The word
"patristic" is derived from the Latin word "pater" meaning
"father" and refers to the time of the Father and the different ideas
created during this time. The term is non-inclusive; no generally accepted
inclusive term has yet emerged in the literature. The patistic period is a
vaguely defined entity, often considered to be the period from the close of the
writings of the New Testament (ca. 100) to the definitive Council of Chalcedon
(451).
A. IRENAEUS
Irenaeus of
Lyons (c. 130–202) It is believed that Irenaeus was born in Smyrna (now
Turkey), but later lived in Rome. He became bishop of Lyon around 178 and held
this post until his death two years later. Irenaeus is particularly known for
his vigorous defense of Christian orthodoxy in the face of the challenge of
Gnosticism. His most important work, Against Heresies, represents the main
defense of the Christian understanding of salvation and especially the role of
tradition in maintaining fidelity to the apostolic witness in the face of
non-Christian interpretations.
Iranaeus
writes that Christ is both God and man and uses the phrase "one and the
same". The Son of God and the Son of Man lived, suffered and died.
Irenaeus suggested that the divine word remained inaccessible (untouched by
suffering). If he were not man, mankind would not be saved in him, if he were
not God, he would not have the power to save. He developed the idea that God
created man in his own image and likeness. All three elements body, soul and
spirit are needed for a perfect man in the image of God. Irenaeus put creation
and incarnation together; in creation the whole universe comes into being, and
in incarnation it is a single human being who enters into existence and finds
that he has the purity that the whole world has lost. The world that God
created needs to be freed from sin, and sin has no power over the man that Mary
gave birth to. When God incarnates, He becomes man. God predestined to live a
sinless life from the very beginning. In Jesus Christ appears the one who
possesses all that man as a creature should have, and none of what Adam brought
upon himself as a result of his succumbing to temptation.
Man: Christ is God and he is
also man, these are two irreconcilable truths. Very God and Very man in one
with no distinction between His divinity and His humanity. At creation there
were two hands of God over the world, i.e. the Son and the Spirit. Man became
alienated from God because of sin, so God sent his son who became flesh and the
Holy Spirit made his home in the human body and soul. Jesus Christ is true God
and true man; it brings man to God and God to man. The birth of Jesus by the
Virgin Mary was considered exclusively as a sign of His divinity. The Son is as
God eternal, begotten of the Father from eternity. Irenaeus explains the works
of God in Christ - God himself is in Christ and offers his salvation in his
incarnate son, because only the creator can save people from the devil. For God
appeared in Christ and through him entered into human life, precisely through
his mercy and love, in order to come to man in his helplessness. If Christ were
bound by sin and defeated, He would not have the power to set man free. The
humanity in Jesus is the pure humanity that God created, and evil has no
influence over it. If Jesus Christ were not a truly human and truly divine
salvation, it would be incomplete and impossible. All salvation came from
Jesus' body and blood, birth, life, suffering, death and resurrection.
B. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
Clement of
Alexandria (c. 150–215/6) considered Christianity to be a true philosophy that
never contradicted Greek philosophy but fulfilled it. He made positive use of
non-Christian ideas such as Socrates and Plato. However, he synthesized every
non-Christian idea but rather rejected some ideas, which is evident in his
rejection of the "eternal universe" in Greek thought and his
insistence on creation out of nothing by God. His positive use of non-Christian
sources and/or philosophers is evident in his motto "all truth is God's
truth wherever it may be found". He taught about the Logos of God; God is
only knowable through his logo. God's logos is the mind of God. And he affirmed
that the Logos is perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, the word in which all
truth comes. For him, Christ is the embodiment of divine wisdom. He was the
divine Logos, the cosmic Spirit of wisdom and truth, who proceeded from the
Father and descended in human form in the person of Jesus Christ incarnate.
Through the Incarnation, Jesus becomes visible; he begat and created his own
humanity. God is absolute unity, Jesus Christ is the logos that communicates
and makes known the truth of the human being. The incarnation in Jesus Christ
is the true and final revelation of truth. He is the highest revelation of God.
He became man (God incarnate) to give the supreme revelation that through him
mankind could receive his immortality.
C. ORIGIN
Logos and Christ
Origen
begins his Christology from divine wisdom. The wisdom they claim is eternally
begotten or created by God. It is understood as impersonal, but as a living
hypostasis (a distinct substance in the one undivided essence of God) in which
the son exists as a separate "being" alongside the father in the
hypostatic union of Father, son, and spirit forming three.
Origen
maintained that the Son existed in timeless eternity; this argues against the
modalists and economic trinitarians that "he is not if the son is
not." Origen asserts that the Son is coeternal with the Father. However,
to preserve the primacy of God the father, he taught the principle of
autotheos, which means "God is only and only God." He believed that
the father begat the son by an eternal act: therefore Christ existed from
eternity. Using John 1:1, he argues that there were two begettings of a son:
one at the time of the virgin birth and the other at the time of eternity by
the father. He insists that although the Logos and the father are coeternal,
the logos is subordinate to the father. Origen's Christology is a katabatic
approach because it proceeds from a high divine wisdom or word that was
generated by the Father from eternity and moves down to the body and soul in
its incarnation.
Union of the Human soul of Christ with Logos
The
Christology of the Logos seems to find its greatest development in the writings
of Origen (c. 185–254). He taught that since God is completely transcendent,
the divine cannot mix with the flesh. The divine is then mediated through the
soul (because the divine cannot mix with the body), and therefore the soul is
the point of contact for the logos. "In the incarnation, the human soul of
Christ is united with the logos. Because of the closeness of this union, the human
soul of Christ becomes part of the properties of the logos. However, Origen
insists that although the Logos and the Father are co-eternal, the Logos is
subordinate to the Father. This connection between the Logos and Jesus makes
him the true God. He explained the unification with the analogy of "iron
heated in a fire". “If a mass of iron is constantly kept in the fire, it
receives heat through all its pores and veins, and the fire is continuous, and
the iron is never removed from it, it is completely transformed into fire, and
in this way the soul. who was permanently placed in the word and permanently in
wisdom and permanently in God, is God in all that he does, feels and
understands”.
D. DISPUTES OF ARIUS AND ATHANASIUS
Arius
(250-336): Arius was a Libyan Christian priest in Alexandria. He was well known
in his community for his ascetic and moral teachings. He attracted many to his
teachings, especially the absolute unity of the divine as the supreme perfect
being. His theological teachings became known as Arianism where he affirmed the
ultimate nature of Christ and was condemned by the early church as a major
heresy at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.
Athanasius
of Alexandria (296 – 373): Born in Alexandria in 296, Athanasius was well
grounded in secular learning and well versed in the Scriptures. He was a short,
dark and poor man from a Coptic family in Egypt. He became the bishop of
Alexandria. He was also a respected theologian, church father and able
apologist. He is particularly noted for his conflict with Arius and Arianism.
His foundation of Christology is apparently John 1:1, which he paraphrases as
follows: "The Logos became man, and entered not only into man."
Arius:
1. The Son
and the Father do not have the same essence (ousia).
2 The Son
is a created being (ktisma or poiema), although he is to be recognized as first
and foremost among created beings in origin and rank.
3 The Son
was indeed the creator of the worlds, and therefore had to exist before them and
before all time, yet there was a time when the Son did not exist.
4 The term
"Son of God" is therefore a metaphor, an honorific term intended to
emphasize rank A son among other creatures. It does not mean that the Father
and the Son share the same being or position.
The
independence of the Father and the humanity of Christ (or the subordination of
the Son)
Arius
emphasizes the very nature of God. God is the one and only source of all
created things, there is nothing that does not ultimately come from God. This
clearly raises the question of the relationship of the Father to the Son. The
Father is considered to exist before the Son. Therefore, "sometimes the
Son is not there". This decisive decision places Father and Son on a
different plane and is consistent with Arius' strict devotion to the creation
of the Son and his denial of the preexistence of Christ. Only the Father is
"unbegotten", the Son, like all other creatures, comes from this one
source of being. However, Arius is careful to emphasize that the Son is not
like any other creature. There is a difference in status between the Son and
other creatures, including human beings. Although Arius has some difficulty in
identifying the precise nature of this distinction; The Son, he argued, is a
begotten being, but a perfect creature, not like one of the other begotten
beings. The implication seems to be that the Son transcends other creatures
while sharing their essentially created and begotten nature. Arius also
emphasized the absolute transcendence and inaccessibility of God. God, he
argued, could not be known by any other creature; therefore he considered Jesus
Christ inferior to God the Father. This idea of Jesus Christ's inferiority to
the Father is influenced by Origen's Logos Christology, which affirms the
subordination of the Logos to the Father.
Athanasius argues with Arianism
If God had
created Jesus, he could have created another extension of himself and he would
not have been permanent, there would have been more sons. This is where the
doctrine of the incarnation began and it is very important to know that Jesus
was and is God. Athanasius replied that Jesus was God incarnate. The rationale
for his argument is: (i) No life can save another life. (ii) Only God can save.
(iii) Jesus Christ saves. (iv) Jesus Christ is therefore God. Athanasius
followed three lines of theological reasoning to prove the ontological unity of
essence (homoousios) of the Father and the Son.
He first
asserted the equality of the Son with the Father (metaphysical). The point of
his argument is that "if God is God, the Son must be God". If there
is "a time when the Son is not", then there is also a time when the
Father is not the Father; and this is contradicted because it also cancels the
non-existence of the Father and the Son. So denying the divinity of the Son of
God was a serious offense against the Father.
Second, his
argument was soteriological. For Athanasius, the main purpose of theology was
to preserve and protect the gospel of salvation. Therefore, he believes that
"if the Son is not God or the Father, then salvation based on rebirth is
impossible." Because man cannot
atone for human sin; only God can atone for sin and bring salvation to mankind.
As such, Jesus, as God, washed away the sin of mankind.
The third
argument was from the line of revelation. Only God can truly reveal God. "If
the Son is not one with God as the Father, he cannot teach the true Father."
Following this line of criticism, Athanasius protects the doctrine of Jesus
from the errors of Arius.
Council of Nicaea (325)
The
fourth-century Arian debate is widely regarded as one of the most important
debates in the history of the Christian church. Arius' teaching provoked a
hostile reaction from Athanasia. The Council of Nicaea was called by
Constantine, the first Christian emperor, to settle the destabilizing
Christological disagreements in his empire. Determined to re-establish
doctrinal unity in the Church, Constantine convened the First Ecumenical
Council—a gathering of Christians from all over Christendom whose decisions are
still considered normative for the churches. Nicaea settled the Arian dispute
by affirming that Jesus was homoousios (one in being or one essence) with the
Father, rejecting the Arian position of the humanity of Christ enjoy the
powerful affirmation of Christ. Arius and his followers were condemned, and an
official creed was formulated, which reads: We believe in one God the Father
almighty, Creator of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord Jesus
Christ, the only Son of God, begotten of the Father, only begotten, that is, of
the essence of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God is from
true God, not created, born. from essence (homoosios) with the Father, from
whom all things in heaven and on earth were created, for our humanity and
salvation and became incarnate, became man, suffered and rose from the dead on
the third day ascended into heaven and he will come to judge the living and the
dead; And in the Holy Spirit.
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