For Lutherans, the Gospel is firmly rooted in the foundation of Jesus Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. This is the material of the Gospel; this is what it rests upon.
If we surrender our understanding of Christ to speculations and emotions, we lose not just the person, but also his redemption. We lose not just formulas, but also our comfort. We lose not only our knowledge that God is, but also our hope that God is for us. The Gospel is that Christ is God and Man for us. And so, we pay very close attention to how we talk about Jesus.
Because of this, we need to also be meticulously aware of how Christians in the past have talked about Christ. The Lutheran Reformation did not happen in a vacuum, as I’ve said before. Our articulation of doctrinal truth is passed down to us by generations of faithful men and women of God, and we stand on their shoulders when we declare “thus says the Lord.” In the words of Basil the Great in his sermon against the Sabellians and Arius:
“Thus Christ spoke, the Apostles taught, the Fathers preserved, and the Martyrs confirmed. Be content to speak as you have been taught.”
Thus, we find ourselves content to speak as we have been taught, first from the Holy Scriptures, and then from the example of pious men and women who have gone before us, who have, like us, been crowned with sainthood by the Risen Christ.
We learn from those saints as younger siblings learn from older siblings: we learn what is good to say and what is bad to say, what will get us into trouble and what will lead us into concord, what will make dad angry and what is in accord with what dad has told us, respecting their experience while always discerning whether their choices should be our own, especially in light of what our Father has made known to us by His Word.
And so, we are especially interested in what these fathers have to say about Christ, because Christ is the foundation and source of our relational knowledge of the Triune God, our very Θεολογία.
Over the next few posts, I hope to offer some initial thoughts on the 3rd century context, the Christological controversies and the major players therein, especially paying attention to the treatment of the Unholy Christological Trinity of Adoptionism, Docetism, and Gnosticism and mainstream orthodox theologian’s reactions to this triumvirate. For this current post, however, I plan to just go over where we’re going and briefly talk about some misconceptions concerning the third century world.
Therefore, let’s dive into some history. The third century has been and is still a source of great controversy for late antiquity scholars. This particular century is seen as the transition from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, from the Emperor of the Classical Roman Empire to the Emperor of the Christian Empire.
And normally, this is portrayed as a step backwards (or rather, into decay). The third century is seen as the Roman Empire’s abandonment of its classical (humanist?) roots, as the forsaking of the ancient traditions that gave meaning and life to the once bustling pagan society of artistic, philosophical, and theatrical antiquity.
This (so the theory goes) was a product of the loss of tightly-knit family units in an increasingly urbanized and individualized society. The Roman people were no longer united by culture, religion, or inter-communal relationships. And so, the foundations of the empire began to shake, which resulted in the nationalizing of the Christian Religion and the inevitable demise of the once great Empire.
It is my opinion (as well as the opinion of revisionist scholars of antiquity) that this is not the right way to view late antiquity. Antiquity was not a decline of the Empire. In fact, a wide variety of social advances were happening during this time period that suggest the complete opposite of decay. And evenmoreso, the political and social institutions were run in such a way that, for a large part, the decisions of centralized government did not affect the decentralized small town, rural citizens that made up most of Roman society.
Let us suffice it to say, though, from the start, the real problem with the thesis of decay and isolation is this: the Romans of late antiquity were not dealing with the plight of modern man, disconnected from communities and plagued with isolation and futility of a radically urbanized, industrial and economic revolution; rather, the evidence clearly shows that whatever their problems may have been, it was not caused by a disruption of communal identity, nor can it inherently be called a decay of society. Communal identity was essential to life in the third century.
Most of the third century world was made up of small towns. And then, even in the larger cities of Rome and Carthage, the inhabitants formed smaller communities based on career, social class, and economics to the point that really when one thinks of large cities, one should think of small towns functioning in relatively close proximity to one another. This more than anything, as Peter Brown has pointed out, may have been more of the source of the problems than the isolation factor.
Maybe this is a good place to end this part of our discussion. We’ll continue next week with a few conclusions about what we just discussed (and maybe some clarifications!) and then move on to a more accurate description of what’s going on in the social context of these Christological debates.
