The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God

By R.P.C. Hanson

The Council of Antioch of 325

“The Council was clearly anti-Arian…There was no mention of homoousios nor of any compound of ousia applied to the Son in the Statement of Faith…and at the end three of the 59 bishops who attended refused to accept this Statement and were excommunicated… [This is] the only anti-Arian and pre-Nicene statement of doctrine which we possess besides the writings of Alexander himself…The reference to the Holy Spirit in this Statement is very meager. Anathemas were added, the first known anathemas against doctrinal deviations in any Church Council. They were directed against those who held that the Son is a creature of geneton (i.e. belonging to those things that have come into existence), or not an authentic product (gennema) or that there was a time when he did not exist, or that he is immutable by his own independent free-will, or those who derive his birth from non-existence and say that he is not by nature immutable as the Father is…Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Contra Marcellum reproduces an anecdote of Marcellus in which he says…’Bishop Ossius asked him (Narcissus) if like Eusebius of Palestine he taught that there were two ousiai, and that he (Marcellus) knew from his (Narcissus’) writings that he answered that he (Narcissus) believed that there were three ousiai’ [I.4.39; 53-4]…[this is] an early example of the confusion about terms which was to dog continually the search for the Christian doctrine of God in the fourth century…[Eusebius’] estimate of the Holy Spirit was so low that he would not have included him within the Godhead, and so would only recognize two hypostases…This little incident [reveals that Eusebius] came to the Council of Nicaea already under a misapprehension about the views of those who represented the opposite party to his.” pp 146-151.

The Council of Nicaea of 325

“We have no evidence as to whether Constantine either favored or opposed this doctrine, or even if he understood it…The other really remarkable point about Niceae is the condemnation in the anathemas at the end of the view that the Son is ‘of another hypostasis or ousia’ from the Father. This can only have been a highly ambiguous and extremely confusing statement. By the standard of later orthodoxy, as achieved in the Creed of Constantinople of 381, it is a rankly heretical (i.e. Sabellian) proposition, because the Son must be of a different hypostasis (i.e. ‘Person’) from the Father [the trinitarian formula staunchly maintains that God is ‘3 hypostases in 1 Ousia’, i.e. ‘1 God in 3 Persons’]. And in fact there were present at the Council people…who were quite ready to maintain that there is only one [Personality] in the Godhead, and who were later to be deposed for heresy because they believed this [Marcellus of Ancyra; Ossius]…the Creed produced by the Council of Nicaea was a mine of potential confusion…Not many who have written upon the subject of the Creed of Nicaea have observed this serious difficulty presented by it…

The theory that N can be accounted for as the result of a victory of Western theology has been considerably damaged by recent studies of the subject…Very few Western bishops took the trouble to attend the Council…Recent studies on the word homoousios have tended to show…that it was of a much looser, more flexible, indeed less specific and therefore less controversial significance…It is a fact which has often been remarked upon that for nearly 20 years after Nicea nobody mentions homoousios, not even Athanasius. This may be because it was much less significant than either later historians of the ancient Church or modern scholars thought that it was…As N does not openly mention the eternal generation of the Son, so it does not openly declare that there is only one hypostasis in the Godhead.” pp 152-178.  

Semantic Confusion: Hypostasis and Ousia

“The search for the Christian doctrine of God in the fourth century was in fact complicated and exasperated by semantic confusion, so that people holding different views were using the same words as those who opposed them, but, unawares, giving them different meanings from those applied to them by those opponents…there was no single agreed word available and widely used for what God is as Three in distinction from what he is as One…The word hypostasis is virtually unknown in Classical Greek in its philosophical sense…[it] later became a key-word in Platonism…The word occurs 5 times in the NT [2Cor 9.4; 11.17; Heb 1.3; 3.14; 11.1]…The word also occurs 20 times in the LXX, but only one of them can be regarded as theologically significant [Wisdom 16.21], even though several Christian writers of the fourth century tried to make out that they all were so…But we must remember that for at least the first half of the period 318-381, and in some cases considerably later, ousia and hypostasis are used as virtual synonyms, not in one sense only but in two…Even those who distinguished hypostasis [from ousia] must not be thought to have anticipated the later meanings of those terms given them in the second half of the century by the great Cappadocian theologians.

In Christian use, until the second half of the third century no examples of the word [homoousios] were Trinitarian in context, and the word was employed in a very fluid and diverse way from which no particular conclusions can be drawn…[this] left a dangerous legacy of confusion for the future.” pp 181-202.

The Council of Tyre 335

“…in the summer of 335, the Council of Caesarea was re-constituted or re-summoned in Tyre…Athanasius was unwillingly compelled to attend by threats from Constantine; he testifies himself to his reluctance (Apol. Sec. 71) and papyrus 14…confirms this. There was little attempt to conceal the fact that the Council had assembled to investigate his conduct of affairs in his see… [He knew his opponents] had a strong case. It is not surprising that he was depressed and apprehensive…The list of accusations against Athanasius was a long one: the case of Ischyras…various types of violence committed by Athanasius against individual Melitian bishops…charges of sexual irregularity which had become almost routine in such prosecutions (but which were dropped in the course of the proceedings)…Athanasius had arrived (July 11^th) accompanied by 30 Egyptian bishops who were his supporters, and who behaved during the session of Council in a disturbing and threatening manner. His encouragement over several years to his supporters to behave like hooligans was now recoiling on his own head…Athanasius realized that he had no more to hope from the Council of Tyre. He secretly left the city and made his way to the court of Constantinople...The result was that the Council condemned Athanasius on a number of charges, deposed him from being archbishop of Alexandria, excommunicating him, and forbade him to return to his former see…His flight in the middle of the Council was taken as an admission of guilt. They reinstated some deposed Melitian bishops and sent a circular letter to all bishops asking them not to communicate with Athanasius…. [The Council gave him] an opportunity to defend himself. The behavior of his supporters during the trial was menacing and exasperating and suggested that he was more concerned with coercion than with justice. It must have been clear to everybody that he had been for some time using indefensible violence in the administration of his see.” pp 259-262.

Athanasius, The Incarnation.

“[Athanasius’ treatise on the Incarnation] was, in the fourth century, a revolutionary new doctrine pregnant with important consequences for the future…We can properly describe this doctrine as a ‘Space-suit Christology’. Just as the astronaut, in order to operate [in space] puts on an elaborate space-suit which enables him to live and act in this new, unfamiliar environment, so the Logos put on a body which enabled him to behave as a human being among human beings. But his relation to this body is no closer than that of an astronaut to his space-suit…his failure to recognize the existence of a human mind in Jesus lands him in an absurd and impossible situation…It does not seem to have occurred to him that moral freedom is what constitutes [a human being] and not animal, and that in this theory he was in effect saying that Jesus Christ was not human…Christ’s conduct and life is therefore an example to us, but not a human example, only an example of God operating through a not-quite-human instrument…One of the curious results of this theology of the Incarnation is that it almost does away with a doctrine of the Atonement…[since Athanasius] cannot really explain why Christ should have died…Even though we may not go quite as far as Harnack when he declared of Athanasius’ doctrine…that ‘every feature which recalls the historical Jesus of Nazareth was erased’ [History, 4.45], we must conclude that whatever else the Logos incarnate is in Athanasius’ account of him, he is not a human being…When his [Arian] opponents cite examples of Jesus asking questions in apparent want of information, Athanasius admits that it is the property of the flesh to be ignorant, as of the Godhead to be omniscient, but he will not follow the logical consequences of his admission, and tries to show that Jesus was not really ignorant. His questions do not necessarily betray ignorance…[Jesus] only asked questions in order to encourage others to gain knowledge of him…Dealing with Mark 13.32…Athanasius labours to show that the text does not mean what it quite obviously does mean…[Jesus] only professed ignorance to show that men were ignorant, and so on…How a human body if the human mind is ignored can grow in wisdom [Luke 2.52] he does not stop to explain…His exposition of Prov 8.22-27 involved assuming that Solomon in this passage switches without warning from referring to the pre-existent Christ to speaking of the incarnate Christ and back again…He can produce the fantastic argument in the account of Moses at the Burning Bush that Moses sees an angel (not Christ) but hears Christ (not an angel). Stead [in ‘Rhetorical Method in Athanasius’ 121-137, says he followed] ‘a course which the rhetorical conventions of his age permitted but which our own more exacting requirements of candour preclude’…

[Athanasius] established the ongoing search for an adequate Christian doctrine of God on a quite new basis, pulling it away from its traditional preoccupation with the identification of the Son with a principle of Greek philosophy. ” pp 447-458.