Trinitarian Spirituality, 9: Cast of Characters, Better than a Russian Novel

May 22, 2012 By K. Mulhern 1 Comment

Inside of the oldest church in Egypt

 

We have a significant cast of characters when we talk about 4th-5th-century controversies. It might be helpful if we first listed them up front, sort of like a Russian novel giving all the main players and their relationships in a list before the story gets started.

The interesting thing about really believing that God is involved in history, not just back then there, but in an ongoing way—speaking, acting, moving, informing, shaping, inspiring, calling—means that we should be able to look for God in all of these persons, even the heretics. God doesn’t raise up heresies to trip us, but he does—indeed he must if we believe he is Lord of history—move through all these events and conversations in ways that lead to his final purpose. So this is no melodrama, where the bad guys should be booed and hissed off the stage because they are thoroughly vile creatures. They are simultaneously actors—meaning active agents, participants—and instruments of God’s will. But perhaps that is going too far afield for now…

So, for this post, let me just list the characters that will star in the show, and give very brief introductions. We will meet them all more intimately as we go along. You may want to refer back to this post occasionally in the weeks to come.

Arius : (c. 256-336), an Egyptian churchman; we met him in the last post. Arius was quite concerned to preserve the Oneness of God, and thus found the divinity of Jesus rather problematic. Exactly how does One + One + One = One? He did not solve this problem by tossing out Jesus’ divinity, as a modern Unitarian might, but by redefining that divinity. So Arius insisted he was a Trinitarian, and used all the Trinitarian language, but he constructed a hierarchical divinity, where Jesus was something more than human and yet less than fully God. This was an enormously popular solution; it created a scenario where believers could give all kinds of praise to the Christ as the favored instrument of the divine, yet never complicate the monotheism and transcendence of the one true God. This solution lingers today in some form in Jehovah’s Witnesses theology.

Alexander : (d. 326), bishop of Alexandria in Egypt. Here is Arius’ first opponent, a fiery earlier defender of Trinitarianism as it had been believed and practiced in the first three centuries of the church. Since Arius probably outlived him by a decade or so, Alexander had a hard time keeping up with the work of rebuttal.

Eusebius of Nicomedia : (d. 341), a bishop and supporter of Arius’ thinking; he liked to emphasize the term “unbegotten” as the summation of God’s essence, which clearly creates an issue with the “only-begotten” status of Jesus. If Jesus is the “only-begotten,” does that mean that he had a beginning? That there is only One who, not having a beginning, is God?

Eusebius of Caesarea : (c. 263-339) [TWO Eusebiuses? Seriously?]; a notable church historian; he rejected Arius’ ideas, but couldn’t quite bring Jesus up to the level of God the Father, so we end up with a subpar God indwelling Christ. Clearly, he ended up more sympathetic with the Arian compromise than he did with the orthodox mystery.

Asterius : (d. 341); known as a philosopher and, having caved under persecution and sacrificed to pagan gods as a way to avoid death and torture, he was never allowed to hold church office. A significant supporter of Arius, he tweaked Arian thought in ways he hoped would make it more palatable to those orthodox nuisances. Tweak away, Asterius, but Athanasius is going to have you for lunch.

Marcellus : (c. 374); bishop of Ancyra (modern-day Ankara, capital of Turkey). Marcellus strongly opposed Arian thinking, but came up with a solution that ultimately was also unacceptable to orthodoxy. Nothing quite like forcefully opposing a heretic and then becoming one.

Athanasius : (c. 296-378), at first Alexander’s deacon assistant, and then successor as bishop of Alexandria. Though he had that position for forty-six years, he spent more than one-third of that time in exile, banished by Arian supporters, including the Emperor. It is famously told of Athanasius that, having been exiled for the fifth time, the Emperor said to him with exasperation, “Athanasius, don’t you know that the whole world is against you?” To which Athanasius replied, “Oh no, it’s Athanasius against the whole world.”

Gregory of Nyssa : (c. 335-395), bishop of Nyssa and one of the famed Cappadocian Fathers, a threesome of theologians who contributed a great deal to the shaping of Trinitarian language, including the Creed. One of the three was Gregory of Nyssa’s brother, Basil of Caesarea, and the other was another Gregory, Gregory of Nazianzus.

(We pause here to remember Basil and Gregory’s sister, Macrina, also a saint of the church. While we don’t have evidence that Macrina was instrumental in the Trinitarian resolution, take a look at their family life. Macrina was the older sister, and most reports have her undertaking the religious training of her younger brothers. Gregory talks about her with great reverence, and wrote a couple of treatises about her life and thought. Shall we really imagine that Gregory and Basil never had meaningful conversations with Macrina about the Trinity? That Macrina’s own deep spirituality had no influence on her brothers’ work? Um, I don’t think so. I’m herewith including her as one of our Trinitarian heroes, though a silent one.)

Augustine : (354-430), bishop of Hippo, in northern Africa, and famed author, theologian, and key shaper of Western Christian spirituality. (The Eastern church likes him too, but not as much as the West does. They have “issues” with some of his ideas on sin and grace. But again, not something for us to discuss here and now.)

(Another aside: Augustine’s mother, Monica, had an enormous influence on Augustine, and we cannot deny that some part of his thinking developed in conversation with her. Another silent participant.)

There are other characters in the drama, some major and some minor, and some of those will get introduced along the way, but these are the ones Anatolios identifies as the focus of his study, so for the most part, that’s where we’ll play too.

As we meet these theologians and writers, we might find their arguments petty or puny, and when we do, we must keep a spirit of humility about us. Their worldview and their philosophical presuppositions may not align with ours. Their arguments may sound too weird to be wonderful. The easy way out of all this is to just shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, no wonder they got their panties in a wad. They’re thinking in mental categories that we no longer care about or that we understand better. Therefore, their conversations are meaningless to us.”

Anatolios, our guide here, reminds us that the construction of creedal language gave voice to vital Christian life and practice, and that language serves us as well when we are willing to do the work of understanding why and how they got there. It is we modern Christians who all too often end up with a petty and puny faith when we abandon the great conversation of Trinitarian spirituality and its language.

Next week let’s actually talk about language. It’s so easy to misunderstand each other, especially when I’m speaking Greek and you’re speaking Latin.

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Trinitarian Spirituality, 8: What Makes a Heretic?

May 15, 2012 By K. Mulhern 3 Comments

Steve Sawyer, Flickr

 

The brouhaha began because people wanted to understand, they wanted to explain, they wanted to feel comfortable with mystery. Perfectly understandable.

When I teach church history courses, I try to help us all appreciate the value that heretics bring to the table. [Don’t unsubscribe just yet…hang with me.]

None of our early thinkers planned to be a heretic, scheming and wringing hands in evil glee at the prospect of skewing truth and making a mess of good Christian doctrine. Early church heretics merely asked good questions, hard questions, and when the Church had not voiced a well-considered answer, they came up with their own answers. Perfectly reasonable behavior, I think. So heretics actually help the Church—they push the Church to think more deeply, pray more fervently, study more thoroughly, and hopefully to articulate more clearly what it really believes and why.

One historian (Malcolm Lambert) put it this way: “It takes two to create a heresy; the heretic, with his dissident beliefs and practices; and the Church, to condemn his views and to define what is orthodox doctrine.”

One of first, and most influential, “heresies” to come along that furthered the Trinitarian conversation is called “modalism.” It was associated with a couple of 3rd-century writers by the name of Paul of Samosata and Sabellius. It is also sometimes called Sabellianism—poor guy got a heresy named after him. Modalism, however, is easier to remember, because basically this explanation of the Trinity says that since God is One (and we all agree about that), the Threeness must be merely aspects of the Oneness—modes of God’s being. So sometimes God presents himself to us as Father, sometimes as Son, sometimes as Spirit—like masks that God wears in his different personas.

I admit I have a soft spot for this heresy. It’s just so simple and handy, so easy to understand, so tidy.

The problem, of course, is that it isn’t true—it isn’t true to the ways scripture talks about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Who was Jesus praying to? Himself? Who descended on the baptized Christ? Who was the other Helper Jesus talked about? Whose voice called Jesus his Beloved on the Mount of Transfiguration? Was that all just for show?

No, there is something else going on, and this “appearance” explanation is not going to cut it.

But all through the 4th century, the specter of “modalism” drives the discussion. Anything that came close was in the danger zone. In the scramble to avoid any modalistic tendencies, other heresies arose.

There were so many other possibilities.

Another key thinker, who provoked one of the largest crises in Christian theology, was an Egyptian churchman called Arius (c. 256-336). We’ll have a lot to say about Arius, but perhaps we can just say right now that he rocked the boat in enormous ways, and that therefore the calming of the storm that he had created is equally momentous in Christian history. Big heresies provoke big orthodoxies. At one point, the Arians (followers of Arius’ way of thinking) dominated  the Christian world. What we call orthodox thinking was in the minority.

I love the way Alister McGrath talks about it in his fascinating book, Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth. He addresses the ways that in the contemporary world, “heresy” has some crazy allure; our culture thinks of heresy as “radical and innovative, whereas orthodoxy is pedestrian and reactionary.” Part of this is due to the touting of the gnostic gospels—alternative versions of the gospel story—like the Gospel of Thomas and the Secret Book of John, and other spicy titles. McGrath calls this a love affair with heresy, and, really, a vote for the underdog. We have heard all too often that “history is written by the winners,” and therefore, since the Church silenced all the other versions, we can only define orthodoxy as the version that prevailed, not the version that is necessarily true. Heresy then becomes “the ideology of a defeated or oppressed group, whereas orthodoxy is the ideology of the ruling class.” And we do hate those nasty elitist bullies.

McGrath argues that, on the contrary, every heresy that has ever wormed its way into Christian discourse is a reduction of the great gospel. Every heresy is a human management system trying to pin Christian faith and practice down in ways that lessens the grace, boxes God in, closes the possibilities, controls faith, reduces the glory and mystery and power of who God is, what God has done, and where God is taking us. Orthodoxy is far more liberating—bigger, grander, deeper, and richer—than any heresy.

So we throw out modalism, in part because it isn’t true, but in part because it reduced the mystery of God in ways that were not congruent with the Church’s experience of Christ among them. And we will do the same with Arianism, but not without a long, protracted, imperial struggle involving emperors and barbarians and bishops and mobs… just like an HBO mini-series.

 

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