Exploring Early Christian Thought: Trinity, Human Nature, and Church Organization, Study notes of Christianity

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Clarifying Theology

Sample Texts On Central Issues

1. Nature of God

Trinity

Tertullian - Trinity

• (^) The perversity (of Praxeas) considers that it has the possession of pure truth in thinking it impossible to believe in the unity of God without identifying the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; failing to see that the one may be all in the sense that all are of one, that is unity of substance; while this still safeguards the mystery of the ‘economy’ (divine ordering of things), which disposes the unity into a trinity arranging in order the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Tertullian - Trinity

• (^) Metaphors
  • (^) King –Heir –Viceroy: One Imperium
  • (^) Source – Stream – Mouth: One River
  • (^) Sun – Ray – Reflection: One Light

Clement of Alexandria

• (^) God is indemonstrable and therefore is not an object of knowledge. But the Son is Wisdom and Knowledge and Truth and all that is akin to these, and he admits of demonstration and explanation.

Clement of Alexandria

• (^) But to begin with, there is no faith without knowledge, nor knowledge without faith. Nor does the Father exist without the Son, for ‘Father’ immediately implies ‘Father of a Son;’ and the Son is the true teacher about the Father.

Irenaeus – Christ as Mediator

• (^) He is truly the good and suffering Son of God, the Logos of God…Had he not as man overcome man’s adversary, the enemy would not have been justly overcome. Again, had it not been God who bestowed salvation we should not have it as a secure possession. And if man had not been united to God, man could not have become a partaker of immortality. For the mediator between God and man had to bring both parties into friendship and concord through his kinship with both; and to present man to God, and make God known to man.

Irenaeus – Christ as Mediator

• (^) The Logos existed in the beginning with God…But he was incarnate and made man; and then he consummated in himself the long line of the human race, procuring for us a comprehensive salvation, that we might recover in Christ Jesus what in Adam we had lost, namely the state of being in the image and likeness of God.

3. Human Nature

Irenaeus – Free Will

• (^) God does not use force…he equipped man with the power of choice …If it was by nature that some are bad and others good, the latter would not be praiseworthy for their goodness, which would be their natural equipment; nor would the bad be responsible, having been so created. But in fact, all have the same nature, with the power of accepting and achieving good, and the power likewise of spurning it and failing to achieve it.

4. Church Organization

Irenaeus - Succession

• (^) It is our duty to obey those presbyter/bishops who are in the Church, who have their succession from the Apostles, as we have shown, who with their succession in the episcopate have received the sure spiritual gift of truth according to the pleasures of the Father. The others, who stand apart from the primitive succession, and assemble in any place whatever, we regard with suspicion; either as heretics, and unsound in doctrine; or as schismatics, conceited and self-assured; or else as hypocrites, acting thus for the sake of gain and vanity. All have fallen away from the truth.

Clement of Alexandria

• (^) There is one true Church, the really ancient Church, into which are enrolled those who are righteous according to God’s ordinance…The one Church is violently split up by the heretics into many sects. In essence, in idea, in origin, in pre-eminence we say that the ancient catholic church is the only church. This Church brings together, by one faith which is according to the respective covenants, those who were already appointed; whom God fore-ordained, knowing before the world’s foundation that they would be righteous. The preeminence of the Church, just as the origin of its constitution, depends on its absolute unity: it excels all other things, and had no equal or rival. As the teaching of the Apostles is one, so als is the Tradition…

Tertullian - Baptism

• (^) Granted that in former days, before the Lord’s passion and resurrection, there was salvation through bare faith; still, now that faith has been enlarged to include belief in his birth, passion, and resurrection, there is an enlargement added to the mystery, namely, the sealing of baptism: the clothing as it were, of the faith which before was bare.