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October 27, 2016
the vast majority of Christians have always believed that God is revealed, however vaguely, in the natural order that he created, including human existence itself.
Thomas Aquinas developed a “natural theology”—knowledge of God through evidences and reason alone—based on the existence and order of the world and on human conscience. He admitted that such knowledge of God is insufficient for salvation and for knowing God as loving person, but he believed (and the Catholic church accepts) that God’s existence is manifest in nature and that human reason is fully capable—in spite of sin—of grasping that.
The majority of the early church fathers quoted from Hebrew prophets as well as from apostolic writings as if all of them were vehicles of special divine revelation.
By the end of the second century and beginning of the third century, however, one finds church fathers Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen agreeing on most candidates for inclusion in the Christians’ “Testament” of inspired works. The Bible, then, came to be regarded by all Christians as a form of special divine revelation—above nature but below Jesus Christ himself.
The response by more traditional and faithful Christians was the “Barmen Declaration” of the Confessing Church movement that declared Jesus Christ as sole Lord for Christians and rejected any belief in a new savior and lord or a superseding revelation of God in culture.
Another alternative to historic, consensual Christian belief is that general, universal revelation—because it is available to reason apart from faith—is greater than special divine revelation.
George Fox and other Quakers of the seventeenth century tended to locate revelation within the heart of every individual, and belief in this “inner light” of Christ became a distinctive teaching of Quakerism. Many Quakers or Friends in the twentieth century have adopted a more traditional Christian view of divine revelation without giving up the idea that Christ illumines Christian minds and hearts in a special way.
The idea that new divine revelations may supercede even Jesus Christ and surpass even canonical Scripture denies the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as God’s self-revelation in person and opens the door to all kinds of new messiahs and incarnations. If such claims and expectations were allowed at all, it would be impossible to maintain any stable identity of Christianity or message of the gospel. Where such openness to new revelation surpassing Jesus Christ and Scripture has been taken seriously, Christianity has been transformed into a cult.
Belief that the highest form of revelation is individual and inward very seriously undermines the objectivity of God’s Word in divine revelation.
Relativism is the dangerous and nearly inevitable outcome of such a view of divine revelation. That is not to denigrate experience of God and of Jesus Christ within one’s own heart and mind.
Unless something transcends inner experience it becomes the ultimate authority and then everyone is free to believe whatever seems right in his or her own heart. The consequence of that would be chaos.
First, Christians who agree about the core doctrine of divine revelation often disagree vigorously about natural knowledge of God. Second, within modern Christian theology significant debate has swirled around the nature of special revelation as primarily personal or primarily propositional. Third, differing beliefs about continuing revelation—especially the “gift of prophecy”—give rise to divisions and sometimes arguments.
The Roman Catholic Church officially holds as doctrine that God can be known as Creator in this way. In order to know God as redeemer, the church affirms, one must possess a special revelation and have faith in it.
“ontological argument”
Thomas Aquinas developed other arguments for the existence of God that relied less on pure logic and more on evidences of nature.
The best known of these is the “cosmological argument,” which deduces God’s necessary existence from the contingent (nonnecessary) existence of the cosmos. This is popularly known as the “first cause argument” because it attempts to prove that in order for the finite, contingent world of causes and effects to exist at all, it must have an uncaused, first cause as its source.
Apologists used evidence,
Anselm and Thomas are just two of the best known and most influential theologians in Christian history to rely heavily on general revelation and reason to construct a natural theology. Neither one believed that general revelation and unaided reason are capable of yielding redemptive knowledge of God; both believed in divine special revelation as the remedy for the ignorance of God brought about by sin.
Luther and Calvin both expressed grave reservations about any positive role for general revelation or natural theology, and Calvin averred that even though God is revealed in nature, sin has so blinded fallen humans that unless they encounter God through Christ and the Scriptures they will only construct idols from that revelation.
Plenary verbal inspiration implies that the human authors of Scripture were not mere secretaries of the Holy Spirit, and the process of divine authorship through them was not mechanical.
The major alternative orthodox view of inspiration is “dynamic inspiration”
According to this view inspiration refers primarily to the writers and not primarily (only secondarily) to the writings.
relativize
Some cults and sects on the fringes of Christianity have also rejected the Trinity, but for the most part the doctrine of the Trinity has remained for two thousand years an essential part of the Great Tradition of Christian belief. Denominations and organizations that deny it completely (as opposed to holding an eccentric interpretation of it) have generally been relegated by other Christians to the status of cults. Why? What is so important about this model of God?
“immanent Trinity” refers to the eternal triunity of God within himself; the “economic Trinity” refers to the triunity of God in salvation history and in divine revelation—God for us.
Three such heresies about the Godhead have challenged belief in and confession of the Trinity: modalism (also known as Sabellianism), subordinationism (known in two forms as Arianism and adoptionism), and tritheism.
Modalism is the idea that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not three distinct persons—hypostaseis—but merely three distinct modes of revelation or manifestations of the single person who is God. In this view, God is by nature a simple being with no internal distinctions. Modalism begins with the truth of monotheism and then attempts to fit the revelation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit into that without seriously adjusting classical monotheism. According to it, the “persons” of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are merely masks worn by God—as a single actor in Greek theater played more than one role
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Something like the modalist view is believed by members of several Pentecostal denominations that are together known as “Jesus Only” (because they affirm that Jesus is all of God and baptize only in Jesus’ name) and “Oneness Pentecostals” (because they hold to the essential oneness of the Godhead and deny any immanent threeness).
subordinationism, which appears in two forms: adoptionism and Arianism. Subordinationism
also begins with strict, undifferentiated monotheism and then tries to explain how three can be “one God.” Both forms of subordinationism identify God with the Father and subordinate the Son and the Holy Spirit to God.
Adoptionism was first taught by a second-century Christian bishop of Syria named Paul of Samosata, who was deposed by a synod of Christian bishop...
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His teaching was that Jesus Christ was a great prophet and messiah raised up by God the Father and ...
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The Unitarian movement—founded in the late eighteenth century by rationalist Christians—promoted a form of adoptionism as its alternative to trinitarian belief. Some modern liberal theologians also teach a form of adoptionism in which Jesus Christ is nothing more than a “fully God-conscious man,” the “human face of God,” or “God’s representative among men.”
Arianism—named after the early fourth-century Alexandrian Christian leader Arius, who sparked the great controversy over the Trinity that gave rise to the Nicene Creed. Arius argued that the Son of God—the Word (Logos)—preexisted the man Jesus and became incarnate in him.
Arian subordinationism has reappeared since the fourth century several times; in the twentieth century it appeared as the official doctrine (without the name of Arius acknowledged or attached) of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses) and several sects closely related to it. According to the Watchtower organization, Jesus Christ is not God or equal with God but the incarnation of the archangel Michael who is God’s first and greatest creature. While Arius did not propose such an identity for the preincarnate Word and Son of God, they share the same basic concept of who and
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As the early church fathers never tired of emphasizing, we are only saved by God, and if Jesus Christ is not God we are not saved.
tritheism—implicit (hardly ever explicit) belief in Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three separate divine beings or gods. While several theologians have been accused of promoting tritheism, few if any have ever actually admitted that they believed in three gods.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not that God is one object made up of three separable parts; it is that God is one perfectly unified being made up of three inseparable and wholly equal persons who—as several theologians have said—interpenetrate one another eternally (perichoresis).
blatant tritheism or even the implicit tritheism of folk theology, they have implied too great a difference and distance between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The medieval mystical theologian Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) verged on tritheism in his account of the ages of history tied to persons of the Trinity, but even he did not intend to teach that there are three gods.
Cappadocian fathers, Basil and the two Gregorys, helped bring about the final form of the Nicene Creed in 381 at the Council of Constantinople by suggesting the distinction between ousia (substance) which is one in God and hypostasis (subsistence, person) which is three in God. Thus, the Nicene faith is often summed up as belief that God is one substance and three persons. Or, expressed more informally, it might be said that God is one “what” and three “whos.”
In varying ways post-Augustinian trinitarian thinkers in the Catholic and Protestant traditions developed it further. A twentieth-century Protestant theologian compared the Trinity with President Theodore Roosevelt who, although one integrated person, had three distinct roles that together made him who he was. He was father and family man, president and statesman, and rough rider and outdoorsman.
Western tradition’s emphasis on the unity of God. Barth derived the Trinity from the reality of divine revelation itself. For him, the Trinity is an immediate implication of the structure of revelation as self-disclosure. If God truly reveals himself in revelation, then as revelation is threefold, revealer, revealedness and revelation
Barth preferred the term “modes of being” to “persons” to express the threeness of God both in his self-revelation and in himself. For him, “person” too strongly connoted individuality while “mode of being” (Seinsweisen) connoted distinction without difference.
“social analogy,”
(or “kingdom analogy”) for verging on tritheism.
All would say that God is both one (monotheism) and three (dynamic monotheism): one being manifested eternally as three persons. But they diverge over how best to picture and explain that fundamentally mysterious reality.
In 1054 when the Greek-speaking bishops of the East and the Latin-speaking bishops of the West excommunicated each other and their churches (so that the church became divided between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism) one of the issues dividing the two halves of Christendom was the Trinity and, most particularly, the insertion into the Latin form of the Nicene Creed of the phrase “and from the Son” (filioque).
filioque
The social analogy must be supplemented by the psychological in order to avoid falling into tritheism, which is merely a form of polytheism (belief in more than one god). This is a classical case of both-and theology rather than either-or theology.
How a single being can be faithfully and somewhat accurately described as both a single mind with multiple dimensions and a community of persons knitted together inseparably in a bond of love is beyond complete understanding. Nevertheless, divine revelation requires that God be described in both ways.
