Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Nicäa (Nicea); Hauptfrage: deskriptiv - erklärend; Tradition; Securus iudicat orbis terrarum

Kurzinhalt: The issue is whether the passage from description of a thing-in-its-function-in-regard-to-me to definition of the thing-in-its-subsistence-as-a-thing-in-itself is sheerly contingent and historical or necessary and essential; test of orthodoxy

Textausschnitt: 58a In other words, you are raising the issue of the relation between the two basic modes of human thought, the descriptive and the explanatory. The issue is whether the passage from description of a thing-in-its-function-in-regard-to-me to definition of the thing-in-its-subsistence-as-a-thing-in-itself is sheerly contingent and historical or necessary and essential. More simply, the issue is whether the definition of a thing is inherent in or extrinsic to the description of it. Concretely, was the word of the Church (which defined what the Son is-in-himself) an accretion and an addition to the word of God (which described what the Son is-to-us) to the effect that the definition and the description remain heterogeneous and therefore cannot both be words of faith, or was the explanatory word of the Church simply an organic growth in understanding of the descriptive word of God to the effect that the two words are homogeneous and therefore both words of faith, intrinsically related as two ways of understanding the same one faith, whose one object is the Son and Lord? (Fs) (notabene)

59a The matter grows complicated. You may therefore wish to transcend, and thus avoid, the whole issue by saying that the faith of the Christian cannot be made subject to the test of a formula against which its orthodoxy is to be judged. This is again to raise the issue of tradition. Certainly the Nicene Fathers and the faithful of their churches, and after them the faithful of the universal Church, considered that such a test was legitimate, valid, and necessary. The creed that they composed was not a baptismal creed, a simple profession of faith, a mosaic of scriptural phrases. It was a "bishop's creed," as it has been aptly called. It was deliberately designed as a test of orthodoxy. This is why it went beyond the traditional formulas of Scripture, in order to make sure that the affirmations in the tradition would be understood by all the bishops and by all the faithful in the same single sense, in the only sense in which the word of God may be rightly understood. You may say that the Nicene Fathers were in error in thus subjecting the faith of Christians to the test of a formula. Securus iudicat orbis terrarum. It may be, however, that they were not in error, in which case the error would be to say that they were in error. (Fs)

59b The foregoing is altogether a skeletal form of the ecumenical argument. It may even be that the skeleton is missing an arm or a leg or a few bones from the breast cage. I merely wanted to illustrate what I take to be the fact, that a basic place in the dialogue may be claimed for the Nicene question, what think ye of the homoousion-is it the Christian faith or is it only philosophy?