" (Creeds and Loyalty, James Arthur Muller, Episcopal professor of church history, p9) As regards the relation of the Three, there is little to be gleaned from Justin beyond his statement that Christians venerate Christ and the Spirit in the second and the third ranks respectively. Athenagoras echoes this idea when he inveighs [a verbal attack] against labeling as atheists 'men who acknowledge God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit, and declare both Their power in union and Their distinction in order'. This order, however, was not intended to suggest degrees of subordination within the Godhead; it belonged to the Triad as manifested in creation and revelation." (Early Christian Doctrines, J.N.D. Kelly, p 102 Tertullian "The word Trinity is not found in the Bible, and, though used by Tertullian in the last decade of the 2nd century, it did not find a place formally in the theology of the Church till the 4th century. (New Bible Dictionary, J. D. Douglas & F. F. Bruce, Trinity, p 1298) Origen But Origen, in his attempt to combine strict monotheism with a hierarchical order in the Trinity, ended up by making the Son and the Holy Spirit not precisely creatures but 'diminished gods,' inferior to the Father who alone was God in the strict sense. The stage was set for Arius. He saw in Scripture, the Apologists, and especially Origen two interwoven ideas, one that the Son was God, the other that the Son was subordinate and inferior to the Father in divinity. He saw a tension between these two ideas that the Father alone was God in the strict sense and that the Son was a 'diminished god' but not a creature, and he was not satisfied with the tension. He felt it must be resolved, and so he put a blunt question: Is the Son God or creature? He answered his question just as bluntly: The Son is not God. He is a perfect creature, not eternal but made by the Father out of nothing. And thus the subordinationist tendency in the Apologists and in Origen had reached full term. (The Triune God, Edmund J. Fortman, p 66-70) Origen, the greatest theologian of the East, rejected this two-stage theory and maintained the eternal generation of the Son. But to reconcile the eternity of the Son with a strict monotheism, he resorted to a Platonic hierarchical framework for the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and ended up by also making the Son and Holy Spirit not precisely creatures but 'diminished gods.' (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, introduction: p.xv) To some extent Origen was a subordinationist, for his attempt to synthesize strict monotheism with a Platonic hierarchical order in the Trinity could have and did have only a subordinationist result. He openly declared that the Son was inferior to the Father and the Holy Spirit to the Son. But he was not an Arian subordinationist for he did not make the Son a creature and an adopted son of God. (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, p59-61) By Steve Rudd Click to View Go To Start: WWW.BIBLE.CA |
