Bible Stories

Who is God, and what is he like? This question has been answered very differently in different periods of history since New Testament days. The medieval understanding ofGod, for instance, is light-years away from the modern existential understanding. And these different answers have affected us all. Our opinions are shaped, much more than we think, by ideas dominant in previous centuries. This is just as true of our beliefs about God as of any other area of thought. The pictures of God painted by leading thinkers help, for good or ill, to set the tone forsucceeding generations. So we do well to note what these pictures have been.

The God of the Fathers

The early Christian fathers bequeathed to their successors an impressive doctrine of God. The nature of God was central in debate throughout the first five centuries AD. The church had to come to a sound and comprehensive statement of belief about God, both to convince adherents of pagan religions and philosophies, and to exclude heretical opinions. The constant focal point was the claim, revolutionary if not nonsensical in pagan eyes, that Jesus Christ, the Jew from

Galilee, humanity’s Saviour from sin and death, is the Son of God. He should be worshipped alongside God the Father, yet on the basis that there is one God only. These long centuries of discussion had both positive and negative results:

On the credit side, the confession of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, ‘three in one and one in three’, wasestablished as basic to Christianity. The church found standard forms of words both for the trinity (the equal deity of the Son and the Spirit with the Father) and for the incarnation (the full deity and equally full humanity of Jesus Christ).

The Nicene Creed defined the Son as of one ’substance’ (or being) with the Father, and the Chalcedonian definition described Jesus Christ as one person in two natures. These became fixed points ofreference. With this the writings of certain theologians came to be rated as touchstones of orthodoxy. On the trinity, these theologians were Athanasius and the three Cappadocian fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus) writing in Greek, and Augustine writing in Latin. On the incarnation, they were Cyril of Alexandria (Greek) and Pope Leo (Latin).

Another development was more negative: the continuing encounter with Greek philosophies, especially Platonism in its various forms, led theologians to highlight the contrast between God and his world. They used terms for God borrowed from philosophy such as eternal being, one in essence, timeless, immaterial, immutable, uncreated, infinite, indivisible and incomprehensible. The more biblical way of describing God, using language closer to human experience, they saw as a potentially misleading concession on God’s part to the weakness of man’s understanding, and so they played it down. The general effect of this theology was to highlight the truth that God is holy and separate from sinners, and to obscure the equal truth of his personal presence in his people’s lives.

In the West, Augustine (354430) was the classic exponent of this account of God as three-inone and as transcendent. Augustine stressed God’s sovereignty. God predestines us according to his own will, and God’s grace restores the hearts of those whom he chooses. In recoil from the dualism which he had once accepted, Augustine diagnosed evil as a defect of persons and things that God created good: evil is good gone wrong, which though God overrules and uses, he does not cause.

Augustine also adapted from the neoplatonists their model of the mind’s ascent to knowledge. He claimed that understanding of God, who can only be known through the incarnate Son, comes solely as God illumines the willing minds of those who have already taken Christian truth on trust. ‘Believe in order to understand’ was Augustine’s principle here. A good will was, he thought, basic to knowing God. The minds of people unwilling to know God would be left in inward darkness. They would resist the first impulses of God’s grace, and by resisting it, they would forfeit that grace altogether.

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