,
9 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Every generation seems to re-invent the charge that early Christian theology hellenized the gospel. Some generations do it w/a touching purism & decent intellectual furniture; others as a zombie argument immune to falsification, w/a know-nothing swagger-limp.
This came to mind as I browsed one of the many books that have long since undermined the charge of acute hellenization. It's 1964's Christian Faith & Greek Philosophy, by Markus & Armstrong. It's a short book by two major (already senior then) scholars writing accessibly. 
They sketch the false theological solutions suggested by Greek philosophy, allude to some of the heterodox ways early Christian thinkers flirted w/them, and then make the key move: Actual Nicene theology tamed & trimmed those hellenizing tendencies, in service to the gospel.
"The Church in the Councils of Nicaea & Constantinople was able to free Christian teaching from the distortions introduced into it by these philosophical assumptions... and to state that doctrine of the co‑equal Trinity which she has maintained ever since." 22
Greek speculative theology (Armstrong was a Plotinus expert) made God & the world correlates of each other; a central idea was the divine cosmos as the divine mind's self-expression. Nicene theology shattered that link, replacing it w/trinitarian doctrine: The Father has the Son.
"The Trinity, so envisaged, becomes for the Christians what the divine cosmos was for the Greeks, the perfect self‑expression of divinity. The Christian theologians insist as much as the Greeks that God in his perfection cannot be sterile and unproductive." 23
"For the Christians the outpouring of divine productivity, the self‑giving of divine love, reaches its unbounded term, its infinite fulfillment, within the Trinity." 23 God is Light, and always has (in the Nicene phrase) Light from Light.
"The created universe then appears as an "extra," a magnificent and purely superfluous expression of pure disinterested generosity, in the image and for the glory of the eternal Logos; and not, as it was for the pagan Platonists, the descending stages of divine self‑expression."
So my advice is, 1. Read this lovely little book by Markus & Armstrong, 2. Knock it off with the uncritical hellenization charge, 3. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
