Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Arius; von der phänomenologischen zur ontologischen Frage; Realismus des Wortes Gottes

Kurzinhalt: The Christology of the New Testament was, in our contemporary word for it, functional. For instance, ...

Textausschnitt: 40a Four comments need to be made on Arius' position of the problem of the Son. It was new, inevitable, legitimate, and exigent of an answer that would have to be an answer of faith. (Fs)

In the first place, the Arian question was new in the form and mode of thought in which Arius raised it. The New Testament problem had been that of the presence of the Son, and with him the Father, in the midst of the people as Savior and Judge. Explicitly, therefore, the problem had been stated in the intersubjective category of presence with its attendant dynamic categories of power, function, and action. The Christology of the New Testament was, in our contemporary word for it, functional. For instance, all the titles given to Christ the Son-Lord, Savior, Word, Son of God, Son of man, Messiah, Prophet, Priest-all these titles, in the sense that they bear in the New Testament, are relational. They describe what Christ is to us; they detail his functions in regard to our salvation. They do not explicitly define what he is, nor do they explicitly define what his relation to the Father is. Therefore, in asking whether the Son is God or not. Arius altered the scriptural state of the question. He moved the problem into a different universe of discourse. In effect, he asked a new question. (Fs) (notabene)

41a In the second place, it was inevitable that the new question should have been asked. If Arius had not asked it, someone else would have. There are two reasons for its inevitability. (Fs)

The first lies in the essential dynamism of human intelligence. When it functions without any bias induced by faulty or prejudicial training, the mind moves inevitably from the question of what things are to us (the phenomenological question) to the deeper question of what things are in themselves (the ontological question). The human mind moves from description to definition. In this case, it moves from inquiry into the reality of God's presence to inquiry into the reality of the God who is present. The biblical question, whether God is with us, is organically related to the patristic question, what the God-who-is-with-us is. (Fs) (notabene)

41b The second reason for the inevitability of Arius' question lies in the realist conception of the word of God contained in Scripture and unanimously held in the Church of the Fathers. At that time, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the Scriptures were not simply the record of the religious experience of Isaiah or Ezechiel, of Paul or John. In the patristic era, the Christian did not consider that his faith was based on religious experience, his own or that of anyone else. It was based on the events of the sacred history-the event of Christ supervening on the ancient events of the history of Israel. He knew that in these events, which were irruptions of the divine into history, God was the "speaking God" of the Letter to the Hebrews (1:1). He knew that the word spoken by God came from Intelligence and was addressed to an intelligence. It was suffused with mystery, but it was nonetheless compact of conceptions that were somehow intelligible and of affirmations that were unconditionally true. He knew, finally, that, since they were true (as warranted by the "speaking God"), the affirmations in the word of God put him in touch with reality. They had for him an ontological reference. They were not mere symbols whose value would be as vehicles of man's religious experience, which would itself then be the ultimately real. The value of the word of God was in its truth, in the fact that it affirmed what is, what exists in an order related indeed to man's religious experience but only because it is itself antecedently real. So, when the Christian cried, "Lord Jesus!", he was not simply uttering his religious experience of the risen Jesus. He was affirming that Jesus did rise from the dead and that he is the Lord. (Fs)