The understanding that Jesus became God’s unique child through his resurrection and the Johannine understanding of Jesus’ pre-existence as the Word of God make distinct affirmations. Christian theology needs to recognize both.20 The first sees Jesus becoming something more through his death and resurrection than he had been in life. The events of his life, death, and resurrection have a real significance for his person, and beyond that for God and God’s creation. Jesus as eschatological prophet and Jesus as the risen Christ do not fit into the world as it is, but call for and promise its transformation. The second understanding affirms the radical transcendence of God’s Word to creation, yet also that this radically transcendent Word became incarnate in Jesus, experienced the human condition, suffered, died, and rose again. In this way God has already entered into a new relationship with creation that is the basis of what the first understanding promises. Both understandings are oriented to Jesus’ special status and relationship to God, not his gender. This relationship and status can also be expressed through the feminine image of Sophia, divine Wisdom.21
The decision made in the early church to understand Jesus in this way rather than simply as inspired by God is one that has to be rethought in the present generation. Some argue that this was a departure from Jesus of Galilee, a mystification that helped enshrine a patriarchal worldview in the church and that lost sight of Jesus’ prophetic practice.22 There is some truth in this.23 Notions of Jesus as God’s Son or as fully human and fully divine need to be made concrete by recurrence to accounts of Jesus’ life in the Synoptic Gospels,24 and at times subjected to an ideological critique. But conversely, notions of Jesus as a moral exemplar need to be undergirded by understandings of his ultimate saving significance that mediate the courage to love in the face of radical sin and evil.25 Understandings of Jesus as the Son or Wisdom of God can do this, and also express how the risen Christ is continuous with but not restricted to Jesus’ historical particularity.26
The early Christian experience of salvation in Jesus was one of inspiring example and authoritative teaching, but also of reconciliation to God and others despite one’s sin, hope for a new heaven and a new earth, and for life after death. These different aspects of salvation can conflict, but they also remain unfulfilled without each other. The salvation Jesus brings, like the Reign of God he preached, includes all aspects of the person and creation. Christologies have to offer an adequate explanation of how Jesus can mediate this kind of radical salvation.27 As only God can save and if salvation is experienced through Jesus, Jesus must in some way have a unique relationship to God. The divinity of Jesus is inferred from the experience of his saving significance.28 Affirmations of this and Jesus’ ultimate saving significance can become mystifications distracting people from urgent tasks within history that Jesus calls them too. But these can also be powerful moral sources enabling people to oppose radical evil without becoming fanatical in the quest for justice or falling into contempt for those they care for.29 Understandings of Jesus as God’s Sophia or Son explain how Jesus is able to mediate this kind of salvation30 and by doing so be this kind of moral source.
From Binitarian Worship in the New Testament to Trinitarian Faith at the Council of Nicaea
There are passages in the New Testament that speak of Jesus Christ, God, and the Holy Spirit (2 Cor13:13) or of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19), and a Trinitarian understanding of God can be discerned “retrospectively” within John’s Gospel.31 But the full doctrine of the Trinity as affirmed at the council of Nicaea is not present in the New Testament. In hindsight one can say that its roots are present there. A number of New Testament passages are “functionally Trinitarian.”32 They speak of how salvation is mediated to humanity from God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. But the council of Nicaea was concerned not only with Jesus’ saving function, but also with what enabled him to fulfill this, the nature of his person and relationship to God. In this respect the council of Nicaea said things about Jesus that the New Testament does not. Through the process of inculturation that led to this council, the church attained greater metaphysical precision in its understanding of Jesus.
The church’s journey from the New Testament to Nicaea was a search for an understanding of God adequate to certain aspects of the gospel.33 It was “a process of trial-and-error,”34 influenced by political, religious, ecclesiastical, and personal factors. It did not end at Nicaea. What follows will sketch some of the stages of this development.
As the church took shape as an institution in the second century CE, ecclesiastical writers sought to harmonize the disparate teachings of the New Testament.35 At roughly the same time Christian theologians entered into a prolonged dispute with Gnosticism, which saw Jesus as representing a higher divinity over against a lesser divinity who had created the world. This controversy led the early church to emphasize the oneness and sovereignty of God, 36 which in turn raised the question of Jesus’ relationship to God. Use of the formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” became increasingly common in Christian worship and was used by theologians like Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 135–200) to understand the dynamics of salvation history. By the late second century Christian theologians were asking about Jesus’ relationship to God.37 The term “the Logos”38 was seized upon by some to describe Jesus’ relationship to God in opposition to a theological movement known as Monarchianism, which more sharply distinguished the two. This term was chosen because of its use in the Gospel of John and its resonances in Hellenistic culture. By this time Christian theologians had begun to seek greater clarity in their understanding of the gospel through the use of Hellenistic philosophy. This produced various ways of understanding Jesus’ relation to God that led to the affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon39 and made them necessary as part of defining the theological parameters of Christian faith in the Hellenistic world.
Early in the third century, in dispute with the Monarchian Praxeas, Tertullian (c. 160–225) developed the first explicitly Trinitarian understanding of God. Tertullian developed an economic40 theory of the Trinity, concerned with how God acts and is experienced in history. Subsequently Origen of Alexandria (c. 186–255) went further, describing God as existing in three hypostases. This term “hypostasis” became important in subsequent Trinitarian discussion. In this usage it means concrete reality, individual entity or subsistence.41 Origen also argued that the divine Logos was united to Jesus’ human soul as the heat of fire infuses a piece of iron placed in it. In arguing this Origen stated a principle that became central to christological teachings judged to be orthodox at Nicaea and Chalcedon: those elements of human nature which are not assumed by God in the incarnation are not saved.42