Wisdom’s Word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  John 1:1 NASB

The Word – Richard Rubenstein’s book, When Jesus Became God, investigates the battle between Arius and Athanasius in the early centuries of the Church.  That battle ended with Athanasius as the victor, and established the Latin Roman Church’s doctrine of the Trinity as the central belief of Western Christianity.  Rubenstein’s investigation into the tactics used to win this theological war show the ruthlessness of the victor, causing any contemporary believer to wonder where God was in all this evil.  The historical record does not speak well of the bishops.  But Rubenstein makes another point that is too often overlooked.  Nearly half of Christendom during that time did not embrace Trinitarian doctrine.  In other words, what is today considered fundamental to Christian theology was, at the beginning, only one way to view the implications of the text.  The other ways were just as legitimate.

This historical fact is embedded in Danial Boyarin’s conclusions about Jewish and Christian perspectives during the same era.  Boyarin writes:

“Thus, one of the most characteristic differences between Judaism and Christianity as we know them is the belief in or denial of complexity within the godhead, but in these early centuries there were non-Christian Jews who believed in God’s Word, Wisdom, or even Son as a ‘second God,’ while there were believers in Jesus who insisted that the three persons of the Trinity were only names for different manifestations of one person.”[1]

“In the fate of the Logos in Judaic and Christian theology, we can examine a doctrine that was originally shared but finally became central to opposing self-definitions on either side . . .”[2]

Let’s be sure we understand.  Rubenstein shows that Christianity was divided on the Trinitarian doctrine prior to Athanasius’ brutal campaign to exterminate those who did not share his view.  Boyarin shows that Jews also had multiple views of the Father-Son relationship.  In fact, in the first century when the apostles were writing, Jews and non-Jews (who might later be called Christians) could worship together and, at the same time, have very different views of the godhead.  With today’s theological language, we might even say that some Jews viewed Yeshua as divine, other Jews viewed him as a manifestation of the divine, and still others viewed him as a human agent of the divine.  And no one killed the others over doctrinal differences.  Doesn’t this imply that John, Paul, Peter, and the others could be utterly Jewish and still view Yeshua as somehow divinely connected in ways most human beings aren’t?  Does this mean that John, Paul, and the others might have been pre-“Trinitarian” Jews?  I’m not suggesting that these apostles would embrace the entire Trinitarian dogma.  That seems quite unlikely given what it became after Gregory of Nicaea.  What I’m suggesting is that all those inuendoes and hints that Trinitarians find in the text today might be nothing more than Jewish first century differing opinion.  If Boyarin is correct, why shouldn’t we think of John’s quixotic statement as Jewish, not Christian?  Why should we have doctrinal agita about John’s use of logos (word)?  Until Justin created heresy, John’s Jewish opinion about the divine-human status of Yeshua was just one of the possible ways of thinking.  Until Justin forced Judaism to create its own “orthodoxy,” John’s opinion was an acceptable alternative.  No one was burned at the stake for having a different view.  No one was excommunicated or threatened with eternal damnation.  Instead, men examined the alternatives and sought God together much like the half of the later Church that took exception to Athanasius’ view, except, of course, by the time of Athanasius, differing opinion was punishable by death.

Without historical perspective, doctrine becomes fossilized.  Believers are separated into two groups: those with the truth and those who have fallen into heresy.  Without an appreciation of the historical record, we are duped into thinking that our view is the only accurate, ancient view, and we marshal of the textual evidence according to our paradigm.  We ignore the flux and flow of the authors and pretend that God wrote it all with a few secretaries taking dictation.  History is not a friend of dogma.

Topical Index: Rubenstein, Boyarin, Trinity, word, logos, John 1:1

[1] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 89-90.

[2] Ibid., p. 90.