Ayres begins the section by noting that the latest scholarship on the early church has cast Adolf von Harnack’s charge of the inappropriate “Hellenization” of the church’s theology in more negative light

Recent scholarship has argued that characterizing the fourth century as the culmination of Christianity’s “Hellenization” is misleading. This is especially so if Hellenization is understood as resulting in a philosophically articulated doctrinal system only distantly related to the words of Scripture. The revisionary scholarship to which this book is indebted has tried to demonstrate the ways in which exegetical concerns shaped the theologies with which we are concerned here (31).

The author goes on to note why early church exegesis is so harshly judged.

These negative judgements have usually resulted from comparisons between early Christian and modern academic exegetical practice, comparisons that assume the former is a deficient form of the latter. An implied comparison between fourth-century exegesis and modern historical-critical modes is also frequently embedded in reference, for instance, to post-Reformation divisions between allegory and typology, or to some ways of distinguishing Alexandrian from Antiochene exegesis (particularly those which assume that Antiochenes were more interested in the historical, that they were somehow more modern).

We need to assess the early church hermeneutical and exegetical practices on their own terms rather than subjecting them to the standards of other eras. I would be in general agreement with the author in terms of getting at just what the practices were. At other times I have noted we need to recognize the distinction between the historical question (what was said and done?) and the normative question (is it right or is it Scriptural?). Was the early church guilty of importing pagan notions uncorrected into Christian theology? Was the Reformation and post-Reformation distinction between allegory and typology a distinction without a difference? Did Antioch and Alexandria really embody totally distinct exegetical approaches? These are all interesting and important questions.

Was the early church guilty of importing pagan notions uncorrected into Christian theology?

The first question has to do with the use of pagan thought in Christian theology. Is that what the church fathers as a whole thought they were doing or actually did? Is it wise to do that? This is another way of wrestling with the relationship and priority of natural revelation and special revelation. It is also another way of relating philosophy to theology, faith to reason, and the antithesis to common grace. We must note with all seriousness that the antithesis came before common grace in the scheme of things. The fall created the antithesis between belief and unbelief. Yes, it is true that the reality of common grace means that unbelievers do know things after a fashion and that we Christians can learn things from unbelievers. But insofar as they deny the connection of everything in creation to the triune God of Scripture and refuse to accept that God determines the meaning and significance of every last thing in the cosmos, to that extent, their knowledge will be corrupted and truncated and distorted. This is why Augustine in his On Christian Teaching talks about plundering the Egyptians and baptizing the truth that we gain from pagan thought. That is why Cornelius Van Til said that while the king of Lebanon could provide timber for the Jerusalem temple, only God could provide Solomon with the blueprints. The question remains, what did the early church fathers think they were doing? It would be best to treat each father on his own terms as I imagine there were a variety of opinions and practices. Von Harnack shared the anti-metaphysical bias of his age and so created a procrustean bed and whatever was too small he stretched and whatever was too big he hacked off according to his Ritschlian (Kantian) standards. In reality I suspect the best of the fathers thought they were using the terminology of Greek philosophy while cleansing the said terminology of its pagan roots much as the New Testament uses the word theos for God, a word used with regard to Zeus and no doubt other gods in the divine pantheon. We have to look at each instance and each theologian carefully. It can be the case that we fail to untwist the twisted truth found in pagan thought.

Was the Reformation and post-Reformation distinction between allegory and typology a distinction without a difference?

The second question has to do with the Protestant rejection of the so-called quadriga or fourfold sense of Scripture. While the schematization is of later development, our forebears in the Reformed faith no doubt recognized that it had its seeds in earlier hermeneutical practices. Ayres says that the fathers understood the idea of the plain sense or sensus literalis or literary sense of the text of Scripture or what he describes as knowing the “way the words run” (32) but that they also assumed that the text could “have a variety of functions in the education of the Christian mind” (33). Ayres challenges the distinction made between allegory and typology. In our setting we would say that typology is divinely intended and implanted meaning that resides in the text connecting an earlier OT text involving persons, places, events, and institutions to later OT texts or NT texts, especially culminating in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Typology as properly conceived is grounded in redemptive history as well as the literary sense of the text whereas it seems that allegory cuts itself loose from the historical referential moorings of the text. I concede that in practice it is not always easy to see the difference between allegory and typology. And it is likely that various fathers of the church did both intentionally and unintentionally.

Did Antioch and Alexandria really embody totally distinct exegetical approaches?

On the related question of whether there was a hard and fast distinction between the hermeneutical practices of the schools of Alexandria and Antioch, the current scholarship appears to be calling the clear cut distinction between the two schools overwrought. Alexandria was not committed to unalloyed allegory and Antioch was not tied to only historical concerns. Do we see these tendencies at work in the work of the fathers? Yes. But as Ayres points out, these characteristics were shared by both schools. Sometime back there was a two-part article in the Westminster Theological Journal that argued the same thing. Alexandria and Antioch do not represent two diametrically opposite schools of biblical interpretation. This is where reliance only on secondary literature can be problematic. We can’t be experts in everything so we do rely on the expertise of others to keep us up to date on scholarly developments insofar as they assist us in understanding what were in fact the conditions on the ground in the ancient church.

Ayres argues for the figural reading of Scripture which at its best is a trained sensitivity to the theological, historical, literary, philosophical, linguistic, and cultural features of the text. Figural readings are dependent on the historical foundation of the biblical text (37). Ayres is correct to point out that the bifurcation between exegesis and theology, which is so common in biblical studies these days, was not a working assumption of the fathers (38). Pre-critical exegesis has much to commend it and I for one am happy to recover as much of the theological mindset of pre-critical exegetical practice as we can. Related to this are the guides that arose in the early church: the analogy of Scripture, the analogy of faith, and the scope of Scripture. The analogy of Scripture has to do with comparing Scripture with Scripture and allowing clearer passages to shed light on less clear passages. The analogy of faith was a more synthetic idea where one gains a sense of the whole so that we never fall into the trap of not allowing one part of Scripture to enlighten another. And the scope of Scripture has to do with the telos or goal of the Bible, which is Jesus Christ himself (see Ayres’s discussion on 39-40).

We have now come to the end of the author’s bird’s eye summary of the book and with the next segment we will delve into the deep structure of the book and the history and theology of the fourth century Trinitarian controversy.

Renaming the Series

This week we rechristen this blog series Standing on Giants’ Shoulders since that reflects more the character of what I am trying to accomplish with this series. Because this is a renaming of the Criterion series we can still number this entry 5. Today we come to the second point of departure for Lewis Ayres’ Nicaea and Its Legacy. We will be covering material from pages 20 through 30.

Origen the Brilliant Alexandrian

Many of you will no doubt be familiar with the name of the early church father Origen (circa 185-251) who hailed from Alexandria in Egypt. Perhaps he is best known as an early practitioner of textual criticism (he created a six version Bible known as the Hexapla) and for his subordinationistic tendencies and for his being declared heretical by subsequent church councils (he is also known as possibly mutilating his body from an overly wooden interpretation of Christ’s words about eunochs, but that is fodder for another post).

Origen’s Complexity

Ayres’ concern in this section is to consider Origen’s subordinationism. This tendency is to view the Son of God as a kind of lesser deity than the Father. It is a Trinitarian question. By now we expect Ayres to argue for and typically demonstrate far greater complexity on the question than is usually assumed. Ayres rightly stresses familiarity with the context (and this includes the tradition of said theologian, 20). Clearly the Arian heresy is subordinationist in that Jesus is not even God but an exalted creature. But can we directly lay the blame for Arianism at the feet of Origen? Ayres’ briefly answers that such a view is “implausible” for three main reasons (21).

1. Origen influenced theologians on all sides of the conflict including those within Alexandria and beyond in Egypt and Palestine.
2. No theologian adopted Origen’s system wholesale.
3. Origen’s theology which “in some ways subordinates” the Son to the Father shares this feature with his contemporaries (21).

Origen Among the Theologians

Origen was an extremely influential theologian in his day, perhaps analogous to the pervasive influence of Karl Rähner at Vatican II such that he was called the ghost of Vatican II. Ayres notes

Origen commented on a huge amount of the biblical text and at every turn he was determined to display the capacity of the Scripture to illumine the story of creation and redemption, and the ways in which the text draws Christians into a process of purification and salvation. For Origen the text yields its message in degrees as purity of heart and attention to the Logos grows. To serve these he developed several styles of intertextual practice, allowing texts throughout Scripture to illuminate each other and the whole. Many of these interpretative practices are used throughout the fourth century (21).

Origen was in the air, so to speak. Getting down to specifics, Ayres points out that Origen argued for the correlativity of the Father and Son. That is, they presuppose each other. The Father could not be the Father without the Son and vice versa.

Introducing an argument that will be developed in the fourth century, Origen argues that Father and Son are ‘correlative’ terms. The name Father implies the existence of a child, and if God is truly called Father, the Son’s generation must be eternal. The Son’s existence thus seems to be essential to God being what God from all eternity wills to be. Thus we see that while the Father is superior to the Son, Origen works to make the Son intrinsic to the being of God: subordinationism is an inappropriate word for describing this theological dynamic (22-23).

A Nuanced and More Specified Species of Subordinationism

I would respond that while our understanding of what subordinationism means might need more nuance or specificity than we normally give it, Origen still is subordinationistic in a significant way (the use of the language of the Son being by the Father’s will is troubling to me). Ayres goes on to note that for Origen the Son while correlative with the Father (i.e., eternally generated) and while the Son was not temporally after the Father, he was a “distinct being dependent on the Father for his existence” (23). Post-Calvin we could ask whether Origen has in view here the derivation of the Son’s divine being or person. Calvin will argue, understandably many years after Origen’s time, that the Son is autotheos as to his divinity but he derives his personhood from the Father.

Ayres also points out that Origen shied away from ousia (substance) language because it smacked of materialism to him (24). Origen appears to have begun the use of hypostasis with regard to the existence of the three persons of the Godhead being concerned to stress the equality of the persons with regard to their distinctness as individuals (25). Origen, we are told further, held that the Son did not share the simplicity of the Father (26) either. As Ayres notes after discussing Rowan Williams’ consideration of Origen’s understanding of the relation of the Father and Son (especially in how the Son reveals the Father) in his study of Arius, “Origen’s account of shared but graded divine existence offers an initially clear, but complex language to describe this relationship” (26). It is this graded existence which has yielded charges of subordinationism by others methinks.

Origen also spoke of the Son as from the will of the Father and not of his essence (27). However, as Ayres hastens to add, given that the Father’s will is eternal means that the Son’s existence is eternal as well. This would certainly mark Origen out as distinct from Arius who argued that there was a time when the Son was not. Origen also spoke of the Son as created. But he clearly distinguished between the creation of the Son and the material world (27). Ayres goes on to comment on the complexity of Origen’s Christology, “Origen’s account is, then, complex. He speaks of the Son as inferior to the Father, and yet his explanation of this inferiority turns, at many points, into an account of the necessity of the Son within the divine life” (28). Ayres is right to carefully note how Origen should not be confused with Arius (or our understanding of Arianism) at this point. But I would once again note that Origen’s thought is still a species of subordinationism even if a more nuanced and complex form.

We Need to Understand the Exegetical and Hermeneutical Practices of the Day

Ayres concludes this initial look at Origen’s influence on the fourth century Trinitarian controversy by noting the need for students of the controversy to familiarize themselves with the exegetical and hermeneutical practices of the day,

Origen’s theology thus encountered criticism but influenced many across the theological spectrum. His theology shaped many of the theological trajectories found in the early fourth century. While Origen may, however, serve as a temporal point of departure for understanding fourth-century theology, the constant ground of all fourth-century theologies is a conception of the reading of Scripture and the practice of theology. Narrations of these disputes tend to assume that readers are familiar with the exegetical practice of fourth-century Christians and understand how it may be understood as the core of early Christian ‘theology’. This seems to me a considerable mistake (30).

We will turn to Ayres’ discussion of the grammatical and figural readings of Scripture practiced by fourth century theologians in our next blog post. We will find that treatment interesting and highly relevant to present day concerns. I conclude this blog entry by noting that Ayres has brought to light greater specificity to our understanding of Origen’s subordinationism, but he has not convinced me that the term is altogether inappropriate when applied to Origen. If the term is reserved for views which place the Son outside of the Godhead then yes, the term no longer applies. However, allowing for gradations of existence within the Godhead (as over against the distinction of the persons) seems to me to be a species of subordinationism. Among other things, this compromises the voluntary nature of the plan and execution of redemption and specifically the Son’s part in that. I am not suggesting this was even on Origen’s radar. I recognize the difference between intent and result. I also recognize that Origen is early in church history and we need to be fair to him as we place him within his historical setting. While we would agree that there has been growth in the church’s understanding of the relation between the Father and Son since Origen’s time and that we need to be careful about holding him to the standard of a later development, it is equally true that once the church has come to conclusions on some point of theological dispute or development, there is no benefit in going backwards. Still, having said that, Origen had the Word of God which is not principially shackled by any historical or cultural context. To say that Origen was a man of his times and circumstances is not to say he was a prisoner of his times and circumstances. That would be the error of historicism.

Traditionally, it has been understood that Arius took umbrage with the teaching of his bishop, Alexander. Alexander taught that the Father and the Son always existed from eternity, suggesting the eternal generation of the Son. Arius is said to have objected to this teaching since it implied two foundational principles of the universe rather than one. Arius is said to hold that the Son was inferior to the Father, being as Ayres notes, a created “derivative copy of some of the Father’s attributes” (16). Whatever we ultimately make of the historical accuracy of this all-too-brief description, it remains true that as explicated here, Alexander is sound and Arius is defective. Whether this summary is adequate will become clear as we move along. Typically, in summaries of church history this is the picture we get. Ayres is trying to overturn this facile reading with a thicker contextually sensitive, historically accurate, and theologically nuanced consideration of matters.

This begs the question of how much distortion occurs when we seek to simplify inherently complex matters? Is it possible to bring clarity without distortion? All thinking involves a certain level of selectivity and abstraction. If it didn’t we would be faced with a blooming, buzzing chaos or with bare chronologies which are about as exciting as reams and reams of statistics (with all due respect to all you statisticians out there). In philosophical terms I am talking about the one and many problem. We work hard to wrestle the facts of history into a coherent plan. The voluminous events, persons, and circumstances are the many and our attempted explanation is the one. This is not in itself problematic as this is how God has made us to think. There is a unified plan according to God and his Word. The question is whether we treat the facts of history as bits of silly putty malleable to our template (read procrustean bed) or, to use another metaphor, do we try to shoehorn historical data? Our explanation should arise from the facts of history. Of course this is talking in general terms and I have not considered the sovereignty of God over the whole process and his speaking into our world and into our historiographical method. Huh? God who created the world in which we live and who has created us in his image and who has sent his Son into the world to save us and sent his Spirit to apply the Son’s redemption to us and spoken into this world has something to say about history and truth-telling, etc. Christian historiography at the very least ought to be concerned to uphold the ninth commandment. It is possible to break the ninth commandment with how we do history. We ought to aim for truth.

All of this is to remind us that we should allow the evidence left from the past to speak on its own terms within the context of a biblical and Reformed world and life view (ooh, did I use that nasty Kantian word “worldview”?). Our commitment to orthodoxy does not per se determine what in fact various historical individuals said or did. That is a matter of historical investigation and making sense of what is left to us to conclude from the evidence. Our Reformed Christian theological commitment (er, …worldview) provides biblical parameters (for instance, there is such a thing as the supernatural) but it is possible that things get mixed up or misunderstood or simplified or distorted over time.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch Ayres points out that there were other issues that may have been at play beyond the purely Trinitarian. Among these was the rise of monarchical episcopacy. That is, the church in Alexandria was moving from the bishop as primus inter pares among a college of presbyters to being sole absolute authority within a diocese (15). The conflict between Arius and Alexander may betray elements of this movement. We need not fear the reality of politics within the church as if this is something new. Politics played its role in the OT church as well and this fact does not undermine the sovereignty of God, nor does it necessarily sully theological formulations. It can, but does not necessarily do so. Politics has been defined as the organization of our common life. That is, any group of people will have to organize themselves around certain agreed-upon principles. So all groups involve politics in this general sense. The question is, is the politics seen in the history of the church godly or corrupt?

Ayres highlights the complexity of the situation in the early church.

Alexander and the Alexandrian clergy condemned Arius after he refused to sign a confession of faith presented by Alexander. Over the next few years Arius gained support from some bishops in Palestine, Syria, and North Africa, especially Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine and Eusebius of Nicomedia, near Constantinople. Many of his supporters appear to have greatly valued the teaching of Lucian of Antioch, a priest and teacher in Antioch martyred in 312 and some were Lucian’s students. Although these supporters may have been wary of some aspects of Arius’ theology—especially his insistence on the unknowability of the Father—they joined in opposition to Alexander. For all of them Alexander’s theology seemed to compromise the unity of God and the unique status of the Father. Two small councils, one in Bithynia, the other in Palestine, vindicated Arius, and Alexander may have refused a conciliatory approach from Arius as involving insufficient concession. For some of this period Arius seems to have left (or been expelled from) Alexandria and travelled to seek support; eventually he returned and openly opposed Alexander (17).

There is such a thing as oversimplification and over-complication. These are two extremes to avoid. As we work through theological controversies we need to learn to live with complexity whether we personally like it or not. We might like things to be neat and tidy and wrapped with pretty paper and tied up with a nice bow. But that is rarely how God works. Maturity involves learning to live with our heroes, warts and all, as the Bible does. The Bible presents the saints in all their colorful glory. Only Jesus was sinless.

Emperor Constantine even got in on the action, writing to Alexander and Arius, telling them to cease and desist doctrinal bickering (18). After a series of meetings and communications, a council met at Nicaea in 325 which produced a statement

asserting that the Son is generated from the Father himself in an ineffable manner and that the transcendence and ineffability of this generation forbid us from speaking of the Son as in any way like the creation. The text distinguishes the language of the Son’s ‘generation’ from language used about the ‘creation’ of the cosmos (18).

The so-called Nicene Creed that was produced stated the following

We believe in one God, Father Almighty Maker of all things, seen and unseen; and in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten as only begotten of the Father, that is of the being of the Father (ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός), God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial (ὁμοούσιον) with the Father, through whom all things came into existence, both things in heaven and things on earth; who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and became man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens, and is coming to judge the living and the dead…But those who say ‘there was a time when he did not exist’, and ‘before being begotten he did not exist’, and that he came into being from non-existence, or who allege that the Son of God is from another hypostasis or ousia (ἐξ ἑτέρας ὑποστάσεως ἢ οὐσίας), or is alterable or changeable, these the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemns (19).

As Ayres points out, this formulation, later modified at Constantinople, did not end the theological controversy swirling around Arius. Arius was a problem, but his teaching did not arise de novo. Arius claimed that Alexander had distorted the theology taught in the catechesis of the Alexandrian church (20). There may be more than a scintilla of truth about this.

Those who assume that this narrative of Arius and his conflict with Alexander is the most important point of departure for the fourth-century controversies interpret the events after Nicaea by narrating the emergence of an Arian conspiracy to keep alive his theology, to oppose Athanasius, and to contend against Nicaea and its theology. In fact, little evidence for any Arian conspiracy can be found. In these confusing events around and after Nicaea, we see the need to consider not simply Arius and his fortunes but the wider context within which that particular controversy occurred. If we are to make useful judgements about Nicaea’s creed and about how the Christian community viewed the conflict over Arius, we need to understand the theological options available in the 300–25 period. For example, the initial opponents of Arius present him as distorting the Church’s traditional faith; Arius argues, however, that Alexander’s theology changes and distorts the traditional catechetical teaching in Alexandria. We can only assess these claims by understanding the wider context within which those claims were made. Indeed, through exploring this context we will find pre-existing deep theological tensions at the beginning of the fourth century. Controversy over Arius was the spark that ignited a fire waiting to happen, and the origins of the dispute do not lie simply in the beliefs of one thinker, but in existing tensions that formed his background (20, emphasis mine).

As far as I can tell, the orthodoxy of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed is not being called into question. It just turns out that the path to its formulation was more convoluted than we have traditionally thought. That’s OK. God is sovereign over the meandering historical process. One does not have to choose between a cardboard version of events on the one hand and the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code-like conniving on the other. What Ayres is attempting to get at is a more adequate and hopefully more accurate description of the path the church took to get at the truth of orthodox Trinitarian theology. I am not saying that Ayres would agree with my assessment here. He is a Roman Catholic lay theologian and church historian and has to come to grips with how this topsy-turvy pathway squares with his church’s view of the relationship of Scripture and tradition and how tradition unfolds in history (we touched on this in an earlier post and will come back to this later on).

God does not need us sprucing up the messiness of church history. If church history is convoluted and complex, so be it. Redemptive history as revealed in Scripture was not exactly a straight-line development from Genesis to Revelation. If biblical history was filled with twists and turns and our heroes were not typically flawless, why do we think our heroes of church history would be? Does not that expectation fail to square with the grace of the gospel and our own experience of the faith? Another way of putting this is to say that the church is being sanctified in the process of theological development as are the individual heroes of the faith. Richard Muller has argued (in his co-authored book with James Bradley on church history methodology) that our theology does not determine whether someone somewhere at some time in the past said such and such. Our theology can provide, as I have already intimated in this post, parameters or guiderails for historical research, but it cannot determine in advance or a priori the historical particulars as such. That requires historical investigation.

History is in God’s hands and we can be sure he is guiding his church through the travails of wrestling with Scripture and the ups and downs of theological development. Scripture is infallible and inerrant. Theological development is not necessarily either. To use the language of the Reformed Scholastics, our theology is ectypal, not archetypal. Our theology is also in via. We are pilgrims on the way to the eternal city. By God’s grace we will arrive at the new heavens and new earth to dwell eternally with the Triune God and the saints and angels. Between our Lord’s ascension and our eternal felicity there have been and will no doubt continue to be a few bumps in the theological road.

We are reading through Lewis Ayres’s Nicaea and its Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2004). Our goal is to read this relatively new but still classic text on the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy with intelligence and understanding. The impetus for our pilgrimage is the recent broadly Reformed internecine conflict on the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father in the Trinity (in se or ad intra). While this is the occasion for choosing this text as our first book it will not inordinantly control our reading. We will sometimes move through the book at a snail’s pace and sometimes at breakneck speed (well, maybe).

In the last post we had a brief overview of the book so that we can now delve into the text with abandon. There is no better place than to begin at the beginning. That is, there is no better place once we have read the back of the book cover and the inside flaps, have perused the contents pages, looked at the bibliography and indices (ok, indexes too!). Once we have fanned the pages to get a sense of the whole we can begin.

Point of Departure

The first chapter is titled “points of departure” (11-40) and we will be covering the first five pages (Lane Tipton is my hero!). In this section Ayres wants to line out what he is doing and how he is doing it differently than others who have gone before. This is such an important concern that Ayres devotes the first ten chapters of the book to getting the historical and theological context right. It is not simply that the controversy was a matter of Arius being bad and Nicaea setting the record straight for all time. That is simplistic and not at all helpful. Real history is more complex or complicated than that. This is not to suggest, as far as I can tell, that Arius was somehow a good guy. But the author wants us to get to know all the textures and strands that go into the fabric of the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy. This matters to us because we Reformed folk are catholic in the best sense of that lower-case word.

The context I was speaking of is what Ayres calls a “theological culture” (12). He tells us that this theological culture was a combination of doctrinal propositions and strategies for using the doctrines. We could say that the controversy drove the church to develop a theological grammar. That is, the church developed a way of talking about the Triune God through the rough and tumble of theological debate. Ayres puts it this way:

It is now a commonplace that these disputes cannot simply be understood as the product of the Church’s struggle against a heretic and his followers grounded in a clear Nicene doctrine established in the controversy’s earliest stages. Rather, this controversy is a complex affair in which tensions between pre-existing theological traditions intensified as a result of dispute over Arius, and over events following the Council of Nicaea. The conflict that resulted eventually led to the emergence of a series of what I will term pro-Nicene theologies interpreting the Council of Nicaea in ways that provided a persuasive solution to the conflicts of the century (11-12).

Real History is Complex

By stressing the complexity of the era Ayres seeks to consider not only the myriad differences between various theologians and theological parties, but also what ways of thinking and what propositions they may share in common (13). This seems to me to be a basic historiographic necessity. In order to properly interpret and understand a document from another era we must seek to understand as best we can both the uses of language (especially if we detect technical terms) and the historical setting. Expressions can become settled at a later time that are more fluid at an earlier time and we err when we read the later more settled meaning back into the more fluid usage if that is the case. A more recent example would be the use of the words regeneration and sanctification in the Reformers and post-Reformation eras. As best as I can tell from my own reading of John Calvin and some of the scholastics, these words overlap considerably and do not have the later settled significances we are accustomed to. Calvin can speak of sanctification occurring before justification. That may be the result of his twofold blessing understanding of the benefits of redemption and it can be the result of sanctification being used here in a sense that covers what we now refer to as regeneration. This sense is sometimes conveyed in the expression “sanctification begun.” And regeneration can be thought of in terms of an ongoing lifelong work of the Holy Spirit. So you see a fluidity in technical terms that are more settled in our time. Sensitivity to this difference and development is a must when reading older texts.

Here is Ayres’s summary of the traditional understanding of the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy:

Many summary accounts present the Arian controversy as a dispute over whether or not Christ was divine, initially provoked by a priest called Arius whose teaching angered his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria. Eventually, this traditional account tells us, the controversy extended throughout the century—even after the decisive statements of the Council of Nicaea—because a conspiracy of Arians against the Nicene tradition represented particularly by Athanasius perpetuated Arius’ views. Even when the century is understood as one of evolution in doctrine, scholars continue to talk as if there were a clear continuity among non-Nicene theologians by deploying such labels as Arians, semi-Arians, and neo-Arians. Such presentations are misleading in two very important ways (13).

Organicism

Before we look at Ayres’s reasons for suggesting the traditional account is misleading, I want to note what he is getting at. Ayres is saying that this controversy was not about settled theological parties simply warring with one another. There was movement, misunderstanding, and conventional ways of thinking and formulating doctrine that fluctuated. It was not a matter of development as neat straight-lined progress. Is Ayres dissenting from the view advocated by John Henry Cardinal Newman in his essay on the development of doctrine and elsewhere? These comments toward the end of the book suggest this may be partially so:

Over the last two hundred years these questions have been faced through a variety of theories of doctrinal development. The emergence of these theories is in many ways another part of the story of modern theology’s appropriation of Hegelianism and Romanticism. This can be seen most clearly in the ways that such theories have tended to use ‘vitalist’ metaphors likening the development of doctrine to the growth of an organism. It is frequently noticed, of course, that the theories of development seen in the nineteenth-century Tübingen school and in such figures as John Henry Newman are attempts to hold together the reality of growing attention to historical development with the need to show the continuity of Christian teaching in a Catholic context. Those theories that were not broadly vitalist in this way (especially Thomist models from the first half of the twentieth century) have tended to work on a rationalist model in which the earliest deposit of Christian faith was seen as the foundation for the developed faith of later centuries, broader propositional content being slowly deduced from logical principles. In liberal Protestant contexts development could of course much more easily be seen as a basic story of departure from an original kernel or the carrying of that kernel through history with various accretions (426).

Ayres is not dealing merely with the nature of developmentalism (organicism in 19^th century terminology) in that it was often viewed as the movement from the acorn to the oak tree. Ayres, as a Roman Catholic, desires to hold together a historical sensibility and a trust in sacred texts and their interpretation by revered theologians and biblical scholars. These are not questions limited to Roman Catholics with their views of the relation of Scripture to tradition which we as Protestant Reformed folk would dissent from. The question of the nature of doctrinal development and the relationship of Scripture to tradition is a live issue for us as well. I am not sure we need to set the logical deduction of doctrine by good and necessary consequence from Scripture against a robust recognition of the complex nature of the historical development of doctrine. How else would one be able to assess whether historical changes in doctrine are in fact advances and not backtracks or other kinds of errors? I doubt Ayres would advocate the pitting of reason against historical understanding unless he assumes rationalism and/or historicism. That is, rationalism is the idea that the human mind can determine all reality without divine revelation. Sir Arthur Eddington once said “what my net can’t catch ain’t fish.” That is unvarnished rationalism. Historicism is the view that all of reality can be reduced to the historical setting in which some text was written. It tends to be anti-supernatural and there is no room for divine activity. History is the record of human activity only. Ayres is clearly critical of the influence of Hegel on historiography. That is certainly salient. Hegel (and Romanticism more generally) viewed everything (so it seems) through the lens of gradualism/developmentalism/evolutionism. We will return to this when we come to the end of the book. Just remember that this is one of Ayres’s concerns throughout the book. Historical development is often a two steps forward, one step back kind of experience (or more realistically, a one step forward and two steps back reality).

Back to the two reasons why the neat and clean view of doctrinal development as applied to the fourth-century Trinitarian conflict is misleading. The first reason this approach is misleading is that it treats the Arians as a cohesive party (13). As Ayres points out, many painted with the label Arian protested their ignorance of his writings. These theologians may have shared common characteristics unrelated to any connection with Arius. We shall see. The second reason why the organicist reading of doctrinal development errs with regard to this controversy is that it was not a simple dispute over whether Christ was divine (14). There were different ways of understanding this question and it is arguable whether this was even a major question in the overall controversy. So says Ayres.

Theological Grammar

Ayres offers a helpful definition of grammar: “a set of rules or principles intrinsic to theological discourse, whether or not they are formally articulated” (14). This is a key to properly assessing the meaning and significance of a historical text or artifact. One example of this is that there was the possibility of understanding degrees of deity. A theologian might argue for the Son as God but not as “true God” (14). Sensitivity to these realities makes our investigation more realistic and accurate. We ought to aim for accuracy in understanding texts. I do not buy into the postmodern reader response theory approach to handling texts. Texts have authors and authors intend to communicate something. This is not to ignore the fact that sometimes human authors fail to adequately convey their meaning. Sometimes traditions of misunderstanding arise and gain hegemony. Scripture is free of the failure to communicate because of divine inspiration (this says nothing about adequate spiritual receptivity as that is a different matter).

Going Forward

Ayres sets out to discuss the origins of the Trinitarian dispute along the following lines which will be unpacked over the next several posts: (1) Ayres will consider events involving Arius up to the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325. (2) Ayres will then consider the theological legacy of the church father Origen. (3) Then Ayres will examine the exegesis between the time of Origen and the late fourth century. Finally, (4) Ayres will look at the varieties of theological trajectories existing in “tension” when the fourth century commenced (15). Ayres wants to relativize the importance of the first point (the traditional interpretation) along the following lines:

One of my goals in offering this fourth point of departure is to relativize the first: the controversy surrounding Arius was an epiphenomenon of widespread existing tensions and understanding those tensions is essential to understanding how the controversy developed in the decades that followed (15).

Perhaps another way to say this is to say Arius has become a convenient catch-all symbol of the tensions that existed in the church of the fourth century. The tensions were apparently there whether Arius had happened upon the stage of history. Or we might say that Arius reflected theological sensibilities already in place or in development before his time.

This will be a very interesting study. I hope you all are able to follow along. As I said on another occasion, this is a dense book. We are dealing with texts written in an age other than our own (yes, Charlie Dennison, I know we live in the same redemptive historical age as the fourth-century church fathers!) and it is easy to gloss (and here I have absorbed the special meaning of the word “gloss” held by one of my august seminary professors who shall remain nameless-to gloss a text is to read it in a facile manner) texts from another culture and language and historical context.

In my next post I will begin to look at the four points outlined above.

I dedicate this post to my most favorite Christian blogger of all time—Lane G. Tipton.