Transcript

Okay, are we ready to go?

So welcome back.

This is Lecture 6, if anybody's counting.

The first theologian, and this is where it gets fun, because we're going to start talking about the early Theologians.

Now, what's the difference between a theologian and an apologist?

We've already read some of the apologists.

Apologists were writing primarily for a non-Christian audience, even though probably more Christians read their stuff than non-Christians.

The point is that they were writing for a non-Christian audience, which meant they used philosophy more than they used Scripture.

Because after all, if you're writing for a non-Christian audience, why quote Scripture?

And, as we just learned, The canon was still in process.

So now we're getting to the point where the theologians are going to be using Scripture to support their arguments.

And we're going to talk about two of them tonight.

The first one we're going to talk about is Irenaeus.

Some people say Irenaeus.

That's alright.

And his dates are, he was born somewhere in the 120s, so like 120 to 130, somewhere in there, and died, according to tradition, in 202. Although we don't really exactly know that for sure, but the date 202 kind of sticks because there was a lot of persecution going on, and so according to the tradition, he was martyred, so it seems like a good date for him to die, but we're not exactly sure.

He's from Asia Minor, you know it as Turkey, and possibly from the city of Smyrna, or Izmir now.

And among our earlier authors is a guy named Polycarp, Polycarp was Bishop of Smyrna.

And apparently it seems that Irenaeus may have studied under him, but was certainly a priest at that time and was sent.

To the town of Lyon, where he was sent to the mission field.

Now, Lyon, this is France, but back then it's called Gaul, and it's not a vacation spot back then, it's the wilderness, it's the mission field.

And so he's sent there to support the bishop of Lyon, whose name was Pothinus.

And so he's a priest who's supporting that bishop.

Irenaeus is heavily influenced by Justin Martyr's writings.

Of course, there aren't that many writings to be influenced by yet.

But if he's a student of Polycarp and Justin, you can sort of think of Irenaeus as maybe third generation after the Apostles, right?

He moves to Gaul to serve under Bishop Pothinus.

And in the year 177, he returns from a trip to Rome And when he gets back to Lyon, he's told there's good news and there's bad news.

Which one do you want first?

You're going to ask, well, I don't know, give me the bad news.

The bad news is there's been a wave of persecution, and a lot of people have been martyred while you were gone, including our beloved bishop, Pope Sinus.

Jeez, that's terrible.

Well, what's the good news?

You're the new bishop!

So, the lesson to be learned from this is do not miss a church meeting, because you will be elected to some sort of responsibility.

In fact, I refer to that as the Irenaeus Syndrome, when you show up after a meeting and they decide you're going to do something.

So, he becomes the Bishop of Lyon, and in that role, he is our first real theologian since the Apostles, because He wants to support his arguments from Scripture, not philosophy.

Now, his arguments are primarily against Gnosticism.

You already know about that.

The other thing that makes him a theologian as opposed to an apologist is that his primary audience is not outsiders, where he has to convince them to accept Christianity, But his primary audience is insiders, where his agenda is to warn them about the dangers of heresy and specifically Gnosticism.

Why is that such an urgent mission for him?

He says, remember, Christology informs soteriology.

What you believe about Christ matters because your belief about Christ leads you to certain beliefs about salvation and Orthodoxy is important because only a correct belief in Christ leads to salvation.

That's the whole assumption behind this.

True faith matters.

The Church cannot simply let everyone believe whatever they want because believing the wrong thing will not lead to salvation.

With regard specifically to Gnosticism, remember Gnosticism, most Gnosticism is Docetic, meaning that for the most part the Gnostics, along with the Docetics, denied the humanity of Christ.

They said that sure, he's divine, but not really human.

So that his human body was either an illusion, and he's a phantom, or that maybe it was tangible, but you know, Still kind of wispy and not really human.

And so Irenaeus' response to that is that in us, it is our humanity that needs salvation.

I mean, after all, when we sin, we sin in the flesh, right?

It's our flesh that sins, so it's our humanity If Christ is going to be our savior, he has to be one of us.

To save humanity, he has to be human.

There's a principle here behind this that's implied here, but it will be stated later more clearly.

The principle is this.

What is not assumed is not saved.

What is not assumed is not saved.

In other words, if Jesus doesn't become something, he can't save it.

And of course, the something is human, right?

If he doesn't become human, truly human, he can't save humanity.

So that's what's going on here, and that's why Irenaeus writes with such urgency.

His biggest document, one that I am not asking you It's called Against Heresies.

Actually, that's the shorthand title.

This piece of chalk is now down to one molecule.

Against Heresies, the actual title is The Detection and Reputation of Knowledge Falsely So Called.

In other words, knowledge falsely so called.

In other words, false knowledge or gnosticism.

And we call it, again, Teresies.

Again, Teresies was written in about the year 185. So you see where we are now.

We're towards the end of the second century.

We're basically contemporary with Clement of Alexandria, but remember I said I consider Clement more of an apologist and Irenaeus more of a theologian.

But again, Teresies is written, again, because of various forms of Gnosticism, and he goes into great detail about all the different Gnostic teachers.

And so the stuff we know about Gnosticism, a lot of it comes from Irenaeus.

And you might say, well, wait a minute, didn't we say up front that we can't always trust what the early theologians say about their opponents?

And in general, that's true.

Although, when we discovered, not me, I wasn't born yet, but when people discovered actual Gnostic documents, it turns out he's actually pretty accurate.

When he describes what the Gnostics believed and what the different Gnostic schools of thought taught.

And all that Gnostic stuff is in the textbook, so you can read that to your heart's content.

But the idea is here that Irenaeus is trying to expose and then warn Christians about what Gnosticism really is.

And he counters Gnosticism with apostolic succession.

Part of his argument is, hey, look, I'm a bishop.

If there was secret knowledge, I'd know it, because it would have been passed down through the apostolic succession.

And so, since nobody told me about any secret knowledge, there must not be any.

Now, the Gnostics actually had the answer to that.

Their answer was, well, we have our own apostolic succession.

And so the Gnostics would argue that the apostles Peter, James, and John were really sort of ignorant as to what the real deal was, and Jesus told the secret knowledge to Thomas, or to his brother James, or one of these other sort of characters, and they passed down the real secret knowledge that the Gnostics now teach.

So that would be their argument.

But anyway, you get the idea.

Apostolic succession becomes an argument against anyone who says they know something the bishops don't. The other thing that Irenaeus is very serious about is connecting the Old Testament with the New Testament.

Because again, the Gnostics reject the Old Testament as the product of, or the book about, Yes, the Creator God, but the Creator God isn't good.

The Creator God is evil or inept, and creation was a big mistake, and this whole world is sort of half-baked, and it's a big problem.

And that's why there's evil in the world, because this Old Testament God created evil.

So, to argue against that, Irenaeus is showing the continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and so he's going to use typology, we talked about that earlier, and says creation was not a mistake, In fact, Christ himself is the agent of creation.

This is exactly what we read at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel.

Through him all things were made, and nothing was made without him.

So the Old Testament God is, in fact, the one whom Jesus called Father.

And in fact, by using typology, we can actually see Christ not only foreshadowed in the Old Testament, But we can also see Christ himself in the Old Testament when we see things like the angel of the Lord visiting people.

That's Jesus popping up in his pre-existent state.

So we have cases where Jesus himself can be seen in the Old Testament.

It's true, he'll say, you know, I see how you might think that the Old Testament, that God in the Old Testament looks different than the God that Jesus preached, because the Gnostics were saying that Old Testament God is the mean, judgmental, angry God, and the God whom Jesus called Father, he's the nice, compassionate, sacred God.

And so, Irenaeus is saying, well, it's not that God has changed over time, but we have changed over time.

Humanity has matured, the needs of humanity have changed, and so, throughout the different phases of human history, the relationship between God and humans changes.

Now you may, when you read him, although you won't be reading this document, but when you read the other document, you may sense that this leads him into a kind of dispensationalism that you may be uncomfortable with.

But at any rate, that's his answer to the question.

Above all, Irenaeus is affirming Both of the two natures of Christ.

That Jesus Christ is both human and divine.

Of course, the Gnostics would have denied his humanity, so that's the one that he stresses.

But he's affirming both natures.

He's both human and divine.

But not simply human and divine.

He is passable and impassable.

Passable and impassable.

To be impassable means unchanging.

This is the thing about, you know, God doesn't change over time, even though the Old Testament seems different, God doesn't change, humanity changes.

Why doesn't God change?

Because part of the very definition of divinity is that divinity is impassable, unchanging.

Well, if you say that, then you also have to say that about Christ, because if you're going to say Jesus Christ is divine, Then isn't he impassable too?

But that creates a problem.

Wait a minute, I thought he was born small and got big and grew up and learned things.

That sounds like change to me.

So, the way the mainstream theologians are going to answer this question is by saying that yes, his divine nature is impassable, but his human nature is passable, and it is in his human nature that he is born, grows up, learns things, suffers, and dies.

And so, the paradox here is that when the word becomes flesh, the impassable becomes passable.

The one who could not suffer acquires the ability to suffer.

Because remember, the Ebionites had said that because he suffered, he can't be divine.

And the Jothetics and the Gnostics on the other extreme have said, because he's divine, he could not have suffered.

You see, on both extremes, there's the assumption that divinity and suffering are utterly incompatible.

And here's the mainstream church who want to be able to say he's divine and he suffered.

And so, the answer to the question is, he became human so that he could suffer.

He became passable.

The impassable becomes passable.

Is that a question?

Well, yes, in a way it is, in the sense that, in the sense that, We've seen all along the affirmation of the two natures, he's human and divine.

Now Irenaeus is further clarifying how he can be human and divine, how he can be passable and impassable, how he can suffer and still be divine, etc. So yes, he's further clarifying those as we go.

But Irenaeus is quick to point out that While we have the two natures, and while the human nature is the one that suffers and the divine nature does not, you cannot separate the human and divine by saying, well, we'll call this one Jesus and this one Christ.

You don't get to do that.

In fact, it was the Gnostics that And some of the Epianites as well, but it was those folks who were experimenting with separating the concept of Christ from the man Jesus.

And so Irenaeus is quick to point out that we don't do that.

Jesus Christ is one person who has these two natures.

And they did kind of, you know, refer to the humanity of Jesus as the son of man and the divinity of Jesus as the son of God.

They experimented with that for a while, although in the third century they're going to nuance that a little bit and that dichotomy is going to go away.

But again, it's not the case that Jesus is the name of his humanity and Christ is the name of his divinity.

You can't play that game.

The human state being able to change.

What about the mind?

When I say the mind, the thoughts.

If I'm not mistaken, I'm not no Bible scholar.

You're going to be one.

Hopefully.

Jesus' mother comes to him and says there's no more wine at the wedding, correct?

What does he say to her?

He says to her, you know, my time hasn't come.

And then he changes his mind and says, I'll do it anyway.

Right.

I mean, so, even, let's say that the human state can evolve and change the mind of God.

Does that change?

That's a huge question.

You know, questions like, at what point, you know, or does he become increasingly aware of his identity?

Or is, you know, I mean...

And this is not a question that's being answered much yet, because down the road a bit, in a few weeks we're going to start to talk about questions of, well, does he have a human mind, or is the mind part divine, and all that stuff.

So we really haven't gotten there yet.

It's a great question, but right now it basically works like this.

Anything that changes in him over time has to be assigned to the human nature.

And anything that doesn't is part of the divine nature.

One of the gospel passages that would come up in this discussion is when they ask him about the end, and he says, well, no one knows the day or the hour, not even the Son, but only the Father.

Is he just, is he fitting?

We can't go down that road.

So, okay, here's something he doesn't know.

He knows about it, but he admits he doesn't know it.

So what does that mean?

There's a lot of speculation that goes on throughout the history of the church.

Well, his human nature didn't know it, but his divine nature did.

How do you separate the two?

Yeah, exactly, that becomes the problem.

So anyway, people are just starting to ask these questions and there's no solid answer yet.

It's a great thought, but at this point in history I'm going to ask you to put that on the shelf for a while.

We'll get around to more of that kind of stuff.

Okay, so the document that you are going to read by Irenaeus is called Proof of the Apostolic Preaching.

Sometimes it's called Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, but I think in my stuff it's called Proof of the Apostolic Preaching.

And it's written In the late 180s, so if against heresies is written about 185, this one's probably written after that, but still probably in the 180s.

Now this one's a lot shorter, although when you read it, it's not going to seem super short, but it's a lot, believe me, it's a lot shorter than against heresies, and it was probably meant to be read out aloud in Christian assembly.

It's in the literary form of a public letter, so it kind of has the same form as some of Paul's letters, although you may feel like it's a little bit longer than that.

And it's actually kind of a hybrid of apologetics and catechesis.

But it's written for an internal audience.

It's written for a Christian audience, and it uses Scripture to support the arguments.

Now, most of the Scripture quotations in this are actually from the Old Testament, But that's the point, because remember, Irenaeus is trying to demonstrate how Christ fulfills the Old Testament prophecies, how the Old Testament and the New are connected.

And in doing that, he's trying to teach and encourage the faith of Christians.

This is a great document because it's an excellent summary of Christian theology up to this point.

I would say that, you know, end of the second century, this is the state of the art for Christian theology, right here.

Including, you're going to get a window into how he does his exegesis.

So some of the stuff we were just talking about in the last hour, you'll see, you'll notice that he says New Testament.

He calls it the New Testament in this document.

Now, on the other hand, you'll also notice some throwbacks to older kinds of thinking, like he seems to believe in the existence of seven heavens, or seven layers of heaven, and stuff like that.

He also gets some of his history wrong.

He thinks Claudius was the emperor during Jesus' ministry, so he's off by about five years or so.

He's not quite clear on when exactly Jesus was doing his thing.

And you'll also notice that he refers to the shepherd as Scripture.

And in fact, it again terrifies me that he actually calls it Scripture.

So here's a case where one of those documents that didn't make it into our New Testament is being quoted here and referred to as though it ought to be in the canon.

Now, we're still in A time when I would refer to Christology as Logos Christology, the Christology of the Word, based again on what the Fourth Gospel, what John is doing at the beginning, calling Jesus the Logos, or the Word of God, and talking about how He is pre-existent.

So you'll notice when we talk about the two natures, Of course, the divine nature is pre-existing, existing before the human nature.

The human nature has a beginning point.

It would be at the Annunciation, at the conception of Jesus.

But the divine nature has no beginning point.

The divine nature existed before the human nature.

And so that means that the Logos, the divine nature of Christ, If you know where to look in the Old Testament, you can see him in what we call the theophanies of the Old Testament, the manifestations of the divine in the Old Testament.

Now, whenever somebody sees God or some appearance of God in the Old Testament, That they're really seeing Jesus in his pre-existent state.

They're seeing the pre-existent Christ, the divine nature.

Because no one can see God and live.

This is a thing you get in a couple of passages in the Old Testament and it gets quoted in the New.

No one can see God and live.

Have you seen the movie Dogma?

When God finally speaks to Ben Affleck, his head blows up.

So, no one can see God and live.

So if you think you're seeing God, you're not seeing God the Father, you're seeing God the Son.

And so that's how they interpret these things, because God the Father cannot be limited in space and time.

God the Father cannot be limited to one place, or as we say, circumscribed by space and time.

So if you ever think you're seeing God in one place, manifest in place in space and time, again, you're not seeing God the Father, you're seeing God the Son.

Because even though the divine nature of the Son is by nature omnipresent, The Son can be manifest in one place at a time if He wants to.

And even though He has not acquired a human nature yet in the Old Testament, He can even be tangible if He wants to.

And there's all kinds of, throughout some of the early writers, there's all kinds of explanations for this.

Well, he's the agent of creation after all, so if he wants to, you know, pull some molecules together and make himself tangible, he can do that.

But so, you know, whenever you see, like, the appearance of the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament, Or the visitation of the angels to Abraham.

The three, as you read through the passage, it's called three men and one seems to be special.

But again, that's the manifestation of the pre-incarnate divine nature of Christ.

Question?

So would they have believed that when the angel visited Joseph and Mary that that was Jesus?

It could be.

Now again, if we look at all the early Christian interpreters, they might disagree on that.

Some might say, yeah, that was Jesus.

Some might say, well, that was just an irregular angel.

But in this other passage, that's the free and current Christ.

Like, for example, they don't all agree on who spoke to Moses in the burning bush.

Some of them will say, oh, well, that was the voice of the Father, because he didn't really see God, he just heard God.

The divine nature of Christ is pre-existent, and when the divine nature acquires its humanity or the Word becomes flesh, The incarnation is presented as a descent, coming down from the divine realm to the human realm in order to voluntarily go to his death.

Notice that the death of Christ He has to be voluntary.

He doesn't die against his will.

Why?

Because ultimately he's divine.

And a divine being cannot be forced to do anything.

So, he has to die voluntarily.

Incidentally, I mentioned this earlier, the binding of Isaac becomes a type of the crucifixion of Christ, right?

Isaac, remember the story?

Abraham is told to sacrifice his son.

So he brings his son Isaac.

They're going to go up to the mountain, to the altar.

Hey Dad, we got the wood and the knife and the fire.

Where's the sacrifice, Dad?

Right?

Okay, so you know the story.

But the interesting thing about this is that if you track The artistic representations of the binding of Isaac throughout history, Isaac gets older and older and older.

Originally, he's a kid, but that's not going to work.

Why?

Because if he's a type of Christ, he has to go to the altar voluntarily.

Again, it makes Abraham look a little better, I guess.

But the point is that by the time this trajectory comes to its fullest, he's a full-grown man.

I think he's a full-grown man, voluntarily going to the altar, because that's what Christ did.

He voluntarily went to the cross.

It's an anti-type.

Wasn't it done wrong the first time?

Well, yeah, what was wrong with it is the idea that God would really want human sacrifice.

God doesn't really want human sacrifice.

So, then God, you know, provides the substitute, which in the original context was the ram or whatever it was, and then Jesus becomes the once and for all substitute, because even with the substitute, they had to keep doing sacrifices over and over again.

It's all book of Hebrews stuff, right?

But then with Jesus, it's the once and for all sacrifice.

So, yeah, good question.

One of the most important contributions that Irenaeus gives us is that he is the first one to say that in the relationship between the Father and the Son, that the Father and the Son are one essence.

Now, what is that essence?

We know from where this conversation goes that that essence is the divine nature, it's divinity itself.

But the point is that we are beginning to get this language of how do we talk about the relationship between the Father and the Son so that we don't end up with two gods.

Because if we're going to say Jesus is divine, How is that not two gods?

It's not two gods because they are one essence.

There's one God because there's one essence.

And there's a principle behind this.

The principle behind this is, he who is born of God, is God.

Now, to be born of God, that's the same thing as being begotten, which is A word that's not entirely clear on the surface of it, but we're going to take the next few weeks to clarify it.

But the point is that whatever begottenness is, whatever beginning is, we know from Scripture that Christ is the only begotten Son of God.

Whatever that is, and we sometimes refer to that as generation, that's a word I prefer, generation, that the Son is generated of the Father, whatever that is, generation produces the same essence as the generator.

So the one generator, the one begotten, is the same essence as the one begetting or generating.

Does that make sense?

He who is born of God is God.

So, keep that in mind, because that's going to be important.

The Father and Son are of one essence.

Now, depending on which translation of the 19th Creed you may be used to, you may remember that there's essence language in there, sometimes often translated into English as one in being, so essence becomes The Father and Son are one in being.

That's what it means to be one essence.

For Irenaeus and a lot of the early theologians, it also means they are one in power.

That there is one essence and one power that the Father and Son share.

So in that sense, Father and Son are one.

Remember Jesus' words, the Father and I are one.

But Jesus also said, in the same document, the Father is greater than I. So wait a minute, there's also order among the persons of the Trinity.

There's also hierarchy.

Sometimes referred to as economy, but that word is used a lot of different ways and so I tend to avoid it.

But the point is that a lot of folks nowadays are trained to think that hierarchy is automatically a bad thing.

But what we're going to find out as we go through this is that if there were no hierarchy in the Trinity, then we would not know how to make a distinction between the three persons of the Trinity.

In other words, we want to say the Father and Son are one, but we don't want to go so far as to say the Father and Son are one and the same.

So, the distinction between father and son, how are they not exactly identical, is that there is this hierarchy.

So look for that, look for the hierarchy.

It's presented in Irenaeus as kind of a hierarchy of approachability, or transcendence.

The father is more transcendent and therefore less approachable, whereas the son seems to be a little more approachable.

That's not a... It's not a way of describing if it's going to stick or if it's going to be very helpful long term, but it kind of starts out that way.

A more concrete way that it gets described is in terms of visibility.

The Father is ultimately always invisible.

No one can see God and live.

While he's invisible by nature of his divinity, he can be visible when he wants to.

And obviously, during his incarnation, he's invisible and tangible.

So, there's this hierarchy of visibility as well.

The hierarchy of the Trinity, then, when you start to bring the Spirit into it, is that If you want to get to the Father, you've got to go through the Son.

If you want to get to the Son, you have to go through the Spirit.

But the Spirit is in the Church, so ultimately what they'll say is, if you want to get to the Father, you have to go through the Church, because the Church is where you receive the Spirit in the sacraments.

And so you can see this sort of hierarchy in terms of how God relates to us, how we relate to God.

The Son then becomes the Father's messenger.

And sometimes when you read these documents, they will refer to the Son as the Father's angel.

But that's because the Greek word angelos simply means messenger.

They're not implying that the Son is a created spiritual being, like a garden variety angel.

They're saying that the Son is the Father's messenger.

So again, notice the hierarchy here, because the Father is the sender, the Son is the messenger.

And in that relationship, the sender has an authority over the messenger.

The messenger comes with the sender's message.

So, these are all kinds of ways that these early theologians are trying to describe the distinction between the three verses of the Trinity in terms of a hierarchy.

But again, it's not a hierarchy of divinity, because no one is saying at this point that the Father is more divine than the Son or anything like that.

The divinity is the essence, so they are the same essence.

Question here.

If the Father is the sender, And then the Son is the messenger sent by the Father.

What is the Spirit?

Well, they don't really say.

The implication is that the Spirit is the messenger.

Well, I don't know of anyone who says it that way.

It sort of implies that the Spirit is...

The Spirit is the next generation messenger in the sense that the Father sends the Son, the Son comes during His ministry.

When His ministry on earth is over, in a tangible sense, then He sends the Spirit.

And so the Spirit is the messenger for the age of the Church.

But I may be saying too much because it's not that clear.

Remember that during this time, The argument is over who is Jesus and what is his relationship to God, i.e. the Father.

So, there isn't as much talk about the Holy Spirit yet.

There is some, but not as much.

Question here?

Yeah, I'm just going off of that, too.

I don't remember...

Who might have said this, but didn't one of the early Philistines think that the spirit itself might have been a message from the Acts of the Apostles when the whole Pentecost, the random fire came down upon them?

Yeah, you know, that's a good point.

You do get some, I don't know if any of you specifically said that the Holy Spirit was the message, but you do get some analogies along those lines.

Like, Irenaeus, for example, uses this analogy of anointing, where he says the Father is the one who anoints, the Son is the anointed one, and the Spirit is the oil of anointment, which sort of makes the Spirit seem Less of a divine person and more of the glue that holds them together.

Even Augustine experimented with stuff like the Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved, and the Spirit is the love that binds them.

But all those things are problematic in the sense that it sort of leaves the Spirit somehow less of a person, of a divine person.

At least that's how it could be interpreted.

Anyway, yeah, you will see that.

Now, one last thing I'll say about Irenaeus, and then we'll go on to our next one, but, you know, when you get to the end of Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, he goes into a discussion of baptism, and talking about baptism is the rebirth that makes us children of God.

We may be used to thinking that all humans are children of God, but if you look at, for example, the Fourth Gospel, again, the author says that what makes us children of God is the acceptance of the Son of God as our brother.

So, we become children of God, and for Irenaeus, we become children of God through baptism.

Baptism, he calls the seal, This is an important concept.

Baptism as a seal.

This comes up even in the book of Revelation.

To be sealed for God is a reference to baptism.

And so in the book of Revelation, you can be marked for the beast, you can have the mark of the beast, or you can be sealed for God.

Those two things are opposite, and you don't get both.

And if you are sealed for God and then you accept the mark of the beast, you're giving up being sealed for God.

So baptism is the seal of eternal life.

But the seal can be broken.

Remember, in the early church, baptism is not a free ride.

It's a clean slate, but it's not a free ride.

It washes away your sins up until the time of the baptism, but it does not wash away the sins after the baptism.

So baptism gets you in, but what keeps you in, and what What allows you to maintain the Holy Spirit is orthodoxy and morality.

You may receive the Holy Spirit as baptism, but you can kick the Holy Spirit out of your life by immoral behavior or by heresy.

So, you receive salvation by baptism, but orthodox faith and morality The Trinity, in terms of the formula, the Trinitarian formula of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is what Irenaeus called the three articles of our seal.

In other words, we are sealed by the Trinitarian name, because that would be used in baptism.

Alright, so any questions about Irenaeus?

Alright then, I'm going to go on.

We're going to talk about one more theologian tonight.

One of my favorites, Tertullian.

Now, notice I am not writing Tertullian of some place.

That is because he is not a bishop.

He is born somewhere around 145 or 150 and probably lived into the 220s, but the time of his The most profound production in terms of his writing, the time that we would say he flourished, if you ever see this before date, FL, this is when he flourished, this is like the time of his greatest production, is probably the The end of the second century, but for sure the first couple decades of the third century.

So let's say 200-ish to maybe 220, whatever, but somewhere in there.

So that's what we're talking about.

So we have made the transition from the second century into the third century.

Remember the 200s of the third century.

We're also going to make a bit of a transition from Greek to Latin, although that doesn't mean everybody from now on writes in Latin, but he did.

Tertullian is known as the father of Latin theology because he was one of the first to write in Latin, the first important theologian to write in Latin.

He's from Carthage, which is the main city in North Africa and the second most important city in the West after Rome.

He may have been a lawyer although there is some question about that.

He may have lived in Rome although there is some question about that.

He may have been a priest although there is some question about that.

But he seems to have been converted to Christianity in mid-life, mid-career, somewhere around 185, and he seems to have gotten married shortly after his conversion.

So it may very well be that he met a Christian woman and converted and got married.

He may have become a priest in the early 190s.

I think that he was, but it's difficult to prove and some scholars say that he was never a priest.

He was probably, I think, a priest in Rome and left Rome and went back to Carthage when he had a falling out with the bishops of Rome over a group known as the Montanists.

And you're going to read about this, so I'm not going to go into it in any detail now, although I may talk about it later when we talk about the developing hierarchy, but it seems that this group known as the Montanists, there was some question about their orthodoxy and whether they should be allowed to exist within the Church, and Church Julian was in favor of them and argued for their orthodoxy, and apparently At some point in Rome, there was a guy who came along and convinced the bishop of Rome to condemn the monotheists.

So, Tertullian seems to have had a falling out with the hierarchy in Rome.

went back to Carthage and in fact began to associate with the monotonous there somewhere around the turn of the century.

And so his most important writings, most of his writings were done during the time that he was associating with the monotonous, but again they're not really heretics and his writings are thoroughly orthodox and in fact help define orthodoxy itself.

If all this is true, it seems like he went back to Carthage and probably gave up being a priest, and he seems to be writing as a lay teacher.

And of course, as I said, he never became a bishop.

Now, as a theologian, he's heavily influenced by Irenaeus, which makes sense, because Irenaeus is the one major theologian before him.

And I always think how interesting it would be to live in a world where you could read every Christian document ever written over a summer.

But you don't live in that world, sorry.

So, as I said, Tertullian is the first important theologian to write in Latin, and so he's called the father of Latin theology, also because he's the one who coined the term Trinity, in Latin, Trinitas.

Now, you know, we say he coined the term Trinity, but the Greek writers before him had a word for for God as three.

In Greek it was triados, or triad.

But Trinity is the one that will eventually stick.

As a theologian, he follows the lead of Irenaeus in favoring Scripture as support for his arguments over against philosophy.

Tertullian kind of goes to an extreme where he is really against philosophy.

And in some ways he gets this from Irenaeus, too, because these guys, you know, remember the apologists, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria?

They wrote philosophy because they were philosophers.

And Clement of Alexandria was the one who says, you know, philosophy will lead the Greeks to Christ just like the Old Testament is supposed to lead the Jews to Christ.

Well, that's gone.

because with Irenaeus and Tertullian, it's like, philosophy is bad, it will only lead you into Gnosticism, It can't be trusted because human reason is flawed, and the Bible says that the foolishness of God is smarter than human wisdom, and so, you know, philosophy is just not trustworthy.

And Tertullian is famous for having said, you know, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?

In other words, what does philosophy have to do with theology?

Alright, so...

Tertullian builds on everything Irenaeus has said, including the idea that the hierarchy is a kind of a hierarchy of accessibility, in the sense that one gets to the Father through the Son, one gets to the Son through the Church, because the Holy Spirit is found in the Church and through the sacrament.

Tertullian, like many of his days, said that there is no salvation outside of the Church.

One of the later bishops of North Africa, a guy named Cyprian, would later say, whoever does not have the church for a mother does not have God for a father.

So this idea that there's no salvation outside of the church because there are no sacraments outside the church.

There's no Eucharist outside the church, so there's no Holy Spirit outside the church.

So you can't get to Jesus outside of the church, and if you can't get to Jesus, you can't get to the Father.

Alright, the document that I'm going to ask you to read from Tertullian is called Against Fracteus.

A lot of these documents are called against somebody.

Help me out here.

E-A-M? Yeah.

Now, we don't really know who Praxeus is, but he seems to be the one who convinced the Bishop of Rome to condemn the Montanists.

So, Tertullian hates him because he's against the Montanists, whom Tertullian likes.

But there's a bigger problem, and that is that Praxeus is a heretic.

So, Tertullian uses his dislike of Praxeus As a vehicle to write a document about theology.

And next week we're going to talk about Crassius' particular brand of heresy.

But for now, I just want you to set this up in terms of what you should look for when you read this document.

Because in this document, Tertullian develops the language to talk about the Trinity that will become the standard language in the Western Church.

It doesn't mean it catches on right away, but it will become the standard.

And he appears to get the language that he uses to talk about the Trinity from Roman legal terms.

This is why a lot of people say that he was once a lawyer.

But the thing is that these legal terms were probably so common that you wouldn't have to be a lawyer to know these words.

So, you know, maybe he was a lawyer, maybe he wasn't, but the point is that he borrows these terms from Roman legal use and applies them to theology.

And so the first one is...

The first one is persona.

Persona, or we would translate that, person.

But not simply a person.

In Roman legal use, persona is a legal entity, a personality in the sense of an individual who has legal standing and who can own things under the law.

So not all people are personae.

And by the way, the plural is personae.

So, in Roman law, not all people are persons.

But, a person, in this sense, is someone who can own something.

And, as Sir Julian explained it, God is a trinity of persons.

In other words, there are three personae, three persons.

You know who they are.

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

So those are the three persons of the Trinity.

The other legal word that Triturian uses is substantia, or, as we might translate it, substance.

But be careful, it does not mean a physical or tangible substance.

You know how it works when we hear that word in English, we automatically think, stuff, like, what's this substance on my shoe?

But it doesn't mean a physical or a tangible substance.

A substance is something with legal status or property.

And a contemporary example of property that's non-tangible is intellectual property.

You can own the rights to a concept or whatever.

So it doesn't have to be tangible.

In this sense, of course, it is not.

But it is property in the sense that it is something that is owned.

And so you see where he's going with this.

The three persons own one substance.

What is that substance?

Divinity itself.

It is intangible, it is invisible, spiritual, non-material, but it is divinity.

So the three persons own or share one divinity, one substance.

Now when I say share, I don't mean share as in divio, it's not dividing, but I mean share as in the three persons own the one substance.

While we believe in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we can still say we only believe in one God because there is only one divine substance.

Does that make sense?

Now, for some reason I have lots of energy tonight and I'm cruising right along, so we're not going to be here too much longer.

I bet you're happy about that.

Can I get a witness, huh?

Okay, so what I'm going to do here is give you a visual here.

So there is one substance which is divinity itself, divinity, sorry about that, This one substance is owned or shared by three persons who are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And I know I'm sticking with traditional terms here, but I'm doing that for a reason.

We'll get around to talking about that issue if that's what you're thinking.

But for now, we have to stick with the traditional terms.

So, the three persons are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

But remember, the second person is one person who has two substances.

One of those substances is divinity, the same divinity as the Trinity, but one of those substances is humanity.

Now, when we talk about Christ, we don't use the word substance, we use the word nature, but it means exactly the same thing.

For Christ, we would say he has two natures, but nature is substance, it's the same thing.

So God, as Trinity, is three persons who own or share one substance, and one of those persons, the second person of the Trinity, himself, has two substances, divinity and humanity, that we call natures.

Now, let me stop here and see if there are questions.

It's alright, there are no questions, that's fine.

I mean, you know, sometimes this stuff needs to sink in for a while, until you come up with a question, but I see one here, yes, go ahead.

Thank you for wearing a Packers shirt, by the way.

I guess I don't know how to wear this, but how opposed were the Christians using philosophy, using the style of a time, how opposed were they and the theologians?

Kind of reference it.

Yeah, well, you know, as I said earlier, Iran and Clement of Alexandria are kind of contemporaries, right?

But they don't I don't want to make too much of a dichotomy between East and West.

I don't want to oversimplify that too much.

As it develops, it does appear that the East is going to be more accepting of philosophy, and the West is going to be less accepting of philosophy, so that the Western theologians like Uranus and Tertullian are going to be skeptical of philosophy, and they're going to want to make it more of a distinction between philosophy and theology.

Philosophy bad, theology good.

The Eastern theologians are going to be more like, you know, philosophy is a good thing if you use it right, Maybe there isn't that much of a distinction between philosophy and theology.

But they're both kind of considered orthodox?

Yes.

Yes.

I mean, if they're orthodox in other ways, then that alone doesn't make them orthodox or not.

Especially at this early stage, you can find things in almost all of these guys that didn't stick, that didn't stand the test of time.

Something like this, it did stand the test of time.

But Tertullian, Followed Irenaeus in his dispensationalist interpretation of the book of Revelation.

Again, a lot of people thought that was problematic, and probably still do.

Let me throw one more thing at you.

I told you that Irenaeus used that analogy of the anointing.

The Father is the one who anoints, the Son is the anointed one, and the Holy Spirit is the ointment, or the oil of anointing.

Well, we're moving a little bit beyond that now, and Tertullian's favorite analogy seems to be the sun.

Well, you know the sun is a star, you know, burning the ball of gas, whatever.

But the sun gives off light and heat.

And I'm kind of paraphrasing Tertullian here, but you'll get the idea.

So imagine an analogy where the Father is like the star itself, and the Son and the Spirit are like the light and the heat.

They work together, yet they're distinct.

But you really couldn't separate them.

You can see what he's going for here is a sort of balance between the unity and the distinction.

Unified, but not exactly all the same things.

Distinct, but not really separate.

Another analogy that gets used at this point is The concept of a spring, you know, a spring of water bubbling up out of the ground, right?

So, where's our Minnesota people here, right?

Don't you have the, isn't that where the Mississippi starts?

Yeah, okay.

So, the Minnesota people here, they're probably watching at home.

So, the spring, water bubbling up out of the ground, The spring ends up becoming a stream and the stream becomes a river.

But how do you say where the spring ends and the stream begins?

And so this again becomes kind of an analogy for the father and the son, where the father is like the spring and the son is like the stream.

Distinct but not separate, one but not one and the same.

Question there?

So is this where the whole concept of the Trinity comes into play as a triangle, as an equal, lateral triangle, where they're all equal, but yet they're all different?

Yeah, although I don't know if anyone actually used the triangle as an analogy itself, but that is becoming the issue because, you know, in order to maintain the oneness of God, there's got to be An equality there, or a sameness, you know, the one substance.

But in order to maintain the distinction between the three persons, there's got to be some difference.

So, when we come back next week, we're going to look at the 3rd century, well, late 2nd and 3rd century heresies that are about exactly that.

And so we'll, you know, let's do that.

But that's kind of where we're at right now.

I haven't actually said everything I planned to say, so let me see if there are questions.

We've got plenty of time for questions.

Can you repeat Aeneas' example of the anointing and the oil?

Oh, this is Irenaeus.

You're going to read it.

This is using the analogy of anointing, where in this analogy the father is like the one who anoints The Son is the anointed one, which of course is what the word Christ means anyway, and then the Holy Spirit is the oil of anointing, or the ointment itself.

And again I said, there's a certain aspect of that that's problematic because It seems to leave the Holy Spirit in a position of being less a divine person and more just a thing, or the glue that holds the Father and Son together.

But again, remember, this is so early in the development of the doctrine that they're not talking about the Holy Spirit all that much yet.

It's really more about the Son and his relationship to the Father, and how do you worship Jesus and still claim to say, you only have one God.

This clarification, when you were giving the nine assumptions that Patricia did, Yes, the nine assumptions of patristic exegesis, yes.

Well, the eighth was the New Testament one, that the New Testament is interpreted generally, literally.

If you're using an old version of the handout, there are only eight assumptions on the old version of the handout because one of them I split into two.

Follow what's in the book.

Yeah, the chart's in the book.

But yeah, so number eight was interpretation of the New Testament was generally literal.

All right, we'll go ahead and stop the tape.

Thanks for watching, those of you at home.