Transcript
Thank you, sir, for your kindly welcome. I say that I count it a great honor to be named a Warfield lecturer in a very distinguished succession and in honor of one who is so well known and has done so much for reformed theology in the United States. It was quite easy for me to select this theme for the lectures this year because, as Dr. McCord has told you, this is the 16th centenary of the finalization of
the Nicene Creed at the First Council of Constantinople. That council met in the very lovely Church of St. Irene in Constantinople, which Dr. McCord and I visited last year when we were engaged in orthodox reformed conversation, and that reinforced my resolve that this year we must do something to rehabilitate this magnificent theology. The Council of Nicaea in 325 AD has certainly a unique place in the history of the Church. It succeeded in such a profound and
succinct way in securing the essential connections of the Gospel that it was widely recognized as the century wore on to be one of the great irreversible events in the expansion of the Christian Church. And tradition soon came to hold that the Council had been inspired for a divine work, as they claimed, was done in it. Thus they developed a very deep commitment to the Council of the 318 Fathers, as it came to be called, to the
integrity and identity of their work, the devout understanding of the Gospel, and the reverent worship of the Triune God. The theology of the Nicene Council thus gained a tradition and a momentum of its own, and it was on that ground and in that spirit that Council after Council drew up and completed its work in the centuries that followed, always referring back to the Council of the 318. The Nicene Creed thus provided the apostolic tradition with an
enduring interpretative framework in and through which its truth and message could be unfolded in the understanding of the Church and the inner identity of the evangelical faith could be preserved. It must be noted that the Nicene faith was associated with what was called Eusebia or Theosophia, a piety and a godliness, a way of worship, behaviour and thought that was reverent and worthy of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This was a way of
thinking in which the seal of the Holy Trinity was indelibly stamped upon the mind, the Dianoia or the Phronema of the Church. Godliness and theology, worship and faith went inseparably together and immense attention was given to reverent ways of interpreting the Holy Scripture, a reverent use of the reason and reverent ways of argument in which there was no intrusion into the mystery of God or irreverent teaching about him. Even when theology was concerned with the inner
trinitarian relations in God himself, the Church insisted on maintaining reserve and humility in its approach, conceptual formulation and language. All must be done before the face of divine majesty and glory, like the cherubim who cover their faces before the throne of God, in a holy way appropriate to the transcendent holiness of God. Nicene faith and Nicene interpretation in theology thus gave rise to a distinctive idiom of its own which left its mark upon the mind of
the Church as it came to mature creedal form at the day one, which is the one supreme ecumenical creed of Christendom, not the Apostles' Creed because it never had that ecumenicity, but the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed has undoubted universality and ecumenicity. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who was one of the presidents of the Council of Constantinople and was then Archbishop of Constantinople, wrote to a friend We for our part have never esteemed and can never esteem any doctrine
preferable to the faith of the Holy Fathers who assembled at Nicaea to destroy the Arian heresy. We adhere with God's help and shall adhere to this faith, supplementing gaps which they left concerning the Holy Spirit, because this question had not been raised. But rather more than the doctrine of the Spirit was involved, as we shall see, my main concern in these lectures is not with the various controversies in the Church before and after Nicaea, nor with
the ramifications of the Eastern Baptismal Creed which spontaneously developed along similar lines throughout the Church leading up to the Council of Constantinople. My concern rather is with the inner theological connections of truth which underlay and gave coherent structure to the creedal clauses as they finally took shape in 381. I shall try to offer an account of that coherent structure with the help of the great theologians, the bishops and theologians, who were largely responsible for the development
of the creed in this form. Within the brief compass of these six lectures I must restrict myself to several dominant themes and since the lectures are to be published I will offer here in this oral form an account of each which is necessarily truncated. But I hope nevertheless to be able to throw into relief some of the main issues that must be discussed. You remember that the creed opens with the words, I believe in one God
the Father Almighty the creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. This evening we should be concerned with God the Father and in particular with access to the Father as I have called the lecture. The proclamation of the gospel and the apostolic doctrine took place in a social and cultural context characterized by deep-going dualist modes of thought, anthropological, epistemological and cosmological. You'll recall that Ptolemaic cosmology over-arts the whole of that
culture and nowhere more than in Alexandria and there we have the basic shape, the basic mold which gave shape and pattern to all thinking. Now when the Christian gospel was proclaimed and the teaching of the apostles was taught in that context very quickly a sharp conflict emerged between the New Testament teaching and the patterns of thought around. The Christian message of incarnation and salvation in particular was highly questioned and it had to struggle with culture in
order to take root. Now that situation was made acute by an extraordinary combination of Judaism and Hellenism. All Christians believe with the Jews in the one God who is the creator of heaven and earth but the vast difference between the creator and the creature had the effect at first of accentuating the dualisms latent in Greek thought whether the thought was Platonic, Aristotelian or Stoic and we can see those problems particularly as they are associated with the
work of Philo of Alexandria and then of the Gnostics and the Arians with which the church struggled on the fringe and within itself. Elsewhere I have shown in a number of books how the church struggled with and overcame that dualist structure and in doing so put down its roots and transformed the very foundations of Greco-Roman culture. But today I wish rather to concentrate upon the primacy and centrality of the father-son relation which is highlighted
in the Creed and for a very good reason because it was precisely around and on that father-son relation that the Christian church saw everything else to be built and there they found the crucial relation to which every doctrine must refer. Now let me take as a kind of text the words of Athanasius which are found several times in the country Arianos, the Dei Decretis and almost word-for-word similar statements are found also in the
West by Hilary of Poitiers. Athanasius' words are these, it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the son and to call him father than to name God from his works and call him unoriginate. Now here we have something that is highly distinctive of Nicene theology in which doxology and doctrine, worship and precision went together. But why the father-son relation put into such contrast with the creator-creature relation? In the next lecture we
shall have to consider the creatorship of God, God the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth. But here we are concerned with the primacy of God the Father over God the Creator in the understanding of the church. Now why? Look at it like this. When we think and speak of God from the perspective of the creator-creature relation or the unoriginate-originate relation we can only think and speak of him in vague general and negative
terms at the infinite distance of the creature from the creator where we cannot know God as he is or in accordance with his nature. But only it is utter difference from us as the eternal, unconditioned and indescribable. Now in that approach we can only attempt to speak of God from his works which are related to God only through his will for they are utterly distinct from God and therefore are utterly external to God and his nature
so that they do not tell us anything about who God is or what he is in his own nature. This is a line of argument developed by both Athanasius and Hilary precisely at this point. That line of approach they insist is entirely lacking in accuracy or precision in acrobatia. Take for example Basilides, the Gnostic of Alexandria who kept on insisting that God is not all being, quoting from Plato, and therefore we cannot say anything about what
God is. We can only say something about what he is not. But of course if you cannot say anything about what he is you really cannot say anything accurately about what he is not. The whole thing is vague and muddled. Now that's precisely what the Nicene theologian said. And it will not do to speak about God in vague general and negative conceptions because if you do you then are trying to think of God from a point
far removed from God where there is no point in God which you can use as a test or a control of your conceptions about him and then inevitably you are flung back upon yourself as the center of your conceptions and your philosophizing so that in the last resort all that you say negatively or positively about God is determined by your own conceiving and anything you project out of yourself. Here then we have no knowledge of God
from within God, from a point where we may test or control knowledge of him and come to know him in any way as he is in himself. Now in Alexandria particularly scientific knowledge, accurate precise knowledge was knowledge that is of some reality governed by its nature. It is knowledge that is determined by the nature of what you seek to know. What I call cataphysic knowledge. If you are to know God accurately and in any precise way
then you must allow the very nature of God to control how you know him, how you think of him and what you are to say of him. But that approach from the creator creature relationship doesn't allow you to get even within shouting distance of any kind of scientific accuracy or precision. But everything is very different. If you think and speak of God from a point in God and from a point in our human existence, namely from
the relation of the incarnate son to the father, from the father-son relationship in Jesus where you have a point in God's own being because it is God who became incarnate and you have a point within human existence where human beings are able to conceive of God and yet where human conceptions are controlled and determined by the nature of the son who is of the nature of God. So when you approach God from the son and
you know the nature of the father through his own offspring, the son, then you come into relation with God who is both devout and pious and yet which brings scientific accuracy and precision. Now when we know the father in this way in and through Jesus Christ, we do know that he infinitely exceeds all that we can think and speak of him. For the God who to us in Jesus Christ is a God of inexhaustible and unlimited
reality. He whom we know face to face in Jesus Christ, we know to be infinitely more than we can know. And so in the Latin West, for example, in Hilary and later on in Augustine, they like to contrast apprehending and comprehending God. We can apprehend God positively in accordance with his nature, but the very God we apprehend, we know we cannot comprehend for his infinitely greater than any grasp our minds may have of him. Now the
interesting fact is that here we have justice done to the ineffability and inexhaustible reality of God. And yet it is a way of thinking of God and his ineffability which is governed and controlled by the positive knowledge which God gives us of himself in and through Jesus Christ. To know God in this way then is to know him in a way that is proper to him and worthy of him. And that is to know God in
accordance with his self-revelation, in accordance with his godly nature and therefore in a godly way. And so godliness and accuracy, theosophia and acrobatia condition each other both in the worship of God and in our theological formulation. Now strictly speaking, only God can know himself. Point that Irenaeus made, we can only know God through God. Athanasius argues, only God can know God in a way proportionate to God, in a way that is strictly in accordance with
who God is. Hence if we are to know God, it can only be through God and only through sharing in some incredible way in God's knowledge of himself. That is to say, we can only know God if in some way he communicates himself to us and brings us into an intimate communion with him. And that's precisely what took place in the incarnation and at Pentecost. Because in the incarnation, God has communicated himself to us, Jesus Christ,
not something about himself, his very self. And at Pentecost, he has poured out upon us his own being, his own spirit, the spirit who is God in his ultimate godness. That's the staggering fact about Pentecost. Now when the Nicene theologians developed these thoughts, they led immense stress upon certain biblical texts. And all Nicene theology was built up in the worshipping church, in meditation upon passages of scripture, in which they sought to distill out of the New
Testament scriptures and the Old as well, to distill out of them the essential kernel, the essential connections of Christian faith. And here we find Athanasius devoting a little work all in its own to passages like Luke 10:22, Matthew 11:27. All things are delivered unto me from my Father, and no one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son wills to reveal him.
Here then, Athanasius argues, there is a mutual relation of knowing between the Father and the Son. But if only God can know God, if only God can show him in a way proportionate to his own being, this mutual relation of knowing between the Father and the Son also involves a mutual relation of being between the Father and the Son. So here then we have a closed circle of knowing and being between Father and Son and Son
and Father. But in Jesus Christ that self-knowledge of God has become incarnate. It has been inserted into the sphere where human beings know each other and know the world around them. So in the incarnation, God's self-knowledge has been made to intersect with our human knowledge of one another and of creation in such a way that we human beings may share in the knowledge of God which he has of himself. Knowledge then of God the
Father and of God the Son is coincident, and this is very important. You don't know the Father first and then know the Son, and you don't really know the Son first and then you know the Father. If we begin with knowledge that Christ is God, then we apply a prior idea of God to Christ. But since we know Christ, only as in and through him we know God, we then apply our knowledge of Christ to our
knowledge of God the Father. And so the basic knowledge of God which we may have or may not have is reconstructed through this mutual relation of the Father and the Son. And that is why they point out that when Jesus revealed himself, he didn't say right away to his disciples, I am God. He came in a lowly and humble way because he held back the revelation of himself by word so that it could only take place
step by step with his self-revelation through being and act. And only as they were initiated into the communion of Christ and the Father did they really know both the Father and the Son, the Father from the Son and the Son from the Father, and thus participate in God's knowledge of himself. Now when you look at it like that, all our modern approaches of knowledge of Christ from below or above is nonsense. We see that the
Ebionite approach or the Docetic approach, a Busmanian approach or a Pannenbergian approach, these really are ultimately nonsensical from this point of view because knowledge of the Father and knowledge of the Son are always finally coincident, and it is only in that coincidence that we really know him. Now these ideas were there discussed again and again in the 4th century, and they are, I believe, profounder in their analysis situation than you can find almost anywhere in modern
theology since the Reformation, anywhere, and they're not to be neglected. But now another passage has fundamental significance, and that is 1 Corinthians 2:10. I has not seen nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for them who love him, but God has revealed them unto us by his Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, even the very depths of God's own being. And what man knows
the things of a man except the Spirit of man that is in him, so the things of God knows no one but the Spirit of God. It is then as Jesus Christ mediates to us the Spirit of God that through the Spirit, in the Spirit, we are allowed to share in God's knowledge of himself. We are brought into the closed circle of the knowing of the Father by the Son and the Son by the Father. No
one knows the Father or the Son or the Son of the Father except those whom Jesus wills to reveal him, and he does that so imparting to them the Spirit from the Father who receives from the Son. And so we have here a doctrine of Christ in which Christ mediates the Spirit and the Spirit mediates Christ. So the doctrine of the Son we are given is one in which you cannot separate out from the doctrine of
the Holy Spirit nor can you separate out finally the doctrine of the Holy Spirit from the doctrine of the Son. Now granted epistemologically or logically the doctrine of the Son comes first because in the Son we have the logos, the mind, the reason, the word of God incarnate, and it is because we know God only through his logos, that is only through the logos that we can know the Spirit. But nevertheless we cannot know the logos
except through sharing in the Spirit to whom the word became incarnate and who mediates Christ as Christ mediates the Spirit. Now in addition we have here, and this is something that came out of hard struggle with the Aryans, the controlling significance of the incarnate humanity of Jesus. Now you won't get this in the patristic texts because the patristic scholars by and large all talk about these things from the controversies of the 19th or 18th or 20th
century and they miss out the and a lot of modern scholars don't like that and so they try, and this happens in the biblical field as well when they don't like a text, they try to undermine its authority by saying it's not genuine. For example the text I quoted further earlier from Luke 10 and Matthew 11, modern scholars don't like very much and they say that's late but there's no textual evidence anywhere against them. There's some
pure external dogmatic reasons they throw doubt upon them and the same thing is true here. Patristic scholars are also guilty of that kind of play. But here well we can understand it this way, the Aryans sought all through the scriptures define statements that spoke about the humility, the civility, the lowliness, the creatureiness of Jesus and they fastened upon this text actually belongs to the to the arms of new college eventually in Edinburgh from book of Proverbs
which was interpreted in a Christian way that Jesus Christ that the son was created by God the beginning of all his ways and works the key of all his ways of what does that mean now the Aryans use this to say there you see Jesus Christ is a created intermediary he is not God he was the first of God's creatures and he is the beginning of all that but no the Athanasian said on the contrary what
that means is this that God has come among us in the Jesus Christ so that he has made the humanity of Jesus the controlling principle the archē by which all our knowledge of God shall be tested so it is the sheer downright humanity of Jesus which becomes the touchstone of what is genuine knowledge of God and what is not genuine knowledge of God what is pagan knowledge of God and what is devout biblical knowledge of God
now later on we shall have to probe into this little further and this is a point that Gregory and at the end is unfortunately missed out in the passage I gave you but and it's of fundamental importance so here then we have the centrality of the father-son relationship one in which in the very forefront there confronts us the humanity of Jesus if that humanity is not genuine humanity we know nothing about God Athanasius insists again
and again the incarnation does not mean that God came among us by becoming into man he came as man as man now that's staggering he said God came into a prophet God came into an apostle God came into a saint the spirit of God dwelling in them but that is not the incarnation the incarnation is a staggering fact that God the creator of all things came to us as himself man as man that as we shall
see is a staggering revelation of the mightiness of God that God Almighty could come and did come in his own eternal being as a man and as a creature now when we take the incarnation in that way seriously then it is through this Jesus that we have access to the father and it is in the one spirit of the father and the son which he mediates to us that our knowledge of God in and through the
humanity of Jesus is genuinely and finally knowledge of God in his own ultimate being as God now in order to highlight this let us contrast this with Judaism and Hellenism because that's exactly what the fourth century had to do we find the fourth century fathers struggling to bring their understanding of the apostolic gospel and the apostolic teaching to mature form by battling on two fronts with Judaism on the one hand and Hellenism on the other and
as we see what the Nicene faith Nicene formulation means vis-a-vis Judaism and Hellenism that we begin I think to see its far-reaching significance now of course the difference between the New Testament and the old is obvious in that here we have the word of God incarnate the incarnation of the word opens up a way for us within our creatureliness where we don't need to take leave of our creaturely reason our creaturely senses opens
up a way for us to know God in himself but the identification of the logos with the son the word with the son means that our access to knowledge of God in himself is and must be of an acutely personal kind now many people miss this emphasis in the fathers because you see the person the concept person is late the concept person is itself a product of this very controversy the concept person is a product of
Christology in the doctrine of the trinity and none of the fathers formulated just as precisely as we would what person means but in all kinds of ways of expressing it and we find Athanasius himself reaching out again and again to insist that the kind of knowledge that we have of God in Jesus Christ is not impersonal but personal and it is one in which we share in the most acute way the personalizing operations of God in
Jesus Christ let us put it this way in drawing near to us by uniting himself to us in our human nature and Jesus Christ and by living his divine life in our human life as a real human life God has revealed something of the innermost secret of his own divine personal life and Jesus revealed that as I've indicated not simply by teaching but by his life by his act and by his being now contrast the knowledge
of God we have here in Jesus in this way with the knowledge of God we have in Judaism Judaism is concerned with the ineffability of God the unnameability of God there is no knowledge of God in his internal relations there's only a knowledge of God in his external relations now granted that in Judaism we're not we don't simply know God in the contrast between the creator and the creature the unoriginate and the originate we know God
through his word and through his self-revelation but not in such a way that we are initiated into the inner life and personal communion with God now in order to bring this home as I have in one or two places I've taken a point that Martin Buber has made when he attacked Protestantism for conceptually letting go God John Hicks used to be here for example denies we have any conceptual knowledge of God or take skill of
X [sp?] who denies that faith is basically conceptual knowledge of God it is non-conceptual non-evidential he argues and therefore he has to come in a roundabout way and this is true also Saint Thomas in order to fill out our knowledge of God with concepts that of course with the basic point of Tilley Saint Thomas regularly attacked Anselm for saying three days naked sin he can keep the only there is no faith without conception and now
that is what Buber was concerned about you don't really know God unless you have in some measure a conceptual grasp of God and he pointed out that Protestantism has lost that now of course we know how this arose and it's largely through the Kantian doctrine that you cannot know things themselves you only know them and their appearances and there is no real thing in itself so far as we can know it but of course I didn't
go into this that whole idea has been exploded we do know things in terms of their internal relations and structures so how can could Buber then a Jew speak about knowing God in in his own internal relations getting a conceptual grasp of the being of God in himself now the interesting thing and I think the exciting thing is that Buber did this by latching on to an element in Spinoza where Spinoza taught that we know God
in terms of his rational love of himself and we know that this doctrine of God's love of himself in Spinoza is itself a relic a residue of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity but whether that be the case or not it is certainly true that Buber and Spinoza were concerned to grasp God in some measure in the inner communion of his own being and God's knowing and loving of himself and they knew Buber knew that is
ultimately how we know God and only if we know God in that way do we really know him because only then do we have a conceptual grasp of him but that is what the Holy Trinity is about that's what the Nicene Creed is about that's what Christianity is about we are given to know God through Christ and in the spirit in such a way that we have access into his inner being into the inner communion of
the divine life and that is really to know God and it is at that point that Christianity differs from Judaism and that point that Buber seems have gone halfway from traditional Judaism to Christianity which of course is a fundamental point for our dialogue today with the Jews now what Christianity then teaches us is that God does not allow himself to be imprisoned in his own loneliness God has opened himself to us and that Jesus Christ is
the open heart of God and it is in and through Jesus that we may share in the inner being and life of God himself in a measure but the very inner being and life of God we share is one that infinitely transcends us and so here you can see how the Nicene theologians again and again where they came to this point recalled the fact that the cherry beam covered their faces as they came before God because
to know God in this way is is quite staggering how can we look upon God and live how can we really know God as he is in himself and yet this is how God reveals himself and therefore we must tread this path as on holy ground taking the shoes from off our feet let's say with utter reverence and reserve and humility and that is the very combination of piety and precision in the text of Athanasios that
I quote you but now what about Hellenism now we're all familiar with Hanak's thesis that what happened in the fathers the Greek particularly was a Hellenization of Christianity now I want to say that the exact opposite is the case the exact opposite is the case now in a superficial sense of course the gospel was translated out of Hebrew and Aramaic and Syriac into Greek and the early church was primarily expressed its doctrines in Greek in that
sense if you like the Hellenization but only in that superficial sense but when you look at fundamental point out of fundamental point you see that the Nicene theology radically reconstructed the very basis of Greek thought let us look at it in one or two ways that are important I've been talking of the father-son relation but what we mean by father what we mean by son how are we to understand the figure or the image of
fatherhood and the image of sonship now if you are a Greek again to quote Buber you think with your eyes you have an optical approach to it or you have a mimetic understanding of the relation of images to realities so if you are a Greek you project your images back into the realities they refer to and that's a mythological way of thinking and if in the father you have father begetting a son and a son begetting
a father and you talk about a father-son relation then you project the sensual creaturely images in fatherhood and sonship back into God and that's exactly what the Aryans did I'd say the Aryans were so troubled about the term father and son because they sexized those relationships and read sexism back into God and then of course they had to de-sexize God but what did the Nicene fathers say no no no they said that's not how
to think that's the way the pagans think that's the way the Greeks think but Christians don't think in that way and here we see the Hebraic understanding of God the second commandment which both the Roman Catholic Church unfortunately and the Lutheran Church abolished but the second commandment is a fundamental significance in all Greek patristic theology what does it say and it says this when you think and you must think in terms of human images like father
and son these images are related to God image-lessly without images now that's a very difficult way for us to think especially in a generation or several generations we're concerned with cinema and and comics and picture thinking and so on and audio-visual aid aids where we have taught our people to think in pictorial images well you can't think about God in that way now the father has insisted that you must not think of fatherhood or
sonship in any material or sensual or visible way you dare not read that back into God but if you use the term father or the words or the term son the term father term son refers to God without an image now many people understand here the Greek orthodox doctrines icons because the icon is not an imaging of the saint or imaging of the god an icon is related to what it refers to image-lessly now this
was made clear and this is one of the important things in epistemology of the fathers by the doctrine of the homoousion of the spirit which I shall come to in the homoousion of the son we shall also discuss that what God is in toward us in Jesus Christ he is in himself but the homoousion of the spirit along with that tells us there are certain things you cannot read back from the humanity of Jesus into God
the father-son relationship is essentially a spirit relation that does not allow you to read sensual images back into God now this is discussed again and again and again throughout the fourth century when the Aryans started to think in sensual and sexist ways about fatherhood and sonship and say how can you do that and they made fun about the father the grandfather and all that sort of nonsense but the nice in theology cut that all away
with a stroke by saying look you just don't begin to know God because that's the way to know God you really know God when the very human terms you use are not projected into God in their creaturely content but they are related image-lessly to God because God has used these terms in which to name himself to us and to reveal himself to us we can't get rid of them because God has taken them and that's
why we baptize in the name of the father the son and we have to teach our children to think about this in a Hebraic and not in a heathen or Hellenic way now I believe that is immensely important for us today because many of our problems are bound up with this sensual or sensible way of reading pictorial images back into God did John Robinson who says quite frankly I cannot think except in pictorial images but how
in the world can he think God it's impossible and no wonder the poor man has great problems the adoption of God now I believe here we've got to go to school with Israel sellers and why I whom I consider to be the finest and the profoundest of the Anglican patristic scholars points out that Athanasius was radically Hebraic in his whole approach and he saw this point very clearly but now let us look at it in another
way take two statements of Athanasius where he spoke about the Logos that became incarnate the Logos that we see incarnate in Jesus is the Logos that lives and inheres in the very being of God the Logos Enousios he called it now that's an entirely un-Greek concept totally un-Greek concept and yet that is absolutely fundamental to patristic theology and here we see the Greek way of thinking radically destroyed in its very root now I could
show you this again and again in many ways but take a simple example you remember in the Phaedo when Socrates is discussing what lies beyond death he's about to take the hemlock and pass from this world into the next and they discuss what it's like and because there is no Logos from the other side no Logos from the other side the best that we can do Plato makes them say is to make a little raft out
of the ideals that we have and try and sail across the unknown water that's Greek thinking but the Christian thinking is the opposite we do have a Logos from the other side and the Logos has come from God but it's not only a Logos from God different from God it is a Logos that inheres in God's own being so when God's word comes to us it is God himself in his own eloquent being who comes to
us and here the whole relation of Logos to being is radically changed that's not anything that Heidegger understands because although Heidegger speaks about knowing the truth in the house of being knowing the word in house of being Heidegger hasn't any idea of the Logos in hearing in the phooses in hearing in the being because he's still radically Greek and pagan in that respect but the Christian teaching that I've seen teaching is the opposite of that it
is the inheritance of Logos and being that transforms the whole thing but the same thing is true also of the inheritance of act in being the energeia enusios the doctrine of the unmoved mover which had unfortunately such a massive influence upon later thought especially after John of Damascus on who resurrected Aristotle in these respects God is simply an inertial point who affects us inertially without being moved without moving us when God acts upon us in his
movement and what a devastating effect that had upon the whole development of science no concept of movement no concept of motion but as John Philoponus the great Christian physicist of the first sixth century saw if you take this seriously that energeia is inherent in God and God is dynamic in his own being God moves in his own being and if God created being he created being in such a way that he put movement into created being
and so the whole doctrine of motion and being was changed and altered we only get a glimpse of that through our gazelle and gross test in the west and not until well not until our own day because Galileo Newton didn't really grasp this adequately either have we really a certain understanding of motion and being in the integration but that's precisely what we have here in the Nicene theology well I mentioned these things to show that far
from we the Nicene theology being a Hellenization of Christianity it took these elements of Greek thought and radically changed them from the very bottom and so radically changed them from the bottom that they unrecognizable as classical Greek concepts you see when we know God the Father through God the Son and in the Spirit all our inheritance of thought whichever culture we have is taken up and changed radically and put into the service of the love of
God and the communion of God in Jesus Christ and here knowledge of the Father through the Son in the Spirit puts its indelible stamp upon it all and we discover then in language that I used elsewhere that the Holy Trinity constitutes the basic grammar of all theology what I'm concerned in this lecture simply to say is that everything pivots upon the father-son relation the son-father relation in such a way that you cannot separate godly
worship and godly devotion from sheer accuracy and scientific precision they influence one another you cannot be a theological scientist without knowing God according to his nature but you cannot do that without falling on your knees and worshiping God in and through Jesus Christ so worship and scholarship precision and piety belong in separately together and that is the blend of the evangelical faith in Jesus Christ with the immense care of the fathers in thinking and expressing things
succinctly and accurately and the Nicene Constantinopolitan creed is really something that emerges out of there and enables the church and century after century to keep to that path more pious and more accurate to signify God as father from the Son and to talk in vague general terms about being and non-being, uncreated being and created being and that means that Jesus and the spirit he mediates are absolutely central. Thank you.