A Christmas carol about St Nicholas, the Arians, and the Nicene Creed

St. Nicholas bringing gifts © Elisabeth Ivanovsky

On Facebook the other day, Derek Rishmawy said he wished there were more Christmas carols about St Nicholas' defence of the Nicene faith. The Santa Claus songs are excellent in their own way, but they don't always go as deeply as they could into the problems of 4th-century trinitarian theology. So, as an early Christmas present to Derek, I wrote this carol about St Nicholas, the Arians, and the Nicene Creed.

Possible titles: "Santa Ain't an Arian", or "Put Some of That Old Time Trinitarian Theology in Your Stocking", or "All I Want for Christmas Is the Faith of Saint Nick," or, perhaps best of all (suggested by David Koyzis), "Ho-ho-homoousios". Whatever you call it, just be sure to sing it nice and jolly, accompanied by sleigh bells.

To the tune of Jingle Bells

Chorus:
Nicholas, you’re the best,
Nicky all the way!
Defender of the Nicene ὁμοούσιον Πατρί – hey!
Nicholas, you’re the best,
Nicky all the way!
Defender of the Nicene ὁμοούσιον Πατρί.

“There was when he was not,”
said Arius & Co.
It seems they had forgot
that God has come below:
born in Bethlehem,
crucified and raised,
not a creature but the One
whom angels hymn with praise – oh!

Chorus

By the candlelight
Share some Christmas cheer!
Give someone a gift!
Drink another beer!
For our light has come
And burned away our dross.
God in flesh: O come let us
Adore φῶς ἐκ φωτός – oh!

Chorus

Heresy is dull,
a bland philosophy,
it steals away the gifts
beneath the Christmas tree.
The holy catholic church
Bids all our joys increase,
So get beneath the mistletoe
And give the kiss of peace – oh!

Chorus

Every girl and boy,
And all the grown-ups too,
Let your hearts be glad,
Let Christ be born in you.
Sinners, don’t despair,
There’s no need to be blue,
Lift your hearts up to the Son,
he’s θεὸν ἐκ θεοῦ – hey!

Chorus.

Know-it-all heretics

Eunomius has everything figured out. Which pretty much summarises everything that is wrong with his theology. Divinity is, Eunomius claims, unbegottenness (which is why he thinks that the Son cannot be divine). Basil is aghast: “How much arrogance and pride would it take for someone to think that he has discovered the very substance of God?” (Against Eunomius, 1.12). Eunomius is like every other heretic: an aggravating know-it-all.

Arius is certain that the Son is not co-eternal with the Father. Apollinaris, agreeing that Arius must be wrong, knows that Christ can be fully divine so long as he is not fully human. Nestorius, going with the dismissal of Apollinaris, figures out how the divine and the human natures interact in Jesus (even in Mary’s womb!). Eutyches, standing with the church in rejecting Nestorius, solves the metaphysical problem of two natures (or one or three—the numbers all blend together). The early christological heretics all claim to understand the relation of the divine to the human in Christ. Each heretic solves the problem with confidence, but the church confidently keeps the problems and so keeps the faith.

The orthodox tradition maintains the tension between the knowable and the unknowable in its affirmations. We cannot know what divinity is in itself, just as we hardly understand the nature of humanity, but it seems necessary to say—if salvation is real—that Christ is fully divine and fully human and that these two “natures” are not merely pressed up against each other or mixed together, but are somehow united in the person of Jesus Christ. But orthodox theology rarely attempts to specify that “somehow”.

The heretics prefer to iron out the creases in their doctrines of God and Christ, leaving a smooth surface where everything is laid bare. But the orthodox tradition leaves the bedsheets in a crumpled pile, with hidden and mysterious crevices. Ironing the divine linen is an impossible task, for God is like a fitted sheet—accomodating yet unwieldy. Talk about God will always have hidden depths and untidy corners. “Heretics were too clever by half, thinking they could know God precisely so as to define the divine Being in all exactitude” (Frances Young, God’s Presence, 253).

Rowan Williams points out that the word “heresy” comes from the Greek hairesis, which connotes making a choice that creates division—“a heresy in St Paul is… choosing to belong to this little group rather than the whole fellowship” (“What is Heresy Today?”). The heretic is the one who looks at the doctrine of God and says “I understand this” or “I can prove that this is so” in such a way as to exclude all other understandings. The creeds, by contrast, were written to establish unity within the church through prayer, contemplation, and interpretation. To riff on Robert Jenson, there is nothing as capacious as a creed.

Social implications of the doctrine of original sin

I've been teaching the doctrine of original sin in my theological anthropology class this semester. Here's a table I created to try to explain the social implications of the doctrine of original sin. Obviously this isn't meant to be a nuanced scholarly presentation, just a rough and ready tool for teaching purposes. The table presents the doctrine of original sin as the foundation of a Christian understanding of society, as opposed to the two generic modern "heresies" of gnosticism and romanticism.

	Gnosticism	Romanticism	Christianity
Nature is…	Split into good and evil	Pure and innocent	Created yet fallen
Human nature is…	Perfectible	Already perfect	Not perfectible
Salvation is…	Victory of the good side of society over the evil side	The spontaneous flourishing of human nature	Never fully present until the last judgment
The problem with society is…	The presence of evil forces or evil structures that need to be eradicated	Laws, institutions, and social constraints that need to be abolished or transcended	The fallenness of every aspect of society. All relationships, groups, institutions, and structures are ruled by a fallen nature.
Education is…	About enlisting children in a pre-defined struggle against evil. Education is a form of propaganda.	A threat to the child’s spontaneous freedom and creativity. Education is the root of all evil.	Necessary to form children in virtue, and to help them manage their own fallen tendencies
Sex should be…	Either rejected (as evil) or worshipped (as a god)	Allowed to flourish spontaneously without any social constraints. Repression vs emancipation.	Managed and disciplined within covenantal relationships which are protected by various laws and customs
National and ethnic identity should be…	Protected and purified at any cost, as a bulwark against external evils	Transcended and obliterated. There is no ethnicity in the state of nature.	Respected in spite of its imperfections, and valued for the sake of higher goods
The role of government is…	To eradicate evil and to make the world good; to pursue absolute justice in order to usher in a utopia	Invalid, since it interferes with the state of nature. Grass-roots movements are a better path to justice.	To seek approximate justice; to provide law and order so that sinful tendencies are restrained
The purpose of life is…	To be true to your vision of a better world.	To be true to yourself.	To be true to something beyond this world.

The theologian's automobile: or, how to tell you are a Docetist

It has often been observed that most of us incline instinctively to one or another form of heresy. It is why heresy is the most natural (and also the most individually satisfying) thing in the world, while orthodoxy takes effort and requires a whole community of individuals listening to one another and not only to their own inner voices.

I was reminded the other day of my own instinctive pull towards heresy. It was during a seminar. A theologian was reading a learned paper. I listened with the greatest interest and sympathy. I nodded gravely. I made notes in a mental notebook. I grunted agreeably when he quoted St Basil. I smiled with pleasure at his description of the genre of panegyric. He referred to a paper by John O'Malley on the topic. I added it to my mental notebook: Panegyric. Cf. John O'Malley. It was all perfectly splendid.

But then it happened. In a casual aside, the theologian mentioned his automobile. His car. He told a little anecdote involving – of all things – the car. How he had been walking somewhere one day because his car was in the – I hesitate to speak the word out loud – in the garage. How it was getting serviced. How there had been (stop it, I thought, why are you telling us this?) an oil leak. That is why the car was getting serviced. That is why he had been on foot that day, so he told us.

It took only the merest mention of this car for all my intellectual pleasure to dissipate. I was not pleased with the car. The car did not please me: I cannot emphasise this point enough. I did not want the theologian's car to be mentioned. I wanted St Basil and panegyric and ideas. Not garages. Not oil leaks. Not machines that require servicing.

As I drove my car home afterwards, I reflected on my displeasure and I had to admit to myself that I am, by nature, a Docetist. I am willing to put up (as far as necessary) with the world of the body, but it is the world of the mind that truly interests me. As a boy it was books and not sports that made me feel alive. I rolled up my sleeves to study Plato's dialogues, not to change engine oil. (Even the photo I chose for this post – did you notice? – is of an old car, a classic car, a Platonic black-and-white Ideal Car, not a vehicle that somebody would actually drive.)

I admit this. I confess it. I believe that it is wrong. I do not believe a Docetist like me can enter the kingdom of heaven.

That is why I need to go to church. It is why I need other believers to tell me about their mortgages, their barbecues, their babies' nappies – even, if necessary, their cars. It is why I need to gather around a table with other believers and their bodies, and to have someone stuff a piece of bread into my hands and tell me, The body of Christ, given for you.

I am a heretic by nature, I won't deny it. But the church is orthodox. The church is catholic. And in the church there is even room for a one-sided Docetist like me.

The weird pedigree of biblical inspiration: Marcion, Origen, and the problem of the Old Testament

As far as I can tell it is Marcion who comes up with the first full-blown "Christian" theory of biblical inspiration. It is fundamental to Marcion's system that the Hebrew scriptures are divinely inspired. They are a perfect, utterly reliable revelation, word for word and letter for letter. But there's a sinister twist in this doctrine of inspiration. For these Hebrew scriptures are inspired not by a good God but by the Demiurge, the wicked god of the Jews. In Israel's scriptural writings this god has given us a completely reliable revelation of his (monstrous) deeds and character. Corresponding to Marcion's theory of inspiration is a commitment to literal interpretation. Read literally, the Hebrew scriptures plainly show the Jewish god to be a god of violence, wrath, jealousy, injustice, ineptitude, and petty legalism. 

So the function of divine inspiration in Marcion's system is clear: it's a way of forcing the problems of the Hebrew Bible out into the open. If every word is inspired then there's no way to escape the problematic texts. And when it comes to interpretation, there's no allegorical wiggle-room. In Marcion, biblical inspiration – with its correlate, literal interpretation – is an anchor for the all-important doctrine of the badness of the Jewish God (and, by implication, the badness of the Jewish people).

Writing a century later, Origen attacks the Marcionite system at its roots. He speaks of scripture as "One Testament" of Hebrew and Christian writings. He develops a science of textual criticism and produces the first Christian commentaries on entire books of Hebrew and Christian scripture, incorporating immense philological, archeological, and historical learning. Crucially, his exegesis aims to demonstrate that beneath the letter of scripture is a pervasive spiritual sense. Not just select passages but the whole of scripture invites christological interpretation. 

And this is where the theory of biblical inspiration comes into play. In authoring scripture, Origen argues, God has deliberately planted all sorts of interpretive obstacles: problems, difficulties, mistakes, morally objectionable stories, and so forth. These manifold obstacles lead us to press beneath the surface of the text and to search more deeply for its spiritual meaning. Such spiritual exegesis isn't just a scholarly technique. It requires ascetic purification, the spiritual transformation of the reader. So the problems in scripture – the same problems which Marcion takes as proof of divine wickedness – are planted there by God to lead us into the depths of spiritual life, just as a wise teacher might plant mistakes in a class discussion in order to lead the class, gently and unobtrusively, towards the truth. 

Origen's exegesis lays the foundations for all later Christian interpretation of scripture. His conclusions are as far removed from Marcion's as the east is from the west. But what's interesting is how much he takes over from Marcion. Like Marcion, Origen sees the scriptural text as divinely inspired. And like Marcion, he sees biblical inspiration not as a way of avoiding difficulties (à la some modern evangelicals!), but as a way of radicalising the problematic aspects of scripture.

But it is part of Origen's genius to assimilate the Marcionite theory of inspiration, to absorb it into his own system so completely and so systematically that the Marcionite reading of scripture seems not only exegetically superficial (in as much as Marcion sticks to the surface of the text) but also lacking in ascetic seriousness. When you recall that the whole appeal of the Marcionites was their commitment to asceticism, Origen's deployment of the theory of inspiration must be judged a tactical tour de force in the campaign against heresy.

Milton, heresy, toleration

The latest issue of the Journal of the History Ideas includes my article on Milton and toleration: “‘Following the Way Which Is Called heresy’: Milton and the Heretical Imperative,” JHI 69:3 (2008), 375-93. (If you’d like a copy, just email me.) This is part of a larger project I’m currently working on, exploring the theological basis of the secularisation of politics in the 17th century. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“If the underlying basis of a free society is the practice of individual religious choice, what then becomes of those who refuse to engage in this practice? What becomes of Roman Catholics, who simply refuse to become heretics in Milton’s (positive) sense – that is, they refuse to make the individual conscience the locus of religious authority? In Milton’s conception of English society, such persons are clearly excluded: their refusal of individualistic choice is tantamount to a repudiation of the entire social order, so that the possibility of their toleration by the state cannot even be entertained. In other words, Milton’s relativization of heresy, if carried out as a social program, would lead to precisely the same impasse as Locke’s theory of toleration: the practice of subjective Protestant piety gives rise to the right to toleration, but the resulting construction necessarily excludes those who do not practice such piety, or who practice the wrong kind….

“I am not suggesting that Milton’s conception of toleration is merely ‘inconsistent,’ or that his otherwise rational theory of toleration is hampered by an unfortunate remainder of religious prejudice. On the contrary, Milton’s theory of toleration is theological through and through. The right to toleration is grounded on a specific Protestant understanding of the nature of faith; and the exception to this right is inextricably connected to the whole logic of toleration. Indeed, the normative ‘centre’ of Milton’s theory is constituted precisely by its exception, by its exclusion of certain groups who are declared incapable of moral participation in the sphere of politics, and who thus forfeit the right to toleration.”

Mathias Eichhorn: the state in the thought of Karl Barth and Carl Schmitt

Mathias Eichhorn, Es wird regiert! Der Staat im Denken Karl Barths und Carl Schmitts in den Jahren 1919 bis 1938 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994), 290 pp. (review copy courtesy of Duncker & Humblot)

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Or what could Karl Barth possibly have in common with Carl Schmitt? A Protestant theologian who passionately opposed Nazi ideology in the 1930s – and a Catholic state-jurist who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and who was even briefly dubbed “the crown jurist of the Third Reich.” It would be hard to imagine two more unlikely discussion-partners – but in this fascinating study, Mathias Eichhorn brings these two towering thinkers into conversation with one another. Although this is not a new book (1994), I thought it would be well worth reviewing and discussing in light of all the current interest in “political theology.”

So anyway, why bring Barth and Schmitt into dialogue? First of all, Eichhorn argues that both thinkers made their fundamental intellectual decisions in the face of the catastrophe of 1914-18. Barth and Schmitt both believed that the catastrophe in Europe was a political consequence of the Enlightenment, with its liberalism, its rationalism, and its doctrine of progress.

In Schmitt’s view, the category of “the political” is constituted by the irreducible relation of friend and enemy (Freund und Feind). And according to Eichhorn, the closest structural relation between Barth and Schmitt lies here: the same accusation which Schmitt brings against political liberalism – that it is no longer capable of perceiving the distinction between friend and enemy – is directed by Barth against theological liberalism. While political liberalism pursues the dream of rational consensus and so pretends that there is no longer an enemy, theological liberalism similarly eliminates the category of heresy, so that the theological distinction between friend and enemy disappears.

And this disappearance of heresy, Eichhorn argues, has grave political consequences. In Barth’s view, liberal theology had forfeited the capacity to resist the National Socialist regime. Indeed, Barth’s own struggle against liberal theology was precisely an attempt to reintroduce the distinction between truth and heresy, so that a theological intervention in the state would again be possible (just think of the Barmen Declaration, with its profoundly political deployment of the concept of heresy). In short, Eichhorn argues that the (Schmittian) friend/enemy political distinction requires a (Barthian) theological distinction between truth and heresy.

Eichhorn thus points to a fundamental irony in Schmitt’s thought: in spite of his concept of the enemy, Schmitt refuses to recognise the validity of theological judgment as the means of distinguishing friend from enemy. His concept of the enemy thus lacks its internal theological criterion, without which it finally becomes arbitrary. Indeed, Schmitt was even tempted to regard the theologian as the fundamental enemy who endangers the state – even though the theologian, with his concept of heresy, is the only one who might have authentically distinguished friend from enemy.

And while the politically anti-liberal Schmitt was undecided about theological questions, the theologically anti-liberal Barth was able to be passionately committed not only to theology, but also to democratic politics. This difference, Eichhorn suggests, is not coincidental, since each thinker’s stance in relation to theology was constitutive of his understanding of the state. Indeed, when Schmitt “threw himself into the arms of Behemoth” in 1933, he showed that he had become incapable – theologically incapable – of distinguishing friend from enemy.

Drawing on Schmitt’s own remark that the enemy is always “my brother,” Eichhorn thus concludes this fascinating and provocative study with the poignant observation: “The enemy is always a part of me, not a stranger and not remote from me. In this sense, Karl Barth was – like no other – the enemy and the brother of Carl Schmitt” (p. 276).

Ten propositions on heresy

by Kim Fabricius (his 25th set of propositions!)

1. Heresy comes from the Greek hairesis (literally “choice” or “thing chosen”) and denotes an “opinion” or a “school of thought.” In I Corinthians 11:19 the RSB translates haireseis as “divisions”, the NRSV as “factions”; and while Paul suggests that “there have to be (δεῖ) factions among you,” as a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, nevertheless, as the context confirms, he deploys the word in a negative sense. See also the list of vices (“works of the flesh”) in Galatians 5:20: “factions” (NRSV), “party intrigues” (REB).

2. Of course what constitutes heresy is not pre-packaged; there is no timeless, pure dogma, discovered, simpliciter, like a diamond. On the other hand, a purely constructivist account of orthodoxy is inadequate, as if it were costume jewellery. There is a real sense in which dogma gives expression to what has been given to the church from the beginning, to what the church already knows before it recognises it, yet comes to recognise it only through relentless arguments about it, arguments issuing in fine and fragile articulations that say neither too little nor too much, and sometimes say it in negatives (cf. the apophaticism of the Chalcedonian Definition). The rough diamond has to be cut.

3. The early cuts, set in the creeds, were made in the context of ferocious Christological controversies. In dispute was the very identity of God, the God who creates and redeems us, to whom the church witnesses and prays (lex orandi, lex credendi). The arguments were not “academic,” what was at stake was “personal,” viz. the experience of salvation in Christ, and the transmission, through careful conversation, of the parameters within which the experience may be realised. Augustine called sound doctrine the hedge that protects the field where the Christian encounters God. I would only add that a hedge is made of shrubs, not bricks and barbed wire.

4. Another image: if orthodoxy is the bull’s eye, heresy is, as Rowan Williams puts it, the “near-misses” – which actually help guide the church towards the target (cf. Schleiermacher’s reference to his own teaching on God as “inspired heterodoxy”). The early heretics were generally neither knaves nor fools but pious and passionate men, zealous for God, morally serious, scrupulously scriptural. They were very clever, but conventional, fetchers and carriers for the zeitgeist. Heretics like a “wrap”, and heresies are fastidiously neat and tidy, the product of minds stuck inside the box of common sense. “Consistency,” said Oscar Wilde, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” Unsurprisingly, then, heresy is aesthetically unattractive, even ugly.

5. I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said that there are no such things as whole truths, there are only half-truths, and treating half-truths like whole truths plays the devil. Whitehead might have been talking about heresy. Heretics are one-eyed, they lack the “vision thing”: failing to see the bigger picture, they take the part for the whole. That’s why heresy is inevitably rather boring. Heretics have no sense of adventure; they go only so far, they won’t go “all the way.” You could say they are theological prudes, often wearing philosophical chastity belts, who resist being ravished by revelation.

6. Marcion was a literalist who couldn’t get his head around the apparent contradictions between Old and New Testaments, and so he hacked the Bible in two. Arius was monomaniacally monotheist and uncompromisingly conservative and resistant to conceptual innovation; his “notion of unity is devoid of the richness – and the mystery – of God’s unity. It is devoid of the unity of love” (Arthur C. McGill). Eutyches was “a confused and unskilled thinker ... blindly rushing forward to defend the unity of Christ against all attempts to divide Him”; while Nestorius, if not perhaps a Nestorian, launched such a “maladroit, crudely expressed exposition of the Antiochene position” on the two natures of Christ that he was never able to explain coherently what constitutes His centre (J. N. D. Kelly).

7. And then there are those perennial pests, Pelagianism and Donatism (technically a “schism,” an error of love rather than faith). A fair-minded comparison of Pelagius’ exegesis of Psalm 14, and Donatus’ interpretation of the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, with Augustine’s is initially embarrassing. But when the bishop of Hippo raises the bar, deconstructing the human soul and insisting that God is always greater than we think, the two heresiarchs, the one monkish and severe, the other hawkish and charismatic, both perfectionists, are out of their depths. They are noble figures, and theirs are heroic theologies, but, as Rowan Williams observes, commenting on Augustine’s legacy, “God asks not for heroes but for lovers; not for moral athletes but for men and women aware of their need for acceptance, ready to find their selfhood in the longing for communion with an eternal ‘other’.”

8. “Remember,” wrote Chesterton, “that the church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer.... This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into the foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.” And the mark of the mad: “this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.” And so: “Whenever we feel that there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.” Heresy is uncomfortable with the oddness of God.

9. “The truth of dogmas does not depend on the fact that the church maintains them. But is this really so? This is an abiding question, and dogmatics must always leave it open!” (Gerhard Sauter). Tradition always gets the benefit of the doubt, but might some of it be but “agedness of error” (Milton)? An ancient dogma, now widely contested, is the divine impassibility. With Moltmann, Jüngel declares that the cross “has destroyed the axiom of absoluteness, the axiom of apathy, the axiom of immutability, all of which are unsuitable axioms for the Christian concept of God.” Process and liberation theologians join the troops, while Thomas Weinandy and David Bentley Hart mount rearguard actions. Were the Theopaschites (if not the Patripassianists) right after all? In any case, claims to infallibility – a kind of tradition fundamentalism – bring orthodoxy into disrepute, and church history is littered with enough ill-conceived defences of orthodoxy to warrant theological vigilance and modesty. Moreover, while doubt plays black to trust (Wittgenstein), the acute post-enlightenment awareness of the historical and social location of ideas, and the undeniable insights of Tendenzkritik regarding the power-interests that texts serve and legitimate, entail a loss of dogmatic innocence that must give suspicion its due.

10. Finally, what do you do with heretics? Burn ‘em (though in fact none of the early heresiarchs were murdered)? Or at least track them down and corner them? If you’ve got a magisterium, you can fire the Küngs and the Currans. If you’re a powerful and aggressive church leader, you can threaten to take your ball and go home while at the same time invading other pitches (or is it Bishop Akinola who is the [Donatist] heretic?). Karl Barth warned against witch-hunts against Bultmann, and the author of the Barmen Declaration found the contemporary “confessional movement” “dead, cheap, fly-sieving, camel-swallowing, and Pharisaic.” On the other hand, I’m sure Barth would have approved of declaring apartheid a heresy. Finally, however, Stanley Hauerwas is right: “That one of the tests of orthodoxy is beauty means orthodoxy betrays itself if it is used as a hammer to beat into submission those we think heterodox.” And, of course, unless orthodoxy itself issues in orthopraxis – because truth is not so much thought as done (John 7:17) – well, hypocrisy isn’t heresy, but it ain’t pretty. The telos of orthodoxy is not conformity but faith working through love in joyful obedience.

The non-existence of the spirit world

The Aussie writer Peter Sellick has posted an excellent polemical piece on the non-existence of the spirit world. He discusses the Arian heresy as an example of rationalist biblical literalism, and he remarks:

“I can’t help thinking that attempts to make Jesus subordinate to the Father are produced by a refusal to accept that the man on the cross, on the stinking dunghill of Golgotha, outside of the city walls and abandoned by all, is God. This is the offence at the centre of the Christian story.”

On heresy

At the group-blog God as the Mystery of Theology I’ve posted some theses by Eberhard Jüngel on heresy and superstition. Here’s an example:

“A mere recitation of confessions of Jesus Christ does not preserve theology from becoming heretical, but makes it all the more heretical. The mere recitation of confessions is christological superstition.”