How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (44 page)

God the Son, then, is the one to whom God the Father is speaking in the Old Testament when he says, “Let us make humankind in our own image” (Gen. 1:26); he is the one to whom God speaks in the psalms when he says, “Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever” (Ps. 45:6); and he is the one to whom the text refers when it says “The L
ORD
says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand . . .’” (Ps. 110:1).

For Justin, Christ was not only the Angel of the Lord, however; he was also the Word (Logos) of God who became human. It appears clear that Justin was influenced by the Christology found in the Gospel of John, a book that he rarely, if ever, actually quotes, surprisingly enough. But Justin’s Logos Christology is more advanced and philosophically developed than that found in the Fourth Gospel.

Justin maintains that the Logos of God is the “reason” that can be found within anyone who uses reason to understand the world (
1 Apology
5). This means that all humans have a share in the Logos, since all humans use reason. But some have a greater share of it than others. Philosophers, in particular, are skilled in using their reason. But even philosophers do not have a full knowledge of God’s Logos. If they did, they would not spend so much time contradicting one another (
2 Apology
10). Still, some philosophers were closely attuned to God’s truth, as revealed to them through the Logos within them; this would include above all that great Greek philosopher Socrates. For this reason, Justin maintained that a philosopher like Socrates should be considered to be a pre-Christian Christian (
1 Apology
46).

Most important, though, this Logos was known to and proclaimed by the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament (
2 Apology
10). And it eventually became a human being, Jesus Christ (
1 Apology
1.5). Christ, then, is the incarnate Logos that created the world and manifested itself in the world in human reason that seeks to understand the world. It is in Christ himself that “reason” is fully incarnate. Those who accept and believe in Christ, therefore, have a fuller share of Logos/reason than anyone else—even the greatest philosophers of antiquity. Moreover, since he is the incarnation of God’s own Logos, Christ deserves to be worshiped along with God (
1 Apology
6).

Justin was especially concerned to deal with the question of whether Christ is in any sense a being distinct from God the Father, and if so, how one is to imagine the relationship of Christ, the incarnate Word, to God the Father himself. In one place Justin considers Christ as the Word in relation to words we ourselves use. When we speak a word, in some sense that word has an existence independent of us (as we discover when someone misunderstands a word we have spoken); on the other hand, the word we utter owes its existence entirely to us, since we are the ones who utter the word. The Logos of God is like that: it comes forth from God, and so belongs entirely to God, but it takes on its own kind of existence once it comes forth.

In another place Justin likens Christ’s relationship to God to a fire that is used to start another fire. The second fire exists independently of the first, but it could not have come into existence without the other. Moreover, when it is started, the new fire does not diminish anything of the first fire, making it less than it was to begin with. The first fire is just the same as it was before. But the second fire is just as fully fire as the first. And that’s how it is with God and Christ. Christ came forth from God and became his own being, and yet God was not diminished in the slightest when that happened (
Dialogue
61). Thus Justin stresses that Christ is a separate being from God and is “numerically distinct from the Father” (
Dialogue
129); but Christ is at the same time fully God.

One might suspect that Justin has moved into tricky waters with these explanations, since they could be taken to mean that Christ did not always exist (a view that later came to be declared a heresy) and that he was a kind of second God created by God the Father and who was, therefore, subordinate to God the Father (views also declared heresies). Justin is living before later theologians worked out the nuances of these views.

There is some question, in fact, about whether Justin can rightly be thought of as embracing a doctrine of the Trinity. He does not yet talk about the three divine beings, Father, Son, and Spirit, as being all equal and the “three” being “one.” He does say that God is worshiped first, the Son second, and the prophetic Spirit third (
1 Apology
1.13). But this again seems to suggest a hierarchy of divinity, with God at the top and the others in lower places beneath him; and elsewhere Justin claims that God alone is “unchanging and eternal” and the Son is subordinate to the Father (
1 Apology
13). So too he indicates that Christians worship God, the Son, angels, and the Spirit—clearly not a Trinitarian view (
1 Apology
13). If nothing else, one can say that Justin represents a development
toward
the orthodox Christological and Trinitarian paradoxes.

M
OVING THE CLOCK FORWARD
a hundred years to the middle of the third century, we come to the writings of a leader of the Roman church named Novatian (210–278
CE
). Like Hippolytus, whom we met in the previous chapter, Novatian was the head of a schismatic movement in the church and was elected as a kind of antipope. His theology, however, was completely orthodox in its day. Novatian’s most famous work is a treatise on the Trinity, in which he foreshadows ideas that theologians after his time developed; he still has not worked out the implications of a Trinitarian view with the nuance that later thinkers would. He, like Justin before him, still understands Christ to be a divine being subordinate to God the Father. But his chief concern is to show that Christ is fully God and yet is not the same as the Father. In other words, he develops his views in relation to the heresies that were still affecting his own day, adoptionism and modalism.

In some ways these heresies were at the opposite ends of the theological spectrum, one of them claiming that Christ was not God by nature at all, but only human, and the other claiming that Christ was not only God, but was actually God the Father. At the same time, one could argue that the very same monotheistic concern was driving both of these very different Christologies. The adoptionists, who said that Christ was not by nature God, did so in part to preserve the idea that there was only one God; the same concern lay behind the view of the modalists—that Christ was indeed God by nature, because he was God the Father made flesh, so here too there was only one God. Novatian saw these two contrary views as fundamentally related, as flip sides of the same heretical coin. As he puts it, Christ himself was crucified between these two thieves (of heresy).

Novatian is quite explicit that he is opposing these views that were intent on preserving the oneness of God. At one point he states that when the heretics “perceived that it was written that ‘God is one,’ they thought that they could not otherwise hold such an opinion than by supposing that it must be believed either that Christ was man only or really God the Father” (
Trinity
30).
²
And so both views were driven by those who objected to the idea that Christ could be a separate God from God the Father, since otherwise there would be “two gods.”

In response, Novatian wants to emphasize that Christ indeed is God, that he is distinct from God the Father, but that he is in perfect unity with him: “[Christ], then, when the Father willed it, proceeded from the Father, and He who was in the Father came forth from the Father; and He who was in the Father because He was of the Father, was subsequently with the Father, because He came forth from the Father” (
Trinity
31).

The complete unity of Christ with God is qualified, however, because for Novatian, as for the orthodox before him (but not so much afterward), Christ is not actually equal with God, but is subordinate to him, a divine being who came into existence at a certain time, begotten by God at some point before the creation. This is because there cannot be, in Novatian’s view, two different beings who are both “unborn” or “unbegotten” and “without beginning” and “invisible.” Novatian’s reasoning has a certain force to it: “For if [Christ] had not been born—compared with Him who was unborn, an equality being manifested in both—He would make two unborn beings, and thus would make two Gods” (
Trinity
31).

Very much the same thing can be said if he was “not begotten” like the Father, or was “formed without beginning as the Father” or “invisible” like the Father. In all these cases, Christ would necessarily be “equal” with the Father, which would mean that there would not be one God but “two Gods.” And that, for Novatian, cannot be. As a result, Christ is best seen as a subordinate divinity who was begotten by God the Father before the creation:

[Christ] therefore is God, but begotten for this special result, that He should be God. He is also the Lord, but born for this very purpose of the Father, that He might be Lord. He is also an Angel, but he was destined of the Father as an Angel . . . For all things being subjected to [Christ] as the Son by the Father, while He Himself, with those things which are subjected to Him, is subjected to His Father. He is indeed proved to be the Son of His Father, but He is found to be both Lord and God of all else. (
Trinity
31)

Novatian was more or less driven to this view by his opposition to heresies that declared that since there can be only one God, then Christ either was not God or was God the Father himself. The natural solution, then, was to say that Christ indeed was God, but there are not two Gods because he was begotten by God (not eternal with him) and subordinate to him (rather than equal with him). In Novatian’s day, this view could count as orthodoxy. But it was not long before this orthodox position came to be declared a heresy. In its stead, the orthodox theologians of the fourth century asserted a more complete paradox: that Christ was fully, not partially, God; that he had always existed; and that he was equal with God the Father. But together they, along with the Spirit, made up just one God.

A
STEP TOWARD WHAT
was to become the established orthodox view can be seen in a short letter by the bishop of Rome, Dionysius, who was writing just about a decade after Novatian (ca. 260
CE
). His letter was directed to a bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, who happened to have the same name. This other Dionysius had taken a strong stand against modalism—which he called by the name of the most famous of the later modalists, a man named Sabellius (so sometimes modalism was termed
Sabellianism
). But in opposing the Sabellian position that there was only one God in three modes of existence, Dionysius of Alexandria had gone too far in the other direction, at least in the opinion of Dionysius of Rome. He was in danger of claiming that the Father, Son, and Spirit were so distinct from one another that they could be seen as three different Gods. But any kind of polytheism—or in this case, tritheism—was a heresy to be avoided. So Dionysius of Rome wrote a letter to his namesake in Alexandria to help provide greater nuance to his theological views, affirming that Christ is God and is a separate being from God the Father, but is so united with him that they form an absolute unity.

Dionysius of Rome states the situation that he has heard about in the theological disputes occurring in Alexandria: “I learn that there are some of you . . . who are, one might say, diametrically opposed to the views of Sabellius; he blasphemously says that the Son is the Father and the Father the Son, while they [those who oppose Sabellius] in a manner preach three Gods, dividing the sacred Monad into three substances foreign to each other and utterly separate.”
³
In response, Dionysius of Rome gives his own corrective, which stresses that the three are one: “The Divine Word must of necessity be united to the God of the Universe, and the Holy Spirit must have his habitation and abode in God; thus it is absolutely necessary that the Divine Triad be summed up and gathered into a unity, brought as it were to an apex, and by that Unity I mean the all sovereign God of the Universe.”

Three beings make up a “Divine Triad.” But they are so harmonious that they can be seen as a “unity,” and this unity is itself the “God of the universe.” This unity, for Dionysius of Rome, signifies that the Son of God is not a creature made or begotten by God, but that he is eternal with God and that he shares all the attributes of God the Father, as his Word, and Wisdom, and Power. For Dionysius of Rome the logic for this is compelling: “for if the Son came into being there was [a time] when these attributes were not; therefore there was a time when God was without them; which is most absurd.”

By refusing to “divide into three deities the wonderful and divine Monad,” and yet insisting that they are in fact three different beings united together into one, Dionysius reaches the desired theological result: “For thus both the Holy Triad and the holy preaching of the Monarchy will be preserved.”

Obviously, we are moving into some deep theological waters. There need to be three divine beings. But the three need to be one, not three. The question of how this can be became the major theological obsession of the fourth century. It all started with a controversy in Alexandria, in which a priest had serious disagreements on the matter with his bishop. The priest embraced a view that seems very similar to that endorsed earlier by the orthodox Novatian and others in the orthodox tradition, but it came to be condemned as one of Christianity’s most notorious heresies. This heresy was called
Arianism
, named after the priest with whom it allegedly originated, Arius.

A
RIUS WAS BORN AROUND
260
CE
, right about the time Dionysius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria were engaged in their back-and-forth over questions of Christology. Arius came from Libya but eventually moved to the city of Alexandria and became intimately involved with the vibrant Christian community there. In 312 he was ordained as a priest and was placed in charge of his own church. In that capacity Arius was answerable to the bishop of Alexandria, who, for most of his time there, was a man named Alexander.