Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Adolf von Harnack; Hellenisierung der Bibel; homoousion

Kurzinhalt: The only place where one cannot find Hellenism is in the homoousion

Textausschnitt: 53c Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a learned assault on the religious significance of the Nicene dogma was led by Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), the coryphaeus of rationalist liberalism. He broached and elaborated, with great historical erudition, the thesis of the "Hellenization of the faith" in the patristic era. The Nicene dogma and the other conciliar dogmas that succeeded it represented, he said, the "work of the Hellenic spirit on the soil of the Gospel." The work was one of corruption. The substance of the Gospel perished under the accretions of Hellenistic ontology. The essence of Christianity was lost. (Fs)

54a No one today holds Harnack's thesis in the form in which he presented it; it has become untenable in the light of the findings of more advanced scholarship. Biblical studies have destroyed its premise, that the essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums, the title of one of Harnack's famous books) consisted in little more than an inner religious sense of the Fatherhood of God. Patristic studies have disallowed Harnack's essential conclusions with regard to what really happened in the early Christian centuries. Nevertheless, Harnack's main thesis persists, in diluted form. It happens continually that theories, once seemingly supported by scholarship, survive in the popular mind long after their learned support has been undermined. One hears the Harnack thesis faintly echoed in the view that the Church of the early centuries reinterpreted the Christian faith in terms of contemporary philosophies. (Fs)

54b This, of course, is exactly the thing that the Church did not do. This is, in fact, the thing that Nicaea (to stay with my own subject) anathematized Arius for doing. The issue here is one of historical scholarship. If one is looking for Hellenizers of the Christian faith in the pre- and post-Nicene period, one can indeed find them. In Tertullian one can find Hellenistic ontology on the Stoic model, as in Origen one can find it on the Platonist model. But both forms of Hellenism were rejected in the Nicene homoousion, which is neither a Stoic nor a Platonist conception. Above all, one can find the Hellenic spirit in the Arian school-the rationalist spirit that would dissolve the Christian mystery of the Son by a process of corrosive dialect, destroying the essence of Christianity, which is the belief that salvation is through the Son, sent by the Father as the Lord-of-us. The Arian Son, the perfect creature, was indeed the construction of the Hellenic spirit working on the soil of the Gospel. But this Hellenic spirit and its creation were condemned in the Nicene homoousion, which re-announced, in the face of Hellenic rationalism, the mystery of Father and Son, the one Pantokrator. (Fs)

55a The only place where one cannot find Hellenism is in the homoousion. It would be impossible to find a conception more remote from, at odds with, all the ontologies of the Graeco-Roman world than the conception embodied in this word, which says that the Son is all that the Father is except for the name of Father. In respect of its Christian meaning, the homoousion was a new coinage, a sort of Melchisedech among words, without father, without mother, without genealogy-whether Gnostic, Platonist, or Stoic. It was a technical, dogmatic coinage, struck for the purpose of declaring the sense of the Scriptures with regard to what the Son is and whence he is. It may be said that in the homoousion the Fathers of Nicaea christianized Hellenism in the single sense that they sanctioned the ontological mode of conception characteristic of the Hellenic mentality. But it may not be said, on peril of learned absurdity, that they hellenized Christianity. (Fs) (notabene)