Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J. F.

Buch: The Way to Nicea

Titel: The Way to Nicea

Stichwort: Entwicklung im Verstehen 3: Trinität; Dialektik: Materialprinzip, Formalprinzip; Dialektik: Gesetz - Botschaft; Lösung ohne Durchbruch

Kurzinhalt: The formal principle ... consists in the light of natural reason, either illumined or unillumined by Faith

Textausschnitt: 133a This internally inconsistent mixture of dogmatic and naive realism provides what we called above1 the material foundation for the process of dialectic. (Fs) (notabene)

133b The formal principle of that same dialectic cannot fail to be at hand-it consists in the light of natural reason, either illumined or unillumined by Faith. Therefore, given the appropriate occasions, which heretics are apt to provide, the objective dialectic process itself is calculated to drive out naive realism and in so doing to bring dogmatic realism to a greater self-consciousness. (Fs) (notabene)

133c However, since the dogmatic realism that we speak of was only implicit, the dialectic process also was only implicit; it was not grounded philosophically, but worked itself out in the handling of religious and theological questions. Or, to express the matter differently: from the beginning the word of God contained within it an implicit epistemology and ontology, but what was there implicitly became known explicitly only through dialectic process that was spread over time; and this dialectic process was all the more complex, as the real roots of the problem were touched only indirectly. (Fs)


133d There was a first movement, begun in the New Testament itself, that was an exploration of the mutual relationships of the Law and the Gospel, according to the familiar principle that the New Testament lies concealed in the Old and the Old is made plain in the New; and to this were added the various apologies, some addressed to the Jews and some to the Gentiles. But among the new converts to Christianity there were, on the one hand, Jews who were as yet unable to transcend the Old Testament categories and kept insisting that Jesus was no more than a teacher, a prophet, or an angel. At the opposite pole there were the Gentile converts, to whom the Old Testament seemed sheer nonsense and who, therefore, basing themselves on the symbolic speculations of the Gnostics or the biblical criticism of the Marcionites, made a distinction between the much inferior Creator God and the supreme, good God. Thus arose two related problems about the manner of conceiving God, one a problem of hermeneutics and the other a problem of theology. Soon there was added a trinitarian problem; for when the Creator God of the Old Testament and God the Father of the New Testament and the supreme God, known by natural reason, had all three been identified with each other, along came those who were variously called Patripassians, Monarchians, Sabellians, to say that God the Father was the same person as God the Son. (Fs)

134a To the challenge thus posed the Western Church responded in one way and the Alexandrians in quite another. The Western Fathers, hardly broaching at all the hermeneutical problem, insisted on the distinction between God the Creator and his Son; in the process of defending this distinction they manifested objectively their naive realism and they discovered the trinitarian formula, "of one substance". The Alexandrians, on the other hand, attacked the hermeneutical problem methodically and scientifically, they sought a way of getting beyond the scriptural symbols to the reality that they symbolised, and they overcame naive realism by adopting a form of Platonism, and so Origen would say that the Father was truly God, while the Son was God by participation. (Fs)

134b Now if it is clear enough that the theology that arose in Alexandria and was brought by Origen to Caesarea was less than perfect, it is no less clear that the theology of Tertullian, Hippo-lytus, Novatian and Dionysius of Alexandria was not entirely without defect. What was needed was a kind of breakthrough, and this was finally brought about through the protracted Arian controversies. (Fs)