A History of Christian Theology (Repack) E-Book

Gerald Bray

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 2980

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A Historical Examination of Christian Theology through a Trinitarian Framework Theology is important. But so is the story behind the specific doctrines that have been debated, defined, and refined throughout church history. In this book, professor Gerald Bray introduces readers to the history of Christian theology, the Trinity (our doctrine of God), and the Bible (our knowledge of God). Unlike other books on the topic, Bray's volume is not organized primarily by time period or distinct doctrinal categories. Rather, it puts theology first and history second, following a Trinitarian pattern that begins with God the Father, moves on to God the Son, and ends with God the Holy Spirit. This unique approach offers readers a more holistic understanding of the development of theology, paralleling the order in which the church wrestled through challenging theological issues and controversies related to God, man, and salvation. - Accessible: Aimed at non-specialists, not just the academic community - Unique Organization: Uses a Trinitarian framework to provide a more holistic understanding of the development of theology - Historical: Explores the Jewish background behind the development of Christian theology - Written by Gerald Bray: An internationally renowned historian and theologian - Replaces ISBN 978-1-4335-2694-7

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“A remarkably learned, wise, and substantial study of the history of Christian doctrine. Written by an Anglican who is also an evangelical, this volume interacts with the entire scope of Christian theology in all of its major ecclesial trajectories. This book will stand the test of time—in the best tradition of Newman, Harnack, and Pelikan.”

Timothy George, Distinguished Professor of Divinity, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University

“Despite its breadth, one that covers the centuries, A History of Christian Theology also plumbs the depths of numerous doctrines throughout the church’s last two thousand years. This volume is an excellent resource for students, pastors, and scholars, and for anyone who wants to study the organic development of the church’s theology. This will prove to be an invaluable resource for generations to come.”

J. V. Fesko, Harriet Barbour Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson

“Under Gerald Bray’s able pen, the history of Christian thought comes to life. Bray’s Trinitarian way of framing the story of Christian doctrine is a creative and helpful contribution to the discipline. His familiarity with the sources from every branch of the Christian tree is refreshing—and enviable! His evenhanded narrative—mixed with periodic personal commentary that is often witty, always insightful, and occasionally provocative—makes this book a delight to read. A History of Christian Theology will be essential reading for scholars and students for years to come. Highly recommended.”

Nathan A. Finn, Provost and Dean of the University Faculty, North Greenville University

A History of Christian Theology

A History of Christian Theology

A Trinitarian Approach

Gerald Bray

A History of Christian Theology: A Trinitarian Approach

Formerly published as God Has Spoken: A History of Christian Theology

© 2014, 2024 by Gerald Bray

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

First printing 2014

Reprinted with new title 2024

Printed in Colombia

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-8919-5 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8922-5 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8920-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bray, Gerald Lewis, author.

Title: A history of Christian theology : a trinitarian approach / Gerald Bray.

Other titles: God has spoken

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024000862 (print) | LCCN 2024000863 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433589195 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433589201 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433589225 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Theology, Doctrinal—History.

Classification: LCC BT21.3 .B73 2024 (print) | LCC BT21.3 (ebook) | DDC 230.09—dc23/eng/20240329

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024000862

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024000863

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2024-08-29 08:06:24 AM

Contents

Preface

Part One

The Israelite Legacy

1  Christianity and Judaism

The Parting of the Ways

Christianity and the Hebrew Canon of Scripture

Christianity and Jewish Biblical Interpretation

Christianity and the Prehistory of Israel

The Christian Interpretation of Israel’s History

2  A Shared Inheritance

God Is One

The Divine Act of Creation

The Image of God in Man

The Nature of Sin and Evil

Election and Redemption

Part Two

The Person of the Father

3  God as Father

Judaism and the Fatherhood of God

Non-Jewish Conceptions of Divine Fatherhood

Jesus and His Father

The Father as the Principle of Divinity

The Unbegotten and Almighty God-in-Himself

The Father and the Creator

4  The Father and His Children

A New Relationship with God

A New Understanding of Scripture

Part Three

The Work of the Father

5  The Reconciliation of the World

The Work of the Father from a Jewish Perspective

The Work of the Father from a Gentile Perspective

The Christian Doctrine of Creation

6  Providence and Predestination

The Image and Likeness of God

The Call to Holiness

7  The Work of the Father and the Trinity

The Father and His Creation

The Divine Hierarchy

The Eclipse of the Father

Part Four

The Person of the Son

8  The Challenge of the Incarnation

The Church Confronts the Roman World

Jesus and His Contemporaries

Jesus in Early Christian Teaching

Adoptianism

9  The Son of God

Arianism

The Way to Nicea

The Aftermath of Nicea

A New Departure in Christology

The Triumph of Athanasius

The Trinitarian Synthesis

10  The Christian Theological Vocabulary

Hebrew, Greek, and Latin

What Is God?

What Is God Like?

Who Is God?

11  The Son of Man

The Divine Word in Human Flesh

Nestorianism

The Chalcedonian Definition

The Definition of Humanity

The Will of Christ

The Portrait of Christ

Retrospect and Prospect

Part Five

The Work of the Son

12  The Body of Christ

The Man from Heaven

The Water and the Blood

The Likeness of Sinful Flesh

The Second Adam

13  The Death of Christ

The Only Sacrifice for Sin

The Cost of Reconciliation

The Centrality of the Lord’s Supper

The Memorial of Christ’s Sacrifice

The Sacramental System

The Invention of Purgatory

The Justification of Sinners

The Glory of the Cross

Prophet, Priest, and King

14  The Coming of Christ’s Kingdom

The Eternal Reign of Christ

The Crisis of Authority

The Heavenly Kingdom

The New Covenant

Part Six

The Person of the Holy Spirit

15  The Forgotten Person of the Trinity?

The Road Less Traveled

The Spirit of God in the Bible

The Paraclete and Personhood

The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Creeds

16  Spirit of the Father, Spirit of the Son

Double Procession?

Augustine and the Holy Spirit

The Origins of Controversy

Anselm and the Holy Spirit

The Course of the Controversy

The Parting of East and West

The Filioque Question Today

Part Seven

The Work of the Holy Spirit

17  The Presence of God

From Glory to Glory

The Indwelling Power of God

18  The Inspiration of Holy Scripture

The Prophetic Word of God

The Rule of Faith

The Handbook of the Christian Life

19  The Preservation of the Church

The Mind of Christ

The Wisdom of the Ages

The Source of Truth

20  The Pathway to Heaven

Angels and Archangels

The Peace That Passes Understanding

The Imitation of Christ

21  The Mystical Body of Christ

The Gift of Righteousness

The True Church

Life in the Spirit

The Scope of the Covenant

The Extent of Christ’s Atonement

The Assurance of Salvation

The Fellowship of the Spirit

The Devoted Life

The Pentecostal Mission

Part Eight

One God in Three Persons

22  The Classical Doctrine of God

The Patristic Synthesis

The God of the Philosophers

The Reformation Breakthrough

The Emergence of Unitarianism

23  The Eclipse of Theology

The Cult of Reason

The Reconstruction of Theology

The Crisis of Authority: Roman Catholicism

The Crisis of Authority: Protestantism

The Crisis of Authority: Eastern Orthodoxy

24  The Trinitarian Revival

The Protestant World

The Roman Catholic Church

The Eastern Orthodox Tradition

25  The Challenge of God Today

A Suffering God?

The Credibility of Theology

Where Are We Now?

Chronological List of Persons

Chronological List of Events

General Index

Scripture Index

God hath spoken—by his prophets,

Spoken his unchanging word,

Each from age to age proclaiming

God the One, the righteous Lord:

Mid the world’s despair and turmoil

One firm anchor holdeth fast,

God is king, his throne eternal,

God the first and God the last.

God hath spoken—by Christ Jesus,

Christ, the everlasting Son,

Brightness of the Father’s glory,

With the Father ever one;

Spoken by the Word Incarnate,

God of God, ere time began,

Light of Light, to earth descending,

Man, revealing God to man.

God yet speaketh—by his Spirit

Speaketh to the hearts of men,

In the age-long word expounding

God’s own message, now as then;

Through the rise and fall of nations

One sure faith yet standing fast,

God abides, his word unchanging,

God the first and God the last.

George Wallace Briggs (1875–1959)

Preface

Until the nineteenth century, there was no such thing as the “history of Christian doctrine.” The doctrines themselves were contained in the creeds and confessions of the church, but how they had come into being was seldom examined in any detail. Protestants were aware that there had been developments over time, since otherwise the sixteenth-century Reformation would have been incomprehensible. If no change of any kind was possible, the Reformation should have been rejected as an innovation that was incompatible with eternally revealed truth, which is just what their Roman Catholic adversaries argued. Claiming the authority of the apostle Peter as the appointed successor of Jesus and the first bishop of Rome, the popes and their supporters assumed that what they believed and taught had come directly from the Lord himself.

The Eastern Orthodox churches had never accepted papal jurisdiction over them. On the whole, they agreed with Rome about the content of the church’s theology, but not about the nature of the authority that had defined it. To them, Rome not only claimed a power that Jesus had not given to Peter, but it had corrupted the church’s teaching in the process. This was the significance of adding the word filioque (“and [from] the Son”) to the Nicene Creed’s statement that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (John 15:26). Did the pope have the power to authorize such an addition as this without the backing of a universal (“ecumenical”) church council? Rome said that he did, but the East replied that he did not. Each side believed that the other had misread the Bible, in particular the words of Jesus in Matthew 16:18–19:

. . . you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

It was the use made of this statement to undergird papal power that split the church apart. In 1054, papal legates excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople because he would not submit to their authority, and in the sixteenth century Rome did the same to the Protestants, who also looked back to the eleventh century as the time when things had started to go seriously wrong in the church.

It soon became apparent that the Protestant rejection of papal authority was not like that of the Eastern churches, but no one thought to appeal to history as an explanation for this difference. Change and development over time were dimly understood, but their significance was not properly appreciated. Martin Luther, for example, did not hesitate to tell his students that Paul’s epistle to the Galatians was of special relevance to them because Germans and Galatians were both of Celtic stock, and so it was only to be expected that the problems of ancient Galatia would be paralleled in contemporary Germany! It was not until the nineteenth century that historical development was used to explain the divisions that had occurred over time and the emergence of the doctrines that the different churches held, either in common or in opposition to one another. Since none of those doctrines was clearly stated in the New Testament, the suspicion began to grow that the very concept of doctrine had evolved in postbiblical times and had been imposed on the church by a priesthood determined to secure its own power.

To men who believed that the Christian faith ought to be grounded on Scripture alone (sola Scriptura), this came to mean that theology (or “dogma,” as they usually preferred to call it) was a corruption of the primitive faith. They believed that if dogma could be sidelined or even dismantled, Christians might come together again, not in the churches (because they too were the product of postbiblical deviations) but in their hearts. Believers who demonstrated the spirit of Christ in their lives were more likely to persuade others of the truth of the gospel message than institutions which imposed their own orthodoxies on people who did not understand what they meant.

This was a one-sided view, of course, but the notion that what the church(es) taught was significantly different from what could be found in the Bible took root and gave birth to what we now call the “history of Christian doctrine.” Of course, by no means everyone agreed with the thesis that postbiblical developments were corruptions of Christ’s original teaching. That interpretation was promoted mainly among liberal Protestants, though over the course of the nineteenth century it became dominant in the Protestant world.

Roman Catholics, by contrast, initially found it hard to reconcile their beliefs with any notion of doctrinal development, but after the proclamation of papal infallibility in 1870 (which clearly was an innovation of sorts), the idea was taken over and used to explain why the papacy could introduce such apparent innovations and make them compulsory parts of Catholic belief. In Roman Catholic eyes, doctrine developed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who worked through the pope in order to confront and confound the errors of the age. They agreed with liberal Protestants that some of their teaching had been unknown in the early days of Christianity but argued that it had been made clear to the church in response to changing historical circumstances. The history of Christian doctrine was therefore to be understood not as a corruption of the original message of the New Testament but as a work of the Holy Spirit, adapting and bringing to perfection over time the revelation that had been given once and for all in Jesus Christ.

Conservative Protestants, and eventually even the Eastern Orthodox churches, gradually accepted the concept of the historical development of doctrine along lines broadly similar to the Roman Catholic view, but they interpreted the work of the Holy Spirit very differently. To them, the history of Christian doctrine was a struggle to maintain the truth of the gospel over against predators of different kinds—the popes, of course, but also the ancient heretics and the liberals of modern times.

Today, these nineteenth-century positions have been greatly modified, if not entirely abandoned, by all sides in the debate. No one now believes that Christian doctrine is a corruption of the teaching of Jesus, even if it is still widely claimed that much of it is different from anything he would have recognized. Similarly, very few people would now assert that what their particular church teaches is absolute truth to the exclusion of everything else. The concept of doctrinal orthodoxy still exists and is defended by conservatives from very different backgrounds, but everyone recognizes that it has often been formulated by political and other extraneous factors whose influence must be transcended if we are going to recover the sense of unity that lies beneath the surface of our divisions. Whether this recovery will lead to a reunion of the churches is doubtful, because the force of tradition and the staying power of institutions militate against it, but it can certainly be said that there is now a kind of spiritual ecumenism in the Christian world that brings people together across traditional barriers, both individually and in a plethora of parachurch organizations.

All this means that it is no longer possible to write a history of Christian doctrine whose main purpose is to debunk or defend a particular denominational tradition. We all have our preferences, of course, but anyone who argues that only the Baptists, or only the Roman Catholics (or the Reformed, the Eastern Orthodox, the Lutherans, or whoever) are right while everyone else is wrong is now regarded as a propagandist, not as a historian—and is dismissed accordingly. At the present time it is universally agreed that the historian must rise above his own bias and be as fair as he can be to others, accepting that even disagreeable facts must be analyzed and explained in their context, even if he might privately wish that the past had been different.

To some extent, the course of recent secular history has helped make this more “objective” approach easier and more natural. If we look back over the twentieth century, which one of us does not wish that it had been different from what it was? No one in 1900 wanted world war, routine genocide (a word that did not then exist), or the invention of weapons of mass destruction, and no one wants them now. But we cannot pretend that they never happened, nor can we blame one side for having caused all the trouble. The Western Allies (the United Kingdom, France, and the United States) tried that on Germany after the First World War, and look what they got—the revenge of Adolf Hitler! We do not want to make that mistake again, and this feeling has rubbed off on church historians as much as on others. Responsibility for what happened in the past is shared by all involved, because human beings are inherently sinful, and no one should be more aware of this than Christians, whose business it is to preach sin, righteousness, and judgment to an unbelieving world.

Of course, if we are to write a history of Christian doctrine at all, it must have some unifying principle, and if denominational or ideological allegiance will no longer do, something must be found to take its place. One possible approach is to take individual doctrines and trace their history, which is basically what Gregg Allison has done in his recent book Historical Theology (Zondervan, 2011). This is useful for students who are asked to write a paper on the development of something like the doctrine of the atonement, for example, because the information relating to it is gathered in one place. It also corresponds to a general tendency in modern research, which likes to make its material manageable by chopping it into bite-sized chunks and examining each one of them in depth, often to the virtual exclusion of anything else. Thus we can study the Trinity or justification by faith as discrete doctrines that have developed over time and look at how they have come to be what they are today, without getting bogged down in apparently irrelevant things like papal authority or original sin.

The trouble with that approach is that it oversimplifies and therefore distorts the history that it wants to explain. There has never been a time when people have held to individual doctrines as if the rest of theology did not exist. Even those who have stressed one particular thing—the sacraments, for example, or biblical inerrancy—have done so in a context that affects everything they believe. They may be accused of having distorted their theological inheritance by an undue emphasis on one part of it, but they have never believed that one point to the exclusion of the rest. Theology has always come as a complete package, even if the arrangement of its materials has changed over time and may now be quite different from what it once was.

Today we live in a climate where the doctrine of the Trinity has assumed a new prominence in theological discussion. Why this is so can be debated, but however we got to this point, this is where we are now. It therefore seems logical and appropriate to adopt a Trinitarian framework as the basis for explaining historical theology in the current context. Everyone agrees that the doctrine of the Trinity as we know it did not spring fully grown out of the New Testament. Whether we think that its emergence was a deformation of the original divine revelation or the natural outcome of godly reflection on it, no one can doubt that the result has commanded the assent of the vast majority of Christians over the centuries. Disputes there have certainly been, but every branch of the Christian church confesses that “we believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Furthermore, we also agree that each of these three persons is active in a distinct way. The Son came into the world as Jesus Christ; the Holy Spirit comes into the hearts of believers, giving them the power to cry “Abba, Father!”—and the Father is the one to whom our prayers are directed. Theologians differ about whether priority should be given to who the persons are or to what they do. The former is the more logical approach, since the authority of what a person does depends on who that person is, although it is possible to argue that the first Christians saw what God was doing in their midst and only later figured out how each of the divine persons was involved. Nevertheless, an understanding of who God is must come before there can be a proper appreciation of what God does, an order that is borne out by the way Christian theology actually developed.

When Jesus proclaimed his relationship with the Father, he introduced a subtle but significant shift in the Jewish picture of God, which now had to allow for a Father-Son relationship that could embrace both a divine incarnation and the ongoing transcendence of the supreme being. Nevertheless, the early Christians gave a priority to the Father that was in direct continuity with the Old Testament, and the revelation of the Son did not entail any departure from its transcendent monotheism. It was the organizing principle on which everything else depended, but the confession of the Son as Lord made it necessary to determine what his relationship to the one God was. Similarly with the Holy Spirit. Was he to be regarded as a person like the Father and the Son, as a personification of the divine being, or simply as another name for the Father? Were Christians expected to relate to God as one, as three, or as some combination of the two, depending on the circumstances?

These questions were inherent in the New Testament revelation, but resolving them was not an immediate priority for the first generation of Christians. Awareness of their importance and the need to get to grips with them grew over time and became urgent when false teachers emerged who tried to lead the church astray by equating the Father with God and denying the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Some people today argue that these questions should never have been raised and that had they remained dormant the church would not have been divided in the way that it was, but this is naive and contrary to the teaching of the New Testament, where Christians were told that they must move on from the milk of the word to its meat.1 That meant coming to terms with problems that did not appear on the surface but that would threaten to destroy the gospel message if they were not resolved. Laying a firm foundation involved going beyond what was immediately visible, and that is what the church found itself obliged to do. One thing led to another, and in the course of church history different aspects of Christian doctrine came to the fore and demanded resolution. Each time this happened, theologians had to take another look at their inheritance and examine it from a different angle. Just as a piece of cut glass reveals different aspects of the light according to how it is held, so the New Testament appears in a new light when looked at in response to the different theological questions that have been put to it.

This is the essence of historical theology, whose task is to explain how and why this happened. Theological developments did not occur arbitrarily but appeared in a logical sequence over time. The resolution of one problem led naturally to the next one, a process that we can observe from the beginning of the church up to the present time. Whether we have now arrived at the “end” of Christian theological development is impossible to say. Our perspective can only be governed by where we are, because each generation has a complete theology of its own. Future ages may well have to recast the tradition in order to explain developments that are as yet hidden from our eyes, but this we cannot tell. It may also be that we have reached the end of the present age and that Christ will come again before that can happen. This we do not know either. All we can do now is look at where we have come from, try to understand where we are, and suggest where we might go from here. What happens next remains hidden in the mind and purposes of God.

If these basic principles are understood, the organization of this book will be easy to grasp. Christian theology began with its Jewish inheritance, which it appropriated in toto and claimed was to be understood only in and through Jesus Christ. The nature of that inheritance and its impact on the early church must therefore be considered first. Next there comes the person of God the Father, whom Jesus introduced to his disciples. As good Jews, they knew about the one God, but they did not address him as their Father, and Jesus became known for this teaching. His signature cry was Abba (Aramaic for “father”)—it is one of the few words of his that has been preserved in the original language.

Christians who prayed to God as their Father had to stress that he was the God of the Old Testament—the Creator and the Redeemer are one. This was disputed by the so-called “Gnostics” but it was fundamental to the integrity of Christianity. The Father was not a superior deity who intervened in order to rescue the work of an inferior Creator, but was himself the Creator who stepped in to put right what had gone wrong with his creation.

After that was established, the identity of the Son was next on the theological agenda. The incarnation of the Son could not really be understood until it was agreed that created matter was not the work of an inferior deity, because in that case, God could not have become man without ceasing to be divine. The great disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries over the person of Christ arose out of attempts to express this great mystery in a way that would affirm both the divinity and the humanity of the incarnate Son without compromising the integrity of either. That was not an easy task and it produced many serious disagreements, but the end result was the great creedal theology that has commanded the assent of virtually the entire Christian world and has stood the test of time.

Once the person of the Son had been defined to most people’s satisfaction, the church had to move in two different directions. On the one hand, it had to link the person of the Son to his work, just as it had previously connected who the Father is to what the Father does. But it also had to move on to define the person of the Holy Spirit, who was neither a second Son nor an attribute of the Father’s divinity. Which of these two would be dealt with first was not logically determined in advance, and it is fair to say that the Eastern (Orthodox) churches generally moved on to the person of the Holy Spirit, whose identity and relationship to the other persons would preoccupy them for centuries, whereas the Western church (the ancestor of today’s Roman Catholics and Protestants) concentrated more on the work of Christ. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) wrote on both subjects, but his treatise on the Holy Spirit was directed toward the controversy between the West (which he represented) and the East, whereas his discourse on Christ’s atonement was intended for a purely Western audience, which gives us a good picture of how theology was developing in the eleventh century. It is also typical of the Western tradition that it is for his work on the atonement that Anselm is now famous, whereas his arguments for the double procession of the Holy Spirit have attracted far less attention.

By 1500 East and West had gone their separate ways because they could not agree about the Holy Spirit’s identity. It was clear that what was central for the East was relatively peripheral in the West, where the procession of the Spirit from the Father (or from the Father and the Son) was something rarely discussed outside the polemics connected with East-West relations. What they concentrated on was the work of Christ, especially as this was communicated to the believer through his presence in the sacraments. The sixteenth-century Reformation had nothing to do with the double procession of the Holy Spirit but was preoccupied with the sacrifice of Christ: was it a once-for-all, unrepeated historical event, or did it miraculously reappear every time the priest celebrated Holy Communion? This was a question that few people in the East understood (let alone had an opinion about), but it split the Western church in two.

The disputes between papal loyalists, whom we now call Roman Catholics, and their opponents, whom we lump together as “Protestants” even though this term originally applied only to Martin Luther and his immediate followers, was not really about the work of Christ, however. Rather, it was about the way the effects of his saving work were received in the church, and that was the work of the Holy Spirit. Did the Spirit work primarily through objective means like the papacy, the institutional church, the sacraments, and so on, as the Roman Catholics claimed, or did he work subjectively, in the hearts and minds of individual believers, as the Protestants insisted? To understand the difference, ask yourself the following question: “When did you become a Christian?” A faithful Catholic would answer, “When I was baptized,” but no true Protestant would say that. However important baptism may be, Protestants would insist that ceremonial water cannot make someone a believer. Without the inner working of the Holy Spirit, the outward rite we call “baptism” is of no intrinsic value. The same principle applies to everything else. A minister’s vocation is “valid” not because of his ordination but because of his calling by God. Anyone can be ordained by the church authorities, but not everyone is called by God, as both Protestants and Catholics recognize. But where most Protestants would accept the ministry of an independent person like John Bunyan or Billy Graham, whether he was properly “ordained” or not, they would be less inclined to sit under the ministry of an immoral preacher. Many Catholics, on the other hand, would be more likely tolerate a bad priest than a do-it-yourself evangelist, because it is the authority of the church that counts for them, and not the personal holiness of its individual representatives.

Finally, in the modern world, the historical antagonisms between different groups of Christians have had to compete with something quite different. This is the suspicion that either there is no God at all, or that all religious beliefs point to the same transcendent deity. From the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century until about 1700, no theologian had been forced to argue the case for New Testament monotheism—the belief that there is one God who reveals himself in three persons—unless he was engaged in dialogue with Jews or Muslims. Such dialogues did take place from time to time, but they were rare and peripheral to the main body of the church. For the most part, Christians persecuted Jews and fought against Muslims with no questions being asked on either side.

All this changed in the eighteenth century, when men brought up in “Christian” Europe and America began to challenge their own religious inheritance in the name of “reason.” First to go was the Trinity, which seemed to them to be illogical and even incomprehensible. From there it was a short step to open atheism, because if God was a distant power with no direct connection to everyday life on earth, what was the point of believing in him? Admittedly, many atheists hedged their bets and declared themselves to be “agnostics,” if only because they realized that disproving the existence of God was even harder than proving it, but the practical result was the same. God was removed from the mental furniture of educated Westerners, a situation that continues to the present time. Christians (and others) enjoy “religious freedom” in Western countries, but only to the extent that their beliefs do not matter. If a religious conviction interferes with the atheistic mind-set, then it must be silenced, or at least sidelined. You will not get a doctorate today if you claim (as Isaac Newton did) that your research is primarily intended to explore the mind of God at work in the universe!

It is in this Babylonian exile of the modern church that the doctrine of the Trinity has returned to center stage. Christians of different traditions have come together, realizing that if they do not hang together they will be hanged separately. Where this will lead (if anywhere) is impossible to say, and it is not the business of the historian to indulge in prophecy. All we can affirm is that this is the point that we have come to at the present time, and those of us who believe in the providence of God (as this author does) are confident that he is working out his purposes for us and for his church as much today as in the past. This was the confidence of the late Archdeacon George Wallace Briggs, who after living through two world wars and an unprecedented “rise and fall of nations” could still write the forward-looking words of the hymn with which this preface began. The God who has spoken in the past continues to speak in the present, but his message is the same now as it has always been. The forms change over time and new developments occur in the way that the truth is expressed, but its substance remains unaltered. How this has happened and what it means for us today is what the following pages are all about.

The aim of this book is to make the history of Christian theology comprehensible to nonspecialists while at the same time providing a useful resource for those who want to take the subject further. Technical terms are explained in simple language, and background information is provided when it is necessary for understanding the subject and is unlikely to be part of the average person’s general knowledge. At the same time, original sources are given in the footnotes, where it is assumed that serious students will be able to consult works not only in Latin and Greek but also in French and German. Works in other languages (Danish, Dutch, Romanian, Russian, Swedish) are also cited when theological developments in those countries are being discussed. However, English translations are also noted when they are available.

In the main body of the text, quotations from other languages have been freshly translated, and biblical references have been taken from a form of the text that the original author of the quote would have been familiar with, not from a modern translation based on a critical edition.

This book began life at Moore Theological College in Sydney, an institution of higher learning that shines as a beacon of light in an Anglican Communion that is currently beset by the storm clouds of schism, heresy, and apostasy. Special thanks are due to the former principal John Woodhouse and his wife, Moya, for the warm hospitality which they have always shown the author, and to the current principal Mark Thompson and his wife, Kathryn, on whose kitchen table the first draft slowly emerged. Different parts of it were subsequently written at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama; at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and at Tyndale House in Cambridge, all of which have been spiritual homes to me over the years. In addition, I must thank my employers, the Latimer Trust, whose constant support and encouragement have made this work possible.

As it happens, the volume reached completion on a return visit to Moore College, where a rapidly assembled team of critics put it through the final test of relevance to its intended audience. Special thanks are due to Joel Atwood, Matt Baker, Katherine Cole, Nick Davies, Matt Dodd, Tom Habib, Hank Lee, Matt Simpson, Mike Turner, Luke Wagenaar and Mike Weeks, who kept the author on his toes and did much to make this book accessible to its intended audience. It is to them and to the many godly men and women who over the years have passed through Moore College as teachers, staff, and students, that this book is humbly dedicated as a small token of my abiding affection for them. To them and to all who read this book, may the Lord God of Israel preserve and protect you in your earthly pilgrimage and bring you safely home to rest in his eternal glory.

Gerald Bray

The Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist

October 18, 2013

A Note on Transliteration

Greek and Cyrillic words that occur in the text have been transliterated into the Latin alphabet so as to make it easier to read them. In the footnotes, the standard international conventions that govern transliteration have been followed where names and publications are concerned, unless there is a generally recognized English equivalent (for example, Tolstoy, not Tol’stoj). Ancient Greek names have been given in their English or Latin forms (for example, Aristotle and Plato, not Aristotelês or Platôn). Unfamiliar Greek names have been Latinized, because a form like Autolycus looks less outlandish to most readers than pseudo-Greek alternatives like Autolukos, Autolykos, or Aytolykos. Modern Greek names are transliterated according to the same principles unless the writers concerned have adopted their own form of transliteration. So, for example, John Zizioulas is widely known under that name, not as Iôannês Zêzioulas, and so the more familiar form is adopted here.

The titles of ancient works have been given in Latin, which is the standard way of tracing them, even when they are written in Greek and there are English equivalents. Thus, Augustine’s City of God is given in the footnotes as De civitate Dei, Basil of Caesarea’s book on the Holy Spirit is De Spiritu Sancto, and so on. Scholarly monographs that have been translated into English from another language are referenced in both the original and the translated editions, but when no English translation exists only the original title is given.

Otherwise the system of transliteration has been designed to make it as easy as possible both for readers who know the original languages to reproduce the forms in the appropriate script and for others to pronounce the different words and names correctly.

With respect to Greek, most of the transliterations are straightforward. However,

Ypsilon has been rendered as y when it stands alone but as u in diphthongs (au, eu, ou).

Long vowels have been indicated with a circumflex (ê for Eta and ô for Omega).

With respect to Cyrillic, the soft sign after certain consonants has been indicated by an apostrophe (’) but the hard sign has been ignored. The Russian letter ë (which is always stressed) has been rendered as yo, in accordance with the pronunciation—Solovyov, for example, and not Soloviev, as is often found in Western publications. Likewise Fyodor and not Fedor. An occasional exception has been made when a Russian writer has adopted a particular form of his name in the Latin alphabet, but the phonetic equivalent is indicated in parentheses where a reader might otherwise mispronounce it, as for example, Zernov (Zyornov). This is not done, however, for the descendants of Russian exiles who have no real connection with their ancestral homeland. Thus, for example, Bouteneff is not accompanied by Butenyov.

Soft vowels have usually been indicated by a preceding j (in the footnotes) or y (in the main text) but omitted after a soft sign or a preceding i. Thus, for example, rasp’atie (“crucifixion”) rather than raspjatije or raspyatiye. Greek and Latin loan words in Russian have been transliterated according to the standard Russian conventions, even when this leads to inconsistency. For example, typographia from Greek becomes tipografia when it is from Russian, even though it is the same Greek word.

Note also that because the Cyrillic alphabet lacks the Greek Xi, a name like Maxim(us) becomes Maksim. Since 1917 Greek Theta has been written as f in Russian, which is how it has always been pronounced. Thus the Greek name Theophanes becomes Russian Feofan, Theodore is Fyodor, and so on. This is not a problem with modern writers, whose names are usually preserved intact, but it can cause some confusion when dealing with pre-1917 Western publications, which often Hellenized or Latinized them. It should also be remembered that Russian names can be “Latinized” according to different systems that correspond to different Western languages. Thus, for example, we can find Yeltsin (English), Eltsine (French) or Jelzin (German) instead of the more technically correct El’cyn, Jel’cyn or Yel’cyn, but all six of these forms transliterate the same Russian original! Most Russian émigrés of the early twentieth century preferred the French form of their name, which has now become standard in their family—e.g., Zouboff instead of Zubov, which would be the form more likely to be used today.

11 Cor. 3:2; Heb. 5:12–13.

Part One

The Israelite Legacy

1

Christianity and Judaism

The Parting of the Ways

Why are Christianity and Judaism different religions? Today we are used to this and seldom give it much thought, but for the historian it is a question that demands an answer. Consider the evidence. Jesus was a Jew and so were his disciples. Neither he nor they expressed any desire to break away from Israel. Jesus made it clear that his message was intended primarily for Jews, and his disciples followed him in this.1 He regarded the Hebrew Bible as authoritative Scripture, quoted it often, and even stated that not one word of it would be overruled by his teaching.2 His message was that he had come to fulfill the promises made in the law and by the prophets, and there were many Jews in Jesus’ time who were actively waiting for that to happen. They expected a charismatic Messiah figure who would come and deliver Israel from its bondage to the Romans, and to some of them at least, Jesus looked like a plausible candidate for the role. They may have been wrong to interpret his mission in political terms, but that was a mistake that could be corrected by a more spiritual interpretation of the promises made to Israel—it was not a new idea that was alien to the hopes and aspirations of the nation.

Furthermore, although the Jewish world of Jesus’ day stood apart from its non-Jewish (or “Gentile”) surroundings as a distinct religious and national entity, it was not a monolith. Alongside the temple establishment in Jerusalem, which all Jews recognized as their central religious authority, there were many subgroups competing for influence among them. In the New Testament we meet the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who are well known from other sources. There was also the Qumran community, which was not mentioned by anyone in ancient times but which we know a lot about thanks to the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls in 1947. Among several other groups there were many “Hellenized” Jews, people who had adopted Gentile ways and the Greek language but without abandoning their ancestral faith.3 We might even include the Samaritans, who were Jews of a kind even though they were rejected by the mainstream. Why could Jesus not have launched a messianic sect similar to one of these and remained within the fold of historic Judaism?

In fact, some modern scholars think that this is more or less what Jesus wanted to do. They portray him as a great rabbi whose intentions were traduced by others after his death.4 What propelled his disciples (or perhaps their disciples) to develop a belief in Jesus as the Son of God that was incompatible with the Jewish understanding of monotheism remains something of a mystery to them. They generally conclude that this development occurred under non-Jewish influence, but why that was able to supersede traditional Jewish beliefs is unclear and remains controversial.5

There were always many Jews who rejected Jesus and his message, but only when his followers started admitting Gentile believers to their fellowship without obliging them to become Jews first did it become clear that Christianity was not just another form of Judaism. Within a couple of generations, Jewish converts to the new faith tailed off and the church became a largely Gentile body to whom the political heritage and religious culture of Israel were alien. Once that happened, it was inevitable that Jews and Christians would emphasize their differences and downplay what they held in common. In many ways Jews found this easier to do than Christians did. Jews could always dismiss Christianity as an aberration based on a false interpretation of their sacred Scriptures, but Christians could not reject their Jewish inheritance so easily. They insisted that Christ had come to fulfill those Scriptures, and they knew that he had ministered almost exclusively to his fellow Jews. They also realized that his teaching and work could not be understood if the Jewish background to them was not recognized. The few Christians who tried to reject the Hebrew Bible were condemned as heretics, and the church continued to emphasize not only that Jesus had fulfilled the promises contained in it but also how he had done so.

The stages by which Christians separated from Judaism are obscure, though we may assume that the process was not the same everywhere. What is universally agreed is that by about AD 100 a Christian church had emerged that claimed a Jewish origin and heritage by appropriating the Hebrew Bible as its own, but that no longer thought of itself as Jewish.6 The Jerusalem temple had been destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, so whatever connections the church continued to have with it after the resurrection of Jesus were automatically severed. The Old Testament food laws and other aspects of traditional Jewish practice that survived the initial conversion of Jews to Christ were gradually ignored or abandoned, and any knowledge of Hebrew was quickly lost. Christians read the Greek translation of the Bible as their sacred text and used it to argue that Jesus was the promised Messiah. Somewhat oddly, although Christians advocated loyalty to the Roman authorities, it was they who were persecuted for their beliefs and not the Jews, despite the Jewish tendency to rebel against Rome. The reason for this was that Judaism was a legally recognized religion, while Christianity was not. Even as early as AD 64, when most of the apostles were still alive, the emperor Nero could distinguish Christians from Jews to the extent of blaming the former, but not the latter, for having started the great fire of Rome in that year. This unfair discrimination inevitably caused bad feelings, and some Christians believed that Jewish agitators were the main cause of their suffering. How true that was is hard to say, but that there was an abiding tension between two otherwise similar communities is certain.

How did this happen? A comparison between Christianity and Samaritanism may help us understand the process more clearly. The Samaritan schism seems to have been political in origin, as much as anything else, and with a scriptural text that contained only six books (Genesis to Joshua), Samaritanism was less developed than full-blown Judaism. Christianity, on the other hand, was everything that Judaism was and more. Not only did it take over the whole of the Hebrew Bible, it added to it quite considerably. The Old Testament that the church preferred to use was a Greek version that contained a number of books (and parts of books) that were missing from the Hebrew text,7 and what we now call the New Testament was gradually added to it—in Greek, not in Hebrew. The New Testament is less than a third as long as the Old, but its significance for Christians is at least as great as that of the Old Testament, if not greater. The reason for this is that the church regards it not only as equally authoritative (and therefore just as divinely inspired) as the Hebrew Bible but also as a kind of commentary on it, giving principles of interpretation that the church can use to read and interpret its Israelite legacy.

It is the New Testament that tells us what the essential difference between Christianity and Judaism was, and we must look to it for clues to explain how the two became separated. Let us start with the teaching of Jesus. Was he a rabbi with new and challenging ideas, or was he something quite different? What was his take on the law of Moses, and why was his view rejected by the Jewish leaders of his day?

What is certain is that Jesus was not a rabbi in the usual sense of the term. He was not trained in a rabbinical school in the way that the apostle Paul was, and as far as we know, his only contact with the rabbinic world before he began his public ministry occurred when he went to Jerusalem at the age of twelve and spent several days with the teachers in the temple.8 However there is no indication that he learned anything from them; on the contrary, it appears that even as a boy he was teaching them as their equal. It is true that during his adult ministry he was frequently addressed as “rabbi,” but this was a courtesy title bestowed on him by people who did not know what else to call him.9 Neither his training (if he had any) nor his message could be described as “rabbinical” in the usual sense of the word.

Admittedly, rabbinical Judaism was still developing in Jesus’ day, so there may have been more freedom for Jews to recognize the kind of freelance teacher that Jesus was than would have been the case later on. But even if that is true, what Jesus said was often quite different from standard rabbinical teaching. The main differences between them can be sketched as follows:

1. The rabbis were concerned to interpret the law and apply it to situations that were not envisaged in the original text, or not fully expounded there. Jesus said that he had come to fulfill the law and make it redundant. In this sense, he was not really messianic, as Jews understood it, because he did not see his mission as the establishment of a Jewish state in which the law of Moses would be perfectly observed. On the contrary, he said that his kingdom was not of this world, something that was beyond the comprehension of most Jews of his time.10 Messianic movements remained active among Jews until AD 135, when the defeat of Bar-Kochba’s rebellion finally put an end to them, but Christians did not get involved in them because, in their view, the Messiah had already come!

2. The rabbis understood the law essentially as the performance of particular tasks, whereas Jesus saw it more as the adoption of a certain attitude. While it is too simple to say that the rabbis thought of righteousness as something external whereas Jesus internalized it, there was definitely a difference of emphasis between them along these lines, as can be seen from particular incidents in the life of Jesus. For example, the rabbis believed that it was wrong to heal people on the Sabbath because it was a sacred day of rest, whereas Jesus thought it was appropriate and sometimes even necessary, because meeting human needs was more important than observing divinely appointed regulations that might get in the way.11

3. The rabbis took their cue from Moses the lawgiver, whereas Jesus went back to Abraham as the true source of Israel’s faith. According to Jesus, Moses stepped in to bolster that faith because the people were unable to keep it, but his law was a stopgap to prevent further degeneration, and not a pathway to eternal life.12

4. The rabbis wanted to protect Israel from contamination by the outside world, whereas Jesus wanted to transform Israel by raising it to a higher plane. For Jesus, the things of the world could not pollute those who were pure in heart, and so there was no need to fear or avoid them as a matter of principle, even if they had to be used with discretion.13

None of these things by themselves, or even all of them taken together, need have caused a breach between the Christian church and the Jewish world. If Jesus had been no more than a reformer within the Jewish culture of his time, it is quite possible that his ideas would have been taken on board after his death. After all, the Jews had persecuted the prophets but then canonized their message, and presumably the same thing could have happened to Jesus.14 What made him different was the nature of the authority on which his teaching was based. Both the rabbis and Jesus believed that all authority came from God and that it was contained in the law of Moses. But Jesus taught that the written law pointed to him as its author, its content, and its fulfillment, and he claimed authority over it.15 If Jesus was right, it could only mean that, in his view, the Hebrew Bible taught that he was God in human flesh, come to earth as the prophets had promised that he would.16 The signs of this are there in the Gospels. Not only did Jesus reinterpret the law, but he forgave sins, which was something only God could do.17 In his duel with the Devil at the beginning of his ministry, he was tempted in ways that only God could be. A mere man could not have turned stones into bread, but the Creator of all things could do so.18 Once that is understood, the rest of Jesus’ ministry falls into place and his resurrection becomes inevitable—how could death have held the One who made all things and who is eternal life in himself?

Putting Jesus at the center and interpreting the law as something that was meant to be fulfilled in him caused a seismic shift in biblical interpretation as it affected Christians. No longer was it a matter of applying the law to previously unknown (or unforeseen) circumstances, as the rabbis typically did. Now the main subject of discussion became how the law revealed Jesus—who he was, where he came from, and what his relationship was to God, whom he called his Father. It was questions of that kind that brought Christian theology into being and set the church on an intellectual journey quite different from anything that could be found in rabbinical Judaism.

Theology as an academic discipline did not exist in Old Testament times, nor has it developed very much in modern Judaism, where “theological studies” focus more on religious laws and their interpretation than on the being of God. The ancient Israelites knew that their beliefs were different from those of the surrounding peoples, but they never developed a “doctrine of God” to explain this. That term did not exist in ancient Hebrew, but if it had, it would have meant something quite different from what we mean by it today. When we talk about the doctrine of God in the writings of Paul, we focus on what Paul taught about God. But if Paul had used the term, he would have meant not what he (or anyone else) thought about God, but what God had told them about himself. The “doctrine of God” would have been the teaching received from God, not what its recipients thought about him, and in thinking this way Paul would have been typical of his time.

The ancient Israelites knew about other belief “systems,” if we can call them that, but they were not interested in dialoguing with those who held them or in trying to persuade them to accept Israel’s understanding of God instead. Foreigners could worship the God of Israel if they wanted to, but it was extremely difficult for them to become Israelites, if only because they were not descended from the ancestors to whom God had revealed himself.19 Jews saw little need to explain their faith to outsiders, and their leaders were more concerned with the practice of worshiping God than with developing a theory of monotheism.20 Of course they knew that there was only one God, but that knowledge was less important than the fact that he had established a relationship with them, a “covenant” that demanded obedience to a set of laws rather than a confession of certain beliefs.21 But what for Jews was their national covenant became for Christians the Old Testament, a body of law and tradition that was superseded by a new and fuller revelation of God in Jesus Christ. That revelation was not another law but a new relationship with God that was rooted in a deeper understanding of who he is and of what he has done to save us.

Instead of creating new laws, the Christian church developed theology, which is the understanding of God based on his self-revelation.22 In itself, the New Testament is not a textbook of theology any more than the Old Testament is, but what it says shows us why the church would have to create such a discipline. Christians had a commission to preach the gospel to the nations, which meant that they had to explain what it was and why it mattered. People who did not understand even the rudiments of Jewish thought would find it very difficult to grasp the Christian message, as Paul discovered when he went to Athens.23 Furthermore, Jewish beliefs had to be presented to them in a coherent and systematic way, since otherwise they would either have made no sense at all or else would have been absorbed in a piecemeal fashion, which might have been even worse.

A religion or culture that adopted certain Jewish beliefs without understanding the context in which they had emerged might easily end up misunderstanding and even perverting them. A good example of this was the widespread adoption of the Hebrew week in non-Jewish circles. A cycle of time that for