The church and its history » God the Son
Dogmatic teachings about the figure of Jesus Christ go back to the faith
experiences of the original church. The faithful of the early church
experienced and recognized the incarnate and resurrected Son of God in
the person of Jesus. The disciples’ testimony served as confirmation for
them that Jesus really is the exalted Lord and Son of God, who sits at
the right hand of the Father and will return in glory to consummate the
Kingdom.
The church and its history » God the Son » The Christological
controversies
As in the area of the doctrine of the Trinity, the general development
of Christology has been characterized by a plurality of views and
formulations. Solutions intermediate between the positions of Antioch
and Alexandria were constantly proposed. During the 5th century the
heresy of Nestorianism, with its strong emphasis upon the human aspects
of Jesus Christ, arose from the Antiochene school, and the heresy of
Monophysitism, with its one-sided stress upon the divine nature of
Christ, emerged from the Alexandrian school. After Constantine, the
first Christian Roman emperor, the great ecumenical synods occupied
themselves essentially with the task of creating uniform formulations
binding upon the entire imperial church. The Council of Chalcedon (451)
finally settled the dispute between Antioch and Alexandria by drawing
from each, declaring: “We all unanimously teach…one and the same Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in deity and perfect in humanity…in two
natures, without being mixed, transmuted, divided, or separated. The
distinction between the natures is by no means done away with through
the union, but rather the identity of each nature is preserved and
concurs into one person and being.”
Even the Christological formulas, however, do not claim to offer a
rational, conceptual clarification; instead, they emphasize clearly
three contentions in the mystery of the sonship of God. These are:
first, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is completely God, that in
reality “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” in him (Colossians
2:9); second, that he is completely human; and third, that these two
“natures” do not exist beside one another in an unconnected way but,
rather, are joined in him in a personal unity. Once again, the
Neoplatonic metaphysics of substance offered the categories so as to
settle conceptually these various theological concerns. Thus, the idea
of the unity of essence (homoousia) of the divine Logos with God the
Father assured the complete divinity of Jesus Christ, and the mystery of
the person of Jesus Christ could be grasped in a complex but decisive
formula: two natures in one person. The concept of person, taken from
Roman law, served to join the fully divine and fully human natures of
Christ into an individual unity.
Christology, however, is not the product of abstract, logical
operations but instead originates in the liturgical and charismatic
sphere wherein Christians engage in prayer, meditation, and asceticism.
Not being derived primarily from abstract teaching, it rather changes
within the liturgy in new forms and in countless hymns of worship—as in
the words of the Easter liturgy:
The king of the heavens appeared on earth out of kindness to man and
it was with men that he associated. For he took his flesh from a pure
virgin and he came forth from her, in that he accepted it. One is the
Son, two-fold in essence, but not in person. Therefore in announcing him
as in truth perfect God and perfect man, we confess Christ our God.
The church and its history » God the Son » Messianic views
Faith in Jesus Christ is related in the closest way to faith in the
Kingdom of God, the coming of which he proclaimed and introduced.
Christian eschatological expectations, for their part, were joined with
the messianic promises, which underwent a decisive transformation and
differentiation in late Judaism, especially in the two centuries just
before the appearance of Jesus. Two basic types can be distinguished as
influencing the messianic self-understanding of Jesus as well as the
faith of his disciples.
The traditional Jewish view of the fulfillment of the history of
salvation was guided by the idea that at the end of history the messiah
will come from the house of David and establish the Kingdom of God—an
earthly kingdom in which the Anointed of the Lord will gather the tribes
of the chosen people and from Jerusalem will establish a world kingdom
of peace. Accordingly, the expectation of the Kingdom had an explicitly
inner-worldly character. The expectation of an earthly messiah as the
founder of a Jewish kingdom became the strongest impulse for political
revolutions, primarily against Hellenistic and Roman dominion. The
period preceding the appearance of Jesus was filled with uprisings in
which new messianic personalities appeared and claimed for themselves
and their struggles for liberation the miraculous powers of the Kingdom
of God. Especially in Galilee, guerrilla groups were formed in which
hope for a better future blazed all the more fiercely because the
present was so unpromising.
Jesus disappointed the political expectations of these popular
circles; he did not let himself be made a political messiah. Conversely,
it was his opponents who used the political misinterpretation of his
person to destroy him. Jesus was condemned and executed by the Roman
authorities as a Jewish rioter who rebelled against Roman sovereignty.
The inscription on the cross, “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews,”
cited the motif of political insurrection of a Jewish messianic king
against the Roman government as the official reason for his condemnation
and execution.
Alongside worldly or political messianism there was a second form of
eschatological expectation. Its supporters were the pious groups in the
country, the Essenes and the Qumran community on the Dead Sea. Their
yearning was directed not toward an earthly messiah but toward a
heavenly one, who would bring not an earthly but a heavenly kingdom.
These pious ones wanted to know nothing of sword and struggle, uprising
and rebellion. They believed that the wondrous power of God alone would
create the new time. The birth of a new eon would be preceded by intense
trials and tribulations and a frightful judgment upon the godless, the
pagan peoples, and Satan with his demonic powers. The messiah would come
not as an earthly king from the house of David but as a heavenly figure,
as the Son of God, a heavenly being, who would descend into the world of
the Evil One and there gather his own to lead them back into the realm
of light. He would take up dominion of the world and, after overcoming
all earthly and supernatural demonic powers, lay the entire cosmos at
the feet of God.
A second new feature, anticipation of the Resurrection, was coupled
with this transcending of the old expectation. According to traditional
Jewish eschatological expectation, the beneficiaries of the divine
development of the world would be only the members of the last
generation of humanity who were fortunate enough to experience the
arrival of the messiah upon Earth; all earlier generations would be
consumed with the longing for fulfillment but would die without
experiencing it. Ancient Judaism knew no hope of resurrection. In
connection with the transcending of the expectation of the Kingdom of
God, however, even anticipations of resurrection voiced earlier by
Zoroastrianism were achieved: the Kingdom of God was to include within
itself in the state of resurrection all the faithful of every generation
of humanity. Even the faithful of the earlier generations would find in
resurrection the realization of their faith. In the new eon the
Messiah–Son of man would rule over the resurrected faithful of all times
and all peoples. A characteristic breaking free of the eschatological
expectation was thereby presented. It no longer referred exclusively to
the Jews alone; with its transcendence a universalistic feature entered
into it.
Jesus—in contrast to John the Baptist (a preacher of repentance who
pointed to the coming bringer of the Kingdom)—knew himself to be the one
who brought fulfillment of the Kingdom itself, because the wondrous
powers of the Kingdom of God were already at work in him. He proclaimed
the good news that the long promised Kingdom was already dawning, that
the consummation was here. This is what was new: the promised Kingdom,
supra-worldly, of the future, the coming new eon, already reached
redeemingly into the this-worldly from its beyond-ness, as a charismatic
reality that brought people together in a new community.
Jesus did not simply transfer to himself the promise of heavenly Son
of man, as it was articulated in the apocryphal First Book of Enoch.
Instead, he gave this expectation of the Son of man an entirely new
interpretation. Pious Jewish circles, such as the Enoch community and
other pietist groups, expected in the coming Son of man a figure of
light from on high, a heavenly conquering hero, with all the marks of
divine power and glory. Jesus, however, linked expectations of the Son
of man with the figure of the suffering servant of God (as in Isaiah,
chapter 53). He would return in glory as the consummator of the Kingdom.
The church and its history » God the Son » The doctrine of the Virgin
Mary and holy Wisdom
The dogma of the Virgin Mary as the “mother of God” and “bearer of God”
is connected in the closest way with the dogma of the incarnation of the
divine Logos. The theoretical formation of doctrine did not bring the
veneration of the mother of God along in its train; instead, the
doctrine only reflected the unusually great role that this veneration
already had taken on at an early date in the liturgy and in the church
piety of orthodox faithful.
The expansion of the veneration of the Virgin Mary as the bearer of
God (Theotokos) and the formation of the corresponding dogma comprise
one of the most astonishing occurrences in the history of the early
church. The New Testament offers only scanty points of departure for
this development. Although she has a prominent place in the narratives
of the Nativity and the Passion of Christ, Mary completely recedes
behind the figure of Jesus, who stands in the centre of all four
Gospels. From the Gospels themselves it can be recognized that Jesus’
development into the preacher of the Kingdom of God took place in sharp
opposition to his family, who were so little convinced of his mission
that they held him to be insane (Mark 3:21); in a later passage Jesus
refuses to recognize them (Mark 3:31). Accordingly, all the Gospels
stress the fact that Jesus separated himself from his family. Even The
Gospel According to John still preserved traces of Jesus’ tense
relationship with his mother. Mary appears twice without being called by
name the mother of Jesus; and Jesus himself regularly withholds from her
the designation of mother.
Nevertheless, with the conception of Jesus Christ as the Son of God,
a tendency developed early in the church to grant to the mother of the
Son of God a special place within the church. This development was
sketched quite hesitantly in the New Testament. Only the Gospels of
Matthew and Luke mention the virgin birth. On these scanty
presuppositions the later veneration of the mother of God was developed.
The view of the virgin birth entered into the creed of all Christianity
and became one of the strongest religious impulses in the development of
the dogma, liturgy, and ecclesiastical piety of the early church.
Veneration of the mother of God received its impetus when the
Christian Church became the imperial church. Despite the lack of detail
concerning Mary in the Gospels, cultic veneration of the divine virgin
and mother found within the Christian Church a new possibility of
expression in the worship of Mary as the virgin mother of God, in whom
was achieved the mysterious union of the divine Logos with human nature.
The spontaneous impulse of popular piety, which pushed in this
direction, moved far in advance of the practice and doctrine of the
church. In Egypt, Mary was, at an early point, already worshiped under
the title of Theotokos—an expression that Origen used in the 3rd
century. The Council of Ephesus (431) raised this designation to a
dogmatic standard. To the latter, the second Council of Constantinople
(553) added the title “eternal Virgin.” In the prayers and hymns of the
Orthodox Church the name of the mother of God is invoked as often as is
the name of Christ and the Holy Trinity.
The doctrine of the heavenly Wisdom (Sophia) represents an Eastern
Church particularity. In late Judaism, speculations about the heavenly
Wisdom—a figure beside God that presents itself to humanity as mediator
in the work of creation as well as mediator of the knowledge of
God—abounded. In Roman Catholic doctrine, Mary, the mother of God, was
identified with the figure of the divine Wisdom. To borrow a term used
in Christology to describe Jesus as being of the same substance
(hypostasis) as the Father, Mary was seen as possessing a divine
hypostasis.
This process of treating Mary and the heavenly Wisdom alike did not
take place in the realm of the Eastern Orthodox Church. For all its
veneration of the mother of God, the Eastern Orthodox Church never
forgot that the root of this veneration lay in the incarnation of the
divine Logos that took place through her. Accordingly, in the tradition
of Orthodox theology, a specific doctrine of the heavenly Wisdom,
Sophianism, is found alongside the doctrine of the mother of God. This
distinction between the mother of God and the heavenly Sophia in
20th-century Russian philosophy of religion (in the works of Vladimir
Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, W.N. Iljin, and Sergey Bulgakov) developed a
special Sophianism. Sophianism did, however, evoke the opposition of
Orthodox academic theology. The numerous great churches of Hagia Sophia,
foremost among them the cathedral by that name in Constantinople
(Istanbul), are consecrated to this figure of the heavenly Wisdom.
The church and its history » God the Holy Spirit » Contradictory aspects
of the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit is one of the most elusive and difficult themes in
Christian theology, because it refers to one of the three persons in the
Godhead but does not evoke concrete images the way “Father” or “Creator”
and “Son” or “Redeemer” do. A characteristic view of the Holy Spirit is
sketched in The Gospel According to John: the outpouring of the Holy
Spirit takes place only after the Ascension of Christ; it is the
beginning of a new time of salvation, in which the Holy Spirit is sent
as the Paraclete (Counsellor) to the church remaining behind in this
world. The phenomena described in John, which are celebrated in the
church at Pentecost, are understood as the fulfillment of this promise.
With this event (Pentecost), the church entered into the period of the
Holy Spirit.
The essence of the expression of the Holy Spirit is free spontaneity.
The Spirit blows like the wind, “where it wills,” but where it blows it
establishes a firm norm by virtue of its divine authority. The spirit of
prophecy and the spirit of knowledge (gnōsis) are not subject to the
will of the prophet; revelation of the Spirit in the prophetic word or
in the word of knowledge becomes Holy Scripture, which as “divinely
breathed” “cannot be broken” and lays claim to a lasting validity for
the church.
The Spirit, which is expressed in the various officeholders of the
church, likewise founds the authority of ecclesiastical offices. The
laying on of hands, as a sign of the transference of the Holy Spirit
from one person to another, is a characteristic ritual that visibly
represents and guarantees the continuity of the working of the Spirit in
the officeholders chosen by the Apostles. It is, in other words, the
sacramental sign of the succession of the full power of spiritual
authority of bishops and priests. The Holy Spirit also creates the
sacraments and guarantees the constancy of their action in the church.
All the expressions of church life—doctrine, office, polity, sacraments,
power to loosen and to bind, and prayer—are understood as endowed by the
Spirit.
The Holy Spirit, however, is also the revolutionizing, freshly
creating principle in church history. All the reformational movements in
church history, which broke with old institutions, have appealed to the
authority of the Holy Spirit. Opposition to the church—through appeal to
the Holy Spirit—became noticeable for the first time in Montanism, in
the mid-2nd century. Montanus, a Phrygian prophet and charismatic
leader, understood himself and the prophetic movement sustained by him
as the fulfillment of the promise of the coming of the Paraclete. In the
13th century a spiritualistic countermovement against the institutional
church gained attention anew in Joachim of Fiore, who understood the
history of salvation in terms of a continuing self-realization of the
divine Trinity in the three times of salvation: (1) the time of the
Father, (2) the time of the Son, and (3) the time of the Holy Spirit. He
promised the speedy beginning of the period of the Holy Spirit, in which
the institutional papal church, with its sacraments and its revelation
hardened in the letter of scripture, would be replaced by a community of
charismatic figures, filled with the Spirit, and by the time of
“spiritual knowledge.” This promise became the spiritual stimulus of a
series of revolutionary movements within the medieval church—e.g., the
reform movement of the radical Franciscan spirituals. Their effects
extended to the Hussite reform movement led by Jan Hus in 15th-century
Bohemia and to the 16th-century radical reformer, Thomas Müntzer, who
substantiated his revolution against the princes and clerical hierarchs
with a new outpouring of the Spirit. Quakerism represents the most
radical mode of rejection—carried out in the name of the freedom of the
Holy Spirit—of all institutional forms, which are regarded as shackles
and prisons of the Holy Spirit. In the 20th century a revival of
charismatic forms of Christianity, called Pentecostalism and the
charismatic movement, centred on the recovery of the experience of the
Holy Spirit and necessitated some fresh theological inquiry about the
subject.
The church and its history » God the Holy Spirit » Conflict between
order and charismatic freedom
As the uncontrollable principle of life in the church, the Holy Spirit
considerably upset Christian congregations from the very outset. Paul
struggled to restrict the anarchist elements, which are connected with
the appearance of free charismata (spiritual phenomena), and, over
against these, to achieve a firm order in the church. Paul at times
attempted to control and even repress charismatic activities, which he
seemed to regard as irrational or prerational and thus potentially
disruptive of fellowship. Among these were glossolalia, or speaking in
tongues, a form of unrepressed speech. Paul preferred rational discourse
in sermons. He also felt that spontaneity threatened the focus of
worship, even though he himself claimed to possess this gift in
extraordinary measure and the Apostles spoke in tongues at Pentecost.
This tendency led to an emphasis on ecclesiastical offices with their
limited authority vis-à-vis the uncontrolled appearance of free
charismatic figures.
The conflict between church leadership resident in the locality and
the appearance of free charismatic figures in the form of itinerant
preachers forms the main motif of the oldest efforts to establish church
order. This difficulty became evident in the Didachē, the Teaching of
the Twelve Apostles (early 2nd century). The authority of the Holy
Spirit, in whose name the free charismatic figures claim to speak, does
not allow its instructions and prophecies to be criticized in terms of
contents; its evaluation had to be made dependent upon purely ethical
qualifications. This tension ended, in practical terms, with the
exclusion of the free charismatic figures from the leadership of the
church. The charismatic continuation of the revelation, in the form of
new scriptures of revelation, was also checked. In the long historical
process during which the Christian biblical canon took shape, Bishop
Athanasius of Alexandria, in his 39th Easter letter (367), selected the
number of writings—of apostolic origin—that he considered “canonical.”
Revelation in the form of Holy Scriptures binding for the Christian
faith was thereby considered definitively concluded and, therefore,
could no longer be changed, abridged, or supplemented.
The church creeds reflect little of these struggles and suppress the
revolutionary principle of the Holy Spirit. Neither the so-called
Apostles’ Creed nor the Nicene Creed goes beyond establishment of faith
in the Holy Spirit and its participation in the incarnation. In the
Nicene Creed, however, the Holy Spirit is also described as the
life-creating power—i.e., the power both of creation and of rebirth—and
is identified as having already spoken through the prophets.
The emergence of Trinitarian speculations in early church theology
led to great difficulties in the article about the “person” of the Holy
Spirit. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit appeared more as power than
as person, though there was distinctive personal representation in the
form of the dove at Jesus’ baptism. But it was difficult to incorporate
this graphic or symbolic representation into dogmatic theology.
Nevertheless, the idea of the complete essence (homoousia) of the Holy
Spirit with the Father and the Son was achieved through the writings of
Athanasius. This was in opposition to all earlier attempts to
subordinate the Holy Spirit to the Son and to the Father and to
interpret the Spirit—similarly to anti-Trinitarian Christology—as a
prince of the angels. According to Athanasius, the Holy Spirit alone
guarantees the complete redemption of humanity: “through participation
in the Holy Spirit we partake of the divine nature.” In his work De
Trinitate (“On the Trinity”), Augustine undertook to render the essence
of the Trinity understandable in terms of the Trinitarian structure of
the human person: the Holy Spirit appears as the Spirit of love, which
joins Father and Son and draws people into this communion of love. In
Eastern Orthodox thought, however, the Holy Spirit and the Son both
proceed from the Father. In the West, the divine Trinity is determined
more by the idea of the inner Trinitarian life in God; thus, the notion
was carried through that the Holy Spirit goes forth from the Father and
from the Son. Despite all the efforts of speculative theology, a graphic
conception of the person of the Holy Spirit was not developed even later
in the consciousness of the church.
The church and its history » God the Holy Spirit » The operations of the
Holy Spirit
For the Christian faith, the Holy Spirit is clearly recognizable in
charismatic figures (the saints), in whom the gifts of grace
(charismata) of the Holy Spirit are expressed in different forms:
reformers and other charismatic figures. The prophet, for instance,
belongs to these charismatic types. The history of the church knows a
continuous series of prophetic types, beginning with New Testament
prophets, such as Agabus (in Acts 11:28), and continuing with the
12th-century monk Bernard of Clairvaux and such reformers as Luther and
Calvin. Christoph Kotter and Nicolaus Drabicius—prophets of the Thirty
Years’ War period—were highly praised by the 17th-century Moravian
bishop John Amos Comenius. Other prophets have existed in Pietism,
Puritanism, and the Free churches.
Prophetic women are especially numerous. In church history they begin
with Anna (in Luke 2:36) and the prophetic daughters of the apostle
Philip. Others are: Hildegard of Bingen, Bridget of Sweden, Joan of Arc,
and the prophetic women of the Reformation period. In the modern world
numbers of pioneers in the “holiness” and Pentecostal traditions, such
as Aimee Semple McPherson, were women, and women’s gifts of prophecy
have sometimes been cherished among Pentecostalists when they were
overlooked or disdained by much of the rest of Christianity.
A further type of charismatic person is the healer, who functioned in
the early church as an exorcist but who also emerged as a charismatic
type in healing personalities of more recent church history (e.g.,
Vincent de Paul in the 17th century). Equally significant is the
curer-of-souls type, who exercises the gift of “distinguishing between
spirits” in daily association with people. This gift is believed to have
been possessed by many of the great saints of all times. In the 19th
century it stands out in Johann Christoph Blumhardt, in Protestantism,
and in Jean-Baptiste Vianney, the curé of Ars, in Roman Catholicism.
The “holy fool” type conceals a radical Christianity under the mask
of foolishness and holds the truth of the gospel, in the disguise of
folly, before the eyes of highly placed personalities: the worldly and
the princes of the church who do not brook unmasked truth. This type,
which frequently appeared in the Byzantine Church, has been represented
especially in Western Christianity by Philip Neri, the founder of the
religious order known as the Oratorians, in the 16th century.
The charismatic teacher (didaskalos), on the other hand, still
appears. Filled with the spirit of intelligence or knowledge of the Holy
Spirit, he carries out his teaching office, which does not necessarily
need to be attached to an academic position. Many Free Church and
ecclesiastical reform movements owe their genesis to such spirit-filled
teachers, who are often decried as anomalous. The deacon likewise is
originally the holder of a charismatic office of selfless service.
Christian service, or diakonia, was not confined to Christian offices.
Some of the energies that once went into it are now found in social
service outside the church. Many of the agents of such service were
originally or still may be inspired by Christian norms and examples in
the care of the sick and the socially outcast or overlooked. Alongside
such men as the Pietist August Hermann Francke, the Methodist John
Wesley, Johann Wichern (the founder of the Inner Mission in Germany),
and Friederich von Bodelschwingh (the founder of charitable
institutions), important women have appeared as bearers of this charisma
(e.g., the English nurse Florence Nightingale and the Salvation Army
leader Catherine Booth).
The Holy Spirit that “blows where it wills” has often been recognized
as the impulse behind an enlargement of roles for women in the church.
However limited these have been, they enlarged upon those that
Christians inherited from Judaism. Partitions had screened women in a
special left-hand section of the synagogue. While the pace of innovation
was irregular, in the ecstatic worship services of the Christian
congregations women tended to participate in speaking in tongues, hymns,
prayer calls, or even prophecies. Evidently, this innovation was held
admissible on the basis of the authority of the Holy Spirit: “Do not
quench the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). Inasmuch as the appearance of
charismatic women upset traditional concepts, however, Paul reverted to
the synagogal principle and inhibited the speaking role of women: “the
women should keep silence in the churches.” (1 Corinthians 14:34).
Because expressions of free charisma were increasingly suppressed in
the institutional churches, the emergence of Pentecostal movements
outside the institutional churches and partly in open opposition to them
arose. This movement led to the founding of various Pentecostal Free
churches at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th;
it is represented through numerous independent Pentecostal groups, such
as the Church of God and the Assemblies of God. At first scorned by the
established churches, the Pentecostal movement has grown to a world
movement with strong missionary activity not only in Africa and South
America but also Europe. In the United States, a strong influence of the
Pentecostal movement—which has returned high esteem to the
proto-Christian charismata of speaking in tongues, healing, and
exorcism—is noticeable even in the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and
Anglican churches. This has occurred especially in liturgy and church
music but also in preaching style and the return to faith healing.
