Theologians You Should Know: An Introduction: From the Apostolic Fathers to the 21st Century

by Michael Reeves

If we assume that the past is inferior, we will not bother consulting it, and will thus find ourselves stranded on the tiny desert island of our moment in time.

For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

Its greatest value for us, though, is probably its treatment of Scripture: it contains the earliest example (outside the New Testament) of a passage from the New Testament being referred to as “Scripture” alongside the Old Testament.9 It reveals that there was a clear and early understanding of a New Testament canon of Scripture.

Ignatius wanted his life and death to proclaim that “There is only one physician, who is both flesh and spirit, born and unborn, God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God, first subject to suffering and then beyond it, Jesus Christ our Lord.”15 It is hard to read such material and not be incredulous of the claim that Jesus’s full divinity and full humanity is a later, fourth-century invention.

His argument continues with a defense of the innocence of Christians. Yet, he maintains, “what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world”—that is, as the soul is in the body but not of it, so Christians are in the world, and so, like souls, are despised. And, just as the soul is improved by fasting, so Christians increase when persecuted.

Justin then goes on to argue that because Christianity is the oldest, rather than the latest, religion, ancient and venerated philosophers stole their best ideas from it. In particular, he argues, Plato plagiarized Moses in composing his philosophy. Moses, for instance, had created the tabernacle according to the heavenly pattern shown him on Mount Sinai; Plato had adapted this idea to suggest that all earthly things are copies of an ideal reality:

What is so important to notice here is that Justin restricts himself to arguing from the Hebrew Scriptures alone, knowing that the books that make up what we now call the New Testament will carry no weight with Trypho. In this, Trypho and Justin are agreed: the case for Christianity can be made or broken by the Hebrew Scriptures.

Irenaeus argues, the root of the problem lay in how the Gnostics read Scripture. He suggests that they treated Scripture like a mosaic, taking whichever tiles they liked and rearranging them to come up with whatever image they fancied, so transforming the original picture of, say, a king, into something entirely different, perhaps that of a dog or fox. They are thus, he says, perverters, abusers, and evil interpreters of the Scriptures. Yet how exactly they are so is vital for Irenaeus. The reason they warp Scripture is that they read it based on non-scriptural principles, forcing it to fit into an alien mold. Scripture cannot be so read, according to Irenaeus; rather, Scripture can be understood only by Scripture. No other knowledge, theological system, or oral tradition can accurately mediate the true meaning of Scripture.

flesh? To answer this, Irenaeus now articulates the theory for which he is most famed: “recapitulation.” In a nutshell, Irenaeus’s idea of recapitulation is that Christ is the second Adam, undoing the evils brought about by the first Adam. Sin and death had entered the world on a bad Friday (Irenaeus placed Genesis 3 in day six of creation), through a tree (the tree of knowledge), through one man eating, aided by a disobedient betrothed virgin (Eve); life and salvation came on Good Friday, through a tree (the cross), through one man fasting (in the desert), aided by an obedient betrothed virgin (Mary).75 However, the word “recapitulation” can be a little misleading (as well as off-putting!), giving the impression that Irenaeus imagined Christ simply reversing the fall to take us back to Eden. Irenaeus was a long way from seeing salvation as a U-turn, though: for him, salvation was about going through death to a perfection never possible in Eden. Irenaeus believed that Adam and Eve were never God’s goal; they were only children, and the project of salvation was about humanity being brought to maturity. This was achieved in Christ, who came as an infant and grew to full maturity for us.

In Athanasius’s scheme, evil arises out of a perverse use of human freedom. Evil comes from sin. As for what sin is, Athanasius argues that it is, at root, a relational problem, a turning away from God. But since God is the ground of all being, to turn away from God is to turn into nothingness. To walk into sin is to walk into unbeing. Sin is anti-being, which is why it never delivers the happiness it promises, for it is the very opposite of being. As for the gods manufactured by the sinful imagination, they too are anti-being and therefore corrosive of all that humanity was created to be.

That is, Christians pray to the Father, not to “the Unoriginate,” for Father he is, not merely some abstractly defined “Unoriginate” being. And it is possible to know God as Father only “from the Son.” However, if we first define God by something such as being the Creator, we will define God abstractly (as something like “Unoriginate” or “ungenerate”) and so define the Son out of his deity. And when we do that, we find ourselves worshiping a God who is not a real Father and who does not really have a Son. We have become idolaters. This, Athanasius holds, is the essential Arian problem: by trying to know God other than through the Son, they had come to know an entirely different God. And this was why Athanasius held the deity of the Son to be nonnegotiable, for it is only by knowing the Son that anyone can ever know the God who is.

His God was not static, but a dynamic, personal being, inherently outgoing and productive. Athanasius compares the Father to a fountain and a sun: just as a fountain must pour forth water to be a fountain, and just as a sun must have a radiance, so the Father must “pour forth,” “radiate,” or beget the Son in order to be who he is—the Father. In contrast, Arius’s talk of a Father without a Son signified a barren God who was like a dry fountain or a sun that does not shine.

Nicea had clarified a distinction between being “begotten” and being “made” that had not been sufficiently obvious beforehand, but which would be crucial for Athanasius’s doctrine of God (as well as for the church as a whole). That is, a subject can “beget” only the same kind of being as itself; thus men “beget” men and the Father “begets” the Son. On the other hand, a subject can only “make” a different kind of being; thus men “make” doughnuts and God “makes” the world. Men cannot “beget” doughnuts, nor God “beget” the world; just so, men cannot “make” men, nor can God “make” the Son.

However, something quite different happened when the Word took flesh, and Athanasius is emphatic that we should not think “that, as in former times the Word was used to come into each of the Saints, so now He sojourned in a man.”109 Far from merely sojourning in a body, the Word assumed the flesh entirely in order to “make it Word.” And then (at last!) Athanasius explains that he does this by the Spirit: “we, apart from the Spirit, are strange and distant from God, and by the participation of the Spirit we are knit into the Godhead.”

It is characteristic Athanasius, who always managed to imbue the darker themes of Christian suffering and self-denial with a golden sense of light and joy. In a letter that announced the Lenten fast to the Christians of Alexandria, for instance, his focus was not on gloomy thoughts of self-denial but on entering the fast so as to relish Christ as the true feast. For Athanasius, fasting and self-denial were associated with gratitude, with looking away from the sensual pleasures that foster self-love to contemplate God and find joy in him. Even suffering fitted into this for Athanasius, who counseled Christians to embrace sickness and afflictions in hope and as means to dispel lust of self and conform them joyfully into the image of Christ.

Thomas Weinandy’s Athanasius: A Theological Introduction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) is probably the best overall introduction, and has the advantage of being up-to-date with important changes in scholarly opinion.

Barth got down to the task of theology with even greater fervor. What Barth saw was that, instead of its being a time to abandon deep theology for quick response, now was the time to do theology all the more intensely in order to recover and safeguard the gospel.

Barth believed that the task of theology is the same as the task of preaching, and thus preaching is just what he does in the Church Dogmatics. But preaching is not about merely conferring information: it is about winning hearts, and thus involves the sorts of persuasion and repetition that take time. Points must be reinforced, the readers won.

Barth combined the two subjects of revelation and Trinity. And thus his theology begins with the God who makes himself known—that is, the self-revealing Trinity. Because God is triune, he reveals himself in a threefold word. First, there is Christ, the revealed word of God; second, that revelation is attested to in the written word of God, the Scriptures; and third, those Scriptures are preached or proclaimed, and so the world hears the one word of God. However, it is not as if revelation is the mere giving of information; it is God himself coming to us, making himself known. God the Father is the revealer; God the Son is the revelation; God the Spirit is the “revealedness,” the one who enables us to perceive the revelation.

From revelation, Barth then goes on to focus on the triune nature of this God. As Father, God reveals himself as the creator; as Son he reveals himself as the reconciler; as Spirit he reveals himself as the redeemer. Thus Barth shows his intent to have the very structure of the Dogmatics shaped by the triune being of this God: after looking at the doctrine of the word of God (vol. I) and the doctrine of God as a whole (vol. II), his aim was to examine creation (vol. III, appropriated to the Father), reconciliation (vol. IV, appropriated to the Son), and redemption (vol. V, appropriated to the Spirit).

God, he argued, is one divine person or subject, not three; and, rather than speaking of the three “persons” of God, it would be more accurate to speak of God existing in three “ways of being.”

it is only under the influence of Christianity “that the world has been affirmed in its full reality. In Platonism it isn’t; in Hinduism it isn’t—only where the Christian gospel has run have people believed that the world concretely exists.”