David Bentley Hart on Theosis
DBH on theosis as the historical rationale for the trinity > "In all of us, and in all things, there sleeps a fallen god called by God to awaken and seek union with him as a…
DBH On Theosis As The Historical Rationale For The Trinity
DBH on the trinity, salvation, theosis
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short quote
David Bentley Hart on theosis as the historical rationale for the doctrine of the trinity:
The greatest achievements of this period, in defense of Nicene orthodoxy, were those of the so-called Cappadocian fathers...I am simplifying their arguments rather brutally in phrasing the matter thus, but the essence of their position was that if the Son and Spirit are not God in the same sense as the Father, we cannot be saved.
It must be appreciated, I hasten to add, that “salvation” was not understood by the Cappadocian fathers in that rather feeble and formal way many Christians have habitually thought of it...Rather, salvation meant nothing less than being joined to the living God by the mediation of the God-man Himself, brought into living contact with the transfiguring glory of the divine nature, made indeed partakers of the divine nature itself (2 Peter 1:4) and co-heirs of the Kingdom of God. In short, to be saved was—is—to be “divinized” in Christ by the Spirit. In the great formula of St. Irenaeus (and others), “God became man that man might become god.”
It is precisely here, therefore, in the economy of salvation, that the true nature of the eternal Trinity must declare itself—for, simply said, no creature could ever join us to God. The calculus of the infinite is absolute: The finite can never reach the infinite, the created can never aspire to its transcendent source, and nothing—no economically reduced manifestation of the God-head, no “ontological pleonasm” of mediating principles, no conceptual Tower of Babel erected upon the foundations of the human spirit—can unite us with God save that God in His mercy condescend to unite us to Himself, by becoming one of us. If the Son saves us by joining us to the Father, then the Son must necessarily be, in every sense, God of God, essentially and infinitely. But, then again, how are we joined to the Son? By the Holy Spirit—in the sacraments and corporate life of the Church and in His sanctifying work within the soul—and so the Spirit too, it follows, must be God of God, no less than the Son. Only God can join us to God, and so we must affirm that in the incarnation of the Son and actions of the Spirit God Himself is in our midst. Or rather, more wonderfully, we are in the midst of God, and the movement of relation among the three divine Persons, as it is unfolded through salvation history, is nothing less than the triune God drawing us into the infinite splendor of His life.
Trinitarian doctrine, then, is not merely an abstract metaphysics forcibly imposed from above upon the more spontaneous and vital experiences of the Church...it is first and foremost a “phenomenology of salvation,” a theoretical articulation of the Church’s experience of being made one in Christ with God Himself.
full quote:
“Most Christians, no matter how orthodox or devout they may be, have (through no fault of their own) little notion of how the doctrine of the Trinity took shape, or why it assumed the form it did. Few, certainly, take an interest in the doctrinal disputes of the Church’s early centuries, and many harbor at best some vague conception of the Christian doctrine of God that, if more closely examined, turns out to be either some version of one of the heresies rejected by the councils of the ancient Church—“tritheism,” “adoptionism,” “modalism,” even “Arianism”—or a bland ethical Unitarianism bound only tenuously to the historical career of Jesus of Nazareth.
Many, I suspect, think of the doctrine of the Trinity (when they have occasion to think of it at all) either as a mere revealed “fact” susceptible of no rational investigation or as something rather arbitrary and historically fortuitous, to be embraced ex convenientia but accorded little serious reflection. In fact, however, the orthodox articulation of Trinitarian theology came at the end not only of many decades of extremely complicated theological dispute, but also of centuries of meditation upon the meaning of the scriptural account of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and continued presence to the Church in the Holy Spirit.
At the beginning of the fourth century, there were many models by which Christian theologians attempted to grasp the nature of the interrelations of Father, Son, and Spirit, and to determine to which of the three Persons—and in what manner—it was correct to apply the name “God.” Scripture made it impossible, of course, to deny Christ at least some ascription of divinity, and equally difficult to reject the divinity of the Spirit. But it was by no means clear to all that the three divine Persons should be understood as co-equally, co-eternally, or “co-essentially” one and the same God. Hence, the most appealing, intellectually sophisticated, and plausible fourth-century alternative to what would become Nicene orthodoxy was some variant of “subordinationism.” This was the school of thought (especially well established in the great city of Alexandria) that saw the Son and Spirit as derivative and lesser emanations of the Godhead of the Father—“economically” reduced versions of God mediating between the transcendence of the Father, who dwelt in light inaccessible, and the darkness of the material world.
This was a version of what is sometimes called the “pleonastic fallacy,” which pervaded almost every school of Alexandrian thought: the fallacy that says that—since there is an infinite qualitative distance between the ultimate principle of all reality and the world of “unlikeness” here below—it is necessary to posit a certain number of intermediate principles or “hypostases” in the interval between the two in order to bridge that distance. The most speculatively accomplished forms of this fallacy were to be found among the Neoplatonists, and the most barbarous, fabulous, and risible among the various Gnostics. But among Christian thinkers the most consistent and austere form of this fallacy was found among the Arians, who were so anxious to preserve a proper sense of the Father’s transcendence that they were moved to assert that the Son was a creature: the highest and most god-like of creatures, of course—worthy even of being called “God” honorifically, the Great High Priest of heaven who leads all intellectual creation in its worship of the unknowable Father—but a creature for all that.
There would be no purpose in rehearsing here the long history of the Arian controversy and its sequelae. What is important in this context is that the dogmatic discords of the fourth century forced theologians to examine perhaps more deeply than ever before (or, at least, more explicitly) the governing logic of the Church’s immemorial Trinitarian diction. The greatest achievements of this period, in defense of Nicene orthodoxy, were those of the so-called Cappadocian fathers: Basil of Caesarea, Basil’s younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil’s friend Gregory of Nazianzus. These three, in the course of their disputes with the “Eunomians,” the intellectual heirs of the Arians, grasped with a special urgency that a proper attention to biblical language regarding Father, Son, and Spirit—and, most particularly, regarding the story of our salvation in Christ—makes a subordinationist construal of that language impossible. I am simplifying their arguments rather brutally in phrasing the matter thus, but the essence of their position was that if the Son and Spirit are not God in the same sense as the Father, we cannot be saved.
It must be appreciated, I hasten to add, that “salvation” was not understood by the Cappadocian fathers in that rather feeble and formal way many Christians have habitually thought of it at various periods in the Church’s history: as some sort of forensic exoneration accompanied by a ticket of entry into an Elysian aftermath of sun-soaked meadows and old friends and consummate natural beatitude. Rather, salvation meant nothing less than being joined to the living God by the mediation of the God-man Himself, brought into living contact with the transfiguring glory of the divine nature, made indeed partakers of the divine nature itself (2 Peter 1:4) and co-heirs of the Kingdom of God. In short, to be saved was—is—to be “divinized” in Christ by the Spirit. In the great formula of St. Irenaeus (and others), “God became man that man might become god.”
It is precisely here, therefore, in the economy of salvation, that the true nature of the eternal Trinity must declare itself—for, simply said, no creature could ever join us to God. The calculus of the infinite is absolute: The finite can never reach the infinite, the created can never aspire to its transcendent source, and nothing—no economically reduced manifestation of the God-head, no “ontological pleonasm” of mediating principles, no conceptual Tower of Babel erected upon the foundations of the human spirit—can unite us with God save that God in His mercy condescend to unite us to Himself, by becoming one of us. If the Son saves us by joining us to the Father, then the Son must necessarily be, in every sense, God of God, essentially and infinitely. But, then again, how are we joined to the Son? By the Holy Spirit—in the sacraments and corporate life of the Church and in His sanctifying work within the soul—and so the Spirit too, it follows, must be God of God, no less than the Son. Only God can join us to God, and so we must affirm that in the incarnation of the Son and actions of the Spirit God Himself is in our midst. Or rather, more wonderfully, we are in the midst of God, and the movement of relation among the three divine Persons, as it is unfolded through salvation history, is nothing less than the triune God drawing us into the infinite splendor of His life.
Trinitarian doctrine, then, is not merely an abstract metaphysics forcibly imposed from above upon the more spontaneous and vital experiences of the Church (though it most certainly requires and gives shape to a number of profound metaphysical conclusions); it is first and foremost a “phenomenology of salvation,” a theoretical articulation of the Church’s experience of being made one in Christ with God Himself. It would not be too much to say, in fact, that this is the central and guiding maxim of all Christian dogmatics, which in the twentieth century was enunciated with admirable clarity by Karl Rahner: The “economic” Trinity (that is, God in the history of salvation) is the “immanent” Trinity (that is, God in Himself) and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity. In witnessing the drama of redemption, we are seeing nothing less than the triune God’s revelation of His eternal life within time; and so in that drama we may discern (within the limits of our created intellects) who God is.”
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David Bentley Hart on Theosis
…roups/552331154934653/posts/1986825618151859 shared: https://www.facebook.com/groups/749186598934347/posts/1239923839860618/ #DBH #theosis David Bentley Hart on Theosis --- short quote David Bentley Hart on theosis as the historical rationale for the doctrine of the trinity:…