God (christianity)

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Representation of Christ as a geometer. Miniature from a French Bible moralisée , 13th century
The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo . It shows how God the Father brings Adam to life with an outstretched forefinger

The Christianity and the Christian-influenced philosophy assume that there is a single God ( ancient Greek θεός TEOS , Latin deus ) are. The Christian ideas of God have seen several changes over time. Christianity emerged from Hellenistic Judaism and was influenced by both the Jewish conceptions of God and even more so by Greek philosophy . Early Christianity had not yet established a widely accepted set of Christian dogmas , so that several major Christian beliefs and churches coexisted with very different ideas about God. With the secular and ecclesiastical First Council of Nicaea and other confessions, proto-Orthodox Christians established a minimal concept of God, which has since been reflected in the doctrine of the Trinity of the major denominations. This creed describes the one God in the form of the holy, divine trinity of the three divine persons God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit . According to this creed, Jesus Christ was born of the human mother of God Mary , was both human and God, and was executed as a criminal by crucifixion under Roman justice . Non-Trinitarian Christians such as the Unitarians , Jehovah's Witnesses , Mormons or Christian Scientists reject the Trinity doctrine .

Early Christianity

Paul believed Jesus Christ in his New Testament theology as the divine Redeemer of humanity and the Son of God . However, he has not yet developed a detailed theology of the special relationship between God and Jesus Christ and does not yet mention the divine Trinity. His followers were mainly Romans and Hellenistic Greeks. Only in the baptismal command ( Mt 28,19  EU ) are father, son and spirit named together.

In the early Christian, Gentile Christian phase, a distinction can be made between two large groups. On the one hand, there were thinkers influenced by Hellenism who had a more Greek-philosophical understanding of the God proclaimed in the New Testament and who found human reason to be sufficient for understanding it. On the other hand, there were those believers who relied, at least in part, on some reinterpreted Jewish, and later Christian, revelations.

Gnosis

The Gnostics were the first Christian theologians after Philo of Alexandria to take up the ideas of Middle Platonism .

Gnostics believed that in the beginning there was a perfect God. In John's Apocryphon it is described how Sophia produced an imperfect and misshapen divine being called Jaldabaoth , the god of the Jews.

Gnosticism tended to ascribe total transcendence and unfathomability to God ; In John's Apocryphon, for example, there are clear statements about transcendence. God is more than just a "God", but a monad , perfect, infinite, unfathomable, invisible, eternal, unnameable, and without definable attributes. According to Hippolytus of Rome, Basilides went so far as to assert that the nonexistent God created the nonexistent universe out of nothing when he emphasized the negative properties .

The Valentine scholar Ptolemy claimed in his letter to Flora that the Old Testament was utterly false because it described an imperfect God. It must therefore have been inspired neither by the true, perfect God, nor by the devil, but by an intermediate God, the demiurge and creator of the world.

Proto-Orthodoxy

In their writings, proto-Orthodox church fathers such as Tatian , Athenagoras and Theophilus describe God as transcendent and eternal, free from temporal or spatial boundaries, and endowed with the highest supernatural power and honor.

The first major Christian apologist , Justin Martyr , described in his writings a transcendent conception of God that was partly influenced by Middle Platonism. God is the eternal, immovable, unchangeable ground and ruler of the universe, nameless and indescribable, uncreated, dwelling far away in heaven and observing his creatures, but unable to contact them. Tatian and Athenagoras described similar ideas. Athenagoras summarized that God was "uncreated, eternal, invisible, unfathomable, incomprehensible and infinite", and only accessible through the mind.

Theophilus emphasized the transcendence of God and pointed out that all other terms refer to his attributes and actions, but not to his being himself. The same was said of Albinus and the Corpus Hermeticum .

Clement of Alexandria represented an even higher doctrine of God . For him, God was bodiless, formless, and without attributes . He is above space and time, virtue and goodness, and even above the monad. The human imagination could not understand God; the best way to get an idea of ​​him is through the negative process kat 'aphairesin. All of these statements have parallels to Philo, whose work Clemens knew, as well as to the Gnostics and Middle Platonists . In contrast to Plotin's “ One ”, Clemens viewed God as a being with spiritual abilities, while Plotin’s One is the original source of spiritual abilities.

Christian thinkers soon discovered the consequences of God's unfathomable nature. Origen clearly pointed out the contradiction between the increasingly negative theology and the positive language of the holy scriptures and came to the conclusion that all passages that God described with anthropomorphic features - such as his suffering, fear or anger - had to be interpreted allegorically. Origen begins his De principiis with a critique of those who believe that God has a body. God is incomprehensible and it is impossible to have any idea about him. It is an invisible intelligence that does not need space, just as human intelligence does not need space. Origen changed his view in his later comment on Matthew. In it he wrote of the divine Logos , which suffered and loved people. In this sense God is able to feel human emotions when dealing with human affairs. Although Origen again rejected the unfathomable nature of God in a later script, his teaching determined Christian theology until the 20th century.

Trinity doctrine

Athenagoras was the first Christian author who dealt separately with the problem of the doctrine of the Trinity. He defended the doctrine of the oneness of God. The Son of God is "the Logos of the Father in ideal form (idea) and power (energeia) ", and the Holy Spirit is an emanation of God. The first surviving book on the Trinity was written by Novatian .

By imperial decree, the creed established in the First Council of Nicaea in 325 became binding. The Greek expression homoousios (“of the same substance”) used in the Confession of Nicaea characterizes the relationship between Christ and God the Father in a way that on the one hand emphasized the divinity of Jesus Christ, but on the other was intended to preserve the unity of God. The Holy Spirit was also briefly mentioned to reflect the scriptural belief that he was a divine entity separate from the Father and Son.

In the First Council of Constantinople Opel (381) the belief in the Trinity was officially confirmed. The doctrine of the Trinity was reiterated in the Athanasian Creed , written between 381 and 428 . The Council of Chalcedon in 451 stated that Jesus was both God and man. Between the idea that there are three different gods ( tritheism ) and that there are three different aspects of a single god ( modalism ), a middle way established itself as a compromise.

More patristic views

Basil the Great distinguished on the one hand between the essence and substance of God, which are completely inaccessible, and on the other hand the divine powers. These are the forces with which God intervenes in the world, and they are especially in connection with the Holy Spirit.

The writings of Pseudo-Dionysus had much in common with the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. In the Eastern Churches their influence was significant and their orthodoxy was undisputed. The writings of Pseudo-Dionysus emphasize the utter incomprehensibility of the divine essence and emphasize the divine powers. Both positive and negative theology are necessary: ​​the positive to find symbols for God in the world, and the negative to show that there is no designation for God's nature.

Augustine of Hippo viewed God as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, morally sublime, and the ex nihilo creator of the universe. Despite all these qualities, God be simple. The Christian doctrine of God's immutability tried to bring Augustine into harmony with the creation of the world through an interpretation of the concept of time .

Middle Ages and Renaissance

In the eighth century, John of Damascus wrote a comprehensive account of the ecclesiastical dogmatics of the time using the three-part source of knowledge . The first part ( dialectic ) deals with the non-Christian ancient philosophy; the second ( De Haeresibus ) describes 100 heresies ; the third part, the ecdosis ( precise exposition of the right faith ) arranges the beliefs of the Church's teaching in the order of the creed. Eastern spirituality was most clearly expressed in the 14th century by Gregorios Palamas , for whom essence and energy were two aspects of the same divine existence.

In scholasticism , it was Thomas Aquinas in particular who argued in the context of natural theology that belief is not irrational. He described increasingly higher forms of materialless form, at the top of which was God as a pure form without matter, perfect and therefore unchangeable. For Thomas the divine will was subordinate to divine wisdom. This idea of ​​a God whose omnipotent will aims at the right and good goes back to the Church Fathers.

Nikolaus von Kues described his ideas of God partly with mathematical analogies and referred to the term coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) as the core element of his approach. With this he expressed that the relationship of God to the things of the world can be compared with an infinite straight line which contains and produces all finite geometric objects such as lines, triangles and circles. Similarly, according to Cusanus, God goes beyond finite and opposing things. At the same time, God is incomprehensible. This term should clarify that despite all mathematical analogies it is not possible to fathom God's nature through reason. God is the absolute maximum and the absolute minimum at the same time . He also called God the non-other and the ability to be of everything. Although God's nature is inaccessible to reason, it can be described by comparisons.

Reformation, Lutheran Orthodoxy and New Protestantism

Martin Luther emphasizes from the Bible again - more than the doctrine of God of antiquity ( Dionysius Areopagita ) and the Middle Ages (Thomas Aquinas) - the historicity of God. For him God is less the one who is for himself than the one who acts, the God who acts in anger and grace . God is the “God hidden” in anger (= deus absconditus ) and the “God revealed” in grace (= deus revelatus ). Anger does not count as an essential quality of God, it does not belong to the being of God, but it is merely the withdrawal of his being, which is only love . God is a "glowing oven full of love".

The Lutheran Reformation received the ancient church doctrine of the Trinity . Article 1 of the Confessio Augustana professes to the doctrine of the one divine being (una essentia divina) and the three persons (tres personae). The Unitarianism that arose during the Reformation, on the other hand, is constituted in the rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity, which it rejects as unbiblical, as is expressed in the Rakau Catechism .

The Lutheran orthodoxy emphasizes that God is a single substantia personae in three. Essence and revelation trinity are delimited internally and externally by the doctrine of the works. There are the following works internally and externally:

  • opera ad intra (opera ad intra sunt divisa = distributed to the individual persons)
    • generatio ( procreation = work within the father on the son)
    • spiratio ( breath = work inwardly by the father and the son on the spirit)
  • opera ad extra (opera ad extra sunt indivisa = undistributed, belonging to all three people)
    • creatio ( creation = external work of the father)
    • redemptio ( redemption = external work of the son)
    • sanctificatio ( sanctification = work outwardly of the spirit)

In New Protestantism , the doctrine of the Trinity was completely abandoned ( Wegscheider ) or not infrequently limited to the economic or revelatory trinity ( Schleiermacher ).

Modern times

Despite Hume's skepticism , in the English-speaking world, William Paley's argument about the cosmic clockmaker was convincing to many believers, so that Darwin's theory of evolution posed problems for the churches. In order to reconcile evolution with theism, theologians developed theistic evolution , in which God controls the development of life. In principle, however, the findings of evolutionary biology in continental Europe in the 21st century are (as far as possible) recognized by both major churches or are no longer openly questioned and are not viewed as contradicting the biblical message. The biblical story of creation is v. a. viewed as a story of God's relationship with man and less as a scientific and historical factual report; it is theologically decisive that God is the world and v. a. created man and turned to him lovingly in the course of this, not how , where and when this happened or whether it happened historically exactly as described in Genesis . The work of God or the world as a whole remains for human reason in its natural limitation from a Christian point of view always a mystery to a certain extent that cannot or can never be fully grasped in words or logical terms. With the emergence of historical-critical biblical studies and the demythologization of Holy Scripture initiated by Rudolf Bultmann, (continental European or German-speaking) theology has (largely) said goodbye to biblical literalism and the idea of verbal inspiration . For example, historical-critical biblical studies have worked out that in the biblical account of creation (presumably) two originally separate or independently created texts were editorially merged. Accordingly, it is anyway (actually or originally) not one but two stories of creation whose historicity or historical accuracy does not seem to be the theologically decisive. (See also Creation account written in priests ). On the part of the churches, for the most part, at least in Germany, there is no longer any real "competitive thinking" or a need to distinguish from the natural sciences. An exception to this is at best evangelical free churches , in which z. T. creationist points of view are represented.

Albrecht Ritschl , who was influenced by Kant's statements on ethics, saw belief in God as an ethical rather than an ontological question. Theology makes statements about ethics and not about facts. God is therefore the moral highest, and not a being whose existence or non-existence one has to prove.

It was not until the 20th century that there was a return to anthropomorphic images of God. Karl Barth denied that God could be known through human reason and appealed to the Holy Scriptures. Humanity is completely dependent on God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Jürgen Moltmann , on the other hand, emphasized God's suffering. For Bonhoeffer, only a feeling, powerless God could help. For Alfred North Whitehead , God was wholly connected with the world; every event is co-determined by God. Charles Hartshorne developed Whitehead's ideas into a panentheistic notion. He played a prominent role in the development of process theology .

Some Christian thinkers, like Karl Heim, worked to reconcile Christian theology with new scientific discoveries, for example by relating it to quantum mechanics .

From a scientific point of view, following Samuel Alexander , Hermann Helbig tries to interpret God as an emergent phenomenon based on natural conditions , which is both immanent in the world and transcends it in a scientifically understandable way. This approach shows possible solutions for some theological questions, including the universality, perfection and gender neutrality of God as well as immanence versus transcendence . In Christian theology there are close connections to this conception of a dynamically developing God on the one hand to the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead and to the concept of 'noogenesis' or noosphere by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin . This approach shows a way to reconcile theology and the natural sciences as well as between the religions. It could also provide a basis for the form of Hans Küng launched Project Global Ethic .

God - male or female?

Although theologians had always suggested that God was asexual, feminist theologians pointed out that the Christian image of God was always male. Feminists split into those who believe that the Christian God is necessarily patriarchal (according to Mary Daly ) and those who believed that the Christian God is a liberator who can free humanity from patriarchialism (according to Rosemary Radford Ruether and Letty Russell ).

From the biblical creation myth one can deduce that God can contain masculine and feminine elements: “So God created man in his image; he created him in the image of God. He created them as man and woman. ”( Gen 1.27  EU ) Pope John Paul I spoke of God as father in 1978,“ but he is even more a mother ”( E 'papà; più ancora è madre. )

literature

  • Entries "God" and "Attributes of God" in Lindsay Jones (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Religion. Thomson Gale, Detroit 2005, ISBN 0-02-865733-0 .
  • John B. Cobb : God: God in Postbiblical Christianity. In: Vol. 5, pp. 3553-3560.
  • William J. Hill: Attributes of God: Christian Concepts. In: Vol. 5, p. 615 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Cobb (2005), p. 3553.
  2. ^ Grant (1986), p. 86.
  3. ^ Grant (1986), p. 87.
  4. ^ Prestige (1952), p. 3.
  5. ^ Grant (1986), p. 88.
  6. ↑ Grant (1986), pp. 88 f.
  7. ↑ Grant (1986), pp. 90 f.
  8. ↑ Grant (1986), p. 91 ff.
  9. ↑ Grant (1986), p. 157 f.
  10. ^ HP Owen: Concepts of Deity, p. 13. Macmillan, London 1971, ISBN 0-333-01342-5 .
  11. ^ Pöhlmann: Outline of Dogmatics. A revision course , Gütersloh 1973, p. 74.
  12. ↑ Ibid.
  13. ↑ Martin Schmeisser (ed.): Socinian confessional writings: The Rakow catechism of Valentin Schmalz (1608) and the so-called Soner catechism . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-05-005200-7 , p. 126 ff .
  14. ^ Pöhlmann: Outline of Dogmatics. A revision course , Gütersloh 1973, p. 76.
  15. ↑ Ibid.
  16. ↑ A short description including critical theological commentary by Reinhard Hempelmann can be found in the lexicon on the EZW website under the keyword creationism
  17. ↑ Cobb (2005), p. 3554.
  18. ↑ Hermann Helbig: World Mysteries from the Perspective of Modern Sciences - Emergence in Nature, Society, Psychology, Technology and Religion, Springer, 2018, ISBN 978-3-662-56288-8 , chap. 9 and 10 .
  19. ↑ John Paul I, Angelus Address, September 10, 1978; Vatican homepage, Italian , English , accessed February 27, 2013