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DOCTRINE OF TRINITY | SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY | SPECIAL LECTURES | SECULARIZATION AND SANCTIFICATION
CHAPTER III: THE TRIUMPH OF ONTOLOGICAL REALISM AND ETERNAL GENERATION
IN THE NICENE CREED
Jung S. Rhee
(Footnote)
1 Richardson, Creeds in the Making, pp. 49-50. "A serious danger threatened the fourth-century Church...she was threatened with the loss of her specifically Christian conception of God...This was the temptation which the Church rejected when she finally expelled the Arians from her midst. For Arianism represents just such an attempt to paganise the Church's idea of God."
2 Bernard Lonergan, The Way To Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology, tr. Conn O'Donovan (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), p. 110.
3 Ibid., p. 134.
4 Richardson, Creeds in the Making, p. 50.
5 John Burnaby, The Belief of Christendom: A Commentary on the Nicene Creed (London: SPCK, 1959), pp. 74-75. "This was the central argument of Athanasius. To be united to a creature cannot give union with God."; Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines, p. 85.
6 Cf. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 2nd ed., (New York: David Mckay Co., Inc., 1960), p. 205. "Prior to the beginning of the fourth century all creeds and summaries of faith were local in character."
7 The Apostles' Creed does not belong to this category, for it was not made by an official church council. But as for the church-written confessions, the Nicene Creed is the only one which is accepted by the East, West, and Protestant altogether. This all-embracing power is significantly recognized and depended upon especially in the modern ecumenical movement. cf. Emilianos Timiadis, The Nicene Creed: Our Common Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 15. "Certainly the confession of our faith in the Nicene Creed entails valuable doctrinal implications that meet the needs of all times and places. A rereading of this Creed will reveal its present-day relevance and permanent immutability, even though it is sixteen hundred years old."
8 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1: 462-477.
9 Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 224.
10 Colm Luibheid, The Council of Nicaea (Galway: Galway University Press, 1982), p. 52. Concerning Eusebius, he explains that "Born sometimes before 264, he was appointed as a presbyter in Caesarea and came there under the influence of Pamphilus, a disciple of Origen."
11 Hugh M. Scott, Origin and Development of the Nicene Theology (Chicago: Chicago Theological Seminary Press, 1896), p. 78.
12 Lonergan, The Way To Nicea, pp. 118-119; Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines, p. 71. "Yet his theology bore the earmarks of neo-Platonism, and his allegorical interpretation opened the way for all kinds of speculation and arbitrary interpretation."
13 Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, 1: 315.
14 Ibid., 1: 315, 329; Fortman, The Triune God, pp. 66-67. "They stressed...that His was not a metaphorical or adoptive sonship but a real, metaphysical sonship."; cf. Frances M. Young, From Nicaea To Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and its Background (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), pp. 112-
113. "Eunomius[who was condemned in the Council of Constantinople] wanted to claim that all descriptions of the Logos were analogical; he was Son of God metaphorically, not literally."
15 John Courtney Murray, The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 42-43, 45.
16 Ibid., p. 46.
17 Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, I.31. "The purpose of all this is only that they might reduce the Son into works[creatures]."
18 Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, 1: 307, 310.
19 Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, II.19-20.
20 de Margerie, The Christian Trinity in History, p. 93. "If it is true that the Trinitarian doctrines of Tertullian and Origen were influenced by Stoicism and Middle Platonism respectively, it must be stated, that their subordinationist tendencies were rejected by Nicaea. Nicaea signifies precisely the rejection of the hellenization of the dogma in the sense of a syncretism between Christianity and Greek polytheism."
21 Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, 1: 310; Concerning the history of the term "homoousios" as used in the Christian circle, see Ibid., 1: 309-310 and Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, pp. 234-237.
22 Murray, The Problem of God, p. 55.
23 Ralph E. Person, The Mode of Theological Decision Making at the Early Ecumenical Councils: An Inquiry into the Function of Scripture and Tradition at the Councels of Nicaea and Ephesus, Th. D. Dissertation (Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt Kommissionsverlag, 1978), pp. 111-112.
24 Ibid., p. 102.
25 Ibid., pp. 101-111. Concerning the reason for compromise, he contended that the bishops intentionally created this ambiguity in order to preserve peace between the East and the West, because the adoption of one doctrine had to exclude the other.
26 Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 237.
27 Ibid., p. 235.
28 Harnack, History of Dogma, 4: 3.
29 Ibid., p. 3. "He founded in Antioch an exegetical-theological school which, during the time of the three episcopates of Domnus, Timaus and Cyril, was not in communion with the Church there, but which afterwards, shortly before the martyrdom of Lucian, made its peace with the Church."
30 Ibid., pp. 2-7.
31 Ibid., p. 6.
32 Alexander of Alexandria, Letter to Alexander of Thessalonica, 35-36.
33 Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, 1.5. "Therefore he[Arius] says that God, foreknowing that he would be good, gave him in anticipation this glory[of the Son] which afterward he attained as man because of his virtue. Thus, because of his works, which God foreknew, God brought it about that he being of such a nature should come into being now."
34 Fortman, The Triune God, p. 60.
35 Cf. Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, 1.24. "Was God 'Who is' ever without reason[Word]?...Who can endure to hear them say that God was ever without reason[Word]...?"
36 Harnack, History of Dogma, 4: 29.
37 Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, 1: 333.
38 Burnaby, The Belief of Christendom: A Commentary on the Nicene Creed, p. 74.
39 Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, 1.9. Here, sonship by grace means sonship by adoption; For a discussion on the Athanasius' theory of two kinds of sonship, see George D. Dragas, "The Eternal Son: An Essay on Christology in the Early Church with Particular Reference To St. Athanasius the Great," in The Incarnation: Ecumenical Studies in the Nicene- Constantinopolitan Creed A.D. 381, Thomas F. Torrance, ed. (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press, 1981), pp. 32-33.
40 Luibheid, The Council of Nicaea, pp. 26-27.
41 Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, pp. 227-229. He well summarized Arian teachings about the Son in "four propositions which follows logically from the preceding premise." (i) the Son must be a creature, a ktisma or poiema, whom the Father has formed out of nothing by His mere fiat. The term 'beget'(gennan) applied to the Son's generation must therefore bear the purely figurative sense of 'make'(poiein). (ii) as a creature the Son must have had a beginning. There was a time when He was not. (iii) the Son can have no comnunion with, and indeed no direct knowledge of, His Father. (iv) the Son must be liable to change and even sin(treptos; alloiotos).
42 Charles Augustus Briggs, The Fundamental Christian Faith: The Origin, History and Interpretation of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1913), p. 227.
43 Thompson, The Nicene Creed, p. 69. "We cannot, in this life, understand this fully, but we believe that He is God's Son in a sense analogous to that in which we are our father's sons."; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 244. "Like Irenaeus, Athanasius regards the son's generation as mysterious; but he interprets it as implying that, so far from being a creature, He must, like a human offspring, be derived from and share His father's nature."
44 Dragas, "The Eternal Son," p. 43.
45 de Margerie, The Christian Trinity in History, p. 90.
46 Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, I.21. It was said in the context of criticism on the Arian denial of distinction between creation and generation in the mode of the Son's origin.
47 Ibid., I.19.
48 Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, 1: 331-332.
49 Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, I.23.
50 Ibid., I.21-22.
51 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1: 469.
52 Murray, The Problem of God, p. 44.
53 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1: 474.
54 Alexander of Alexandria, Letter to Alexander of Thessalonica, 48.
55 Arius, Letter to Alexander of Alexandria, 3.
56 Ibid., 2.
57 Ibid., 4.
58 Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration Concerning the Son, 5.
59 Alexander of Alexandria, Letter to Alexander of Thessalonica, 22-23.
60 Cf. Luibheid, The Council of Nicaea, p. 32.
61 Athanasius, Orations against the Arians, I.11. Also, he criticized it as "foolish and unreasonaibe."
62 Ibid., I.13.
63 Ibid., I.12.
64 Ibid.
65 Cf. Scott, Origin and Development of the Nicene Theology, p. 191.
66 Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration Concerning the Son, 3.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., 9.
70 Luibheid, The Council of Nicaea, p. 32.
71 For example, Thomson, The Nicene Creed, pp. 78-79. "...the begetting of the Son is an eternal and continuous act, that is to say, the Son is always being begotten of the Father from all eternity, and will continue to be begotten to all eternity."; Fortman, The Triune God, p. 65; Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, p. 240.
72 Scott, Nicene Theology, p. 182. "The eternal generation of the Son first found clear expression in Irenaeus."
73 Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, 1:291.
74 Harnack, History of Dogma, 4: 333. He gave the highest praise to Athanasius as the head of the anti-Origenist movement: "At the beginning of the fourth century, Christianity was, again in consequence of the theology, on the point of disruption. Eusebius has himself admitted the danger in the outward organization, and it was a result of the cleavage in thought. Bishops spoke authoritatively in the East who had learned from Origen all sorts of ideas that put the doctrine of the Church in danger of running to seed. A compact school was in the field that, while it considered itself very scientific and genuinely biblical, yet without knowing or intending it, secularised Christianity. Constantine on the one hand, and Athanasius on the other, saved Christendom," 4: 332-333.
75 Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, p. 217; Person, The Mode of Theological Decision Making at the Early Ecumenical Councils, p. 93.
76 Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, p. 195. "When we turn to the second article, the first thing that leaps to the eye is the unanimity of Eastern creeds in teaching explicitly the Fathers pre-cosmic begetting of the Son."; cf. Ibid., pp. 217-230. Though it has been suggested that the Nicene Creed is a revision of Ceasarean Creed, today this Hort-Harnack hypothesis is no longer agreed that the Nicene Creed was written with "a fairly free hand," p. 229. On the other hand, the Lietzmann hypothesis that the Nicene Creed was based on the creed of Jerusalem is also rejected, Person, The Mode of Theological Decision Making, pp. 87-91.
77 Richardson, Creeds in the Making, p. 53.
78 Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines, pp. 88-89.
79 Robert J. O'Connell, St. Augustine's Confessions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 138-139; Eugene Portalie, A Guide To the Thought of Saint Augustine, tr. Ralph J. Bastian (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company,1960), p. 101.
80 Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, tr. Floyd V. Filson (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964), pp. 61-64.
81 Portalie, A Guide To the Thought of Saint Augustine, p. 98. According to him, the area where the influence of Platonism made the strongest influence on Augustine is the doctrine of the Trinity, especially of the eternal generation.
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