- The history of Christianity
The belief in the oneness of the Father and the Son
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Faith in the Son also brought about a oneness with the Father. The Son became the mediator of the glory of the Father to those who believe in him. In Jesus’ high priestly prayer (in John, chapter 17) he says: “The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one.” In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus taught his disciples to address God as “our Father.”
The Father-God of Jesus after Jesus’ death and Resurrection becomes—for his disciples—the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (e.g., 2 Corinthians 1:3), who revealed his love through the sacrifice of his Son who was sent into the world. Faithful Christians can thus become the children of God, as noted in Revelation 21:7: “I will be his God and he shall be my son.” For Christians, therefore, faith in God is not a doctrine to be detached from the person of Jesus Christ.
Medieval theologians often spoke of a “Beatific Vision,” a blessed vision of God. In the history of Christian mysticism, this visionary experience of the transpersonal “Godhead” behind the personal “God” (as in the works of the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart)—also called an experience of the “trans-deity,” the “divine ground,” “groundlessness,” the “abyss,” and the divine “nothingness”—constantly breaks through and is renewed. Occasionally, this experience of transpersonal divine transcendence has directed itself against the development of a piety that has banalized the personal idea of God so much so that the glory and holiness of God has been trivialized. The attempt of the 20th-century theologian Paul Tillich to reduce the Christian idea of God to the impersonal concept of “the Ground of Being,” or “Being Itself,” pointed toward an understanding of the pre-personal depths of the transcendence of Godhood.
Nevertheless, in the Christian understanding of Christ as being one with the Father, there is a possibility that faith in God will be absorbed in a “monochristism”—i.e., that the figure of the Son in the life of faith will overshadow the figure of the Father and thus cause it to disappear and that the figure of the Creator and Sustainer of the world will recede behind the figure of the Redeemer. Thus, the primacy of Christology and of the doctrine of justification in Reformation theology led to a depreciation of the creation doctrine and a Christian cosmology. This depreciation accelerated the estrangement between theology and the sciences during the period of the Enlightenment. This was subsequently distorted into a form of materialism. On the other hand, some 20th-century dialectical theologians, among them Karl Barth, in opposing materialism and humanism sometimes evoked a monochristic character that strongly accented the centrality of Christ at the expense of some cultural ties.
The revelatory character of God
The God of the Bible is the God who presses toward revelation. The creation of the world is viewed as an expression of God’s will toward self-revelation, for even the pagans “knew God.” In Paul’s so-called Areopagus speech in Athens, he said of God: “Yet he is not far from each one of us, for ‘in him we live and move and have our being,’” in allusion to the words of the pagan writer Aratus: “For we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:27–28). This was the beginning of a knowledge of God that has manifested itself under the catchphrase of the “natural revelation” of God or God’s revelation in the “book of nature.” It has survived as one strand of theory throughout much of Christian history.
The self-revelation of God presupposes, however, a basic biblical understanding of the existing relationship between God and human beings. It cannot be separated from the view that God created humans according to the divine image and that in Jesus Christ, who “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3), the heavenly man has appeared among humans as the “last Adam.” The inner connection between the “natural” and the biblical revelation takes place through the view of Christ as the divine Logos become human.
Hellenistic thinkers had already been attracted by the emphasis in later Judaism on monotheism and transcendence. This tendency was sketched out earlier in Plato and later Stoicism, but it came to its mature development in Neoplatonism in the 3rd century ce. In the 1st century Philo of Alexandria interpreted the Hebrew Bible’s concept of God in terms of the Logos idea of Greek philosophy, but this Hellenization led to a tension that was to dominate the entire further history of Christian piety, as well as the Western history of ideas. The Greeks traced the idea of God to a “first cause” that stood behind all other causes and effects. Theologians under their influence used this understanding to contribute to a doctrine of God as “first cause” in Christian theology.
