The church and its history » God the Father
On the basis of their religious experiences, the mystics of Christianity
of all eras have concurred in the belief that one can make no assertions
about God, because God is beyond all concepts and images. Inasmuch as
human beings are gifted with reason, however, the religious experience
of transcendence demands historical clarification. Thus, in Christian
theology two tendencies stand in constant tension with each other. On
the one hand, there is the tendency to systematize the idea of God as
far as possible. On the other, there is the tendency to eliminate the
accumulated collection of current conceptions of God and to return to
the understanding of his utter transcendence. Theologians, by and large,
have had to acknowledge the limits of human reason and language to
address the “character” of God, who is beyond normal human experience
but who impinges on it. But because of the divine–human contact, it
became necessary and possible for them to make some assertions about the
experience, the disclosure, and the character of God.
All great epochs of the history of Christianity are defined by new
forms of the experience of God and of Christ. Rudolf Otto, a
20th-century German theologian, attempted to describe to some extent the
basic ways of experiencing the transcendence of the “holy.” He called
these the experience of the “numinous” (the spiritual dimension), the
utterly ineffable, the holy, and the overwhelming. The “holy” is
manifested in a double form: as the mysterium tremendum (“mystery that
repels”), in which the dreadful, fearful, and overwhelming aspect of the
numinous appears, and as the mysterium fascinosum (“mystery that
attracts”), by which humans are irresistibly drawn to the glory, beauty,
adorable quality, and the blessing, redeeming, and salvation-bringing
power of transcendence. All of these features are present in the
Christian concepts of God as explicated in the ever new experiences of
the charismatic leaders.
The church and its history » God the Father » Characteristic features of
the Christian concept of God
Within the Christian perception and experience of God, characteristic
features stand out: (1) the personality of God, (2) God as the Creator,
(3) God as the Lord of history, and (4) God as Judge. (1) God, as
person, is the “I am who I am” designated in Exodus 3:14. The personal
consciousness of human beings awakens in the encounter with God
understood as a person: “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face,
as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11). (2) God is also viewed as
the Creator of heaven and Earth. The believer thus maintains, on the one
hand, acknowledgement of divine omnipotence as the creative power of
God, which also operates in the preservation of the world, and, on the
other hand, trusts in the world, which—despite all its contradictions—is
understood as one world created by God according to definite laws and
principles and according to an inner plan. The decisive aspect of
creation, however, is that God fashioned humans according to the divine
image and made the creation subject to them. This special position of
humans in the creation, which makes them coworkers of God in the
preservation and consummation of the creation, brings a decisively new
characteristic into the understanding of God. (3) This new
characteristic is God as the Lord of history, which is the main feature
of the Old Testament understanding of God: God selects a special people
and contracts a special covenant with them. Through the Law the divine
agent binds this “people of God” in a special way. God sets before them
a definite goal of salvation—the establishment of a divine dominion—and
through the prophets admonishes the people by proclamations of salvation
and calamity whenever they are unfaithful to the covenant and promise.
(4) This God of history also is the God of judgment. The Israelite
belief that the disclosure of God comes through the history of
divinely-led people leads, with an inner logic, to the proclamation of
God as the Lord of world history and as the Judge of the world.
The church and its history » God the Father » The specific concept of
God as Father
What is decisively new in the Christian, New Testament faith in God lies
in the fact that this faith is so closely bound up with the person,
teaching, and work of Jesus Christ that it is difficult to draw
boundaries between theology (doctrines of God) and Christology
(doctrines of Christ). The special relationship of Jesus to God is
expressed through his designation of God as Father. In prayers Jesus
used the Aramaic word abba (“father”) for God, which is otherwise
unusual in religious discourse in Judaism; it was usually employed by
children for their earthly father. This father–son relationship became a
prototype for the relationship of Christians to God. Appeal to the
sonship of God played a crucial role in the development of Jesus’
messianic self-understanding. According to the account of Jesus’
baptism, Jesus understood his sonship when a voice from heaven said:
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” In The Gospel
According to John, this sonship constitutes the basis for the
self-consciousness of Jesus: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
The church and its history » God the Father » The belief in the oneness
of the Father and the Son
Faith in the Son also brought about a oneness with the Father. The Son
became the mediator of the glory of the Father to those who believe in
him. In Jesus’ high priestly prayer (in John, chapter 17) he says: “The
glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be
one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become
perfectly one.” In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus taught his disciples to
address God as “our Father.”
The Father-God of Jesus after Jesus’ death and Resurrection
becomes—for his disciples—the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
(e.g., 2 Corinthians 1:3), who revealed his love through the sacrifice
of his Son who was sent into the world. Faithful Christians can thus
become the children of God, as noted in Revelation 21:7: “I will be his
God and he shall be my son.” For Christians, therefore, faith in God is
not a doctrine to be detached from the person of Jesus Christ.
Medieval theologians often spoke of a “Beatific Vision,” a blessed
vision of God. In the history of Christian mysticism, this visionary
experience of the transpersonal “Godhead” behind the personal “God” (as
in the works of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart)—also called an
experience of the “trans-deity,” the “divine ground,” “groundlessness,”
the “abyss,” and the divine “nothingness”—constantly breaks through and
is renewed. Occasionally, this experience of transpersonal divine
transcendence has directed itself against the development of a piety
that has banalized the personal idea of God so much so that the glory
and holiness of God has been trivialized. The attempt of the
20th-century theologian Paul Tillich to reduce the Christian idea of God
to the impersonal concept of “the Ground of Being,” or “Being Itself,”
pointed toward an understanding of the pre-personal depths of the
transcendence of Godhood.
Nevertheless, in the Christian understanding of Christ as being one
with the Father, there is a possibility that faith in God will be
absorbed in a “monochristism”—i.e., that the figure of the Son in the
life of faith will overshadow the figure of the Father and thus cause it
to disappear and that the figure of the Creator and Sustainer of the
world will recede behind the figure of the Redeemer. Thus, the primacy
of Christology and of the doctrine of justification in Reformation
theology led to a depreciation of the creation doctrine and a Christian
cosmology. This depreciation accelerated the estrangement between
theology and the sciences during the period of the Enlightenment. This
was subsequently distorted into a form of materialism. On the other
hand, some 20th-century dialectical theologians, among them Karl Barth,
in opposing materialism and humanism sometimes evoked a monochristic
character that strongly accented the centrality of Christ at the expense
of some cultural ties.
The church and its history » God the Father » The view that God is not
solitary
The leaders of an 18th-century movement called Deism saw God as
impersonal and unempathic—a principle of order and agent of
responsibility not personal or addressable as the Christian God had
been. Deism contributed to some intellectualizations of the idea of God,
approaches that had sometimes appeared in the more sterile forms of
medieval Scholasticism. God appeared to have been withdrawn from
creation, which was pictured as a world machine; this God, at best,
observed its running but never interfered.
According to the original Christian understanding of God of the early
church, the Middle Ages, and the Reformation, God neither is solitary
nor wishes to be alone. Instead, God is encircled with a boundless realm
of angels, created in the divine image. They surround God in freely
expressed love and devotion. They appear in a graduated, individuated
hierarchy. These ranks of angels offer God their praise, and they appear
active in the universe as messengers and executors of the divine will.
From the beginning God appears as the ruler and centre in this divinely
fashioned realm, and the first created of this realm are the angels. The
church of the angels is the upper church; the earthly church joins with
them in the “cherubic hymn,” the Trisagion (“Holy, Holy, Holy”), at the
epiphany of the Lord and with the angelic choirs surrounding him in the
Eucharist. The earthly church is thus viewed as a
participant—co-liturgist—in the angelic liturgy. Because the angels are
created as free spiritual beings in accordance with the image of God,
the first fall takes place in their midst—the first misuse of freedom
was in the rebellion of the highest prince of the angels, Lucifer
(“Light-bearer”), against God.
According to the view of Christian thinkers from the early Fathers to
the reformers of the 16th century, humans are only the second-created.
The creation of human beings serves to refill the Kingdom of God with
new spiritual creatures who are capable of offering to God the free love
that the rebellious angels have refused to continue. In the realm of the
first-created creatures, there already commences the problem of evil,
which appears immediately in freedom or the misuse of freedom.
The church and its history » God the Father » Modern views of God
If 18th- and 19th-century rationalism and scientific attacks on the idea
of God were often called “the first Enlightenment” or “the first
illumination,” in the 20th century a set of trends appeared that
represented, to a broader public, a “second illumination.” This included
a rescue of the idea of God, even if it was not always compatible with
previous Christian interpretations. Some notable scientists of the 20th
century, such as Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Max Born, and others,
allowed—on occasion, and against the testimony of the majority of their
colleagues—for an idea of God or religion in their concepts of life, the
universe, and human beings.
When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied what he
called “the death of God,” many Christian thinkers agreed that a certain
set of culturally conditioned and dogmatic concepts of God were
inaccessible, implausible, and dying out. Some of these apologists
argued that such a “death of God” was salutary, because it made room for
a “God beyond the gods” of argument, or a “greater God.” The French
Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for a time attracted a large
following as he set out to graft the theory of evolution onto “greater
God” proclamations.
The church and its history » God the Father » Satan and the origin of
evil
In the Bible, especially the New Testament, Satan (the devil) comes to
appear as the representative of evil. Enlightenment thinkers endeavoured
to push the figure of the devil out of Christian consciousness as being
a product of the fantasy of the Middle Ages. It is precisely in this
figure, however, that some aspects of the ways God deals with evil are
especially evident. The devil first appears as an independent figure
alongside God in the Hebrew Scriptures. There evil is still brought into
a direct relationship with God; even evil, insofar as it has power and
life, is effected by God: “I form light and create darkness, I make weal
and create woe, I am the Lord, who do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).
In the Book of Job, Satan appears as the partner of God, who on
behalf of God puts the righteous one to the test. Only in postbiblical
Judaism does the devil become the adversary of God, the prince of
angels, who, created by God and placed at the head of the angelic hosts,
entices some of the angels into revolt against God. In punishment for
his rebellion he is cast from heaven together with his mutinous
entourage, which were transformed into demons. As ruler over the fallen
angels he continues the struggle against the Kingdom of God by seeking
to seduce humans into sin, by trying to disrupt God’s plan for
salvation, and by appearing before God as a slanderer and accuser of
saints, so as to reduce the number of those chosen for the Kingdom of
God.
Thus, Satan is a creature of God, who has his being and essence from
God; he is the partner of God in the drama of the history of salvation;
and he is the rival of God, who fights against God’s plan of salvation.
Through the influence of the dualistic thinking of Zoroastrian religion
during the Babylonian Exile (586–538 bc) in Persia, Satan took on
features of a countergod in late Judaism. In the writings of the Qumran
sects (who preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls), Belial, the “angel of
darkness” and the “spirit of wickedness,” appears as the adversary of
the “prince of luminaries” and the “spirit of truth.” The conclusion of
the history of salvation is the eschatological battle of the prince of
luminaries against Belial, which ends with judgment upon him, his
angels, and people subject to him and ushers in the cessation of “worry,
groaning, and wickedness” and the beginning of the rule of “truth.”
In the New Testament the features of an anti-godly power are clearly
prominent in the figures of the devil, Satan, Belial, and Beelzebub—the
“enemy.” He is the accuser, the evil one, the tempter, the old snake,
the great dragon, the prince of this world, and the god of this world,
who seeks to hinder the establishment of God’s dominion through the life
and suffering of Jesus Christ. Satan offers to give to Christ the riches
of this world if Christ will acknowledge him as supreme lord. Thus, he
is the real antagonist of the Messiah–Son of man, Christ, who is sent by
God into the world to destroy the works of Satan.
He is lacking, however, the possibility of incarnation: he is left to
rob others in order to procure for himself the appearance of personality
and corporeality. As opposed to philanthrōpia, the love of man of
Christ, who presents himself as an expiatory sacrifice for the sins of
humankind out of love for it, Satan appears among early church teachers,
such as Basil of Caesarea in the 4th century, as the misanthrōpos, the
hater of humanity; vis-à-vis the bringer of heavenly beauty, he is the
hater of beauty, the misokalos. With Gnosticism (a loose collection of
sects or movements that postulated a transcendent god and a lesser,
creator god), dualistic features also penetrated the Christian sphere of
intuitive vision. In the Letter of Barnabas (early 2nd century), Satan
appeared as “the Black One”; according to the 2nd-century apologist
Athenagoras, he is “the one entrusted with the administration of matter
and its forms of appearance,” “the spirit hovering above matter.” Under
the influence of Gnosticism and Manichaeism (a syncretistic religion
founded by Mani, a 3rd-century Persian prophet), there also
followed—based on their dualistic aspects—the demonization of the entire
realm of the sexual. This appears as the special temptational sphere of
the devil; in sexual activity, the role of the instrument of diabolic
enticement devolves upon woman. Dualistic tendencies remained a
permanent undercurrent in the church and determined, to a great extent,
the understanding of sin and redemption. Satan remained the prototype of
sin as the rebel who does not come to terms with fulfilling his
godlikeness in love to his original image and Creator but instead
desires equality with God and places love of self over love of God.
Among the early Church Fathers, the idea of Satan as the antagonist
of Christ led to a mythical interpretation of the incarnation and
disguise in the “form of a servant.” Through this disguise the Son of
God makes his heavenly origin unrecognizable to Satan. In some medieval
depictions Christ appears as the “bait” cast before Satan, after which
Satan grasps because he believes Christ to be an ordinary human being
subject to his power. In the Middle Ages a further feature was added:
the understanding of the devil as the “ape of God,” who attempts to
imitate God through spurious, malicious creations that he interpolates
for, or opposes to, the divine creations.
In the Christian historical consciousness the figure of Satan plays
an important role, not least of all through the influence of the
Revelation to John. The history of salvation is understood as the
history of the struggle between God and the demonic antagonist, who with
constantly new means tries to thwart God’s plan of salvation. The idea
of the “stratagems of Satan,” as developed by a 16th-century fortress
engineer, Giacomo Aconcio, had its roots here. This altercation
constitutes the religious background of the drama of world history.
Characteristic here is the impetus of acceleration already indicated in
Revelation: blow and counterblow in the struggle taking place between
God and Satan follow in ever shorter intervals; for the devil “knows
that his time is short” (Revelation 12:12), and his power in heaven has
already been laid low. On Earth the possibility of his efficacy is
likewise limited by the return of the Lord. Hence, his attacks upon the
elect of the Kingdom so increase in the last times that God is moved to
curtail the days of the final affliction, for “if those days had not
been shortened, no human being would be saved” (Matthew 24:22). Many of
these features were retained in the philosophy of religion of German
idealism as well as in Russian philosophy of religion. According to the
20th-century Russian philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev, like the Germans
Friedrich Schelling and Franz von Baader before him, the devil has no
true personality and no genuine reality and, instead, is filled with an
insatiable “hunger for reality,” which he can attain by stealing reality
from the people of whom he takes possession.
Since the Enlightenment, Christian theologians who found the mythical
pictures of Satan to be irrelevant, distorting, or confusing in
Christian thought and experience have set out to demythologize this
figure. Apologists such as the British literary figure C.S. Lewis and
the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, however, have written
cautionary words against this trend. They conceive that it would
represent the devil’s most cunning attempt at self-camouflage to be
demythologized and that camouflage would be a certain new proof of his
existence.
