Transcript
Thank you, sir, for your kindly introduction. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God, a very God, begotten not made, being of one substance by the Father, with the Father, by whom all things were made. In the first lecture we were concerned with the centrality and primacy of the Father-Son relation. It is exclusively from within that relation
that we are given access to know God as he is in himself, for it is only in the Son, the one only begotten Son, the one Logos of the Father incarnate, that God has revealed himself to us, so that we may know him in measure in accordance with his nature. And here we found that piety and precision, theology and science, go together. In the second lecture we discussed the fact that it is only within the Father
-Son relation that we are to understand the creation. God the Creator is to be understood in terms of God the Father and not the other way round. The almighty creatorship of God and the nature of the creation are therefore to be understood from the perspective of Jesus Christ and it is as we think out together the doctrine of the incarnation and the doctrine of the creation that we find the whole empirical ground of thought transformed and
it is at this point that Christian theology radicalizes the revolution it created in Greek philosophy, science and culture. Everything then depends on the relation and the nature of the relation that obtains between Jesus Christ the incarnate Son and God the Father. Now this lecture we turn to ask how then are we to think of that relation between the Son and the Father? What does the Gospel mean when it tells us that Jesus Christ was sent by
God and from God and that he is of God the Father? What is the precise relation of the Son to the Father for everything appears to hinge upon it? Now that is the question to which these clauses in the Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed give an answer. Given the priority of the Father-Son relation over the creator-creature relation how are we to understand the relation of the Son to the Father in an accurate and precise way? That
is in such a way as to exclude the ambiguities and the errors which seemed in the fourth century to be threatening the very heart and substance of the Christian Gospel. Now let us pose this question in two cognate ways. First, if the creator-creature relation has priority the line of demarcation between God and the contingent universe then runs between Jesus Christ and God and Jesus Christ must be considered as falling on the creature side of that
relation. If the Father-Son relation is primary then the line of demarcation must be regarded as falling between the creator word or the Son of God and the created universe and we must think of the Son as he by whom all things were made. Now this involves as we have seen a radically different concept of the Logos from that which is obtained in Greek thought, philosophy or science and here the Logos is also identified with the
Son so that the Logos is conceived as essentially personal and divine no longer then is a Logos thought of here as a mere cosmological principle but himself God, very God, the creator of all things. But second, is Jesus Christ the incarnate word or Logos mediator between God and man in the full sense as he who is both God and man in his one person or is he to be regarded as a created intermediary, the first of
the creatures made by God the Father. Now the answer of the creed is that he is no created intermediary but mediator in the sense that in him God himself condescends to become man in order to give himself and reveal himself to man and not just something of himself. The mediator is to be understood from the side of God's own ultimate reality and not from the side of man's self-understanding or self-exaltation. He is God of
God and light of light. Now serious problem was thrown up from the dualist background of Greico-Roman thought as accentuated by the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation and the utter distinction between God and the universe of created being, a problem which I noted at the beginning of the first lecture. Now this dualist background had a double effect. If you accept that dualist background and allow its epistemological structure to affect your understanding then there takes place a
detachment of Jesus Christ from God and following that a detachment of Christianity from Christ, a double detachment. Now that is the ultimate problem which the Nicene fathers and the allow that dualism to bite into our understanding of Christ and the gospel of grace and salvation then Jesus Christ is reduced to the level of a creature and that has the effect of separating our world ultimately from God and then men must look for salvation in other places
and from other sources than in God and his grace. That is in earth bound or man bound expedience and today of course we have precisely an ideological reflection of that ideological situation in the Nile Delta represented by the Aryan movement. Well then if Jesus Christ is not God of God, very God of very God, then everything in the Christian gospel, everything in the apostolic faith is put in question. First take the doctrine of God. The doctrine
of God, the Christian doctrine of God is put in question. For if God is eternally without his logos before the creation then God is eternally and inherently unknowable, irrational, unlawful and in fact as Athanasius pressed home again and again this is ultimately an atheistic position. Secondly take the doctrine of Christ because that is at stake also and for the whole understanding of Christian worship. If Christ is detached from God then he is no longer the substance
of the gospel but is only a transient variable representation, a symbolic image or representation, a mythological construct and no more and inevitably as indeed Arius claimed, there can be, there could be myriads of these images of God. Third, take the heart of the evangelical message because it is torn out. If Christ is not himself God then there is no final authority or validity to what Jesus claims to say or to do for mankind and fourthly if
Christ is not himself the creator then there is no real connection between redemption and creation as he carries it out and of course we see that in the Marcionite dualism which the fathers of Nicaea also had in mind. Hence God of God, light of light, true God of true God, of one substance with the father by whom all things were made were clauses inserted into the Nicene constant Neapolitan creed in order to secure the very heart
and essence of the Christian doctrine of God and of its evangelical message. The creed tells us then that we must think of Jesus Christ as God in exactly the same sense as God the father is God and that as Epiphanius remarked is the soon des mostes pistios, the bond and the whole faith collapses. Now the particular question posed in the pre-Nicene Nicene and post-Nicene debate was whether the son is the son of the father
only by an act of his will only by an act of his grace or whether the son was son of the father from his very being. Ekousias from the very being of God that is from his essential reality and eternal being as God. If he is then of course the father-son relation will fall within the being of God and indeed as we shall see the incarnation then falls within the being of God. That's staggering fact
pressed home by Athanasius. The Arians claim that in the ultimate resort Christ is begotten of the father by an act of will just as he created the universe by an act of will and that Jesus Christ is not eternally God of God hence the expression of God was given an interpretation not finally different from that of the creation when it is said of the creation that it is of God that it is a product of his
will and that as contingent the creation is ontologically dependent upon God for without that ontological relation between the creation and God the creation has no being no created being of itself so that in a profound sense we have to say even of the creation that it is of God and indeed as Athanasius argues that it is and continues to be in God because it is sustained by God's enveloping presence and power. Now Athanasius tells us in
two of his works where he recalls the debates at the Nicene council of 325 that the fathers came to formulate the basic form of these clauses in two stages at first when the Arians agreed to the formula that the sun is of God for example in light of light the Nicene fathers insisted on defining the of God as of the essence or of the being of God now this meant that the sun is proper to the
essence or the being of God as God as creatures are not but then lo and behold the Arians agreed to the phrase of the being of God and the right the Nicene fathers were rather taking the back and then they realized that the Arians were going to interpret it in such a way that it could apply to us men who are not only created of God but who are created in the image and glory of God
and therefore the Arians felt they could also accede to this form of the statement and the Nicene fathers decided to cut off that prevarication and ambiguity that attempt to twist things round by insisting on the expression of one and the same being with the father homoousios to patri consubstantial with the self is God of God as the father is God the sun is of one and the same being as God very God of very God
in fact the son and the father are so essentially and completely one and the same God that and this is a phrase as the nasa repeats several times that the son is everything that the father is except father thus any detraction from the son is a detraction from God the father and he who honors the son honors the father as Jesus claimed the incarnate son has all the prerogatives of God except fatherhood in order to offset
the term homoousios it was argued by in the Nicene council that the term homoousios might be employed that is to say the son is like the father but it soon became clear that the term like the father makes sense proper sense only if it means really like the father that is one with the father so that a proper understanding of homoousios would imply the homoousios and so the letter was adopted the son
is then thought of as an offspring of the father by nature and as such proper to and identical with the very being of God the father co-essential with the father who begot him eternally in himself the father he does not just partake of the father but is one with the father in essential being and reality homoousios then was reckoned to be an accurate and precise declaration and the words accrues are here used a precise
and accurate declaration of the Christian faith in the face of the arian heresy now once the concept of homoousios had been adopted in this way it for it carried further the profound change in the basic concepts of greek thought which i noted the other day the distinctive meaning of usia and of hypostasis which together with the terms name on on them and prosopan means or meant what we mean by person the distinctive meaning of the
terms usia and hypostasis became changed and we have to interpret them therefore not in the sense of greek thought but in the new sense which is determined for them by the realities they indicate in god and may i say in passing that nearly all patristic scholars in the west particularly insist that we have to understand usia here in terms of aristotle's doctrine of primary and secondary substance but as a matter of fact the 19 fathers didn't
even know the categories of aristotle where this is mentioned it was unearthed later by the platonists and it was translated into latin by boethius and the latin tradition where the roman or anglican tradition tends regularly to interpret it this in terms of primary and secondary substance but a number of people including myself have shown that to be quite false and steed's recent book on substance has also shown that to be false we then have to usia
in the light of the evangelical message to which it is coordinated and by which it is transformed now in this sense usia of being refers to being in its inward reference being in respect of its content or inward relations whereas hypostasis is regarded self-supporting reality in its distinctive relation to what is other than itself that is being in its objective reference or presentation or face now this became quite clear after the council of alexandria in
ad 362 in which athanasius himself who had a much more fluid understanding of terms i should refer to him again in this connection a moment agreed that this was the way in which we may and should use the terms usia and apostasis the term homoousia then refers to a relation within the being of god as god and within that being father son and holy spirit are all co-essential and in relation to one another are hypostatic
or enhypostatic the terms are used in this sense uh interchangeably the co-essentiality or the consubstantiality of the son and of the spirit that isn't actually mentioned the consent of depolitic creed but it is mentioned in athanasius and in various writers epiphanius particularly up to this point the co-essentiality of the son refer then to their substantive identity with god the father their unity and equality with the father within the one indivisible being or usia of
god the son of god is god in the same sense as god the father is god and so the homoousias and the expresses the unity and the identity as well as the equality of being between the father and the son now it's important to see that here we have a step which is governed by the gospel itself and also important to see that this step governed by the gospel and by the apostolic tradition is an irreversible
step in the history of christian thought. Saint Athanasius gives a number of times as his fundamental hermeneutic principle this and i quote terms do not disparage god's nature but rather does that nature draw those terms to itself and changes them for terms are not prior to their essences i'd say their beings or realities but essences are first and terms second now in that life something absolutely fundamental took place in the basic language and the basic epistemology
of the early church in terms of which there could be no going back now let me indicate that by a couple of analogies when newton gave following upon Galileo gave a radical gave us a radical basis for modern science in the way in which empirical and theoretical realities were were operated together in experiments and theory and when on those terms he expounded the system of the world in its coherent patterns of connection something quite irreversible took
place in history human understanding now granted that the newtonian concept of the universe had to be modified by the einsteinian and from einstein we can deduce the newtonian as a limiting case but from einstein newton is not only reconstructed but established all the more firmly on its own limited but irreversible foundation when you take a jigsaw puzzle and you try to assemble them and find the the basic pattern you put the jigsaw pieces together and you
find the pattern you cannot disorder it mess it all up again and then go back the task of reassembling the the jigsaw puzzle pieces without remembering the picture you arrived at the first time something irreversible has taken place in your mind and understanding and that irreversible event influences all subsequent events now that's what took place at the nicene council when the homoousion was formulated in this way something radically fundamental took place in which the gospel
was seen in its profound inner ontological coherence and once that had taken place the church could not go back upon it because here the gospel had been secured in their understanding in a profounder way than they'd managed before now this did mean of course that the terms like homoousios and ousia and apostasis couldn't be put forward in such a way that people accepted them in the way they were accustomed to understand them from the greek
textbooks from the the schools of rhetoric the middle placeness and so on no they had to be put forward athanasia said with interpretations to show that their connection with the gospel and that is gospel itself that has left its mark its imprint upon them now a qualification to the line i have been adopting the debate and the decision at nicaea was not primarily a metaphysical one not primarily a personological one although metaphysical issues were involved the
basic point the ontic union or union and being between jesus christ the incarnate son and god the father the oneness between him and the father in being word and act all had to do with the integrity of the gospel message and it was there on that ground that the basic decision had to be taken and was in fact taken the primary intention of the council of nicaea and constantinople in formulating the homoousion then was to
preserve the heart and substance of the gospel by providing accurate safeguards for it against heretical and paganizing misunderstanding and interpretation far from imposing an alien helenism on the term on the gospel the terms zea and homoousias were used to allow the evangelical witness and message of the new testament to come across without obstruction by an alien framework of thought the term homoousion was then reminted and recast within the believing worship of the church and
its commitment to god's self-revelation in jesus christ and within the whole apostolic tradition in order to convey the all-important father-son relation in a precise and unmistakable sense there is the same the homoousion is in the first place an exegetical and clarificatory expression having to do with the semantic bearing of the biblical language upon the realities they convey and in view of their service to this in an illuminating way they took on the
role of an interpretative framework of thought through which the general understanding of the evangelical and apostolic tradition was given a more precise and exact guidance throughout the church what the homoousion did was to give clear expression to the ontological substructure upon which the meaning of the various biblical texts rested and through which they were integrated as such it proved to be one of those movements of thought from an incipiently conceptual to a conceptual act of
understanding which the committed mind takes under the compelling demands of reality into which it inquires in this instance the compelling demands of the truth as it is in jesus so that here we have the in the homoousion particularly this king pin this integrative bond of the nicene cream here we have an interpretative instrument of far-reaching and irreversible significance in the theological integration of the mind of the church and in its proclamation of the gospel
now in order to disclose something of its significance in this respect we may test it in relation to the evangelical message of the new testament cinders and azios tells us in several of his works that they arrived at this by examining passage after passage in the gospels and in the epistles and of course also in the old testament because the arian particularly threw those passages into discussion they put these various passages together they looked at every
instance where it has said that christ is of god and of the father and so on and he proceeds from and so on comes from and is sent by and they distill the it is through distilling the very essence of that evangelical relation that they came to formulate the concept of the homoousiality so i may use that expression of the relation of the incarnate son to the father now is that is the case then we
may put that to the test by saying well what happens if it is not the case what because that will help us to understand the relation between the homoousian and the fundamental truths of the gospel and the reality and the finality of its divine message of and salvation in jesus and so let us ask what would happen to the import of the gospel message if there were no consubstantial relation between the incarnate son and the
father what would happen if there was not this relation of oneness and identity being between jesus christ and the father for that ought to make it clear us what is really at stake here and whether we really are concerned after all with a point where the very heart and substance of the gospel is at stake well first consider and i'm following the the lines that the fathers adopted first consider the saving acts of christ the healing
acts the restoring and the forgiving acts of jesus now they are presented in the gospel as acts done out of an a relation of unbroken oneness between jesus christ and god the father take for example the passage in john 5 which played such an important role here you remember the passage where jesus healed the man on the sabbath day and he's challenged by the jewish authorities that he should do this miracle on the sabbath day they
weren't concerned with the miracle they were concerned with the fact that he'd broken the sabbath and his answer was my father works hitherto and i work let's say he was continuing on this sabbath day the work that his father did in creating the universe there was he claimed a oneness in his creative agency with that of god the father now what would it mean if there were no such oneness in being an agency between christ and
god separate jesus christ from god and this is what the fathers say the very essence the saving essence goes out of the christian gospel take for example the word of forgiveness when jesus says to someone son daughter your sins are forgiven you go in peace is that merely the word of man or is it the word of god almighty when he forgives you your sins is it merely the kind of word that a neighbor will say
to you and say i forgive you or your father would say to you don't do it again or is it the word of god almighty who forgives in such a way that he undoes the sin that you have done and he recreates your sins are forgiven does that word have behind it the ultimate finality and validity of god's own being is it backed up to the hilt by the sheer ousia of god and the father talented
unless it is backed up by the sheer ousia of god it is not gospel it doesn't ultimately mean anything or consider the passion and the sacrifice of christ and here all kinds of deeper questions went right on right and are most beautifully expounded by Cyril of Alexandria after the Constantinople debate but we have them this question raised right from the start in the extant literature to which i shall refer in the next lecture our bishop of
patriarch alexander the predecessor of athanasius in alexandria consider the passion and sacrifice of christ in which as christ claimed he gave himself for the redemption of mankind so what would become of our understanding of the cross if christ and god are ultimately divided at the cross of christ what becomes of the gospel if christ at the cross of is merely a creature and god is infinitely removed from him in his eternity in his divine being so
what would happen to the patristic concept of the blessed exchange which comes so strongly in aranean language athanasian language and is given such poignant expression in the contra pollinari in this blessed exchange in terms of which salvation is understood as god giving himself for us that we might be given what god gives to us development of the polline concept that for our sakes he became poor that we through his poverty might become rich if god does
not really give himself for us in our in this redemption then is the redemption not ultimately a hoax is there any genuine anti-lutron is any genuine redemption if god does not pledge himself in the sacrifice of christ no there is none the fathers say if christ was not one with god what kind of exchange would there be how could he really penetrate into the depths of our existence our corruption our death and with sin and
evil entrenched in our very being and vanquish corruption and slay death itself if it were not god penetrating into our agony and hurt on calvary no it's the very being of god that we have to think of in the one who died upon the cross third and again this point referenced back particularly and frequently to the fifth chapter of the fourth gospel consider the relation of jesus christ to the last things the ultimate destiny of mankind
the consummation of the kingdom that day when god will judge the world what would happen how are we to think of that if jesus christ is not after all god of god light of light but if jesus christ passes away with the rest of the creation so that jesus christ does not in the last analysis go bail for our future but that all we have at the end is some dark unknown arbitrary deity who is quite
other than jesus christ what if jesus christ is mediator is himself god and man and it is by him that god will judge all men at the last day you see the humblest at this point makes a colossal difference to our understanding of the divine judgment if all judgment is committed into the hands of jesus christ if all power all exousia and heaven and earth are given to him if the father has delivered all things into
his hand then it is by jesus that god will judge the earth there is then not an interval in of difference in the being in being between jesus christ and god the judge of all the earth it is by jesus that god judges the world and that's partly why the creed insists whose kingdom shall have no end the incarnation does not as donald bailey used to say dissolve away it remains ultimate to eternity of form and
this undergoes every thing else we've been considering here consider the revelation of god in jesus christ what would it mean if jesus christ were not really one with god and if revelation is ultimately ultimately empty of god would it not ultimately be a sham a trial with no divine finality no divine authority no divine reality if that is the case then what can revelation mean but something that you construe from a center in yourself what can
revelation mean but something you think out cat epinoyan according to your own inventing rather than catered dear noyan according to the objective truth and mind of god is the way athanasius put it if it is not with god himself and his own being that we have to do in revelation then we have no teologia but only mutalogia we have no theology but only mythology let us say a way of thinking determined from a center of
yourself and not from a way of thinking determined by a center in god what would it mean if jesus christ is not the self revelation of god if god is not ultimately in himself antecedently and eternally and forever what he is toward us in jesus christ would god then not be some quite unknowable arbitrary deity some kind of black patch some kind of arcane mystery behind everything we can't say what he is at all so someone
who does not care to reveal himself to us what would revelation mean if jesus christ the incarnate son of god if jesus christ were not really one with god the father who would it mean if god has not given himself condescended and imparted communicated himself and his own being to us in the incarnation what would it mean if you interpret john 3 and 16 god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son in
such a way as to say that god is one thing and jesus christ is quite another thing it would mean would it not that the love of god has stopped short of becoming one with us it would mean that there is no ontological and therefore no epistemological connection between the love of god in jesus the love in jesus and the love of god in fact there is no revelation of the love of god but on the
contrary something rather that mocks us because while god exhibits to us this picture of the love of god he is not that in himself no the nicene father's constantine apollos and father swept all that away and said no everything depends upon the unity in being and act and agency and word between jesus christ the incarnate son and god the father the new testament then depends upon the exact these athanasius's words an unvarying imaging of the father
in the son co-essentiality or the homovisiality of what god is in christ to what he is inherently and eternally in his own being that jesus christ really is the open heart of god really is the mighty hand of god outstretched to say really is god himself come in person to be one with us and to take us into communion with himself that is the heart and substance of the gospel that is the significance of the
homoousion that the incarnate son really is god of god and light of light in a way that is continuous with and one and the same with the ultimate being of god himself now when the fathers came to this point and realization of the full import of it they were utterly overwhelmed and staggered because this means that the incarnation and what happened in jesus for us and our salvation falls within the life and being of
god almighty that's the staggering fact of the homoousion what jesus did and said for us and our salvation the whole incarnate reality called jesus christ must be understood as falling within the life of god and we saw the other day that if we take the incarnation seriously as something that god became which he was not eternally just as we have to take the creation seriously god was not eternally creator as he was eternally father
then here in creation and in carnation something utterly new happens for god something that has staggered the fathers and you hear echoes of this right down to john of damascus but the most astonishing and the most breathtaking aspect of that is that that man that lived the human life is god come as man and as such it falls within the life of god himself within the being of god himself no wonder that they fought desperately to
maintain the integrity of the lycean faith it means that god really is love eternally and ultimate in himself as father what he is toward us in the sound and that here we have a revelation and the establishment of a kingdom of love of which there is no end for it is eternally grounded in the very being of god the father almighty all right then the homoousion stands for a relation of perfect identity and fidelity between
jesus christ and god the father you can express this by homoousion you can express it by hypostatic union but in death and resurrection in ascension and heavenly intercession and final advent and judgment it is the fidelity the constantly the the fact that god does not deceive us but he is in reality true god of true god in jesus christ on which everything depends the essential substance and integrity the whole new testament gospel finally rests upon
this cuts that ontic connection between christ and god and the new testament messages twisted round into an utterly different gospel and one that is a mocking sham what kind of god would that mean okay now in this lecture i've been concerned with the homoousion in as giving us the patristic the conciliar understanding as precise as they could of the relation of jesus christ the son to the father so we've been concerned with the fact that
in jesus christ we say what god is to us in jesus christ he really is in his own being because in jesus christ it is god and his own being who has come to us but now there's another side to the story because the homoousion is not simply between the eternal son and the father yes it's between jesus the incarnate son and the father and so we have to go on to discuss the fact what
this means from the side of christ's humanity and that's what we shall be concerned with in the next lecture that was in point of fact the question that pressed very quickly upon nyceas you can see in athanasius letter to epictetus what of the humanity of jesus if you're going to talk about the homoousion yes yes it's of jesus in the wholeness and integrity of his humanity that we must say homoousios topatri and unless
we accept the integrity and full complete reality of his humanity unless he's teleios perfect complete in his humanity as he's in a deity then again the homoousion doesn't mean anything as mediator he has to be as fully man as man of man as he is god of god and we shall discuss that in the next lecture but in the nature of the case it is a question that we have to raise from a soteriological point
of view and that's exactly the line raised by alexander and carried through by athanasius thank you