There is some repetition of material already posted here, but I have posted the full text of the Necessary Heresies series given at St Ebbe's for the benefit of those who came (largely). I crave your indulgence!
1. Confronting the barbarians
We live in a time when we may well think that the barbarians are at the gates. What we know as ‘civilization’ - that in which we have so much faith for our comfort and security – cannot conceal its true barbarity. Just this week we have commemorated the 200th anniversary of the passing of the act against slavery, with much self-congratulation all round. However, there was also in this a reminder of the crucial role that slavery played in the economy of the empire; and that the Church of England itself was a supporter of slavery and even an owner of slavery. It was ‘decent’ people who promoted such ‘indecency’; the most civilized people who profited from barbarity. But we shouldn’t imagine that we have entered a stage of superior moral enlightenment. In the name of protecting its own prosperity the society in which we live continues to butcher the unborn and call it a medical procedure justified by certain so-called ‘rights’; and continues to hold in its possession weapons of such appalling potential that it beggars the imagination. The populace of Britain is enslaved by lust, greed, gluttony and drunkenness, vanity, despair and violence to an unprecedented degree in its history, with a decline in subscription to every value except the value of personal freedom of choice. If we imagine that we can look upon the regime of a savage like Robert Mugabe with some degree of superiority, we ought to remember that in our own societies civilized behaviour is only a thin skin stretched over our hearts of darkness. As Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe said, sitting on a boat on the Thames: ‘this too has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ I had a friend, a 22 year old woman, who was in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina. The Hurricane itself was not the most frightening thing. She made her way with several other tourists to the Superdome, where they were to spend several days in fear of their lives in a crowd of almost 25,000 people crammed into the building. Armed gangs roamed around menacing and abusing them. They were afraid to go to the toilets because people had been raped and even killed there. This utterly chaotic and primitive scene occurred in the most advanced society on earth.
The rise of such appalling inhumanity demands a response from any right-thinking person, surely. More than ever before, there is a need for a new moral core, a morality that is convincing to the modern person in its liberality but severe enough to curb the kind of lawlessness we observe. The church itself is need of this moral renewal, too: it exhibits moral confusion and pettiness. When its leaders can make themselves understood, it turns out they aren’t saying anything at all. It has been lax with child-abusers and sexual deviants in its midst; and its clergy are a byword for laziness and ineffectiveness up and down the country. It hasn’t addressed the greed and the moral narrowness of its own membership. Isn’t moral renewal demanded by such circumstances? Isn’t a fresh seriousness about civilized behaviour called for more than ever?
2. The moral seriousness of Pelagius
Pelagius was a British theologian who took morality - and the moral responsibility of human beings - seriously. And he lived through a time in which a great civilisation was decaying around him. He would have been witness to tremendous and brutal evils in his time, living as he did around the sack of Rome in the early 5th Century. His teaching was not that human beings are naturally good - that doctrine would have had no purchase at all amongst those who had seen limbs hacked off and heard the screams of the rape victims. Rather, he held that man and woman were free to choose the right or the wrong. There was no escape behind the veil of determinism, or pleading helplessness as if that was some reassurance. Each of us could and should and would be held fully accountable for our actions. We ought to hear the full impact of God's address to his people 'Be holy, as I am holy', or as Jesus said: ‘You must therefore be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’. This means what it says. Jesus would not have said it if was not a moral possibility. Moral pessimissim is insulting to the creator of human beings, who created not puppets or beasts, but persons. Life and death is set before human beings and we are bid by our maker to choose life, aren’t we (Dt 30:19)? What’s more, this is a New Testament perspective as well: takes James’s epistle for example, where faith and obedience are in close conjunction with one another.
For Pelagius, there are three features in action - posse, velle and esse (power, will, realisation). Posse comes only from God, but the other two belong to us. When we choose to do the right, in order words, we can count on power from God to aid us. Not that Pelagius felt he was negating the sovereignty of God by such a teaching; far from it - man's free will occurs only within the sphere of God's permission and generosity, and ought to be used to the ends that God commands.
There are two futher points that Pelagius taught: First, the human will has no bias in favour of evil, not having inherited the spoiled will of Adam. After all, how can we be blamed for another's sin? That makes no moral sense. Adam set in train a custom or a habit of sin, but not a physical geneaology of sin.
Secondly, Pelagius also denies that man has a bias towards the good. Grace is provided as a grace of knowledge: through the law and the example of Christ, God provides us with all we need to know about what to do.
So, it is possible to say with the Rich Young Ruler, 'all these I have kept since childhood'. In fact, the Bible contains many examples of righteous lives. Now, this is not a trivial business for Pelagius: the merit on offer only comes through strenuous effort and application. He is well aware of the high destiny to which human beings have been called and to which they ought to aspire. No doubt he was also aware of Christians who saw grace as either a short-cut to righteousness or who felt that predestination as Augustine and others taught it was a counsel of despair. Here rather was a call to quit moaning and get on with living righteously. Here was a call to be as magnificent as human life can be. It was quite a heroic vision of the human person. And what’s more, at the time Pelagianism took hold, it did not look particularly unorthodox. Pelagius soon gathered a large following across the Roman Empire, from Britain his homeland to Sicily, Greece and even North Africa, particularly amongst the wealthy and educated.
3. The appeal of Pelagianism
What makes Pelagianism so attractive?
It isn’t too hard to see what makes Pelagianism attractive. Firstly, like most heresies, it could appeal to Biblical sources. The commands of the law and of Jesus were surely commands that could be carried out and ought to be taken seriously.
Secondly, it was the remarkable lives of holiness that Christians had lived in the first years of the Christianity that had been perhaps the most remarkable testimony to the truth of their cause. Pelagianism was a call to return to this source of strength in the face of social chaos.
Thirdly, Pelagianism is a theology that treats us like individuals and like adults. It demands that we put aside childish excuses, and take responsibility each for our own actions. It requires of us discipline and hard work; it calls us to virtue. It turns us to do the good: perhaps, too, it sees most theological talk as foolish speculation and puts before us a concrete path of action and improvement. It tells us that ‘God helps those who help themselves’: whole tax systems have been built on this kind of principle! Being treated like an adult is rather appealing I find, especially when churches are so good at babying us.
Fourthly, it offers a vision of progress in the Christian life. It dangles a reward in front of us, as we freely choose to do the good and discipline our wills to pursue it and ask for God’s aid in it, Pelagianism declares we can leave behind foolish ways and become more and more Christlike, so that in fact, full imitation of Christ may be achieved by certain individuals.
Fifthly, it is positive about humankind in a way that honours the creator’s stamp on us. Human beings have a high destiny indeed serving so majestic a God and seeking to imitate him.
4. Augustine and Original Sin
The Pelagian movement however ran headlong into the most formidible defender of orthodoxy bar Athanasius the church has ever seen: Augustine of Hippo. Already Augustine had taught explicitly that human beings were born into a state sin derived from and inherited from the first couple. When a Pelagian disciple Celestius arrived North Africa, Augustine, who could not resist a controversy, gathered his ammunition.
His first rejoinder to the Pelagian teaching was to agree with this at least: the human being as he or she is made by the Creator is a glorious creature. Augustine paints a remarkable picture of the glories of Adam and Eve physically, morally, spiritually. Adam was in a state of justification, illumination and beatitude (JND KELLY). He was possessed of a true freedom- the freedom not to sin, being endowed with a good will and an inclination to do the right thing.
However, secondly, as the Bible tells it, Adam fell. The fault was entirely with him: there was no way in which God could be blamed for his lapse. His will, free to not sin, had the possibility of choosing in error. This first sin, however, was not merely Adam’s affair: because in that sin a great fall occurred than in any of the myriad sins that followed it. Romas 5:12 in particular is his text here: Romans 5:12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned-…
Third – original sin comes from our participation in Adam’s choice – and thus our co-responsibility for it. We have a tragic solidarity with our first parents in sin.
Fourth, the result of Adam’s sin is that human nature is terribly scarred and deformed. The image of God remains in us, but it is as a cracked mirror. But in every aspect, human beings are now enslaved to sin and destined for death. We are ignorant, lustful and dying. We have lost above all that the use of that free will that Adam enjoyed not to sin. We cannot now avoid sin: sin hangs around even our good, as a bad smell. He would say we still have a free will, but now only use it as a matter of fact to do wrong.
Fifth, if the effects of sin loom large in Augustine’s teaching, it is because the power of grace is overwhelms it (See Romans 5!) His pessimism about human nature gives him no confidence that Pelagius is anything but a deceiver, encouraging in men and women pride to think they can free themselves from the mire. Without God’s help we cannot, says Augustine, overcome the temptations of this life. And grace cannot be merely a matter of external aids, such as the teaching of Jesus how to live a godly life. Augustine was able to see that Pelagianism has a shrunken view of the cross as God’s free gift; and no view of the Holy Spirit as likewise the free gift of God himself to give us, not a kick in the rear, or a great example, but a whole new birth. If we were dead in our sins, then how moreso are we now alive to God in Jesus Christ by his Holy Spirit, and truly freed for doing the works of God.
Augustine and sex… hmm.
- the distortion of the Augustinian position into defeatism or cheap grace.
Finally called heresy at 431 at Ephesus.
5. Contemporary Pelagianism
Pelagianism is very much alive and well: and it takes both secular and religious forms. Partly it is alive and well because the need for moral teaching and guidance has never been more pressing. We have forms of deterministic thinking that need repudiating: that we are determined by our genes for example, or that society is to blame, or our parents. It may be tempting to want to preach Pelagianism in the teeth of that kind of moral laziness. But we need to remember that what people need more than anything is not better moral training: they need a powerful gospel of forgiveness and new life; a gospel of sheer grace, in other words.
Here three types of pelagianism :
1) self-help Pelagianism. I love the self-help section of the book shop… don’t you? I really do love to hear that I have amazing potential, if only I could release it. Unleash The Power Within is what I want to hear: take hold of your full humanity in every aspect. Be a remarkable human being. Unfortunately, there is also a market for Christianised self-help manuals, that are little better. They are targeted at our feelings of spiritual inadequacy, which we pretty much all have. They tell us: the truly uninhibited walk with Jesus could be yours if only you take action now! Within evangelicalism, the Holiness movement was and is especially guilty of this – enticing Christians away from grace and encouraging a deadly spiritual pride.
2) existentialist pelagianism: less religious is the pelagianism of existentialism, which says basically, the world is meaningless and chaotic: and the best we can do is take responsibility for it. Trying to explain things is actually to make things worse. So, Camus’ The Plague: it is the man who just does what is humane and stops trying to make sense of it all who is the hero.
Of course: in reality, it is the believers who actually make the difference, not the existentialists. Camus trades in a false dichotomy.
3) The Pelagianism of the moral gospel: The reduction of the Christian gospel to values, or a set of political rights to be protected… this was always the risk with defending Christian morality in the public square – you encourage a Pelagian view of Christianity, as if somehow you could have values without worship, and moral activity without spiritual transformation.
Showing posts with label heresy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heresy. Show all posts
Thursday, March 29, 2007
2. Arius
1. the necessity of heresy
‘Theology needs its Ariuses’ – today we look at Arius – often called the archheretic…. Reminded that in the history of Christian thinking about God, it has often been the heretics who have asked the right questions, who have forced the clarification of fluffy thinking. The heretical problem has not often been merely saying the wrong thing in the first instance; but saying too much, or of simplifying the truth for easier digestion such that the truth itself disappears. And we should not then at this stage forget exactly what is at stake: what Bishop Allison has called the ‘cruelty of heresy’ – that distorting the truth is not just a matter of not crossing the theological Ts and dotting the theological Is, but rather is something that has devastating spiritual and pastoral consequences for ordinary believers such as ourselves. It is no paltry matter to get this business right.
Remember: heretics don’t set out to be heretics… The heretics for the most part genuinely believed they were teaching orthodoxy and that they could establish the biblical grounds for their teaching.
Even calling them heretics is done with the benefit of hindsight. But that doesn’t diminish the seriousness of correct sight.
2. The mysteriousness of God
The mystery of God is a fundamental truth about the Christian God; like Judaism, Christianity is utterly and stubbornly monotheistic. God does NOT exist as part of the world he created, but rather has his existence apart from it. There is no-one equal to God; and he is beyond the human mind as he is beyond our eye. His invisibility is a kind of un-symbol of his unknowability. “No-one has ever seen God” says John. “O the mystery …’ says Paul. 1 Cor 2:1 – Paul calls his gospel the mystery of God; he is a steward of God’s mysteries in 1 Cor 4:1 God is eternal, the world is not. God is uncreated, the world and we are not. At the same time, Christianity claims that in Jesus Christ, God has decisively and completely and effectively revealed himself: No-one has ever seen God, yes, but God the one and only Son who is at the father’s side, he has made him known.’ ‘In him, the fullness of the deity dwelt bodily’.
But what did this mean? How could we make sense of this, or hold these two truths consistently? One Christian answer was modalism: God appears in three guises, wearing three hats.
In Alexandria, the city of the great library of the ancient world, this was not an intellectually respectable answer. In the pagan world – polytheism vs Platonism.
So Christian theologians had tried to find a way around the difficulty of having an eternal God become incarnate as a man and take on body and experience time. One way: creation is not eternal/and Christ is not eternal. Origen: creation is eternal and Christ is eternal. – ie, Christian confusion.
3. Enter Arius (c.256 – 336)
Around 319 AD Arius, and Alexandrian rector, published his teaching that Christ is neither truly God nor perfectly man. Rather he embodied a divine principle by means of being divinely inspired (as we see in some episodes in the gospel). This seemed a neat way out of the bind - combining the concerns of pure monotheism with a way of claiming still something divine for Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was then an intermediate deity between God and humanity.
The Bible talked of Father and Son – If God was Father in essence, literally a Father, then he must be superior and pre-exist the Son, because that’s what Fathers are by definition. Since there ‘was when he was not’, Arius though that this Son was in some way a creature – a superior creature to the rest, granted - but not eternal.
Arius – popular, gained a following. Though expelled from the local synod in 321, he continued as a missionary for his theology. The rest of the 4th century was a battle in the church over his teaching and teachings that resembled it. The crunch question: how was the order between the Father and the Son to be expressed? How was their relationship to be described? And what was at stake?
4. The attraction of Arianism
3 things made Arianism attractive:
a) it preserved the mystery and the distance and the glory and the transcendence of God. God was not then sullied by his interaction with the creation, he was kept utterly pure.
b) Arianism seemed to have the support of a number of biblical texts AND to able to synthesise them with the philosophy of the day. It was an intellectually respectable option for its time, and preached with sophistication.
c) it gave an account of Jesus Christ which made him highly exalted, but focused on the way in which he had earnt this bestowal of divine favour and glory.
5. Athanasius, Nicea and Orthodoxy
The rise of Arianism was the making of the career of one of the the great advocates for orthodoxy: Athanasius. His turbulent life (he was exiled 7 times) was evidence that this debate aroused great passions, and that it was not easy to resolve. In 325 at the council of Nicea, the term homoousios was adopted as the word that best expressed the way in which the Father and the Son ought to be thought of in their unity: they shared ‘the same substance’ though they were not the same persons, or hypostases. They were divine in their sharing of substance. The Son was not created then, there was not when he was not, indeed: but the Son was begotten by the Father. (see the nicene creed).
This was not the end of the matter at all: over the next few decades, people tried to sneak Arian ideas back in, suggesting that the Son had ‘like substance’ with the Father, for example.
Athanasius’s gift was that he could see exactly what was at stake: he recognised what was being lost in the Arian way of putting things. His passion was for human souls, and for their salvation, primarily. So this was not an abstract debate for him: he could see that salvation itself was what mattered.
Four things:
1) God is mystery, but God reveals himself, in Christ Jesus.
2) God reveals himself in Jesus to truly save. If you took the Arian seriously, what account could you give of the salvation of human people? (see quote)..Athanasius once said ‘God became man in order that we might become God’ – that is, that we might share in the life of God himself, God become one of us. (see 1 John 3:2 - ‘we shall be like him’). If Christ was not fully God, how could we ever be assured of God’s saving of us? How could we ever know God in a saving way?
3) God dies for us on the cross. Athanasius could also see that the cross itself does not work if you describe it Arian terms. If on the cross we have a lesser God then how we can not say that there we see nothing but divine child abuse, a torturing of the innocent Son by his commanding Father? Rather, if we understand the cross according to orthodox teaching, then we will understand that the victim was a willing participant in the salvation of the world in his own death. The Son submitted, but did so from a position of free equality with the Father.
4) The love of Christ is truly God’s love. This has huge pastoral ramifications of course, but also practical ones: because here in the submission of the Son to the Father without a loss of equality of being or dignity we see in essence the nature of Christian love. [See Allison quote] The love that Christ expressed on the cross was divine love: and it is the love we are called to echo in our relations too.
Athanasius was a curmudgeonly genius: perhaps we ought to say, that much as we ‘need’ our Ariuses, those who will ask the right questions, we also need our Athanasiuses: those who will remind us that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself; and that in Christ we truly and fully have the eternal God.
6. Arianism Today?
Is there an Arianism today? Certainly you will find actual Arians in the Jehovah’s Witness movement claiming that Christ is a second ranked deity.
But the more tempting and dangerous Arianism is the Arianism of our apparently orthodox Christianity.
Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one's own experience of the invisibilty and intangibility of God. We long indeed for God to be close and evident, to have him tangible in the way we would like to have him tangible; to be able to identify the hot breath of the Spirit on our faces, to feel, really feel the closeness of God in the instances in which we live.
The tangibility that God offers us - his entry into our world is rather disappointing in comparison to this. God the only begotten Son has made him known, walking among us for a short stretch some time ago now. However much the witnesses to him say they are passing on to us that which they have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands, it seems a long way removed from us. It is easy to stare at the flat page of the Bible, to sit through the dull sermon and the uninspired singing, to pray prayers into a remorseless ceiling, and fail to be convinced that God really is with us and active to save.
Arianism is a counsel of despair, then. It keeps the eternal God at an arms length, because he sure feels like he is at arms length. We even create dogmas that convince us that this is true: that because we feel it to be the case, it ought to be the case. Deity could not and would not live among us - it would be a travesty if it did so. We cannot be so arrogant as to claim to have true knowledge, of a personal kind, of the divinity himself. We can only gaze at this Christ, this bridge built - yes made - across the chasm between us and the true God, which we have to steel ourselves to somehow step onto, not ever assured than when we set out on the journey we have stepped into the heart of God himself.
It is despairing: but it is also, attractively, a way to remove the suggestion that God is uncomfortably near - that he is breathing down our necks. It is frightening to think that, if the true God is really among us in Jesus Christ, then the consequences of mistreating his manifestations will be extremely grave. It is frightening to think that the person next me in the pew, whom I have ignored these long years and even secretly despised, actually has life in God himself. It is worrisome to consider that that church that I helped to divide is not only the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is itself included in God.
In fact, the ethics of the New Testament is a rebuke to us in this. When ever Paul speaks of the Christian life and our acts of love for one another, he speaks of them as being the work of God in us. He calls us the temple of the Holy Spirit because in us God himself lives. We can live and move secure in the knowledge that our lives are hid with God in Christ - that in Christ we enter into the highest place itself. We can know as temporal beings whose bodies decay and melt away that we do have a more long term future, because we are bound with Christ into the eternal God himself. We can know that, though God himself is unknowable and transcendent and remote from us, he – and it really IS him - has come near to us in Jesus Christ.
‘Theology needs its Ariuses’ – today we look at Arius – often called the archheretic…. Reminded that in the history of Christian thinking about God, it has often been the heretics who have asked the right questions, who have forced the clarification of fluffy thinking. The heretical problem has not often been merely saying the wrong thing in the first instance; but saying too much, or of simplifying the truth for easier digestion such that the truth itself disappears. And we should not then at this stage forget exactly what is at stake: what Bishop Allison has called the ‘cruelty of heresy’ – that distorting the truth is not just a matter of not crossing the theological Ts and dotting the theological Is, but rather is something that has devastating spiritual and pastoral consequences for ordinary believers such as ourselves. It is no paltry matter to get this business right.
Remember: heretics don’t set out to be heretics… The heretics for the most part genuinely believed they were teaching orthodoxy and that they could establish the biblical grounds for their teaching.
Even calling them heretics is done with the benefit of hindsight. But that doesn’t diminish the seriousness of correct sight.
2. The mysteriousness of God
The mystery of God is a fundamental truth about the Christian God; like Judaism, Christianity is utterly and stubbornly monotheistic. God does NOT exist as part of the world he created, but rather has his existence apart from it. There is no-one equal to God; and he is beyond the human mind as he is beyond our eye. His invisibility is a kind of un-symbol of his unknowability. “No-one has ever seen God” says John. “O the mystery …’ says Paul. 1 Cor 2:1 – Paul calls his gospel the mystery of God; he is a steward of God’s mysteries in 1 Cor 4:1 God is eternal, the world is not. God is uncreated, the world and we are not. At the same time, Christianity claims that in Jesus Christ, God has decisively and completely and effectively revealed himself: No-one has ever seen God, yes, but God the one and only Son who is at the father’s side, he has made him known.’ ‘In him, the fullness of the deity dwelt bodily’.
But what did this mean? How could we make sense of this, or hold these two truths consistently? One Christian answer was modalism: God appears in three guises, wearing three hats.
In Alexandria, the city of the great library of the ancient world, this was not an intellectually respectable answer. In the pagan world – polytheism vs Platonism.
So Christian theologians had tried to find a way around the difficulty of having an eternal God become incarnate as a man and take on body and experience time. One way: creation is not eternal/and Christ is not eternal. Origen: creation is eternal and Christ is eternal. – ie, Christian confusion.
3. Enter Arius (c.256 – 336)
Around 319 AD Arius, and Alexandrian rector, published his teaching that Christ is neither truly God nor perfectly man. Rather he embodied a divine principle by means of being divinely inspired (as we see in some episodes in the gospel). This seemed a neat way out of the bind - combining the concerns of pure monotheism with a way of claiming still something divine for Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was then an intermediate deity between God and humanity.
The Bible talked of Father and Son – If God was Father in essence, literally a Father, then he must be superior and pre-exist the Son, because that’s what Fathers are by definition. Since there ‘was when he was not’, Arius though that this Son was in some way a creature – a superior creature to the rest, granted - but not eternal.
Arius – popular, gained a following. Though expelled from the local synod in 321, he continued as a missionary for his theology. The rest of the 4th century was a battle in the church over his teaching and teachings that resembled it. The crunch question: how was the order between the Father and the Son to be expressed? How was their relationship to be described? And what was at stake?
4. The attraction of Arianism
3 things made Arianism attractive:
a) it preserved the mystery and the distance and the glory and the transcendence of God. God was not then sullied by his interaction with the creation, he was kept utterly pure.
b) Arianism seemed to have the support of a number of biblical texts AND to able to synthesise them with the philosophy of the day. It was an intellectually respectable option for its time, and preached with sophistication.
c) it gave an account of Jesus Christ which made him highly exalted, but focused on the way in which he had earnt this bestowal of divine favour and glory.
5. Athanasius, Nicea and Orthodoxy
The rise of Arianism was the making of the career of one of the the great advocates for orthodoxy: Athanasius. His turbulent life (he was exiled 7 times) was evidence that this debate aroused great passions, and that it was not easy to resolve. In 325 at the council of Nicea, the term homoousios was adopted as the word that best expressed the way in which the Father and the Son ought to be thought of in their unity: they shared ‘the same substance’ though they were not the same persons, or hypostases. They were divine in their sharing of substance. The Son was not created then, there was not when he was not, indeed: but the Son was begotten by the Father. (see the nicene creed).
This was not the end of the matter at all: over the next few decades, people tried to sneak Arian ideas back in, suggesting that the Son had ‘like substance’ with the Father, for example.
Athanasius’s gift was that he could see exactly what was at stake: he recognised what was being lost in the Arian way of putting things. His passion was for human souls, and for their salvation, primarily. So this was not an abstract debate for him: he could see that salvation itself was what mattered.
Four things:
1) God is mystery, but God reveals himself, in Christ Jesus.
2) God reveals himself in Jesus to truly save. If you took the Arian seriously, what account could you give of the salvation of human people? (see quote)..Athanasius once said ‘God became man in order that we might become God’ – that is, that we might share in the life of God himself, God become one of us. (see 1 John 3:2 - ‘we shall be like him’). If Christ was not fully God, how could we ever be assured of God’s saving of us? How could we ever know God in a saving way?
3) God dies for us on the cross. Athanasius could also see that the cross itself does not work if you describe it Arian terms. If on the cross we have a lesser God then how we can not say that there we see nothing but divine child abuse, a torturing of the innocent Son by his commanding Father? Rather, if we understand the cross according to orthodox teaching, then we will understand that the victim was a willing participant in the salvation of the world in his own death. The Son submitted, but did so from a position of free equality with the Father.
4) The love of Christ is truly God’s love. This has huge pastoral ramifications of course, but also practical ones: because here in the submission of the Son to the Father without a loss of equality of being or dignity we see in essence the nature of Christian love. [See Allison quote] The love that Christ expressed on the cross was divine love: and it is the love we are called to echo in our relations too.
Athanasius was a curmudgeonly genius: perhaps we ought to say, that much as we ‘need’ our Ariuses, those who will ask the right questions, we also need our Athanasiuses: those who will remind us that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself; and that in Christ we truly and fully have the eternal God.
6. Arianism Today?
Is there an Arianism today? Certainly you will find actual Arians in the Jehovah’s Witness movement claiming that Christ is a second ranked deity.
But the more tempting and dangerous Arianism is the Arianism of our apparently orthodox Christianity.
Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one's own experience of the invisibilty and intangibility of God. We long indeed for God to be close and evident, to have him tangible in the way we would like to have him tangible; to be able to identify the hot breath of the Spirit on our faces, to feel, really feel the closeness of God in the instances in which we live.
The tangibility that God offers us - his entry into our world is rather disappointing in comparison to this. God the only begotten Son has made him known, walking among us for a short stretch some time ago now. However much the witnesses to him say they are passing on to us that which they have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands, it seems a long way removed from us. It is easy to stare at the flat page of the Bible, to sit through the dull sermon and the uninspired singing, to pray prayers into a remorseless ceiling, and fail to be convinced that God really is with us and active to save.
Arianism is a counsel of despair, then. It keeps the eternal God at an arms length, because he sure feels like he is at arms length. We even create dogmas that convince us that this is true: that because we feel it to be the case, it ought to be the case. Deity could not and would not live among us - it would be a travesty if it did so. We cannot be so arrogant as to claim to have true knowledge, of a personal kind, of the divinity himself. We can only gaze at this Christ, this bridge built - yes made - across the chasm between us and the true God, which we have to steel ourselves to somehow step onto, not ever assured than when we set out on the journey we have stepped into the heart of God himself.
It is despairing: but it is also, attractively, a way to remove the suggestion that God is uncomfortably near - that he is breathing down our necks. It is frightening to think that, if the true God is really among us in Jesus Christ, then the consequences of mistreating his manifestations will be extremely grave. It is frightening to think that the person next me in the pew, whom I have ignored these long years and even secretly despised, actually has life in God himself. It is worrisome to consider that that church that I helped to divide is not only the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is itself included in God.
In fact, the ethics of the New Testament is a rebuke to us in this. When ever Paul speaks of the Christian life and our acts of love for one another, he speaks of them as being the work of God in us. He calls us the temple of the Holy Spirit because in us God himself lives. We can live and move secure in the knowledge that our lives are hid with God in Christ - that in Christ we enter into the highest place itself. We can know as temporal beings whose bodies decay and melt away that we do have a more long term future, because we are bound with Christ into the eternal God himself. We can know that, though God himself is unknowable and transcendent and remote from us, he – and it really IS him - has come near to us in Jesus Christ.
Text/Notes of the Heretics series: 1. Marcion
There is some repetition of material already posted here, but I have posted the full text of the Necessary Heresies series given at St Ebbe's for the benefit of those who came (largely). I crave your indulgence!
1. Are heresies necessary?
I have rather provocatively entitled this series ‘Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us’. This seems at first to be rather counter-intuitive: surely the heretics of Christian history are to be avoided at all costs? Surely their teaching was precisely (and by definition) false teaching as opposed to the truth of the gospel? Surely the obvious thing is to steer well clear of them?
I would actually argue rather the opposite. The heretics of Christian history were not obviously wrong in their time: in almost every case their teaching was persuasive and powerful. All heretics made the claim that their teaching was Biblical and Christian. And, I want to suggest, every heretic gets at least something right – and often, they have an insight that is profoundly true. All the best untruths are of course half-truths.
And, further, it is because heresies have arisen in the history of the church that the church has been prompted again and again to decide what it thinks on certain essential questions: what books are and are not in the Bible? Is Jesus fully God and fully man, and if so, how is this possible? Is there a new revelation of God? Are human beings basically good or basically sinful? Without the heretics, a clear Christian answer to these questions – what we call ‘orthodoxy’ - might not have been given.
Heresy is by its nature attractive. This may run counter to our modern image of the heretic as the lone voice against the herd mentality of the group, the outsider crushed by the power that can’t face the truth. But that is manifestly not the case in Christian history: heretics posed a threat precisely because they did attract followers. What’s more, heretics posed a threat because they offer plausible explanations of the Christian faith; they bring clear answers to difficult questions, and they offer to smooth over the bumps in Christian experience. Heresy is not simply a matter of wrong teaching as opposed to right; it is frequently a matter of presenting a short cut, a cheap or easy explanation, or a philosophically or morally more acceptable answer to some of the most vexing issues for Christian believers. And so, for its part, orthodoxy, or ‘right-teaching’, frequently persues a more difficult path. Think of the Trinity: well, actually, that itself is the problem. How does one think of the Trinity? Well, an easy way to explain it would be to say ‘there is one God who wears three masks’. Or, ‘there are three gods who act together by agreement’. Or, ‘there are three parts to the one god’. These are all intelligible, but they are all heresies. The great councils of the early church decided instead that God was to be described as having one being in three persons. We search in vain for a nice analogy to make this intelligible, or a formula to explain it. Yet this accords with the Biblical truth most faithfully and with the experience of the churches as they received and lived out the gospel. This was orthodoxy.
The purpose of these three lectures is to listen hard to the heretics. I am not interested in them for their own sakes, but because each of them identifies something which is real challenge for us as modern-day believers, and for which we may be tempted – as indeed they were – to take an easy way out.
2. The monstrosity of God
The Old Testament – if you haven’t noticed – has some very difficult passages for a modern person to read. For example:
Is 45:7 ‘I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who do all these things,’
Or:
1 Samuel 15:2-3 2 Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'"
What kind of a God is this? Is it possible that the God of Jesus Christ could speak of himself as the author and engineer of evil? Do we read here of the deity authorizing – even commanding – genocide, whose horrors we know only too well? Is he somehow murderous? Does he have a dark heart, a demonic side?
We could go further: can the creator of such a world in which we live – a world in which good and evil wrestle with one another, a world of tsunamis and famines and wars – could he really be a good God? Could he really have his creation’s best interests heart to be responsible for such chaos and impurity? Is not the mess we see somehow a reflection on the creator’s character? And this God, what’s more, declares that he will judge the world according to a law that his given that nobody is able to keep!
Consider how this contrasts with the gospel of love and faith and freedom preached by Jesus and Paul – the words of healing and forgiveness. Can we really accept these as being from the same God?
3. Enter Marcion
Marcion was a wealthy Christian ship-owner and a member of a Roman church in the mid-second century. As a respected member of the church, when he began to expound his teachings he soon won a following. Even though he was excommunicated in 144 AD, and his large financial contributions returned, he went around the empire propagating his version of Christianity and apparently succeeded in developing a network of churches.
He only wrote a single work, the Antithesis, which has now been lost. He was often labelled a Gnostic, and there are considerable similarities with Gnostic teaching in his system. He drove a wedge between the supreme God of goodness and the inferior God of justice – naturally Jesus reveals and represents the supreme God. Jesus' emphasis on love and forgiveness was incompatible with the teaching of Moses on retributive justice. The OT is full of contradictions and cannot be reconciled to the NT writings.
Marcion, therefore, rejected the whole of the OT. But he went even further. The Twelve had misunderstood Jesus as the Messiah of the OT God. This corruption of the true gospel Marcion sourced to Galatians. Only Paul understood the real significance of Jesus; and perhaps because of his link to Paul, only Luke's gospel was held to be trustworthy.
But even within this pruned canon, there needed to be some editing. Marcion refused to accept passages which he regarded as Jewish additions. References to the OT were expunged. Galatians 3:16-4:6 was removed because of the mention of Abraham. It was radical surgery indeed.
Marcion’s challenge was essentially two pronged:
a) on the one hand it was a challenge as to the source of our knowledge about God and authorised teaching, the Bible. While there had been some attempts to collect a list of the agreed and approved books of the Christian scriptures prior to Marcion’s appearance, Marcion was now offering an alternative and established list of authorised writings, held together in his mind by a common theme. Marcion and his followers could, they claimed, point to a common body of teaching in written form. Here, he said, was an end to disagreement about the extent of the new scriptures. Here was an end to Christian embarassment about the sheer Jewishness of the OT with its irascible and cantankerous God.
b) But, on the other hand, Marcion’s challenge emanated from a particular vision about the nature of the Christian faith itself. What he had picked up on was the radical nature of Paul’s challenge to our natural religious assumptions; the sheer newness that is offered in a faith of the resurrection and the Spirit; the attack on dead legalism. This was the genius of Christianity, Marcion had decided, and he went about cutting out pieces of Scripture that didn’t fit, to such an extent that he was left with not much.
4. Marcion was right…
Things is: Marcion had a point. He had sensed that in Christ something radically NEW had come, something that couldn’t have been foreseen. Here was indeed a message of the triumph of love over the law, of the triumph of grace over condemnation. Here indeed was a way in which all peoples could participate in a divine life regardless of their fleshly condition – whether as Jew or Gentile. Here was the grounds for a new community that would be marked as no community had before it by its love one for another without need for rule or judge. Here in the gospel of Jesus that Paul preached was indeed a message of transformation and liberation, a heavenly vision of a life of faith and love instead of an earthly yoke of dreary law.
Indeed, in the 19th Century, historian Adolf von Harnack considered Marcion about the greatest church theologian between Paul and Martin Luther:
"…That in the century of the great mixture of religion the greatest apparent paradox was actually realized: namely, a Paulinism with two Gods and without the Old Testament; and that this form of Christianity first resulted in a church which was based not only on intelligible words, but on a definite conception of the essence of Christianity as a religion, seems to be the greatest riddle which the earliest history of Christianity presents. But it only seems so. The Greek, whose mind was filled with certain fundamental features of the Pauline Gospel (law and grace), who was therefore convinced that in all respects the truth was there, and who on that account took pains to comprehend the real sense of Paul's statements, could hardly reach any other results than those of Marcion. The history of Pauline theology in the Church, a history first of silence, then of artificial interpretation, speaks loudly enough. And had not Paul really separated Christianity as religion from Judaism and the Old Testament? Must it not have seemed an inconceivable inconsistency, if he had clung to the special national relation of Christianity to the Jewish people, and if he had taught a view of history in which for paedagogic reasons indeed, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort had appeared as one so entirely different?"
That is the appeal of Marcion: he tidied it all up! Can we really imagine that the God of law is also the God of grace? Can we really imagine that the God of the Jews is ALSO the God of the Gentiles?
5. Responses
But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! The church of old determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.
F.F. Bruce points out that:
...the chief importance of Marcion in the second century lies in the reaction which he provoked among the leaders of the Apostolic Churches. Just as Marcion’s canon stimulated the more precise defining of the NT canon by the Catholic Church, not to supersede but to supplement the canon of the OT, so, more generally, Marcion’s teaching led the Catholic Church to define its faith more carefully, in terms calculated to exclude a Marcionite interpretation.
The church had to respond to both of Marcion’s challenges, then: to clarify which books would be in its canon or list of the Christian scriptures and to clarify what their relationship was the OT; and also to define its faith more carefully. The Churches had to recognize the rootedness of their faith in the Jewish testament, to recognize that their Lord was the Jewish messiah: in fact, he was only intelligible against his Jewish background.
There was the obvious textual issue against Marcion, of course: it was clear that he had decided beforehand what was inconsistent with his vision of say Paul’s teaching and had no textual grounds for his editing other than his personal whim. Further, the apostles had from the earliest times practiced together the reading of the OT as God’s holy word. Certainly too it was the case that the writers of the NT and Jesus himself made explicit appeal to the OT. For Christians then, it would just not be an option, no matter how new and radical their gospel was, to consider the OT obsolete.
The question of whether the Church's canon proceeds or follows Marcion's is not yet settled among scholars. The Fathers assert that he was selecting and rejecting books from a pre-existing church list. Von Harnack claimed that it was the other way around – the church responded to Marcion's canon with its own, adding Petrine or Johannine elements to counterbalance the Pauline. Perhaps the safest historical judgement is that Marcion's canon accelerated the process of fixing the Church's canon. It was a process already begun; but Marcion's criticisms forced orthodox Christians to examine why and what they already believed.
Metzger: “Although the fringes of the emerging canon remained unsettled for generations, a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament was attained among the very diverse and scattered congregations of believers not only throughout the Mediterranean world but also over an area extending from Britain to Mesopotamia."
The Christian Bible then is directly a result of Christian theology: the decision to include the OT was in part necessitated by who the Christian gospel said that God himself was. The Bible does not merely generate Christian theology; it reflects it. Well: that's not quite right, or at least, not quite the full story. But certainly, the rootedness of the gospel in salvation-history is very early on discovered to be non-negotiable; and so: yes, we read the OT as Christian scripture.
Theologians like Irenaeus now appealed explicitly to the dramatic narrative of the whole Bible to show how Jesus fit in to the promises and patterns given in the OT as the second Adam. They realized that Jesus was not revealing a new God, but the same creator and law-giving God. Whatever Christian theology did from that point on, it had to do with the creator and law-giver as identical with the God revealed in Jesus. One significant implication of this realization was the affirmation of the created world, and the human body: if the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, was the creator of the world, then the creation itself must not in essence be bad. Whatever chaos and corruption we observe must be on some other account.
So, the church chose the harder way: it decided that even if having the whole bible meant coping with and addressing some apparent tensions, it would have to do this if it were to be a faithful and obedient church and true to its nature – true to its Lord. Though it had to cope with some tricky parts of scripture, it had far more to lose by going with Marcion than it stood to gain.
1. Are heresies necessary?
I have rather provocatively entitled this series ‘Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us’. This seems at first to be rather counter-intuitive: surely the heretics of Christian history are to be avoided at all costs? Surely their teaching was precisely (and by definition) false teaching as opposed to the truth of the gospel? Surely the obvious thing is to steer well clear of them?
I would actually argue rather the opposite. The heretics of Christian history were not obviously wrong in their time: in almost every case their teaching was persuasive and powerful. All heretics made the claim that their teaching was Biblical and Christian. And, I want to suggest, every heretic gets at least something right – and often, they have an insight that is profoundly true. All the best untruths are of course half-truths.
And, further, it is because heresies have arisen in the history of the church that the church has been prompted again and again to decide what it thinks on certain essential questions: what books are and are not in the Bible? Is Jesus fully God and fully man, and if so, how is this possible? Is there a new revelation of God? Are human beings basically good or basically sinful? Without the heretics, a clear Christian answer to these questions – what we call ‘orthodoxy’ - might not have been given.
Heresy is by its nature attractive. This may run counter to our modern image of the heretic as the lone voice against the herd mentality of the group, the outsider crushed by the power that can’t face the truth. But that is manifestly not the case in Christian history: heretics posed a threat precisely because they did attract followers. What’s more, heretics posed a threat because they offer plausible explanations of the Christian faith; they bring clear answers to difficult questions, and they offer to smooth over the bumps in Christian experience. Heresy is not simply a matter of wrong teaching as opposed to right; it is frequently a matter of presenting a short cut, a cheap or easy explanation, or a philosophically or morally more acceptable answer to some of the most vexing issues for Christian believers. And so, for its part, orthodoxy, or ‘right-teaching’, frequently persues a more difficult path. Think of the Trinity: well, actually, that itself is the problem. How does one think of the Trinity? Well, an easy way to explain it would be to say ‘there is one God who wears three masks’. Or, ‘there are three gods who act together by agreement’. Or, ‘there are three parts to the one god’. These are all intelligible, but they are all heresies. The great councils of the early church decided instead that God was to be described as having one being in three persons. We search in vain for a nice analogy to make this intelligible, or a formula to explain it. Yet this accords with the Biblical truth most faithfully and with the experience of the churches as they received and lived out the gospel. This was orthodoxy.
The purpose of these three lectures is to listen hard to the heretics. I am not interested in them for their own sakes, but because each of them identifies something which is real challenge for us as modern-day believers, and for which we may be tempted – as indeed they were – to take an easy way out.
2. The monstrosity of God
The Old Testament – if you haven’t noticed – has some very difficult passages for a modern person to read. For example:
Is 45:7 ‘I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who do all these things,’
Or:
1 Samuel 15:2-3 2 Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'"
What kind of a God is this? Is it possible that the God of Jesus Christ could speak of himself as the author and engineer of evil? Do we read here of the deity authorizing – even commanding – genocide, whose horrors we know only too well? Is he somehow murderous? Does he have a dark heart, a demonic side?
We could go further: can the creator of such a world in which we live – a world in which good and evil wrestle with one another, a world of tsunamis and famines and wars – could he really be a good God? Could he really have his creation’s best interests heart to be responsible for such chaos and impurity? Is not the mess we see somehow a reflection on the creator’s character? And this God, what’s more, declares that he will judge the world according to a law that his given that nobody is able to keep!
Consider how this contrasts with the gospel of love and faith and freedom preached by Jesus and Paul – the words of healing and forgiveness. Can we really accept these as being from the same God?
3. Enter Marcion
Marcion was a wealthy Christian ship-owner and a member of a Roman church in the mid-second century. As a respected member of the church, when he began to expound his teachings he soon won a following. Even though he was excommunicated in 144 AD, and his large financial contributions returned, he went around the empire propagating his version of Christianity and apparently succeeded in developing a network of churches.
He only wrote a single work, the Antithesis, which has now been lost. He was often labelled a Gnostic, and there are considerable similarities with Gnostic teaching in his system. He drove a wedge between the supreme God of goodness and the inferior God of justice – naturally Jesus reveals and represents the supreme God. Jesus' emphasis on love and forgiveness was incompatible with the teaching of Moses on retributive justice. The OT is full of contradictions and cannot be reconciled to the NT writings.
Marcion, therefore, rejected the whole of the OT. But he went even further. The Twelve had misunderstood Jesus as the Messiah of the OT God. This corruption of the true gospel Marcion sourced to Galatians. Only Paul understood the real significance of Jesus; and perhaps because of his link to Paul, only Luke's gospel was held to be trustworthy.
But even within this pruned canon, there needed to be some editing. Marcion refused to accept passages which he regarded as Jewish additions. References to the OT were expunged. Galatians 3:16-4:6 was removed because of the mention of Abraham. It was radical surgery indeed.
Marcion’s challenge was essentially two pronged:
a) on the one hand it was a challenge as to the source of our knowledge about God and authorised teaching, the Bible. While there had been some attempts to collect a list of the agreed and approved books of the Christian scriptures prior to Marcion’s appearance, Marcion was now offering an alternative and established list of authorised writings, held together in his mind by a common theme. Marcion and his followers could, they claimed, point to a common body of teaching in written form. Here, he said, was an end to disagreement about the extent of the new scriptures. Here was an end to Christian embarassment about the sheer Jewishness of the OT with its irascible and cantankerous God.
b) But, on the other hand, Marcion’s challenge emanated from a particular vision about the nature of the Christian faith itself. What he had picked up on was the radical nature of Paul’s challenge to our natural religious assumptions; the sheer newness that is offered in a faith of the resurrection and the Spirit; the attack on dead legalism. This was the genius of Christianity, Marcion had decided, and he went about cutting out pieces of Scripture that didn’t fit, to such an extent that he was left with not much.
4. Marcion was right…
Things is: Marcion had a point. He had sensed that in Christ something radically NEW had come, something that couldn’t have been foreseen. Here was indeed a message of the triumph of love over the law, of the triumph of grace over condemnation. Here indeed was a way in which all peoples could participate in a divine life regardless of their fleshly condition – whether as Jew or Gentile. Here was the grounds for a new community that would be marked as no community had before it by its love one for another without need for rule or judge. Here in the gospel of Jesus that Paul preached was indeed a message of transformation and liberation, a heavenly vision of a life of faith and love instead of an earthly yoke of dreary law.
Indeed, in the 19th Century, historian Adolf von Harnack considered Marcion about the greatest church theologian between Paul and Martin Luther:
"…That in the century of the great mixture of religion the greatest apparent paradox was actually realized: namely, a Paulinism with two Gods and without the Old Testament; and that this form of Christianity first resulted in a church which was based not only on intelligible words, but on a definite conception of the essence of Christianity as a religion, seems to be the greatest riddle which the earliest history of Christianity presents. But it only seems so. The Greek, whose mind was filled with certain fundamental features of the Pauline Gospel (law and grace), who was therefore convinced that in all respects the truth was there, and who on that account took pains to comprehend the real sense of Paul's statements, could hardly reach any other results than those of Marcion. The history of Pauline theology in the Church, a history first of silence, then of artificial interpretation, speaks loudly enough. And had not Paul really separated Christianity as religion from Judaism and the Old Testament? Must it not have seemed an inconceivable inconsistency, if he had clung to the special national relation of Christianity to the Jewish people, and if he had taught a view of history in which for paedagogic reasons indeed, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort had appeared as one so entirely different?"
That is the appeal of Marcion: he tidied it all up! Can we really imagine that the God of law is also the God of grace? Can we really imagine that the God of the Jews is ALSO the God of the Gentiles?
5. Responses
But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! The church of old determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.
F.F. Bruce points out that:
...the chief importance of Marcion in the second century lies in the reaction which he provoked among the leaders of the Apostolic Churches. Just as Marcion’s canon stimulated the more precise defining of the NT canon by the Catholic Church, not to supersede but to supplement the canon of the OT, so, more generally, Marcion’s teaching led the Catholic Church to define its faith more carefully, in terms calculated to exclude a Marcionite interpretation.
The church had to respond to both of Marcion’s challenges, then: to clarify which books would be in its canon or list of the Christian scriptures and to clarify what their relationship was the OT; and also to define its faith more carefully. The Churches had to recognize the rootedness of their faith in the Jewish testament, to recognize that their Lord was the Jewish messiah: in fact, he was only intelligible against his Jewish background.
There was the obvious textual issue against Marcion, of course: it was clear that he had decided beforehand what was inconsistent with his vision of say Paul’s teaching and had no textual grounds for his editing other than his personal whim. Further, the apostles had from the earliest times practiced together the reading of the OT as God’s holy word. Certainly too it was the case that the writers of the NT and Jesus himself made explicit appeal to the OT. For Christians then, it would just not be an option, no matter how new and radical their gospel was, to consider the OT obsolete.
The question of whether the Church's canon proceeds or follows Marcion's is not yet settled among scholars. The Fathers assert that he was selecting and rejecting books from a pre-existing church list. Von Harnack claimed that it was the other way around – the church responded to Marcion's canon with its own, adding Petrine or Johannine elements to counterbalance the Pauline. Perhaps the safest historical judgement is that Marcion's canon accelerated the process of fixing the Church's canon. It was a process already begun; but Marcion's criticisms forced orthodox Christians to examine why and what they already believed.
Metzger: “Although the fringes of the emerging canon remained unsettled for generations, a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament was attained among the very diverse and scattered congregations of believers not only throughout the Mediterranean world but also over an area extending from Britain to Mesopotamia."
The Christian Bible then is directly a result of Christian theology: the decision to include the OT was in part necessitated by who the Christian gospel said that God himself was. The Bible does not merely generate Christian theology; it reflects it. Well: that's not quite right, or at least, not quite the full story. But certainly, the rootedness of the gospel in salvation-history is very early on discovered to be non-negotiable; and so: yes, we read the OT as Christian scripture.
Theologians like Irenaeus now appealed explicitly to the dramatic narrative of the whole Bible to show how Jesus fit in to the promises and patterns given in the OT as the second Adam. They realized that Jesus was not revealing a new God, but the same creator and law-giving God. Whatever Christian theology did from that point on, it had to do with the creator and law-giver as identical with the God revealed in Jesus. One significant implication of this realization was the affirmation of the created world, and the human body: if the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, was the creator of the world, then the creation itself must not in essence be bad. Whatever chaos and corruption we observe must be on some other account.
So, the church chose the harder way: it decided that even if having the whole bible meant coping with and addressing some apparent tensions, it would have to do this if it were to be a faithful and obedient church and true to its nature – true to its Lord. Though it had to cope with some tricky parts of scripture, it had far more to lose by going with Marcion than it stood to gain.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Paul Morgan, author of "The Pelagius Book"
Author Paul Morgan produced a novel in 2005 entitled "The Pelagius Book" which is an imaginary reconstruction of the observations of Pelagius' disciple Celestius. In an interview, Morgan gave a very interesting account of why Pelagius had attracted him - and Augustine revolted him:
The Augustinian line was that Christianity and the way the church would develop - and we should remember that the Christian church, which would inherit the mantle of Rome in providing a framework for how people saw the world, saw society, saw themselves socially and psychologically, for the Augustinians over large parts of the Empire, this was dominated by a really quite savage fatalism. They use the word 'grace' and really you know, we can't control our own destinies ultimately, and who knows, it's all a mystery and only God can tell. And really that's a huge absolution of responsibility, personal responsibility. There was a really quite fundamentalist attitude towards the Bible. They were extremely strong on original sin and the shamefulness of the body, but also very distrustful of the intellect as well. So I mean really, you had it pretty tough with the Augustinians, because they were against the body, but they were against the mind as well. In fact, there's some passage by Augustine where he says, 'We should be wary of drawing empirical conclusions from the evidence of our senses because they're rooted in the sinful bodily organs of sense, which can't be trusted.' I mean, you can't win with this guy...
Pelagius was almost certainly trained as a lawyer and you can see this in his words. One of the very fascinating fragments of his writings, or writing about him that does survive is fascinatingly a part of his trial for heresy, where he actually takes apart the argument for original sin in just a few sentences, on almost purely logical grounds. He just says, 'Look, God created us and gave us free will. Why would he give us free will and the capacity to be good and then at the same time not give us the ability to do it?' He almost has an 18th century view of the beauty of the logic and rationality of the world, and he sees us in the same way that God's giving free will to humans is part of this. So why would he snatch it away a few seconds after giving it to us? He isn't saying that we can't do evil, do profound evil, but it's our choice that if you want to do something terribly bad...you do it because you take it upon yourself, you don't do it because of some kind of strain of genetic sin that was passed down to you.
Morgan is asking the right questions, though of course he sees things through a very contemporary lens. He criticises Augustinianism for its fatalism, and for its failure to believe in the goodness of the creation. He condemns it for its immorality - for resigning itself to human evil and depending on a divine solution from outside rather than a human one from the inside. It IS a rejoinder to a kind of contemporary scientific fatalism of the genes - that strain of thought which reduces all human choices to genetics (or, in sociology, to environmental factors).
Problem is, of course, he doesn't really understand Augustine (...so he has no chance with Calvin or Edwards!)
The Augustinian line was that Christianity and the way the church would develop - and we should remember that the Christian church, which would inherit the mantle of Rome in providing a framework for how people saw the world, saw society, saw themselves socially and psychologically, for the Augustinians over large parts of the Empire, this was dominated by a really quite savage fatalism. They use the word 'grace' and really you know, we can't control our own destinies ultimately, and who knows, it's all a mystery and only God can tell. And really that's a huge absolution of responsibility, personal responsibility. There was a really quite fundamentalist attitude towards the Bible. They were extremely strong on original sin and the shamefulness of the body, but also very distrustful of the intellect as well. So I mean really, you had it pretty tough with the Augustinians, because they were against the body, but they were against the mind as well. In fact, there's some passage by Augustine where he says, 'We should be wary of drawing empirical conclusions from the evidence of our senses because they're rooted in the sinful bodily organs of sense, which can't be trusted.' I mean, you can't win with this guy...
Pelagius was almost certainly trained as a lawyer and you can see this in his words. One of the very fascinating fragments of his writings, or writing about him that does survive is fascinatingly a part of his trial for heresy, where he actually takes apart the argument for original sin in just a few sentences, on almost purely logical grounds. He just says, 'Look, God created us and gave us free will. Why would he give us free will and the capacity to be good and then at the same time not give us the ability to do it?' He almost has an 18th century view of the beauty of the logic and rationality of the world, and he sees us in the same way that God's giving free will to humans is part of this. So why would he snatch it away a few seconds after giving it to us? He isn't saying that we can't do evil, do profound evil, but it's our choice that if you want to do something terribly bad...you do it because you take it upon yourself, you don't do it because of some kind of strain of genetic sin that was passed down to you.
Morgan is asking the right questions, though of course he sees things through a very contemporary lens. He criticises Augustinianism for its fatalism, and for its failure to believe in the goodness of the creation. He condemns it for its immorality - for resigning itself to human evil and depending on a divine solution from outside rather than a human one from the inside. It IS a rejoinder to a kind of contemporary scientific fatalism of the genes - that strain of thought which reduces all human choices to genetics (or, in sociology, to environmental factors).
Problem is, of course, he doesn't really understand Augustine (...so he has no chance with Calvin or Edwards!)
Monday, March 26, 2007
Necessary Heresy 3: Pelagius, or, are we really that bad?
Pelagius was a man who took morality - and the moral responsibility of human beings - seriously. I have no doubt that he would have been witness to tremendous and brutal evils in his time, living as he did around the sack of Rome. His teaching was not that human beings are naturally good - that doctrine would have had no purchase at all amongst those who had seen limbs hacked off and heard the screams of the rape victims. Rather, he held that man and woman were free to choose the right or the wrong. There was no escape behind the veil of determinism, or pleading helplessness as if that was some resassurance. Each of us could and should and would be held fully accountable for our actions. We ought to hear the full impact of God's address to his people 'Be holy, as I am holy'. He would not have said it if was not a moral possibility. Moral pessimissim is insulting to the creator of human beings, who created not puppets or beasts, but persons. Life and death is set before human beings and we are bid by our maker to choose life, true (Dt 30:19)?
For Pelagius, there are three features in action - posse, velle and esse (power, will, realisation). Posse comes only from God, but the other two belong to us. When we choose to do the right, in order words, we can count on power from God to aid us. Not that Pelagius felt he was negating the sovereignty of God by such a teaching; far from it - man's free will occurs only within the sphere of God's permission and generosity, and ought to be used to the ends that God commands.
JND Kelly offers two futher points that Pelagius taught. First, the human will has no bias in favour of evil, not having inherited the spoiled will of Adam. After all, how can we be blamed for another's sin? That makes no moral sense. Adam set in train a custom or a habit of sin, but not a physical geneaology of sin.
Secondly, Pelagius also denies that man has a bias towards the good. Grace is provided as a grace of knowledge: through the law and the example of Christ, God provides us with all we need to know about what to do.
So, it is possible to say with the Rich Young Ruler, 'all these I have kept since childhood'. In fact, the Bible contains many examples of righteous lives. Now, this is not a trivial business for Pelagius: the merit on offer only comes through strenuous effort and application. He is well aware of the high destiny to which human beings have been called and to which they ought to aspire. No doubt he was also aware of Christians who saw grace as either a short-cut to righteousness or who felt that predestination as Augustine and others taught it was a counsel of despair. Here rather was a call to quit moaning and get on with living righteously. Here was a call to be as magnificent as human life can be. It was an attractive teaching then, and remains so...
For Pelagius, there are three features in action - posse, velle and esse (power, will, realisation). Posse comes only from God, but the other two belong to us. When we choose to do the right, in order words, we can count on power from God to aid us. Not that Pelagius felt he was negating the sovereignty of God by such a teaching; far from it - man's free will occurs only within the sphere of God's permission and generosity, and ought to be used to the ends that God commands.
JND Kelly offers two futher points that Pelagius taught. First, the human will has no bias in favour of evil, not having inherited the spoiled will of Adam. After all, how can we be blamed for another's sin? That makes no moral sense. Adam set in train a custom or a habit of sin, but not a physical geneaology of sin.
Secondly, Pelagius also denies that man has a bias towards the good. Grace is provided as a grace of knowledge: through the law and the example of Christ, God provides us with all we need to know about what to do.
So, it is possible to say with the Rich Young Ruler, 'all these I have kept since childhood'. In fact, the Bible contains many examples of righteous lives. Now, this is not a trivial business for Pelagius: the merit on offer only comes through strenuous effort and application. He is well aware of the high destiny to which human beings have been called and to which they ought to aspire. No doubt he was also aware of Christians who saw grace as either a short-cut to righteousness or who felt that predestination as Augustine and others taught it was a counsel of despair. Here rather was a call to quit moaning and get on with living righteously. Here was a call to be as magnificent as human life can be. It was an attractive teaching then, and remains so...
Thursday, March 22, 2007
The attractions of Arianism
What made Arianism so attractive, and might make it so in its modern versions?
Arianism can be exegetically convincing; and certainly, it was consistent to the form of rationality that pervaded in its own time.
But more than this: Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one's own experience of the invisibilty and intangibility of God. We long indeed for God to be close and evident, to have him tangible in the way we would like to have him tangible; to be able to identify the hot breath of the Spirit on our faces, to feel, really feel the closeness of God in the instances in which we live.
The tangibility that God offers us - his entry into our world is rather disappointing in comparison to this. God the only begotten Son has made him known, walking among us for a short stretch some time ago now. However much the witnesses to him say they are passing on to us that which they have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands, it seems a long way removed from us. It is easy to stare at the flat page of the Bible, to sit through the dull sermon and the uninspired singing, to pray prayers into a remorseless ceiling, and fail to be convinced that God really is with us and active to save.
Arianism is a counsel of despair, then. It keeps the eternal God at an arms length, because he sure feels like he is at arms length. We even create dogmas that convince us that this is true: that because we feel it to be the case, it ought to be the case. Deity could not and would not live among us - it would be a travesty if it did so. We cannot be so arrogant as to claim to have true knowledge, of a personal kind, of the divinity himself. We can only gaze at this Christ, this bridge built - yes made - across the chasm between us and the true God, which we have to steel ourselves to somehow step onto, not ever assured than when we set out on the journey we have stepped into the heart of God himself.
It is despairing: but it is also, attractively, a way to remove the suggestion that God is uncomfortably near - that he is breathing down our necks. It is frightening to think that, if the true God is really among us in Jesus Christ, then the consequences of mistreating his manifestations will be extremely grave. It is frightening to think that the person next me in the pew, whom I have ignored these long years and even secretly despised, actually has life in God himself. It is worrisome to consider that that church that I helped to divide is not only the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is itself included in God.
[thanks to Kosta Milkov!]
Arianism can be exegetically convincing; and certainly, it was consistent to the form of rationality that pervaded in its own time.
But more than this: Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one's own experience of the invisibilty and intangibility of God. We long indeed for God to be close and evident, to have him tangible in the way we would like to have him tangible; to be able to identify the hot breath of the Spirit on our faces, to feel, really feel the closeness of God in the instances in which we live.
The tangibility that God offers us - his entry into our world is rather disappointing in comparison to this. God the only begotten Son has made him known, walking among us for a short stretch some time ago now. However much the witnesses to him say they are passing on to us that which they have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands, it seems a long way removed from us. It is easy to stare at the flat page of the Bible, to sit through the dull sermon and the uninspired singing, to pray prayers into a remorseless ceiling, and fail to be convinced that God really is with us and active to save.
Arianism is a counsel of despair, then. It keeps the eternal God at an arms length, because he sure feels like he is at arms length. We even create dogmas that convince us that this is true: that because we feel it to be the case, it ought to be the case. Deity could not and would not live among us - it would be a travesty if it did so. We cannot be so arrogant as to claim to have true knowledge, of a personal kind, of the divinity himself. We can only gaze at this Christ, this bridge built - yes made - across the chasm between us and the true God, which we have to steel ourselves to somehow step onto, not ever assured than when we set out on the journey we have stepped into the heart of God himself.
It is despairing: but it is also, attractively, a way to remove the suggestion that God is uncomfortably near - that he is breathing down our necks. It is frightening to think that, if the true God is really among us in Jesus Christ, then the consequences of mistreating his manifestations will be extremely grave. It is frightening to think that the person next me in the pew, whom I have ignored these long years and even secretly despised, actually has life in God himself. It is worrisome to consider that that church that I helped to divide is not only the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is itself included in God.
[thanks to Kosta Milkov!]
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Rowan Williams on Arius
I have heard Arius labelled a 'biblicist' in the past, and his case as evidence that exegesis will never decide anything. I have also heard the opposite: that here was a rationalist par excellence, determined to squash biblical material into his Middle Platonist framework.
Rowan Williams writes:
One thing which should be noted immediately is that none of this exegetical material, as described or implicitly characterized by Arius' enemies, really supports the idea that Arius was a 'literalist'. It is not literalism to take the Psalms as spoken in persona Christi or to identify the 'Wisdom' of the OT with Christ...Athanasius' objection to Arius' exegesis is not that it is negligent of a 'spiritual sense', that it is 'Judaizing' in character, but that it is arbitrary...
As Williams goes on to explain, Arius was aiming to be both biblically based AND rationally consistent. That is why he and Athanasius went toe-to-toe on exegetical matters; and in the end, perhaps it was a hermeneutical method that seperated them...
Rowan Williams writes:
One thing which should be noted immediately is that none of this exegetical material, as described or implicitly characterized by Arius' enemies, really supports the idea that Arius was a 'literalist'. It is not literalism to take the Psalms as spoken in persona Christi or to identify the 'Wisdom' of the OT with Christ...Athanasius' objection to Arius' exegesis is not that it is negligent of a 'spiritual sense', that it is 'Judaizing' in character, but that it is arbitrary...
As Williams goes on to explain, Arius was aiming to be both biblically based AND rationally consistent. That is why he and Athanasius went toe-to-toe on exegetical matters; and in the end, perhaps it was a hermeneutical method that seperated them...
Monday, March 19, 2007
Necessary Heresy 2: Arius, or, do we really know God?
Arius is perhaps the most famous heretic of them all - not the least because of his formidible opponent, Athanasius! I belong to an Anglican diocese that has been accused of Arianism: of subordinating the Son to the Father. As always, a terminological difference is part of the problem, I think. I would be ready to drop the word 'subordinate' in exchange for 'ordered' so as to indicate to all that I believe the Son is vere Deus, vere homo... Of course one of the ugliest dynamics of being called a heretic, is that when you are called so by the vituperative and quote-twisting kind of person we were called it by, you start to believe that the heresy must be orthodox. It does your head in! (Of course, as Williams shows, it is doubtful if Arius himself was actual Arian, but never mind that...)
G.L.Prestige writes:
Christianity and monotheism alike were imperilled by the Arian attack on Athanasius and the doctrine of the Trinity; for if Christ were not truly God, salvation through His cross remained a purely human, subjective and imperfectly realised aspiration; and if He were in the strict sense a 'second God' - as certain even among those of substantial orthodoxy somewhat loosely called Him - then there was an end to all faith in one controlling ruler of the universe and one undivided object of worshipful devotion.' p. 76
The stakes are very high on this one.
Arius was incapable of uttering an apparent contradiction and revolted from the supposition that vast, intricate problems might present more than one aspect. His two-dimensional mind regarded the divine mystery of revelation in the flat, foreshortened, without depth or background, like a diagram in Euclid...
For heresy, rationalistic short-cuts are almost always the downfall. As Athanasius clarified it:
If you contemplate the Father, who is one distinct presentation of the deity, you obtain a mental view of the one true God. If you contemplate the Son or the Spirit, you obtain a view of the same God; though the presenation is different, the reality is identical. p. 89
But what was the peculiar attraction of Arianism?
G.L.Prestige writes:
Christianity and monotheism alike were imperilled by the Arian attack on Athanasius and the doctrine of the Trinity; for if Christ were not truly God, salvation through His cross remained a purely human, subjective and imperfectly realised aspiration; and if He were in the strict sense a 'second God' - as certain even among those of substantial orthodoxy somewhat loosely called Him - then there was an end to all faith in one controlling ruler of the universe and one undivided object of worshipful devotion.' p. 76
The stakes are very high on this one.
Arius was incapable of uttering an apparent contradiction and revolted from the supposition that vast, intricate problems might present more than one aspect. His two-dimensional mind regarded the divine mystery of revelation in the flat, foreshortened, without depth or background, like a diagram in Euclid...
For heresy, rationalistic short-cuts are almost always the downfall. As Athanasius clarified it:
If you contemplate the Father, who is one distinct presentation of the deity, you obtain a mental view of the one true God. If you contemplate the Son or the Spirit, you obtain a view of the same God; though the presenation is different, the reality is identical. p. 89
But what was the peculiar attraction of Arianism?
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Harnack on Marcion
The legendary church historian Adolf von Harnack wrote about Marcion:The innovations of Marcion are unmistakable. The way in which he attempted to sever Christianity from the Old Testament was a bold stroke which demanded the sacrifice of the dearest possession of Christianity as a religion, viz., the belief that the God of creation is also the God of redemption. And yet this innovation was partly caused by a religious conviction, the origin of which must be sought not in heathenism, but on Old Testament and Christian soil. For the bold Anti-judaist was the disciple of a Jewish thinker, Paul, and the origin of Marcion's antinomianism may be ultimately found in the prophets. It will always be the glory of Marcion in the early history of the Church that he, the born heathen, could appreciate the religious criticism of the Old Testament religion as formerly exercised by Paul. The antinomianism of Marcion was ultimately based on the strength of his religious feeling, on his personal religion as contrasted with all statutory religion That was also its basis in the case of the prophets and of Paul, only the statutory religion which was felt to be a burden and a fetter was different in each case. As regards the prophets, it was the outer sacrificial worship, and the deliverance was the idea of Jehovah's righteousness. In the case of Paul, it was the pharisaic treatment of the law, and the deliverance was righteousness by faith. To Marcion it was the sum of all that the past had described as a revelation of God: only what Christ had given him was of real value to him. In this conviction he founded a Church: Before him there was no such thing in the sense of a community, firmly united by a fixed conviction, harmoniously organized, and spread over the whole world. Such a Church the Apostle Paul had in his mind's eye, but he was not able to realize it...
Harnack could see the real power of Marcion's idea. He felt the temptation that Marcion felt, to make a separation between the two testaments, to put the stress on the radical newness of Paul's gospel and to highlight his critique of the old faith. Marcion was a remarkable planter of church communities - Harnack even goes so far as to make him the inventor of the Catholic church. Without Marcion the church would not have been able to conceive of its scriptures; it would not have been able to conceive of itself.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Necessary Heresy 1: Marcion, or how big is the Bible?
This week at St Ebbe's I am starting a series of three lectures entitled Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us.
We start on Wednesday with Marcion. Marcion - the wealthy son of a bishop (how did THAT happen?) - gained a great deal of influence in the 2nd century church and beyond for his teaching that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was in fact a different deity to that of the New. He rejected the OT as scripture, and also everything but the letters of Paul - and edited those as well! The Christian gospel was as he saw it a repudiation of everything that the OT stood for. Creation was the product of a malicious and wrathful demiurge, from whose clutches we were to be saved by the Son.
What is interesting here is the interplay between the scriptural/textual issue and the theological one. Marcion would have no truck with allegorising the distasteful bits of the OT away to make them palatable. He just wouldn't see them reconciled with the loving deity of the New - and so he rejected them on the basis of this theological criterion.
It is significant that Adolf von Harnack, the great German liberal-Protestant church historian, thought Marcion was the most significant theologian between Paul and Luther. Partly, this is because Marcion did get something right: he did understand the radical newness of the gospel - its breaking out of boundaries and its dissolving of religious strictures and superstitions. He did understand the import of Paul's radical critique of the torah. He did understand the heart of the gospel is not bare law but divine love.
But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! It was of course the mission of 19th century liberal Protestantism to follow Marcion in his excision from the canon of the Bible parts that did not apparently square with gospel as they had determined it. The church of yore determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.
Is this heresy alive and well today?
We start on Wednesday with Marcion. Marcion - the wealthy son of a bishop (how did THAT happen?) - gained a great deal of influence in the 2nd century church and beyond for his teaching that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was in fact a different deity to that of the New. He rejected the OT as scripture, and also everything but the letters of Paul - and edited those as well! The Christian gospel was as he saw it a repudiation of everything that the OT stood for. Creation was the product of a malicious and wrathful demiurge, from whose clutches we were to be saved by the Son.
What is interesting here is the interplay between the scriptural/textual issue and the theological one. Marcion would have no truck with allegorising the distasteful bits of the OT away to make them palatable. He just wouldn't see them reconciled with the loving deity of the New - and so he rejected them on the basis of this theological criterion.
It is significant that Adolf von Harnack, the great German liberal-Protestant church historian, thought Marcion was the most significant theologian between Paul and Luther. Partly, this is because Marcion did get something right: he did understand the radical newness of the gospel - its breaking out of boundaries and its dissolving of religious strictures and superstitions. He did understand the import of Paul's radical critique of the torah. He did understand the heart of the gospel is not bare law but divine love.
But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! It was of course the mission of 19th century liberal Protestantism to follow Marcion in his excision from the canon of the Bible parts that did not apparently square with gospel as they had determined it. The church of yore determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.
Is this heresy alive and well today?
Monday, February 12, 2007
Prestige on Marcion
GL Prestige's great old book Fathers and Heretics (or 'Daddies and Baddies' as it used to be called by theological students) throws up much interesting material on the making of Christian doctrine in the crucible of heresy. On Marcion he writes:
...if the physical world, grounded in matter, were really the creation of a divine being, and not the self-subsistent organ of a mechanical fate, the pagan mind shrank from attritbutig so imperfect a structure to the creative hand of perfection; it must have been created either by some lower angel, far removed from the almighty Father, or else by the dialbolic enemy; the world was either a mistake or an affront. In contrast with all such speculations, the Christian Gospel offered a message of salvation from the one God and Father of mankind, who, in spite of Marcion's denial, was the direct Creator of the universe, and who, instead of numerous degenerating emaninations or a multiplicity of defective local gods and goddesses, had one single divine Son or Image as the full expression of His being throughout eternity, and the complete revelation of His deity in terms of human life. This was a very different idea of God from anything propounded in the speculations of the highest paganism. It was clear and definite where they were vague; it was rooted in history, while they were floating in imaginitive abstraction. While they rejected the world, it accepted the world and provided for the fulfilment of its purpose even in teh act of its transformation into new heavens and a new earth... p. 37
The Christian Bible then is directly a result of Christian theology: the decision to include the OT was in part necessitated by who the Christian gospel said that God himself was. The Bible does not merely generate Christian theology; it reflects it. Well: that's not quite right, or at least, not quite the full story. But certainly, the rootedness of the gospel in salvation-history is very early on discovered to be non-negotiable; and so: yes, we read the OT as Christian scripture.
...if the physical world, grounded in matter, were really the creation of a divine being, and not the self-subsistent organ of a mechanical fate, the pagan mind shrank from attritbutig so imperfect a structure to the creative hand of perfection; it must have been created either by some lower angel, far removed from the almighty Father, or else by the dialbolic enemy; the world was either a mistake or an affront. In contrast with all such speculations, the Christian Gospel offered a message of salvation from the one God and Father of mankind, who, in spite of Marcion's denial, was the direct Creator of the universe, and who, instead of numerous degenerating emaninations or a multiplicity of defective local gods and goddesses, had one single divine Son or Image as the full expression of His being throughout eternity, and the complete revelation of His deity in terms of human life. This was a very different idea of God from anything propounded in the speculations of the highest paganism. It was clear and definite where they were vague; it was rooted in history, while they were floating in imaginitive abstraction. While they rejected the world, it accepted the world and provided for the fulfilment of its purpose even in teh act of its transformation into new heavens and a new earth... p. 37
The Christian Bible then is directly a result of Christian theology: the decision to include the OT was in part necessitated by who the Christian gospel said that God himself was. The Bible does not merely generate Christian theology; it reflects it. Well: that's not quite right, or at least, not quite the full story. But certainly, the rootedness of the gospel in salvation-history is very early on discovered to be non-negotiable; and so: yes, we read the OT as Christian scripture.
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