On Christ's Divinity

From G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man:

"There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more that Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Bramah. [...] The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. [...] Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centered monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare's works, or preferably in his own works. It is possible to find here and there human beings who make this supremely superhuman claim. It is possible to find them in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. [...] [A delusion of divinity] can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all. [...] If Christ was simply a human character, he really was a highly complex and contradictory human character. For he combined exactly the two things that lie at the two extremes of human variation. He was exactly what the man with a delusion never is; he was wise; he was a good judge. What he said was always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often unexpectedly moderate. Take a thing like the point of the parable of the tares and the wheat. It has the quality that unites sanity and subtlety. It has not the simplicity of a madman. It has not even the simplicity of a fanatic. It might be uttered by a philosopher a hundred years old, at the end of a century of Utopias. Nothing could be less like this quality of seeing beyond and all round obvious things, than the condition of the egomaniac with the one sensitive spot on his brain. I really do not see how these two characters could be convincingly combined, except in the astonishing way in which the creed combines them. For until we reach the full acceptance of the fact as a fact, however marvellous, all mere approximations to it are actually further and further away from it. Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows."

"The Supreme and Serene Blessing of a Jealous God"

From Chesterton's The Everlasting Man:

"It is often said with a sneer that the God of Israel was only a God of battles, 'a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts' pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles. Well it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend ... stretching out his hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods.... It would have been easy enough for his worshippers to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is obvious indeed that his followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin. The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe. In a word, there was a popular pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There was never a god called Jehovah-Ammon. [...] If there had been, there would certainly have been another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before the liberal and enlightened amalgamators had got so far afield as Jupiter, the image of the Lord of Hosts would have been deformed out of all suggestion of a monotheistic maker and ruler and would have become an idol far worse than any savage fetish; for he might have been as civilised as the gods of Tyre and Carthage. [...] [T]he world's destiny would have been distorted still more fatally if monotheism had failed in the Mosaic tradition. [...] [T]he world would have been lost if it had been unable to return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all things. That we do preserve something of that primary simplicity that poets and philosophers can still indeed in some sense say an Universal Prayer, that we live in a large and serene world under a sky that stretches paternally over all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy and philanthropy are truisms in a religion of reasonable men, all that we do most truly owe, under heaven, to a secretive and restless nomadic people; who bestowed on men the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous God."

The Slavery of Death: Part 3, The Gospel as the First Christians Understood It

The gospel story as understood by the first Christians.

Van Inwagen's "Quam Dilecta"

I thought I had posted it before, but I don't think I have. It is well worth the read. I hope someday to be the sort of person who "[shines] with the same, dearly familiar, uncreated light that shines in the pages of the New Testament."

Lewis on Fern-seed and Elephants

An excellent address given by C.S. Lewis originally entitled "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," nicely summarized here.

The Sinner's Prayer: A Brief History of a Novel Practice

A great introductory article by Steve Staten to the Sinner's Prayer.

The Didache

Richard Beck's post about the Διδαχή (Didache), or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, got me re-interested in that early Christian text, and so I read Tony Jones' translation (linked to in Dr. Beck's post) in about twenty minutes. I thought I'd jot down a few quick thoughts on different verses that struck me:

• 2.5-6: I've always wondered about how absolutely we should apply commands like "Give to every one who asks you." For example, should I give money to a homeless person if I know that person will use the money to buy cigarettes or liquor? The saying in v. 6 - "Let your alms sweat in your hands until you know to whom to give them" - suggests that it is wise to use discretion with our almsgiving. This discretion should not lessen our generosity, but it should focus it.
• 2.2: Notice the prohibition of abortion.
• 2.7: "Hate no one; correct some, pray for others, and some you should love more than your own life."
• 3.3: Filthy talking is put on the same level as lust.
• 4.2: Daily fellowship! Apparently, they needed it, too.
• 4.6: Hmm...  
• 4.8: This comes close to saying that Christians shouldn't have private property (echoing Acts 2). We could probably do a lot better in sharing what we have; after all, if we will share everything in Heaven (as the author argues), why not share everything on Earth?
• 4.9: Spare the rod and spoil the child!
• 4.10-11: It seems that the early Christians had servants - or slaves, for the Greek word (δοῦλος) translated "servants" here and "slaves" in Ephesians 6 (among others) is the same. This is something worth keeping in mind (not to condone modern institutionalized slavery).
• 4.14: Confess before you pray!
• 6.2: "For if you are able to bear the entire yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect; but if you are not able, then at least do what you can." Perhaps a reference to martyrdom?
• 6.3: It seems that the author(s) weren't aware of 1 Corinthians 8. This is interesting for determining how authoritative we should consider early Christian texts to be (in this case, this particular text seems to go against Paul's writings)  and for understanding how doctrinally and theologically united the early Christians were.
• 7.4: Already, the Christians seem to be moving away from the immediate baptisms of Acts. I am not sure if this is a good thing; after all, we take our time as well!
• 8.2-3: We probably do not focus enough on the Lord's Prayer.
• 9.4: This is a side of Communion that we almost certainly neglect: the communal aspect. For the author(s) here, the Eucharist (i.e., Communion) symbolizes the Church's desire for unity. (And, of course, the Eucharist was originally part of a meal - a social event.)
• 9.5: Baptism marked the entry of Christians into the Church - not faith. Notice that candidates for baptism (i.e., catechumens) - people who were presumably believers - were not yet considered full members of the Church.
• 10.6: I love this.
• 11.1: Teachers have a distinct role in the Church.
• 11.3ff: "Apostles" and "prophets" seem to be used relatively interchangeably. Also, the different tests for evaluating the legitimacy of prophets are interesting.
• 11.7: Probably a reference to the unforgivable sin (cf. Matthew 12.31-32, Mark 3.29-30). Not sure what to make of that.
• 12.1: Discretion!
• 12.4: "[A] Christian should not live idle in your midst."
• 13.1-3: Yeah, full-time ministry! (Seriously, though, that's what it sounds like.) Notice that teachers are entitled to support just as much as prophets.
• 14.1: cf. 4.14.
• 14.2: This is something Jesus commands as well - and yet I have never (to my knowledge) seen it practiced today. Maybe we should have a time for reconciliation and confession before every Communion.
• 15.1: Bishops (what we would call "elders") and deacons (literally "servants") are appointed by their churches - not by some higher central authority. And they "render to [us] the service of prophets and teachers."
• 16: A lot of interesting things here about the last days, imminent eschatology, and all that jazz.
• 16.2: cf. 4.2. We come together "seeking the things that are good for [our] souls."
• 16.4: Anti-Christ?

Overall, I find this glimpse into the practices of the first-century Christians quite illuminating. Nonetheless, I cannot help but agree with most of the early Christians that the Didache is non-canonical; it just doesn't have the right feeling about it. But it is very instructive, and worth the twenty minutes.

Reply to Evan Fales: On the Empty Tomb of Jesus

Fish Tank Post: Where Were We in Haiti?

Here it is.

Λόγος Christology in John, Justin, and Origen

...and yet another. (I took it out of formatting because it was being weird.)

Λόγος Christology in John, Justin, and Origen

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[1] So famously begins John’s Gospel, in which Jesus is identified as the λόγος (“Word”) incarnate, “who became flesh and dwelt among us.”[2] In the first eighteen verses of the Gospel alone,[3] we learn (among other things) that Jesus has existed from the beginning; indeed, “[a]ll things were made through him.”[4]

With these simple words, John outlined a Christological doctrine that would reverberate through subsequent Christian thought. The idea of Jesus as λόγος was hugely influential in later Christian theology:

The Prologue was so shocking, so divergent from what had gone before, so different from what the rest of the New Testament was saying about Jesus and the Word that it had an immense affect [sic] on what followed, whether that affect [sic] meant convergence with or divergence from Johannine teaching.[5]

Virtually everywhere else in the New Testament (including the Johannine corpus), the λόγος is simply the message or teaching of Christ, not Christ himself; John’s introductory proclamation to the contrary, then, is a powerful attestation to Jesus’ divinity which functions as a “signpost pointing to the incarnation and to Jesus” until Jesus himself enters the narrative.[6] (Importantly, John is not concerned with prolonged metaphysical discussions of the nature of the λόγος, as later Christians would be; John’s use of the λόγος lexeme is not primarily philosophical, but literary – “a clever ruse to grab the reader’s attention.”[7])

Of course, none of this theological reflection exists in a vacuum; long before the time of John or Jesus (in the flesh, at least), Judaism had evolved understandings of “subordinate agencies and powers” – such as God’s Spirit, Word, Wisdom, and Law – which served as intermediaries between God in Heaven (Who, it was thought, could not simply abandon His throne to address human affairs) and man on Earth.[8] (Most famously, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria – considered a forerunner of Christian thought – developed a Platonic theology of Judaism in which the λόγος was variously described as the only-begotten Son of God, man of God, and image of God.[9]) Thus, John, in equating Jesus with the λόγος, draws upon earlier Jewish concepts of divine revelation that are seen both in the ubiquitous Old Testament formula “the Word of the Lord” (suggestive of God’s power) and in the Jewish perception of Wisdom as the Word of God.[10]

As the faith spread beyond Jewish Palestine to the entire Roman Empire, this nascent Johannine Christology (along with the rest of Christian theology) was subsequently Hellenized by later Christians, who increasingly drew on Greek philosophical sources for their conceptualization of the λόγος.[11] (Greek philosophers had used “λόγος” as a technical term since the time of Heraclitus.[12]) Platonists had deemed the “transcendence of God [to be] such that it became more and more difficult to suppose that He exercised any action whatsoever upon the Cosmos.”[13] In contrast, Stoicism had thought of God as being in direct contact with the material world, operating through a divine λόγος that manifested itself in various forms (and was thus more often referred to in the plural as λόγοι – more specifically, λόγοι σπερματικοί[14]).[15] An “elegant blend” emerged as Platonists borrowed the Stoics’ λόγος to serve as an intermediary (or, in practice, as whatever they needed) between their transcendent God and His creation.[16] (One crucial consequence of this appropriation was that the λόγος was always “subordinate, in the second rank” – and indeed, for the first few centuries of Christian history, the Son was thought to be secondary to the Father.[17]) This syncretistic (and multifaceted) doctrine of the λόγος acted as the backdrop for ensuing Christian theologies, even when those theologies strayed significantly from the original meaning of the λόγος (a common occurrence; as de Faye observes, “[The] Logos, adopted by the early Christians, is not exactly the Logos of the philosophers”[18]).

One early example of a Christian thinker influenced by such Hellenistic thought was Justin Martyr (who, ironically, was unfamiliar with the Gospel of John),[19] a pagan philosopher who converted to Christianity in A.D. 132 and became the foremost Christian apologist of his time.[20] For Justin, Jesus is the incarnation of a “rational power [proceeding] from [God], who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos.”[21] Christ can bear all these names because he was begotten by the Father in the same way in which we beget words; such begetting does not diminish the Father any more than the act of speech diminishes us.[22] (In this sense, Jesus is both λόγος as spoken word and λόγος as rational principle; as Stead puts it, “The Logos is pictured in two-fold form, as the Father’s immanent Reason and as his outgoing, active and creative Word.”)[23],[24]

Why did Justin posit such a transitional divine entity? What metaphysical purpose does the λόγος serve? According to Minns and Parvis,

Justin believed that the very possibility of divine revelation required the existence of such a distinct, subordinated, or second-order divinity, for the possibility of God directly and immediately communicating himself to anyone else was ruled out by God’s own transcendence. […] This idea that God deals with the created order by means of a ‘second God’ had contemporary parallels in Jewish exegesis and in Greek philosophy.[25]
(Is Justin’s Christology implicitly ditheistic? It is difficult to say; Justin does, after all, go as far as calling Jesus “another God and Lord.”[26] In fairness to Justin, his λόγος is conceived more as a power than as a persona – following Tertullian – or as an ὑπόστασις – following Origen. Nevertheless, though his Christ is still “subject to the Maker of all things … [announcing] to men whatsoever the Maker of all things … wishes to announce to them,” the problem certainly remains.[27])

It was through the λόγος, then, that the world was created; it was through the λόγος that God spoke by His prophets; and it was through the λόγος σπερματικός (“spermatic word”) – the seed of the λόγος, reason, implanted in all people – that mankind could partially perceive the Truth.[28],[29] (Justin appropriates the concept of a “spermatic” λόγος from Philo and Stoic philosophy. [30]) This seed had afforded the Greek philosophers of antiquity (to whom Justin is heavily indebted) an imperfect view of God; it was only afterwards, however, through Jesus – “in whom the Logos dwells fully” – that a full understanding of God became possible.[31]

Evidently, Justin’s λόγος Christology was deeply rooted in the unfolding revelation of God to man – in Old Testament theophanies, in the Old Testament itself, and ultimately (and most fully) in Jesus himself. Yet, in using a lexeme married to a rich tradition in classical Greek philosophy (as well as in the pagan philosophy of his own time), Justin also clearly sought to establish a common ground with his opponents.[32] In fact, Justin goes so far as to call certain pre-Christian philosophers who have followed the (thitherto un-incarnate) λόγος “Christians”:

We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word [λόγος] of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably [μετὰ λόγου] are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them.[33]


Thus, the λόγος operates not only as a mediator between God and man but also as a mediator between Justin and his interlocutors.

Justin’s λόγος Christology constitutes an unmistakable progression from that found in the Gospel of John. Justin unequivocally follows John in identifying Jesus as the λόγος, but then proceeds (as it were) to flesh out this identification; the λόγος becomes connected to classical philosophy, God’s rationality and revelation, and the faculty by which mankind discerns truth.

Origen’s λόγος Christology (aptly named, for “[t]he doctrine of the Logos … constitutes the very essence of [Origen’s] Christology”[34]) is not wholly dissimilar from Justin’s. Just as Justin sought to defend Christianity against its detractors by means of a λόγος Christology, “the whole of [the] Christology of Origen is nothing else than a learned justification of the Christian belief of his time.”[35] Finally, for both Origen and Justin, “God the Father delegates to his Logos tasks which it would be inappropriate for him to perform in his own Person. […] The Logos might therefore be described as the permanent agent of God’s self-limitation and condescension.”[36]

Yet Origen is innovative in speaking of the λόγος as a distinct ὑπόστασις (“hypostasis”),[37] and he is also the first to develop a concept of eternal generation.[38] Arguing that it would be absurd to suppose that there could have been a time at which God existed but His Wisdom (i.e., Christ) did not, Origen concludes that “we must believe that Wisdom was generated before any beginning that can be either comprehended or expressed.”[39] (This vital distinction, Trigg notes, “provided the theoretical foundation of Nicene orthodoxy. It allows the Father to be the cause of the Son’s begetting and the Spirit’s procession, but in such a way that, in distinction from all other created beings, they share in the Father’s eternal and incorporeal existence.”[40] Arius, in contrast, believed that “the Son came into being in time and out of non-existence.”[41])

Furthermore, Origen integrates into his sophisticated theology the belief that Christ has a divine and a human nature:

The divine nature, God’s Logos, fully shares … in the Father’s eternity and incorporeality. … [T]he Logos also shares our full human nature. […] This union is so intimate that Scripture habitually applies the properties of either nature to the other, so that the man Jesus Christ is called the Son of God and the Son of God is said to have died.[42]


This full human nature includes not only a human body, but also a human soul (which, according to Origen, the divine λόγος assumes before assuming the body itself);[43] in Origen’s words, “[T]his altogether surpasses human admiration … how that mighty power of divine majesty, that very Word [λόγος] of the Father … can be believed to have existed within the limits of that man who appeared in Judea.”[44]

At this point, it may be the case that Origen diverges slightly from John and Justin Martyr. Origen does not believe, as John and Justin did, that the λόγος became Jesus; instead, Origen believes that the λόγος “cohabits with Jesus and remains himself. So independent is he [the λόγος] that … it is permissible for him to leave the man he has chosen, to absent himself, to return and again take up his associate.”[45] In his own words,

[I]f in that man [Jesus] as He appeared among men there was something divine, namely the only-begotten Son of God, the first-born of all creation … of this Being and His nature we must judge and reason in a way quite different from that in which we judge of the man who was seen in Jesus Christ.[46]


Origen does, of course, affirm that Jesus and the λόγος are “one personality.”[47]

Nothing in Origen or Justin, fortunately, indicates any radical departure from the λόγος of John’s Gospel. The same dominant themes of incarnation, creation, rationality, revelation, and subordination to the Father reappear in all three Christologies (though some of these themes are inevitably only implicit in John, given the brevity with which he discusses the λόγος). Differences exist, obviously, mainly indicative of general trends in the evolution of a Christianity that was increasingly Hellenized and systematized; the λόγος of Light and Life in John gave way to the rational power of Justin and finally to the ὑπόστασις of Origen. Ultimately, however, the best summation of the λόγος doctrine remains the opening words of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.[48]


[1] John i. 1. (Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural references come from the English Standard Version.)

[2] John i. 14.

[3] The only other potential New Testament reference to Jesus as the λόγος occurs in Revelation xix. 13. Peter M. Phillips, The Prologue of the Fourth Gospel (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 88.

[4] John i. 2-3.

[5] Phillips, 90.

[6] Ibid., 140.

[7] Ibid., 140-141.

[8] Christopher Stead. Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 148-149.

[9] “logos.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[10] “Philo Judaeus.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[11] “logos.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[12] John Mark Reynolds. When Athens Met Jerusalem (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 39.

[13] Eugène de Faye, Origen and His Work (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 100.

[14] Stead, 47.

[15] De Faye, 100.

[16] Ibid., 101.

[17] Ibid., 102.

[18] Ibid., 103.

[19] Helmut Köster, “Rome and Religious Sectarianism in the Second Century (From the Death of Paul to Irenaeus).” Andover Hall 102, Cambridge, MA. 24 Sept. 2009. Lecture.

[20] “Saint Justin Martyr.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[21] Justin Martyr, Dialogus cum Tryphoni, LXI.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, Justin, Philosopher and Martyr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 61.

[24] Stead, 156.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Justin Martyr, Dialogus cum Tryphoni, LVI.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Helmut Köster, “Christianity and Philosophy.” Andover Hall 102, Cambridge, MA. 8 Oct. 2009. Lecture.

[29] It should be noted that Minns and Parvis argue that Justin – unlike Philo before him and the majority of Christians after him – does not “explicitly assign a mediatorial role to the Logos in the creation of the world. […] His remarkable coyness about ascribing a directly mediatorial role to the Logos or Son in the work of creation, especially when set beside the fact that it is from God as creator that Justin habitually distinguishes the Logos or Son, suggests that he was chary of the idea – perhaps suspecting that it would provide comfort for Gnostic heretics who sought to disparage creation and to deny that it was the work of God.” Minns and Parvis, 62-65.

[30] Minns and Parvis, 65.

[31] Helmut Köster, “Christianity and Philosophy.”

[32] Minns and Parvis, 65.

[33] Justin Martyr, Prima Apologia, XLVI.

[34] De Faye, 99.

[35] Ibid., 113.

[36] Stead, 156.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Joseph W. Trigg, Origen (London: Routledge, 1998), 24.

[39] Origen, De principiis, I.II.2.

[40] Trigg, 24.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid., 25.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Origen, De principiis, II.VI.2.

[45] De Faye, 105.

[46] Origen, Contra Celsum, VII.XVI.

[47] De Faye, 105-106.

[48] John i. 1-5.

Trinity and Controversy in the Third and Fourth Century

Another (slightly rushed and unformatted) paper related to the purpose of the blog...

Trinity and Controversy in the Third and Fourth Centuries

Today, of course, the doctrine of the Trinity is relatively uncontroversial among most Christians (with some notable exceptions).[1] For the first few centuries of Christianity’s history, however, the true nature of the Triune God was hotly contested; in fact, “[i]t was not until the 4th century that the distinctness of the three and their unity were brought together in a single orthodox doctrine of one essence and three persons.”[2] Though Trinitarian formulæ did exist in the New Testament,[3] their exact theological and metaphysical implications were left unexplored. This lack of fixity in apostolic doctrine concerning the Trinity – “the Church entered [the Trinitarian] dispute possessing no established doctrinal consensus concerning the understanding of God as Triad”[4] – provided the impetus for subsequent controversy: “The occurrence of a major debate in the Church concerning an understanding of God as Trinity was inevitable. The issue was too central and basic and too open to conflicting and contradictory positions to be avoided.”[5] Put simply, the need to reconcile the putative divinity of Christ and of the Spirit with the clear Old Testament proclamation of the one God (seen especially in the Shema) was pressing.[6]

What, specifically, was at stake? The broad question involved the entire Trinitarian conception of the Godhead; however, discussion about the exact role and status of the Holy Spirit often appeared peripheral in comparison to the analogous disputations over the Son.[7] Indeed, Novatian, in his third-century treatise De trinitate,[8] summarized the contemporary disagreement in the following manner: “Some heretics have thought [Jesus] to be God the Father, others that he was only God without the flesh.”[9] The former heresy was modalism (also known, in its various forms, as Monarchianism and Sabellianism, or Patripassianism[10]), the latter subordinationism, which developed into Arianism.[11] Both began with the principle of monotheism and concluded either (in the case of modalism) that there was only one person in God or (in the case of subordinationism) that Christ was necessarily inferior to the Father.[12]

The central idea of Sabellian modalism is this:

[A]n only God, Father and Legislator in the Old Testament … became flesh and Son in the New and sanctified the Church as Holy Spirit after Pentecost. […] God was one originally and eternally but … became trinity in time: Father at creation, Son at the time of the Incarnation and Sanctifier at the time of Pentecost. Thus the Three Persons were conceived as modes or functions of one really single Person, just as the same human person could be successively priest, doctor, and magistrate.[13]


For Sabellius and other modalists, the Trinitarianism of what would become Nicene Orthodoxy was, in fact, implicitly tritheistic.[14]

The obvious alternative, which denied the equality of the Son with the Father, was subordinationism. Importantly, subordinationism, though essentially anathematized in the Council of Nicæa,[15] was not terribly dissimilar to earlier theological beliefs that were (in their time) thoroughly orthodox; in fact, Lonergan implies that the ante-Nicene Fathers were, in certain respects, subordinationists.[16] (He cautions, however, against an anachronistic evaluation of “the doctrine of the ante-Nicene authors according to the criteria of a later theology.”[17] We should understand the alleged subordinationism of the ante-Nicene Fathers not as heresy, but simply as an indication that they “were not well up in the theology of a later age.”[18]) Nonetheless, more explicit strands of subordinationism were always rejected as heterodox.

One such strand was adoptionism, according to which “Jesus was a mere man, in whom God dwelt in a special way.”[19] “The son of Mary … was not the Son of God by nature but only by adoption.”[20] Some, such as Cerinthus, extended this notion and argued that Jesus, “superior to other men only in prudence, justice, and wisdom,” was conceived naturally by Mary and Joseph; God sent His Spirit (called Christ) upon Jesus during his ministry, but the Spirit abandoned Jesus before his death.[21]

Others – the Docetists – suggested instead that “Jesus of Nazareth was not really a human being at all. Jesus only seemed to be human; in reality, he was divine. His humanity was a phantasm, an illusion.”[22] Such ideas could be traced backward at least to the time during which the three Johannine epistles were written.[23] Docetism never emerged as an organized movement within non-Gnostic Christianity but enjoyed popularity among Gnostics such as Valentinus and Basilides.[24]

The most important branch of subordinationism, of course, was due to Arius, a presbyter in the church of Alexandria who publicly criticized the doctrine of the co-eternality of the Son and Father maintained by Alexander, his bishop.[25],[26] Arius’ objection to Alexander was simple: Scripture clearly taught that Christ was begotten,[27] yet Alexander contended that he was eternal. For Arius, such a conjunction was impossible: “[Christ] was either unbegotten and eternal, as the Father was, or he was begotten and had therefore come to be.”[28] Arius opted for the latter option:

God was not always a Father, but [that] there was a time when God was not a Father. The Word of God [Jesus] was not always, but originated from things that were not … wherefore there was a time when He was not; for the Son is a creature and a work. Neither is He like in essence [κατ' 'ουσίαν] Neither is He like in essence to the Father … but He is one of the things made and created, and is called the Word and Wisdom by an abuse of terms, since He Himself originated by the proper Word of God, and by the Wisdom that is in God.[29]


Though Jesus was a “very perfect creature … he did not really know the incomprehensible Father, for the finite cannot know the infinite.”[30] The line between God and creation was absolute; rather than reconcile the immutable, transcendent God with the mutable, earthly Christ, Arius chose instead a dissociation of the former from the latter.[31],[32]

Arius’ criticisms of Alexander eventually led to his excommunication in 318 by the Synod of Alexandria; nevertheless, “he continued to spread his own doctrine, and even managed to find favour with other bishops.”[33] Marsh writes,

Arius … did not accept his degradation easily. He already had … considerable support … in Alexandria, but he now sought support also from farther afield and in more powerful quarters. He pleaded his cause to bishops in the Greek East outside of Egypt…. Arius could not but have been gratified by the support he received, especially from the two Eusebiuses [of Nicomedia and of Cæsarea]. Any hope Alexander had of confining the dispute within his own jurisdiction … had now vanished. He too was now obliged to circulate his Episcopal colleagues in the East in order to discredit Arius and vindicate his own position. But the affair had now effectively passed outside his control and had become a public controversy involving and dividing the whole Church of the East.[34]


The repercussions of this parochial squabble were thus far-reaching.

In response, the Emperor Constantine convened a church-wide council to come to a resolution.[35] In Luibhéid’s words, “The bishops who assembled in 325 at the Council of Nicaea dealt with several matters, but the main reason for their gathering lay in [the controversy between Arius and Alexander] which had broken out in Alexandria.”[36] The significance of this first ecumenical council is unmistakable. Such an opportunity to formulate a single, universal proclamation of faith – to address the emerging theological fissures before they ruptured completely – was unprecedented.

The Council, of course, rejected the Arian tenets of the Son’s creaturehood, non-eternality, and mutability.[37] But its enterprise was not entirely negative; in what would become a pivotal moment in the Church’s history, the Council affirmed the ὁμοούσια (consubstantiality) of the Son and the Father, “[proclaiming] inseparably the dogma of the perfect divine unity and of the divinity of the Word, equal to the Father.”[38] Such terminology was not without its drawbacks – it ran the risk of a modalist interpretation – nor was it, strictly speaking, biblical.[39] Nonetheless, it determined the course of all further theologizing concerning the Trinity.

The bishops assembled at Nicæa subscribed to the proposed Creed with near unanimity. (Several bishops – among them Eusebius of Cæsarea, the famed church historian – chose not to endorse it out of concern over the exact meaning of ὁμοούσια.[40] Furthermore, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicæa, both of whom had signed the Creed, soon thereafter “let it be known that they were now dissatisfied with the conciliar document.”[41]) The controversy, however, was far from over. Arius had been exiled by imperial decree following the Council, but Constantine subsequently decided to accept Arius’ return to the Empire.[42] It was this decision of Constantine’s that effectively “brought into existence two opposed parties and initiated the real controversy” in the East.[43]

Athanasius, an Alexandrian deacon and vigorous opponent of Arianism who had succeeded Alexander as Bishop of Alexandria in 328, was commanded to receive Arius back as a priest in the Alexandrian church; his subsequent refusal led to banishment for him and for other prominent anti-Arians.[44] The tide had turned. Arianism was far from dead; in fact, the controversy would persist for another sixty years (long after Arius’ death) until the Council of Constantinople in 381.[45]

How did Arianism persist for so long? Any sufficient answer must address the political dimensions of the controversy. As de Margerie argues,

The gravity of the Arian crisis, in the course of which, some thirty years after Nicaea, about half of the bishops abandoned the orthodox doctrine, becomes more comprehensible when we perceive that the divine unicity … appeared to offer a better justification for the existence of the monarchical Roman Empire. The eternal monarchy of God was the supreme exemplar of the Empire, a projection of the eternal in time. Such a mentality … inclined [the official theologians of the Empire toward the side of Arianism.[46]


Regardless of the truth of this (somewhat Freudian) claim, the political divisions which followed Constantine’s death in 337 must have exacerbated the theological divisions in the Church.[47] The emperor’s three sons (Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius) all adopted competing Trinitarian views; afterward, the co-emperors and brothers Valens and Valentinian would also espouse conflicting stances (Valens, in fact, went as far as to persecute non-Arian Christians in the eastern empire).[48] Only after Valens’ death in 378 did the Emperor Theodosius I succeed in establishing Nicene Christianity in the East as Damasus had already done in the West.[49] (The entire sequence of events, of course, was much more complicated. At one point, four distinct theological positions – the Nicene, Arian, pro-Arian Conservative, and anti-Arian conservative – coexisted in the East.[50])

The Trinitarian controversy, then, was an iconic moment in Christian history. It was during this time that orthodox conceptualization of the Trinity was solidified, and ecclesiastical precedents for settling doctrinal disputes among the different bishops and churches were set; however, it was also the time during which the heavy hand of the Roman State began to meddle in internal Christian affairs. The events of the fourth century involving Arius and Nicæa would thus set the stage for the next thousand years of Western history.




[1] Examples include Christian Unitarians and Oneness Pentecostals.

[2] “Trinity.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[3] cf. Matthew xxviii. 19, 2 Corinthians xiii. 14.

[4] Thomas Marsh, The Triune God (Blackrock: The Columbia Press, 1994), 97. Adds Luibhéid: “What has to be remembered here is that at the start of the Arian controversy the establishment of a consensus on such great problems as the nature of the Trinity … was still in the future.” Colm Luibhéid, The Council of Nicaea (Galway: Galway University Press, 1982), 3.

[5] Ibid., 95.

[6] “Trinity.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[7] Marsh, 96.

[8] “Novatian.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[9] Novatian, De trinitate, XXIII.

[10] Bernard Lonergan, C.C., S.J., The Way to Nicea (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976), 36.

[11] Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., The Christian Trinity in History (Still River: St. Bede’s Publications, 1982), 72. It should be noted that different scholars use these labels in inconsistent ways.

[12] De Margerie, 73.

[13] Ibid.

[14] For example, Hippolytus quotes the modalist Callistus as saying the following: “I will not profess belief in two Gods, Father and Son, but in one. For the Father, who subsisted in the Son Himself, after He had taken unto Himself our flesh, raised it to the nature of Deity, by bringing it unto union with Himself, and made it one; so that Father and Son must be styled one God, and that this Person being one, cannot be two.” Hippolytus, Refutatio Omnium Hæresium, IX.VII.

[15] Maurice Wiles, “Attitudes to Arius in the Arian Controversy.” Michael R. Barnes and Daniel H. Williams, Arianism After Arius (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 32.

[16] Lonergan, 41.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Lonergan, 36.

[20] “Adoptionism.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[21] De Margerie, 87. While adoptionism per se may not explicitly contradict the New Testament, a denial of the virgin birth clearly goes against the Gospel narratives.

[22] Alister McGrath, Heresy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 111.

[23] Ibid., 111. cf. 1 John iv. 1-3: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.” (Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural references come from the English Standard Version.)

[24] Ibid., 113-116.

[25] Luibhéid, 25.

[26] Such criticism, Luibhéid observes, should be understood in its historical context rather than in the context of “a later age when the major doctrinal issues had long been settled and bishops … had come to be regarded as the custodians of a received and unalterable tradition.” In this light, Arius’ actions do not seem quite as mutinous. Luibhéid, 3.

[27] On this point, Arius was in agreement with his opponents; the Nicene Creed itself states that Jesus is “begotten of the Father.”

[28] Luibhéid, 25.

[29] Athanasius, de Arii depositione, II.

[30] De Margerie, 88.

[31] McGrath, 144.

[32] Recent scholarship has proposed a slightly different interpretation of Arius’ theology, beginning not with a particular view of God’s transcendence but with “a particular view of redemption and the Redeemer-figure which this view entails. Arius saw redemption, according to this view, in moral terms, as a breaking out of the cycle of moral weakness and evil which envelops the human scene to union with God. […] The Redeemer was the one who achieved this union with God…. […] But since the Redeemer achieved this union with God, he could not have been one with God from the very beginning or in his essential being.” Marsh, 103.

[33] Lonergan, 69.

[34] Marsh, 99.

[35] “Council of Nicaea.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[36] Luibhéid, 1.

[37] De Margerie, 91.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid., 90-91.

[40] Lonergan, 73. Theodoret preserves a letter from Eusebius to Paulinus in which Eusebius writes, “[W]e affirm that the unbegotten is one and one also that which exists in truth by Him, yet was not made out of His substance, and does not at all participate in the nature or substance of the unbegotten, entirely distinct in nature and in power, and made after perfect likeness both of character and power to the maker. We believe that the mode of His beginning not only cannot be expressed by words but even in thought, and is incomprehensible not only to man, but also to all beings superior to man.” Theodoret, Historia ecclesiastica, I.V.

[41] Luibhéid, 126.

[42] Marsh, 101.

[43] Ibid., 101-102. Of the party opposed to the Nicene Creed, not all were necessarily Arians: “This latter body was … a heterogeneous group which included strict Arians, pro-Arians like Eusebius of Nicomedia and a large middle group which … were very uncomfortable with the statement of Nicaea.”

[44] Ibid., 102.

[45] Ibid., 117-118.

[46] De Margerie, 89.

[47] Marsh, 111.

[48] Ibid., 116.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid., 113.

Lonergan on Gnosticism

From The Way to Nicea, by Father Bernard Lonergan, C.C., S.J.:

"From the time of Harnack it has frequently been said that the Gnostics were the first Christian theologians, since it was they who first used the psychological analogy, and the notions of consubstantiality and of procession. What is one to make of such an assertion? In the first place, we must note that there is a great difference between the dramatico-practical pattern of experience, common to all men, and the intellectual, or theoretic, or scientific pattern of experience.... Further, the drive towards theory has first to develop and become manifest, before one can learn how to guide and control it by logic, by scientific method, and so on. So the cult of numbers preceded the science of mathematics, astrology preceded astronomy, alchemy preceded chemistry, legend preceded history and theogony precede theology. Viewed from this point of view, what happened when heretics borrowed some elements of the Christian faith should cause no great surprise, but one does not have to call the resulting speculation Christian theology."

It's an interesting thought; I'm not sure, however, how far it can be taken.

Ichthus Article: Must Christians be Pacifists?

Here are some of my thoughts on the matter. I'm still very open to more discussion on the issue.

Aristides on the Early Christians

From The Apology of Aristides, written in the early second century:

"Christians love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If a man has something, he gives freely to the man who has nothing. If they see a stranger, Christians take him home and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They don't consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit, in God. [...] And if they hear that one of them is in jail, or persecuted for professing the name of their redeemer, they all give him what he needs - if it is possible, they bail him out.

If one of them is poor and there isn't enough food to go around, they fast several days to give him the food he needs... This is really a new kind of person. There is something divine in them."

(Hat tip to CQOTD.)

Tertullian Is Ballin'

From his Apologeticus:

"As to the Emperor and the charge of high treason against us, Caesar's safety lies not in hands soldered on. We invoke the true God for the Emperor. Even if he persecute us, we are bidden pray for them that persecute us, as you can read in our books which are not hidden, which you often get hold of. We pray for him because the Empire stands between us and the end of the world. We count the Caesars to be God's vice-regents and swear by their safety (not by their genius, as required). As for loyalty, Caesar really is more ours than yours; for it was our God who set him up. It is for his own good, that we refuse to call the Emperor God; Father of his Country is a better title. No Christian has ever made a plot against a Caesar; the famous conspirators and assassins were heathen, one and all. Piety, religion, faith are our best offering of loyalty."

(Hat tip to CQOTD.)

Cyprian on Joy

From a letter Saint Cyprian wrote:

"This seems a cheerful world, Donatus, when I view it from this fair garden, under the shadow of these vines. But if I climbed some great mountain and looked out over the wide lands, you know very well what I would see - brigands on the high roads, pirates on the seas; in the amphitheaters men murdered to please applauding crowds; under all roofs misery and selfishness. It is really a bad world, Donatus, an incredibly bad world. Yet in the midst of it I have found a quiet and holy people. They have discovered a joy which is a thousand times better than any pleasures of this sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are the Christians - and I am one of them."

(Hat tip to CQOTD. Incidentally, several of the quotations I've posted here before have come from them, and I don't think I've ever remembered to tip my hat to them before! Apologies.)

Churches of Christ and Baptism: An Historical and Theological Overview

A good summary of Restoration Movement thought about baptism, relevant to my most recent post. A couple notes:

1. The current ICOC view is not what Dr. Foster describes it to be.

2. The son of the Jimmy Allen mentioned in the article (who is also named Jimmy Allen) spoke at Harvard about baptism just a few months ago!

(Hat tip to Douglas Jacoby. Also, thanks to LT for the correction about which Jimmy Allen was mentioned in the article.)

Denis Lamoureux's Book and Genesis 1-11

I'm planning on reading Dr. Denis O. Lamoureux's Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution. I'm extremely excited, because Dr. Lamoureux (who is at the conference I am at!) has Ph.D.'s both in biology and theology.

This excerpt from the Preface seems to summarize the book's thesis:

"An assumption embraced by many Christians is that God revealed scientific facts in the Bible hundreds of generations before their discovery by modern science. This view of biblical inspiration asserts that the Holy Spirit dictated information about the natural world to secretary-like writers. As a result, there is purportedly a correspondence or alignment between Scripture and science. This is known as 'concordism.' Christians often claim that it is a feature of biblical inerrancy and infallibility. However, chapters 4 and 5 [of the book] review the astronomy, geology, and biology in Scripture and conclude that the science in the Bible is an ancient understanding of nature - the science-of-the-day a few thousand years ago. According to this perspective, the Holy Spirit descended to the knowledge level of the inspired authors by using their conceptualization of the physical world in order to communicate as effectively as possible inerrant and infallible Messages of Faith. This approach to biblical revelation is modeled on the greatest act of revelation - the Incarnation. God revealed Himself by descending into human flesh through Jesus, and in a similar way, the Bible uses a human understanding of the structure, operation, and origin of the world.

Chapters 6 and 7 [of the book] examine Gen[esis] 1-11 in order to determine whether concordism characterizes the relationship between the biological origins accounts and the facts of history. Like the ancient science in Scripture, it will be shown that these opening chapters include an ancient understanding of the origin of the cosmos and humanity. This ancient history is a vessel that transports inerrant and infallible foundations of the Christian faith: the universe and life were made by the God of the Bible, the creation is very good, only men and women are created in the Image of God, the Lord intended us to be in relationships with one another and in particular with Him, everyone has fallen into sin, God judges humans for their sinfulness, and He has chosen a special people through which to bless the entire world. Together, the four chapters on scriptural interpretation conclude that concordism is not a feature of Gen[esis] 1-11, and as a result there is no conflict with the modern understanding of origins offered by academic disciplines of science and history."

Some preliminary thoughts:

1. Buy or read the book!

2. Seriously. I saw Dr. Lamoureux present a lecture yesterday on evolution and intelligent design, and he is a fantastic, faith-filled speaker - with a killer moustache to boot.

3. There is nothing overly radical in Dr. Lamoureux's thesis. Virtually all Christians would deny that the Earth is flat or that the Sun revolves around the Earth, despite the several passages (e.g., Joshua 10:1-15; 1 Samuel 2:8; Job 9:6, 38:4; Psalm 19:4-6, 104:5; Isaiah 41:9; Daniel 4:11; Matthew 5:45) that could indicate otherwise.

The analogy, of course, is not perfect. Many of the references to the "ends of the earth" or the sun's rising and setting are poetic or metaphorical, not meant to be understood as "scientific" descriptions of the world. But this certainly is not always the case; one would be hard-pressed to believe that the author of Joshua, for example, wrote Joshua 10 the way he did whilebelieving that the Earth was a sphere that revolved around the Sun.

4. Of course, Genesis 1-11 are much trickier than Flat Earth theory or geocentrism, because Genesis 1-11 describes the Creation and Fall of Man - a topic of much more theological import than the shape of the Earth (cf. Romans 5-8, 1 Corinthians 15). Dr. Lamoureux promises to address these issues in his book.

5. All Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16). We know this much. But we do not know what exactly it means for Scripture to be "God-breathed" (i.e., inspired) means without some careful investigation and reflection. And I, for one, am excited to buckle down and investigate.

Philo and Early Christian Thought

A paper I wrote for a class. Because it'd be too complicated, I'm not going to worry about formatting.

Philo and Early Christian Thought

Whatever its claims to divine inspiration, Christianity cannot pretend to have arisen independently of the intellectual and cultural landscape from which it emerged. The omnipresence of Judaism and Jewish thought within early Christian writings is obviously undeniable, and the influence of (and exposure to) Greek philosophy can also be witnessed from the very beginning; St. Paul himself is reported to have debated Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in Athens,¹ and St. John began his Gospel with the proclamation, “In the beginning was the Word [λόγος],”² identifying Jesus Christ with a term from Greek philosophy denoting rationality and animating power. According to Runia, “Christianity could not have become the Christianity that we know, if it had not accepted the challenge posed by Greek philosophy with its trust in a world-view based on rational thought.”³

In particular, Mack has identified Hellenistic Judaism, which incorporated elements of Greek philosophy into the Jewish faith (thus synthesizing the two primary traditions from which Christian thought sprung), as the “religious milieu in which many of the theological concerns and language forms common to [early Christianity and Hellenistic Judaism] were first molded.”⁴ And by far the most prominent Hellenistic Jewish figure in early Christian thought (and probably in all of antiquity) was Philo of Alexandria (20 BC-50 AD), a philosopher and exegete who wrote extensively on Mosaic scripture and, as the Jesuit scholar Thomas Tobin describes it, “clearly influenced the interpretation of the Bible for centuries. His impact on patristic exegesis was immense.”⁵ The Church Fathers' respect for him, though not universal, was impressive; St. Jerome placed him among the “ecclesiastical writers,”⁶ and Eusebius mentioned a legend (whose plausibility he does not dismiss) in which Philo spoke to St. Peter in Rome.^7,8 (Not coincidentally, we owe the breadth of the extant Philonic corpus – if not its very existence – to the early Christians, who included him in the incipient Christian tradition: “Had [Origen] not taken copies of Philo's treatises with him when he moved from Alexandria to Caesarea in 233, then these would have gone lost, together with the remainder of the Hellenistic-Jewish literature of Alexandria.”)^9,10 No one contests that Philo had an enormous impact upon early Christian thought.

In this essay, I intend to probe the extent of that impact, analyzing both Philo's role within the larger Hellenistic-Jewish tradition and his place in Christian intellectual history. Doing so will allow me to determine and compare Philo's and Hellenistic Judaism's effects upon Christian thinking.

Philo is often (vaguely) classified as a “philosopher”; however, his main intention was not to construct a systematic philosophy, but instead to understand the Torah;¹¹ in fact, twenty-six of Philo's thirty-three surviving works consist of interpretations of biblical texts.¹² Though his œuvre provides us with our “first sustained reflection about pentateuchal literature and how it should be read,”¹³ Philo, unsurprisingly, drew upon a longstanding tradition of Jewish exegesis in his work. (For example, in his Quæstiones et solutiones in Genesim alone, Philo specifically attributed certain interpretations to previous Jewish thinkers over a dozen times.)¹⁴

Unfortunately, “this rich literature [of Hellenistic Jewish thought] has almost entirely disappeared,” and it is therefore frequently difficult to distinguish between the Philonic and the pre-Philonic in Philo's works, especially because Philo “is the most important and most vital representative of a wider movement, in which the biblical tradition was first brought in direct contact with the philosophical thought that was developed in Greek culture.”¹⁵ Consequently, although several pre-Clementine Church Fathers discussed topics that undoubtedly relate to themes which Philo also explored, it remains uncertain whether these connections stem from a patristic familiarity with Philo himself or from a knowledge of other related sources.¹⁶ (This confusion potentially arises even with St. John; Dodd suggests that “the cast of the [the thoughts of the author of the Gospel of John] clearly suggests that he was acquainted, if not with Philo, at least with Jewish thought proceeding on similar lines.”¹⁷ Furthermore, Philo was quite comfortable with giving multiple interpretations of single texts, often listing previous interpretations which he would sometimes qualify but rarely reject.¹⁸ Because he valued the interpretations of his predecessors enough to assimilate them into his works even when they were not altogether concordant with his own, we must wonder “at what point in this history of interpretation Philo [appeared].”)¹⁹

All of this complicates the task of separating Philo's personal influence upon Christianity from the effects of the broader Hellenistic Jewish tradition. It would be an exceedingly onerous endeavor to parse the two with any success, and I will not attempt to do so here; instead, I have merely flagged some of the obstacles preventing an elucidation of the relationship between Philo and Hellenistic Judaism.

Of course, these obstacles themselves only lead to more questions: What exactly is “Hellenistic Judaism”? In what sort of intellectual environment does Philo write? As Bentwich remarks, “It should be remembered that until the second century of the common era the mass of Jewish tradition was a floating and developing body of opinion not consigned to writing or formalized, but handed down by word of mouth from teacher to pupil, and preacher to congregation.”²⁰ Philo was not a Jewish thinker who subscribed to a particular “Hellenized” branch of Judaism; rather, Philo lived in a time (the first centuries BC and AD) when Greek philosophy had enmeshed itself into Jewish thought and in a place (Alexandria) that was the center of exchange between those two traditions.

Not much is known of the philosophical atmosphere in Alexandria before the first century BC.²¹ However, we know of several Alexandrian philosophers who wrote slightly before Philo's lifetime, one of whom, Aenesidemus of Knossos, founded a Skeptical school of philosophy around 45 BC; Stoic and Peripatetic schools also existed.²² Philo employed some of Aenesidemus' methodology in De ebrietate, drawing upon Peripatetic and Stoic doctrines as well.²³ However, the main Greek influence upon Philo was Middle Platonism, “in which the central position [was] given to Plato's physics or, more importantly, to certain interpretations of Plato's physics.”²⁴ Though the origins of Middle Platonism are unclear, what is known is that first-century Alexandria saw a turn away from Skepticism, an emphasis on Plato's Timaeus (which sketches much of Plato's physics and theology), and a “return of the notion of transcendence” – often including “an intermediate figure between that transcendent deity and the world.”²⁵ Elsewhere, Middle Platonists accentuated Plato's formulation of the purpose of life as “likeness or assimilation to God.”²⁶ Moreover, Middle Platonism possessed a thoroughly religious flavor and a propensity for allegorization of religious stories and rituals:

In general...the Middle Platonic thought of the latter part of the first century B.C., especially in Alexandria, is deeply affected by a Platonism (influenced by Neopythagoreanism) in which cult myths and mystery rites are reinterpreted and allegorized. This interest in the reinterpretation of cult myths and mystery rites...reflects the intensely religious character of much Middle Platonic thought. The attraction, then, of Middle Platonism for Jewish interpreters was not simply its conceptual structure but also the religious sensibility that was a crucial part of that framework.²⁷

All of these developments in first-century Greek philosophy, many of which became fundamental for Philo, primed it for consolidation with (and application to) religious texts. They were vital for Middle Platonism, Hellenistic Judaism, and – eventually – Christianity.

Admittedly, neither Philo nor the early Christians derived the idea of a transcendent God from Greek philosophy; that concept was present enough in the Jewish tradition. However, even before examining the Philonic texts themselves, some salient points can be made about Philo's (and, by extension, Hellenistic Judaism's) importance to Christian thought.

First, as Runia recognizes, The Church Fathers did not learn Platonism from Philo, but rather a means of

[establishing a link] between Platonist ideas and the contents of scripture. ... [Philo and Hellenistic-Jewish thought] showed how insights from the Greek philosophical tradition could be localized in the authoritative words of scripture. ... The history of [Philonic thought] in the church fathers is the process in which a long sequence of apologists and theologians takes over themes and ideas from Philo and the broader Hellenistic-Jewish tradition. These ideas are seldom abstractly philosophical. They are connected to the exposition of the biblical text or – as occurs later – introduced in polemical dogmatic discussions.²⁸

Even where Philo did not provide specific interpretations or hermeneutical principles, his writings illustrated the centrality – indeed, the necessity – of a balanced integration and synthesis of philosophy and scriptural religion. (To borrow Bentwich's bon mot, Philo offered the Greeks a “philosophical religion” and the Jews a “religious philosophy.”)²⁹ Importantly, the early Christians employed a similar methodological equilibrium that allowed them to preserve the distinctiveness of the faith while engaging the surrounding zeitgeist.

Such engagement, crucial both for Philo and for the early Christians, required a noticeably apologetic exegesis – one for believers and non-believers alike. And Philo exemplified this approach:

Why, it must be asked, does Philo artificially attach his philosophy to the Scriptures? He does so for two reasons: first, because he holds and wishes to prove that between faith and philosophy there is no conflict, and his generation worked out the agreement by his method; he does so also because he wishes to establish the Torah and Judaism upon a sure foundation for the man of outside culture. ... A superficial knowledge of the materialistic or rationalistic theories...was made the excuse for indifference to the law. ... The dominating motive of Philo's work is to show that the Bible contains for those who will seek it the richest treasures of wisdom, that its ethical teaching is more ideal and yet more real than that which hundreds of sophists poured forth daily...and lastly that the cultured Jew may search out knowledge and truth to their depths, and find them expressed in his holy books and in his religious beliefs and practices.³⁰

This external and even evangelistic focus of Philo's (with which the Fathers would, of course, wholly empathize) served as a primary impetus for his thought, as it would for the Church Fathers.³¹

But what exactly did Philo say to become so singular a figure in Christian history? What was the substance of his conclusions? How did he come to them? And in what ways did the Church Fathers agree with him?

Runia proposes two Philonic doctrines, God's immutability and his “exaltedness” (or transcendence), as partial answers to these questions; the former “gave expression to the conviction of God's faithfulness and reliability,” while the latter stresses the notion that “God, as he really is, is known only to himself.”³² (Or, as Philo has God says to Moses when asked to reveal Himself: “I bestow what is appropriate for the one who is to receive it.”)³³ According to Runia, this second idea of transcendence was particularly popular with the Cappadocian Father Gregory of Nyssa – so popular, in fact, that he appropriated the title of a Philonic text for his work on the subject, De vita Moysis.³⁴

Philo also “furnish[ed] the church fathers with numerous allegorical themes and schemes, especially in the area of physical (or cosmological), psychological and moral exposition.”³⁵ Pointing out that Philo refuses to allegorize God, Runia nevertheless cites the abilities “to connect up with and exploit contemporary philosophical ideas” and “to preserve at least partly the narrative element of the biblical text, but then at the more general level of the quest of the soul for God” as critical advantages of the allegorical method; it promotes flexibility and unity of message.³⁶ (This essentially is why Bentwich names Philo's allegorical commentaries as “the crowning point of his work.”)³⁷

Several features of Philo's allegorical method bear mentioning. For Philo, “the Torah [was] a unity, and every part of it [had] equal value”;³⁸ in Philo's words,

[T]he giving of the law...is a sort of living unity, the whole of which one ought to examine carefully with all one's eyes, and so discern with truth, and certainty, and clearness, the universal intention of the whole of the scripture without dissecting or lacerating its harmony, or disuniting its unity.³⁹

For Philo, no other hermeneutical perspective can be valid: “[B]y any other mode everything would appear utterly inconsistent and absurd, being dissociated from all community or equity.”⁴⁰ This means that almost every passage in scripture must have a symbolic meaning – and, indeed, Philo devoted his Quæstiones et solutiones in Genesim to answering hundreds of questions about allegorical interpretations of specific pentateuchal clauses, including the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God's indignation with Noah's generation, and such esoterica as the ordering of Shem, Ham, and Japheth's names.⁴¹ Interestingly, he (following interpreters before him) differentiated between the man created in Genesis i. 26-27 and ii. 7; one symbolized the mind, the other virtue.⁴² This is part of Philo's “allegory of the soul,” which “emphasize[d] that the figures described in the text of Genesis are also symbols of faculties and processes that are within each individual.”⁴³ Significantly, Philo considered “both [the 'literal' and the 'allegorical' or 'symbolic'] levels of interpretation legitimate,” and sought to maintain both when possible.⁴⁴ (Important exceptions include Philo's aforementioned refusal to allegorize God on the one hand and his non-literal readings of potentially anthropomorphic passages on the other.)^45,46 This method of double allegory is perhaps the defining characteristic of Philonic exegesis.

There is no room here for an exhaustive survey of the Fathers' use of allegory in biblical interpretation; however, as a representative case, we can consider interpretations of the Genesis creation accounts in Philo and in some of the Church Fathers. Are the six days of the creation story literal days? Philo offers a numerological, non-literal exposition:

It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; because all time is only the space of days and nights, and these things the motion of the sun as he passes over the earth and under the earth does necessarily make. ... When...Moses says, 'God completed his works on the sixth day,' we must understand that he is speaking not of a number of days, but that he takes six as a perfect number.⁴⁷

Origen, who is closely associated with Philo and is known to have studied his works thoroughly,⁴⁸ echoes Philo's view, lambasting literal interpretations as absurd:

For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? ... And who is so foolish as to suppose that God...planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life...so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? ... And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.⁴⁹

But Origen's rather dismissive tone belies the variety of opinions the Fathers held.⁵⁰ St. Basil, for instance, holds a view diametrically opposed to Origen's, and specifically eschews the allegorical approach:

I know the laws of allegory, though less by myself than from the works of others. There are those truly, who do not admit the common sense of the Scriptures, for whom water is not water, but some other nature, who see in a plant, in a fish, what their fancy wishes, who change the nature of reptiles and of wild beasts to suit their allegories, like the interpreters of dreams who explain visions in sleep to make them serve their own ends. For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in the literal sense. “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel.”⁵¹

It is clear, then, that Philo's writings did not sway all patristic writers. Furthermore, even those fathers who were more inclined toward allegorical interpretations often approached the Old Testament in deliberately Christian (and thus non-Philonic) ways. Bentwich (somewhat of a Jewish apologist) laments that the early Christians “[learned] from Philo to trace in the Bible principles of universal thought and profound philosophy; but...used his method and his lessons to support notions of God and the Logos which were alien to his spirit.”⁵²

Indeed, the Christian appropriation of the concept of the Logos presents another fascinating glimpse at the relationship between Philo and the Church Fathers.⁵³ For Philo, “The logos was both the power through which the universe was originally ordered and the power by which the universe continued to be ordered.”⁵⁴ It is referred to as the “idea of ideas, according to which God fashioned the world,”⁵⁵ “the man of God, who being the reason of the everlasting God, is of necessity himself also immortal,”⁵⁶ and the “second deity, who is the Word [λόγος] of the supreme Being.”⁵⁷ Unquestionably, it is central both to Philo's thought and to the thought of the early Christians; after all, Jesus himself is identified with the Logos in the Gospel of John.⁵⁸ Yet Philo obviously did not have any specific human in mind when he wrote about the Logos, nor did he ever identify the Logos with the Jewish Messiah.

Based on these two (hastily covered) examples, we can safely conclude a few things. The Church Fathers plainly felt no qualms recasting Greek philosophical (or, for that matter, Jewish) concepts in a Christian light, even if this reinterpretation was far removed from the original. (The Philonic Logos may be superficially similar to the Christian Logos, but the two are fundamentally different.) For all of the Hellenistic and Jewish influences that supplied the material (as it were) for the Christian faith, something uniquely Christian egressed of the early writings and creeds. Its vocabulary, methodology, and philosophical outlook may have been Jewish and Greek – but Christian thought cannot be reduced to the two traditions upon which it was founded.

What, then, is Philo's ultimate significance? His allegorical method granted a hermeneutical versatility that allowed the early Christians (including many of the New Testament authors) both to connect Christian ideas symbolically to Old Testament figures and events and to accommodate contemporary philosophical (and, later, scientific) trends. His exposition of Hellenistic Jewish philosophy furnished them with the philosophical lexicon and world-view necessary for Christianity to flourish in the classical world. Finally, he supplied the Church Fathers with a paradigmatic illustration of philosophically grounded exegesis, in which foundational scriptural and philosophical assumptions illuminated each other and coalesced into one truth.⁵⁹ Christianity could not have established its intellectual footing without the possibility of such a religio-philosophical synthesis, and Philo provided early Christendom an excellent rubric for such an integration. This means of unifying reason and faith set the course for the tradition which would come to dominate and define Western society for the next two thousand years.

References: Secondary Sources

Bentwich, Norman De Mattos. 1910. Philo-Judæus of Alexandria /. Philadelphia : The Jewish Publication Society of America.

Bouteneff, Peter. 2008. Beginnings : Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives /. Grand Rapids, Mich. : Baker Academic.

Mack, Burton L. “Exegetical Traditions in Alexandrian Judaism.” Studia Philonica, no. 3 (1974-1975).

Dodd, C. H. 1953. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel. Cambridge Eng.: University Press.

Runia, David T. 1995. Philo and the Church Fathers : A Collection of Papers /. Vol. . 32. New York : E.J. Brill.

Tobin, Thomas H. 1983. The Creation of Man : Philo and the History of Interpretation /. Vol. 14. Washington, DC : Catholic Biblical Association of America.

References: Primary Sources

Basil. 378 AD. Homily IX.

Eusebius. c. 4^th century AD. Historia Ecclesiastica.

Jerome. 392 AD. De viris illustribus.

Origen. c. 220-230 AD. De principiis.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. De specialibus legibus.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. De confusione linguarum.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. De migrationi Abrahami.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. Legum allegoriae.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. Quæstiones et solutiones et Genesim.

Stobaeus. c. 5thc entury AD. Eclogarum physicarum et ethicarum.

1cf. Acts xvii. 16-34

2Jn i. 1

3David T. Runia, Philo and the Church Fathers: A Collection of Papers (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 16.

4Burton L. Mack, “Exegetical Traditions in Alexandrian Judaism,” Studia Philonica, no. 3 (1974-1975): 71.

5Thomas H. Tobin, The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of Interpretation (Washington: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1983), 1.

6Jerome, De viris illustribus, XI.

7Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, II.16-17.3

8Tobin discusses Jereome's and Eusebius' opinions of Philo slightly more expansively at the beginning of The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of Interpretation.

9Runia, 7-8, 117. To be fair, Runia himself notes in his Philo in Early Christian Literature that at least one pagan author, Heliodorus of Emesa, almost certainly was acquainted with Philo; a passage from Heliodorus' Æthiopica virtually mirrors a passage from Philo's De vita Moysis.

10In his Philo-Judæus of Alexandria, Bentwich observes that one very essential part of Philo's work, referred to as “The Hexameron” (τό 'Εχημερὸν), has been lost. In this treatise, Philo apparently gave his “philosophical account of the first chapter of Genesis.”

11“For Philo scripture was limited to the books of Moses.” Runia, 15.

12Tobin, 2.

13Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 27.

14cf. Tobin, 5. Tobin lists sixteen relevant passages from the Quæstiones.

15Runia, 11, 12. Philo and Hellenistic Jewish thought are actually so intertwined in the extant literature that Runia proposes categorizing the former as “Philo” and the latter as “Philonism,” acknowledging the centrality of Philo's writings to the preservation of Hellenistic Jewish thought while differentiating his contributions from the broader tradition.

16Ibid., 10-11. “Philo is first explicitly mentioned and cited by Clement of Alexandria.” Runia cites Justin and Theophilus as specific examples of Fathers possibly acquainted with Philo's corpus before the time of Clement.

17Charles H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 41.

18cf. Norman Bentwich, Philo-Judæus of Alexandria (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1910), 100; Tobin, 32.

19Tobin, 32.

20Bentwich, 200-201.

21Tobin writes, “Serious philosophical discussion seems to have come into its own in Alexandria only in the first century B.C. There was probably no lack of philosophers in the third and second centuries in Alexandria, yet, apart from the polymath Eratosthenes (ca. 274-194 B.C.), no prominent philosophical figure was associated with Alexandria during these two centuries.”

22Tobin, 11.

23Ibid., 11. cf. Philo, De ebrietate, 171-205.

24Ibid., 11.

25Tobin, 12-17.

26Stobaeus, Eclogarum physicarum et ethicarum, II.49, 8-12.

27Tobin, 19. For a more thorough analysis, Tobin refers the reader to Antonie Wlosok's Laktanz und die philosophische Gnosis.

28Runia, 15. Runia writes this about one specific Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, not the Fathers as a wholel; however, because he is considering Clement as a “striking example” of the wider relationship between Philonic and early Christian thought, I have taken his words as referring not just to Clement, but to the Church Fathers in general.

29Ibid., 96.

30Bentwich, 92-23.

31It should be noted, however, that Bentwich mentions a polemical side to Philo which “is directed less against the Greek schools in themselves than against the Jewish followers of the Greek schools.” Bentwich, 95.

32Runia, 17-18.

33Philo, De specialibus legibus, I.8.

34Runia, 18. Also, cf. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993), 256. Runia observes that this is “the first time we have a patristic writing with almost exactly the same title as a Philonic work and covering exactly the same ground.”

35Runia, 13.

36Ibid., 13-14.

37Bentwich, 96.

38Ibid, 107.

39Philo, Quæstiones et solutiones et Genesim, III.3.

40Ibid., III.3.

41cf. Genesis ii. 9, vi. 7, x. 1; Philo, Q.G I.11, I.95, II.79.

42cf. Tobin, 32-33.

43Ibid., 34.

44Ibid. 34-35.

45cf. Runia, 14.

46cf. Tobin, 36-55. Tobin cites Genesis i. 26-27 and ii. 7 as important passages interpreted allegorically by Philo to avoid the taint of anthropomorphism.

47Philo, Legum allegoriae I.2.

48cf. Runia, 117, 120-121. Runia writes, “Clearly one of the most prominent Church Fathers who was well acquainted with Philo was Origen.”

49Origen, De principiis, IV.3.1.

50For one discussion of different early Christian perspectives on Genesis i-iii, cf. Bouteneff, 55-87.

51Basil, Homily IX.1. The scriptural quotation is from Romans i. 16.

52Bentwich, 195.

53Before I begin this discussion, I should note Bentwich's argument that the personality of the Logos was only ever intended to be figurative, and that several passages concerning the Logos in the Philonic corpus are “probably spurious.” cf. Bentwich, 155-156.Andrew Wiese, “‘The House I Live In’: Race, Class, and African American Suburban Dreams in the Postwar United States,” in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 101–2.

54Tobin, “Creation in Philo of Alexandria” in Creation in the Biblical Tarditions, ed. Clifford and Collins (Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1992), 116.

55Philo, De migrationi Abrahami, 18.

56Philo, De confusione linguarum, 11.

57Philo, Q.G. II.62.

58cf. John i. 1-18.

59Not that Philo was by any means systematic in his approach. cf. Bentwich, 167.