Austin Farrer makes the simple observation that “What was expressed in human terms here below was not bare deity; it was divine sonship.” Then he adds this beautiful passage: “God cannot live an identically godlike life in eternity and in a human story. But the divine Son can make . . . . Continue Reading »
Susanna Wesley thought Aristotle mistaken for positing eternal matter, but she thought that Aristotle was driven to this conclusion by the true supposition that “a true notion of the goodness of God” must lead to an idea that God “must eternally be communicating good to something . . . . Continue Reading »
As Robert Jenson and Michel Rene Barnes have emphasized, Gregory of Nyssa’s theology (in, eg, Against Eunomius ) centers on a meditation on God’s infinity. Greeks were reluctant to say that God is infinite, since an infinite thing cannot, by Hellenic lights, have a nature. A nature is . . . . Continue Reading »
Augustine’s argument against the Athanasian use of 1 Corinthians 1;24 is that if Christ is the Wisdom and Power of God in the fullest sense, then the Father has no wisdom or power of His own. The Son would not be “wisdom from wisdom, power from power,” and that might imply too . . . . Continue Reading »
At the beginning of Book 6 of de Trinitate , Augustine begins to examine 1 Corinthians 1:24: Christ is the Wisdom and Power of God. Throughout Books 6 and 7, he asks whether this means that the Father possesses His Wisdom “relatively,” that is, in the Son, or absolutely in se . At the . . . . Continue Reading »
Augustine is often charged with a quasi-unitarian, quasi-modalistdoctrine of God. The one substance so dominates the three Persons that the latter are reduced to inflections or operations of what amounts to a single divine Person. Augustine’s discussion of substance, accidents, and relation . . . . Continue Reading »
Gregory of Nazianzus again. He argues that “unbegotten-begotten” point to personal characteristics rather than substance, what Augustine later distinguishes with “substance” and “relation.” In the course of the argument, he makes two puzzling provocative . . . . Continue Reading »
Gregory of Nazianzus has this clever little argument for the equality of Father and Son in the Third Theological Oration. He responds to the Arian argument that Augustine also deals with: a) God is simple, and has no accidents; b) therefore, every statement about God speaks of substance; c) since . . . . Continue Reading »
The more seriously one takes the evangelical claim that God suffers the condemnation of humanity in Jesus, “the stronger becomes the temptation to approximate to the view of a contradiction and conflict in God Himself.” So says Barth. Yet Barth with equal vehemence rejects the notion of . . . . Continue Reading »
Barth says or implies that human language is “in itself” inadequate to the task of bearing God’s revelation. It has to be commandeered in order to become the vehicle of revelation. Language “can only be the language of the world” though we must have confidence that . . . . Continue Reading »
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