Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J. F.

Buch: The Way to Nicea

Titel: The Way to Nicea

Stichwort: Entwicklung im Verstehen Gottes: Weltseele, Idee, Demirug, omnipotent (Stoa, Platoniker, Irenäus)

Kurzinhalt: In the early Christian centuries belief in one, supreme God was quite common among the educated classes. The Stoics, however, ...

Textausschnitt: 118b The movement away from a literal to an allegorical interpretation of scripture and the introduction of a kind of philosophic mode of inquiry could hardly fail to have some effect on the manner of conceiving God. To this topic we now turn, which brings us closer to the topic of trinitarian doctrine. (Fs)

119a In the early Christian centuries belief in one, supreme God was quite common among the educated classes. The Stoics, however, held that this one God was the soul of the world, an intelligent fire that burned without consuming, a part of the material universe, although its active and its principal part. The Platonists, on the other hand, identified God with the supreme, subsistent Idea of the Good; some of them identified this supreme Idea with the Demiurge, who made everything else, but others said that Plato, in the Timaeus, introduced the Demiurge only as a kind of mythical character.1 The Gnostics, for their part, were so insistent on the transcendence and unknowability of God that for them the Demiurge was an inferior being, outside of the Pleroma, belonging not to the class of the "pneumatics", who are saved necessarily, but to that of the "psychics", whose fate is uncertain. For the Marcionites, finally, the Demiurge was that severe God of the Old Testament, from whom the good God of the New Testament purchased us. (Fs)

119b Against all such conceptions of God Ireneus writes:

"... there is only this one God, who made all things, who alone is omnipotent, who alone is Father, making and establishing all things, visible and invisible 'in the word of his power', This is the one, only God, maker of the world, who is above every principality, and above all other supernatural powers. He is the Father, he is God, he is the creator who made all things through himself, that is, through his own Word and his own Wisdom-heaven and earth, and the seas, and all that is in them. He it is who is just and good; he it is who formed man and planted paradise, who made the world, who sent the flood, and saved Noah; he is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of the living, whom the Law proclaims, whose praises the Prophets sing, whom Christ reveals, about whom the Apostles teach, and in whom the Church believes. He is the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ; through his Word, which is his Son, he is revealed and made manifest to those to whom he is revealed: for they know him, to whom the Son has revealed him ...".2

120a In the conception of God presented here by Ireneus there are three elements to be distinguished. In the first place, there was the traditional Hebrew notion that God became known as a person identified with certain historical events: he was the God of the Patriarchs, the God of the Law and the God of the Prophets. Secondly, there was the extension and amplification of this notion, contained in the New Testament: the same God is also the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the God of the gospel, the God of the apostolic preaching, the God of the Church, and the God of each individual Christian's religious experience. Thirdly, there was the doctrine, common to the Old and the New Testaments, that this God is supreme, that he is the Lord, the maker and shaper and sustainer of absolutely all things, and of all persons without exception, to whom no one else can even be compared, much less be considered his equal. (Fs)

120ba Now all three of these elements can equally be conceived as objects of faith; the third, however, is not beyond the grasp of natural human reason, and this is a point that did not escape either Justin or Ireneus, both of whom had some inkling of the distinction between faith itself and the preambles of faith. For as Ireneus wrote:

"Justin says well, in his book against Marcion: 'For I would not have believed the Lord himself if he had announced some other God than him who created and sustains us. But because there came to us, from the one God who made this world and fashioned us, who holds and controls all things, because from this one God there came his only-begotten Son, drawing all things together in himself, therefore my faith in him is firm, and my love of the Father unshakeable, God himself bestowing both on us'".1

120c One must not, of course, transpose this into a much later theological context, to infer that these ancient Christian writers had drawn a sharp distinction between reason and faith, and between fundamental and dogmatic theology. On the other hand, neither can what they said be reduced to a mere fideism. What exactly was the content of this preliminary notion of God, that was somehow to be presupposed in every discussion, and in every later development? There are many indications that the basic notion was of God as omnipotent; this omnipotence, however, was considered rather in its actual exercise than in the range of its possible application, and (more or less in the biblical manner) with little or no distinction made between substance, active potency, and activity itself.2 For in the scriptures the Father is most commonly called the Lord [kypios], as is the Son, and the earliest Christians retained this usage. Next, according to Eusebius3 Justin composed a work (not extant) entitled On the Monarchy.4 Theophilus of Antioch also, and more than once, spoke of the monarchy of God. And the doctrine of the Patripassians, that the Father and the Son are the same person, is said to have been based not on the affirmation of the unity of the divine essence, but rather on their determination to safeguard the monarchy.5 Tertullian, however, saw a grave danger that the mass of simple Christians would be deceived by such an argument;6 he himself considered that it was a sufficient refutation of the Patripassians to say that monarchy consisted not in the oneness of a ruler, but in the oneness of rule.7 Dionysius of Rome, finally, called the doctrine of the monarchy the most august doctrine of the Church.8 And one might add that Ireneus, writing against the Gnostics about the one God, who is the creator of all, seems to come to his most fundamental point when he concludes that the opinion of his adversaries leads to "the voiding of the name, Omnipotent, and such an opinion necessarily ends up in impiety".9 Further, we have already seen the argument of Hippolytus, that the trinity does not destroy the divine unity, because the power of the three Persons is one. And Clement of Alexandria considered that other names of God (for example, One, Good, Mind, That-itself-which-is, Father, God, Creator, Lord) taken not singly, but all together, indicate the power of the Omnipotent.10 Finally, as we remarked before, the contribution of Origen to this whole discussion lies in the area of exegesis, rather than of metaphysics.11 (Fs)