davidbu@loowit.wr.tek.com (David E. Buxton) (05/05/91)
The Trinity has been a popular area in which to find heresies down through
history. The highly esteemed theology of one leader, body of people or
church has been stamped as heresy by another - heresy is in the eye of the
beholder. Battles and wars have been fought and blood has been shed. Just
as the saying goes: "one man's food is another man's poison", so it is that
one man's gospel is another man's heresy. So let us be careful, on one hand
to be tactful and on the other hand to strive for the truth, or to limit
ourselves to what is clearly truth and not speculate further.
I am no authority on the many Trinity heresies found in history. Perhaps
clh or someone else can site some examples and site them more accurately. A
few that I can think of (and perhaps distort):
The Arian limited or denied divinity of Jesus.
God is the Father, the Holy Spirit the mother and Jesus the son of
their union.
Jesus and Satan are brothers born of God.
God the Father is the soul, Jesus the body and the Holy Spirit is the
spirit of God just as man is similarly divisible.
The Holy Spirit is simply the spirit of God. When Jesus was on earth
there was no God in heaven, or perhaps God shuttled back and forth
between the roles of Father and Son. God in the OT, Jesus (really God
Himself) in the NT and now back to God again.
We need to be careful that we do not get into speculation about the Trinity.
Let us examine what the Bible says about the members of the Trinity. Let us
draw what conclusions are clear from these texts and then leave it at that.
The many 'heresies' of history come about when someone gets to speculating
and extrapolating beyond what is clear in the Bible. Let us accept that we
cannot know all that we would like to know about the Trinity. We know that
there is but one God to worship, that Jesus is divine and worthy of our wor-
ship. How to explain this to full human satisfaction is something we are
simply going to have to leave until a future date when we can ask Jesus,
face to face, to explain it to us.
Let us also be careful of our terms. We can compare scripture with scrip-
ture to understand the range of meaning offered by key Hebrew words, under-
standing that Hebrew is the language of God's people; a language developed
while God's people were lead by God, when God was their King. Then we can
determine the NT Greek equivalents and confirm our terms, perhaps calling it
Biblical Greek. We need to be cautious that so much of modern semantics are
better translations of "Pagan Greek" than "Biblical Greek". It is our
desire to understand what God says about Himself and the nature of man and
not what Aristotle or Plato philosophised about man and the gods of the
Greeks. These philosophers can only turn to the philosophy of the pagan
nations from which they were nurtured. What they have to say is quite dis-
tinct from what we find from a careful examination of the scriptures.
We need to be careful that extrapolation and the taking of modern face
values of meanings for favored texts do not lead to wrong conclusions about
the nature of God and the nature of man.
Dave (David E. Buxton)
[Since you ask for my comments:
I'm generally fairly limited in where I use the term "heresy". I
think it's a mistake to use it of anybody who disagrees with you.
Generally I confine it to people who deny one of the central doctrines
of Christianity. Most of these doctrines are attempts at maintaining
a balance between apparently opposing considerations. Almost all
heresies involve overemphasis of one consideration and ignoring the
other. E.g. Christ is presented in the Bible as both a normal human
being with all the problems we have, and as the presence of God on
earth. There are number of ways to describe this in theological
terms. The ones I'd call heretical are those that push one or the
other to the exclusion of the other. E.g. those who emphasized the
identity with God so far that Christ's real humanity vanished. Or
those who see him as a teacher but do not accept that in his person
God really died for us.
Similarly in the area of free will and predestination, Christian
theologians have tried to maintain both an appreciation for God's
providence and human responsibility. Christians feel that God is
responsible for the world. Thus we can give thanks to him for
everything that happens to us, and yell at him when we are angry at
what is happening. (Job makes it clear that Christians need not be
afraid of being angry at God. Our relationship with God demands first
of all honesty. I am very suspicious of those for whom Christianity
is all sweetness and light.) On the other hand, we are also committed
to people's responsibility for their own actions. Heresy consists of
emphasizing one of these to the exclusion of the other, e.g.
emphasizing God's sovereignty to the point where people become
puppets, or human free will to the point where we no longer appreciate
that we have nothing but what is given to us by God.
One thing that is clear from past discussions and from reading
theologians is that there are many approaches to maintaining this
balance. A Christian should always be careful about jumping too
quickly at calling someone else a heretic. In many cases there are
two classical ways of coming at theology. E.g. there are approaches
to Christ that start with God and look at how he could become human,
and those that start with Jesus as a man and show how he embodies God.
Properly carried out, both of these approaches can be orthodox. But
if not properly carried out they each have their own characteristic
way of degenerating into heresy. Church history is full of damaging
battles between people who were unable to see that those from other
theological traditions were also trying to do justice to all sides of
the situation. This is not to say that no real heresy exists -- it
has existed at many times in the past, and does so now. Normally
however it seems to me that it is not a theological tradition as a
whole that is heretical, but its extremists that are. (Unfortunately
though, there seem to be some Christian groups populated entirely by
extremists.)
--clh]jclark@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (John Clark) (05/10/91)
In article <May.4.22.10.32.1991.21747@athos.rutgers.edu> davidbu@loowit.wr.tek.com (David E. Buxton) writes:
+Biblical Greek. We need to be cautious that so much of modern semantics are
+better translations of "Pagan Greek" than "Biblical Greek". It is our
+desire to understand what God says about Himself and the nature of man and
+not what Aristotle or Plato philosophised about man and the gods of the
+Greeks. These philosophers can only turn to the philosophy of the pagan
You are sreaching for 'koine', the Greek idiom of the first few
centuries of Christianity. It is well know to have significant
differences in word use from the 'Classical'(your phrase Pagan)
Greek. But then many of the New Testement text were written in
Aramaic(sp) which had in all likelyhood a completely different world
view that either Greek or Latin. But for the first few centuries
most texts by Christians were written in Greek or Latin so our
modern day interpretations are essentially based on those writers.
The heresies you mention could stem from the difference of the
Aramaic and the contemorary translations. However, others of the New
Testement were written in Greek and used the 'in vogue' Greek
vocabulary of philosophy which was drawn from the 'pagan'
philosophers of that era. The Gospel of John can not be extracted
from the 'Neo-Platonic' environment without serious damage to what
the writer is trying to say. Or if you don't understand the
significance of 'Ho Logos' in terms of the 'Pagan' philosophy, the
book will just be a sequence of anacdotes, interspersed with
meaningless phrases.
I don't think you can 'extract' the vocabulary from the mileux in a
precise fashion.
--
John Clark
jclark@ucsd.edu
[The NT texts that we have are all in Greek. There are some plausible
theories that Aramaic sources underlie some of the Gospels.
John's terminology actually has Jewish precedent, though the Jewish
tradition involved may well have been influenced by Platonizing
thought.
--clh]hudson@athena.cs.uga.edu (Paul Hudson Jr) (05/13/91)
>What books of the NT do you think were originally written in Aramaic? >All I know of is a theory, based on one of the writers of the early >church's quote of another writer that Matthew was written in Aramaic. I think it is reasonable to assume that Paul's writings were written in Greek. Luke's, John's, and Mark's should also be in Greek. Weren't they writing to Gentiles? I am not sure of this. It would make a lot of sense fot he writings to the diaspertia to be in Greek. After all, Hebrew had almost died as a spoken language before and Greek Jews (and ex-prostelytes) should have spoken Greek. Link Hudson