Philosophy - Early Christian Philosophers

Early Christian Philosophers

Philo, Justin and Gnostics - no specific qualities should be predicated of God because they are all too delimiting.

Christian philosophers conceived of God as a spiritual personality, as an infinite Being bearing a personal relationship to Man, as a Being whose personality finds its image in Man.

Christians regarded persons and interpersonal relationships as the very essence of reality.

Plotinus (204-269 AD) student of Athmonius Saccas founder of the Alexandrian school of Neo-Platonism an eclectic mix of Plato, Aristotle, Neo-Pythagoras and Stoicism.

- fundamental principle the doctrine of the transcendence of God

- soul is liberated from the material world through asceticism and can be transported mystically to a state of rapturous ecstasy in contact with the divine.

Patristic philosophy was the body of philosophical doctrines accepted by the Fathers of the early Christian church [ante nicene and post-nicene: Council of Nice 325 AD].

- early Christian philosophers were called Apologists because they devoted most of their time to the philosophical defense of the Christian faith against the claims of secular philosophy and Gnosticism.

Ante-Nicene} Hellenic School: Justin Martyr (150 AD), Felix (200 AD), Aristides, Theophilus, Melito     ===> African School: Tertullian (165-220 AD), Arobius of Numidia (290) - renown for their anti-rationalism, sceptical attitude toward reason, in order to establish the supremacy of faith.

Alexandrian School: Clement (150-220), Origen (185-254)

Christian philosophy was dominated in the post-Nicene period by Augustine (353-430).

Augustine subordinated philosophy to Christian doctrine (laid foundation for medieval philosophy).

- the Scholastics (Middle Ages) sought to resolve the conflict between faith and reason.

Origen - founder of Christian philosophy set on the basis of the Bible and the Regula Fidei (rule of faith as taught by the church or church council)

- matter is changeable and perishable, but the unchangeable God is everlasting (eternal)

- the Logos is not the God who participates in creation; a personal copy of God.

Man’s fall is attributed to his misuse of his freedom of will.

Man aspires through use of his freewill to attain salvation with the assistance of the Logos.

Two fundamental criteria of truth underlie the entire philosophy of Augustine: (1) The authority of the church, (2) The certainty of conscience (knowledge which man actually funds in his inner experiences (memory, intellect and will)).

- incongruities sometimes become evident when church doctrines cannot logically be reconciled with the dictates of reason (inconsistency between his theology and philosophy).

Augustine’s arguments against Skepticism used the experience of uncertainty and doubt as a logical defence for the existence of certainty and absolute truth.

God’s personality: omnipotence, omniscience, absolute goodness.

God created ex nihilo, therefore all natural things are good.

- sin impairs the natural process, attributable not to God but to the will of Man.

Fall of Rome (476) to Charlemagne’s coronation (800) } The Dark Ages

Transcendence, aus!

'The old doctrine of transcendence is nothing more than an assertion of an outmoded view of the world.' Professor R. Gregor Smith

The trick is to preserve an understanding of God even as its prior conception is being done away with. Not an easy thing to do.

The break with traditional thinking to which I believe we are now summoned is considerably more radical than that which enable Christian theology to detach itself from a literal belief in a localized heaven. The translation from God 'up there' to the God 'out there', though of liberating psychological significance, represented, as I have said, no more than a change of direction in spatial symbolism. Both conceptions presuppose fundamentally the same relationship between 'God' on the one hand and 'the world' on the other: God is a Being existing in his own right to whom the world is related in the sort of way the earth is to the sun. Whether the sun is 'above' a flat earth or 'beyond' a round one does not fundamentally affect the picture. But suppose there is no Being out there at all? Suppose, to use our analogy, the skies are empty?

The End of Theism

God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like - whether, for instance, in the last analysis what lies at the heart of things and governs their working is to be described in personal or impersonal categories. Thus the fundamental theological question consists not in establishing the 'existence' of God as a separate entity but in pressing through in ultimate concern to what Tillich calls 'the ground of our being.'

The traditional formulation of Christianity has been in terms of what Tillich calls 'supernaturalism'. According to this way of thinking, which is what we have all been brought up to, God is posited as the 'highest Being' - out there, above and beyond the world, existing in his own right alongside and over against his creation. It is difficult to criticize this way of thinking without appearing to threaten the entire fabric of Christianity - so interwoven is it in the warp and woof of our thinking. Those who reject Christianity do so on the basis that the existence of God as a separate entity can be dismissed as superfluous; for the world may be explained just as adequately without positing such a Being. But with 'God' bowing out of the modern mind, the God of supernaturalism, the question is how far Christianity is ultimately committed to this way of thinking.

In the last century a painful but decisive step forward was taken in the recognition that the Bible does contain myth and that this is an important form of religious truth. It was gradually acknowledged, by all except fundamentalists, that the Genesis stories of the creation and the fall were representations of the deepest truths about man and the universe in the form of myth rather than history, and were none the less valid for that. Indeed, it was essential to the defence of Christian truth to recognize and assert that these stories were not history, and not therefore in competition with the alternative accounts of anthropology or cosmology. The centre of todays debate is concerned not with the relation of particular myths to history, but with how far Christianity is committed to a mythological, or supranaturalist, picture of the universe at all. Is it necessary for the Biblical faith to be expressed in terms of this worldview, which in its way is as primitive philosophically as the Genesis stories are primitive scientifically?

Bultmann maintains that the mythological language is not describing a supranatural transaction of any kind but is an attempt to express the real depth, dimension and significance of the historical event of Jesus Christ. In this person and event there was something of ultimate, unconditional significance for human life-and that, translated into the mythological view of the world, comes out as 'God' (a Being up there) 'sending' (to 'this' world) his only begotten 'Son'. The transcendental significance of the historical event is 'objectivized' as a suprantural transaction.

Bonhoeffer then puts forward the startling paradox of a non-religious understanding of God. Like chidren outgrowing the secure religious, moral and intellectual framework of the home in which 'daddy' is always in the background, 'God' is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him.

Theism as ordinarily understood 'has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. Can God be rehabilitated, or is the whole conception of that sort of a God, 'up there', 'out there', a projection, an idol, that can and should be torn down?

If Christianity is to survive, let alone to recapture 'secular' man, there is no time to lose in detaching it from this scheme of thought, from this particular theology or logos about theos, and thinking hard about what we should put in its place.