Yesterday I tried to explain what was the reason, in interpreting the meaning of Jesus as the Christ, for the Apologetic theologians' use of the concept of the Logos, taken from a long philosophical development beginning with Heraclitus and the Stoics and Philo of Alexandria. The answer was: because the Logos was considered already by Philo to be the universal principle of the Divine self-manifestation, and therefore in saying that this is so, that this is historical reality in Jesus, one said of Him that He is universal. I gave you an interpretation of this term "universal:" Nothing can in principle be excluded, even if it is not actually developed within Christianity

Now I Come to the speculative side, to the combination of the Logos doctrine with the doctrine of God. The Logos is the first "work" or generation of God as father. The Father, being eternal mind, has in himself the Logos, since He is eternally "logical," as Athanasius, one of the Apologists, says. "Logical" doesn't mean that He can argue well; He leaves that to us. "Logical' means that He is logikos, namely adequate to the principles of meaning and truth; God is not irrational will. He is here called eternal nous (mind), and this means He has within himself the power of self-manifestation. This analogy is taken from our own experience. There is no mental process which is not going on in some way or other in terms of silent words. And so, the inner spiritual life of God includes the silent word in him.

There is a Spiritual procession going on from the Father to the world in which He manifests himself to himself and to the world. 'But this procession does not produce separation. The Word is not the same of which it is the Word. But on the other hand, the Word cannot be separated from; that of which it is the Word, namely the manifestation: The Word of God is not identical with God; it is the self-manifestation of God. On the other hand, if you separate it from God, then it's empty, with no content. This tries to describe, in analogy with the mental processes of man, the meaning of the term Logos. Therefore the process of generation of the Logos in which the Logos is produced in God – eternally, of course – does not make God small; He is not less than He was, by the fact that He generates His Word. So Justin can say: "The Logos is different from God according to number, but not according to concept." He is God; He is not the God, but He is one with God in essence. (Justin) also uses the Stoic doctrines of the immanent and the trespassing Logos. The Logos in God is logos endiathetos, "indwelling. " But this eternal indwelling Logos, the Word in which God expresses himself to himself, becomes, with the creation, becomes logos proforikos the proceeding, the outgoing Logos. The Logos is now a word spoken towards outside, towards the creature., through the prophets and the wise men. The old meaning ("word") and the already actual meaning ("reason") – since Heraclitus oscillates – both are always meant. If one thinks in Old Testament terms, one would prefer to translate logos by "word"; if one thinks in Greek terms, as the Apologists mostly did, then one would translate logos by "reason" not by '"reasoning," but by the meaningful structure of reality, which is reason. As the immediate self expression of the Divine, the Word, the Logos form or reason, is less, than the Divine Abyss, because the Divine Abyss is always the beginning, and out of the depths of divinity His self-manifestation and His manifestation towards the world come. The Logos is the beginning of the generations of God; there, everything starts. He has, so to speak, a diminished transcendence or divinity. But if this is so, how can He then reveal God fully? Now this was a later problem – which we have to discuss more fully soon. In the moment in which the Apologists used the term Logos, the problem arose and couldn't be silenced any more. If the Logos is the self-expression of movement, is He less than God or fully God? All this means that one continued to call Christ God. But such a statement – that a historical man, who lived and died, and perhaps was really in the "police files" of Jerusalem, is called "God": how can this be made understandable to the pagans?

The difficulty was not the incarnation as such. "Incarnation" is one of the most ordinary events in Greek mythology and in all mythology. Gods come to earth; they take on animal or human or plant form; they do something and then return to their divinity. This is not difficult. But this idea couldn't be accepted by Christianity. The problem and the difficulty was that the Son of God, who was at the same time a historical man and not a man of mythological imagination, is supposed to be the absolute and unique Son of God.

The incarnation is once for all, but it isn't a special characteristic or element in the Divinity which incarnates, but rather the very center of the Divinity. In order to make this problem clear, the Logos concept was used. The problem was to combine monotheism, which was emphasized so strongly against pagan polytheism, with the divinity of Christ – the humanity and the universality of His nature at the same time. This was the need for that time. The Apologists fulfilled that need and therefore they were successful.

Now the incarnation itself, in the Apologists, is not the union of the Divine Spirit with the man Jesus, but the Logos really becomes man. This transformation Christology becomes more and more important through the Logos doctrine. Existing before the Logos, He now, through the will of God, has become man. He has been made flesh, as Justin says.

This is the first clear decision for the transformation Christology over against the adoptionist Christology. If the Logos or the Spirit adopted the man Jesus, then we have a quite different Christology from the idea that the Logos is made, is transformed into, flesh.

Now I leave all this open. I hope you have many questions and many shakings of your heads about this, because it is certainly not easy, since the concept of Logos is for us not what it was for every reader of Justin among the educated pagans. We know God and we know man, but the idea of hypostasis, of powers of being in God, is extremely difficult for us. But this was the content of the old Christian Christology, and this is still present whenever we perform our liturgy, which all. are dependent on this Christology.

The saving gifts of the Logos are gnosis (knowledge) of God, of the law, and of the resurrection. Christ is, as Logos, as reason, first of all teacher, but not a teacher who teaches us a lot of things he knows better than we, but teacher in the Socratic sense, namely, in the sense of giving us existential power of being.

The Logos gives us truth about God and gives us moral laws which we have to fulfill, by freedom. So a kind of intellectualization and educational elements come into the doctrine of the Christ. This was a possible consequence of the Logos doctrine, and this is the reason why there were always reactions against the Logos doctrine. But I don't want to go beyond this now because we come back to it again and again, and must now deal with another movement of great importance. The Apologists defend Christianity against the philosophers and the emperors. The dangers for Christianity were not only those from the outside – these were lesser dangers, even though persecution often resulted – but there was a much more essential danger, a danger from inside. nd this was the danger of gnosticism. Now what is this? It is derived from the Greek word gnosis meaning "knowledge." It does not mean scientific knowledge. Gnosis is used in three ways: 1) as knowledge in more general terms; 2) as mystical communion; 3) as sexual intercourse.

You can find all three meanings in the New Testament. This means it is knowledge by participation. It is a knowledge which is as intimate as the relation between husband and wife. It is not a knowledge of analytic and synthetic research; it is not scientific knowledge. But it is knowledge of union and knowledge of salvation: it's existential knowledge. Therefore the Gnostics were the Greek intellectuals, but were people who wanted to live in the realm of participation with the Divine, and who understood the cognitive function of man as a functioning of participation.

The Gnostics were not a sect – if at all, they were many sects – but they were much more than this. They were a universal religious movement in the late ancient world. We call this movement "syncretism," usually. It was a mixture of all the religious traditions of that time. This general movement of religious mixture was spreading all over the world, and it was strong enough to penetrate into Greek philosophy, so that we call that period of Greek philosophy the religious period of Greek philosophy. It was strong enough to penetrate into the Jewish religion: Philo of Alexandria is a typical predecessor of Gnosticism. It was strong enough to penetrate into the Roman law and into Christian theology.

The elements of this religion of mixture are the following:

1) The negative presupposition, namely the destruction of the national religions by the conquests of Alexander and of Rome. The great world empires undercut the national religions.

2) The philosophical interpretation of mythology. When you read the systems of the Gnostics, you will have the feeling that this is rationalized myth. And this feeling is right.

3) The renewal of the old mystery traditions.

4) The re-emergence of the psychic and magic elements, as it appeared in the religious propaganda of the East; while the political movement went from the West to the East

(Rome conquered the East), the religious movement, this great syncretistic thinking and acting which we call Gnosticism, went from East to West and conquered, at least partly, even Rome. So when you read about the Gnostics, don't believe you know all about them; it is easy to dismiss them. It was an attempt to combine all the religious traditions which had lost their genuine roots, and bring them together in a system of a half-philosophical, half-religious character. The Gnostic groups showed many similarities and many conflicts with original Christianity. They claim, against the public tradition of the Christian churches, to have secret traditions which are known only to the initiated; they are not public. They reject the Old Testament because it contradicts many of their fundamental tenets, especially the dualistic and ascetic tendencies. And the New Testament is not rejected but is purged. The man who did this first of all was Marcion. He tried to purge the Pauline canon. He leaves the ten main letters and the Gospel of Luke, which is most influenced by Paul. He rejects all other letters and gospels of the New Testament. Luke and ten Pauline letters, that's enough – because there, no elements are present which contradict the basic ideas of Gnosticism.

Marcion was a very interesting man. He was not a speculative philosopher – although he was that, too – but he was a religious reformer. He founded congregations of Marcionites which endured for a long time. The title of his book is Antithesis – (this is not an invention of Hegel's!). He was a gnostic namely, in his distinction between the God of the Old and the God of the New Testament, the God of the law and the God of the Gospel. He rejected the former and reaffirmed the latter. This problem shouldn't be seen in terms of the fantastic idea of two gods. This is much too easy. But it should be seen in the problem with which Harnack, the great historian of Christian dogma, wrestled at the end of his life: namely, the problem whether or not the New Testament is actually so different from the Old Testament that you cannot combine them.

In Church history, we always have Marcionism, or radical Paulinism, and we have it today in the Barthian school whenever they try to put the God of revelation against the God of natural law. In natural law, and accordingly in history, man is by himself, they say. They don't speak of a second God: such a fantastic mythology would not be possible today. But they speak of a radical tension between the natural world – including natural reason, natural morals – and the religious realm, which stands against all the other realms. This was Marcion's problem, and he solved it by a radical separation. The problem is: Gnostic dualism.

For the Gnostics, the created world is bad, and therefore the world must have been created by a God who is bad. And who is this God? It is the God of the Old Testament. Salvation ,therefore; is liberation from the world, and .this must be done in ascetic terms. There is no place for eschatology on the basis of this dualism because the end of the world would be always seen in the light of this dualism, and a dualistic fulfillment is not a fulfillment: it is a split in God himself.

The saviour is one of the heavenly powers, called aeons, eternities – the word "eternity" does not have the connotation of timelessness here, but has the connotation of cosmic powers, and as such it is always used. This higher aeon, the saviour aeon, the saviour power of being, descends to earth and takes on human flesh. But now it becomes obvious that the aeon, a Divine power, cannot suffer. So he takes on either a strange body or a body which only seems to be a body, but he does not become flesh. This of course was a very sensitive point for the early Christians and their conformity, and so they rejected the gnostics on this point. The saviour descends to the different realms in which the different astrological powers rule. This concerns especially the planets, which are considered as astrological powers even long after the Renaissance, even in Protestantism.. He reveals the hidden weapons of these demonic powers by trespassing their realm and overcoming them on his descent. He brings down the seals of their power, their names and their characters, and if you have the name of a demonic power, you are superior to it: you call it by name and then it falls down. One of the Gnostic texts says~ "Having the seals, I shall descend, going through all aeons. I shall recognize all mysteries. I shall show the shape of the gods. And the hidden things of the holy path, called gnosis, I shall deliver." Here you have a claim of the good God, of the mystery power which comes down to earth.

The demonic powers are the representatives of fate. The human soul which has fallen into their hands is liberated by the saviour and by the knowledge he gives. One could say: What the saviour does in gnosticism is somehow to use white magic against the black magic of the planetary powers, the same powers of whom Paul speaks in Romans 8 that they are subdued to Christ. Therefore the magic power of the sacraments as mysterious practices is acknowledged. In them the highest Divine power comes to earth. But besides these sacramental and speculative tendencies, the Gnostics had ethical values of community and asceticism. What is demanded is the ascent of the soul, following the saviour who also ascended, but then descended. The souls have descended; now they shall ascend.

The savior liberates from demonic powers for the sake of union with the highest itself, with the fullness, the pleroma, the Spiritual Word.

On the upward way, the human soul meets these rulers, and then the soul tells the rulers what it knows about them. He knows their name, i. e., their mysterious power, the structure of evil they represent. When he tells them their name, they fall down and tremble and cannot stop the soul any more.

Now what really is meant in these poetic images is a religion of salvation from the demonic powers, which was the problem of the whole period, inside and outside Christianity. Man is somehow better .than his creator. Man can be saved from the powers of the demiurge, of him who creates the world. But not all men are able to be saved. There are three classes of human beings: the pneumatikoi, i. e. , the Spirituals; the psychikoi, those who follow the soul; and the sarkikoi, those who follow the flesh. The sarkikoi are lost; the Spiritual ones are saved; but the middle group, the psychikoi, can go this way or that way. In order to reach the elevation, man must participate in the mysteries. These mysteries are mostly mysteries of purification, therefore mostly connected with baptism. The Spirit in baptism enters the matter of the sacrament (water) and dwells in it. After the Spirit has been brought down by a special formula, namely the formula of the initiation of the sacraments., – it is the magic idea of the sacraments which was accepted by these Stoics...

All these ideas were a great temptation to Christians. Christ remained in the center of history. He is he who brings salvation. But He is put into the frame of the dualistic world-view of Hellenism. He is put into the context of the great syncretism.

The religious mood of this whole time is beautifully expressed in the Acts of Andreas , one of those apocryphal writings. He says: "Blessed is our generation. We are not thrown down, for we have been recognized by the light. We do not belong to time, which would dissolve us. We are not a product of motion, which would destroy us again. We belong to the greatness towards which we are striving. We belong to Him who has mercy towards us, to the light which has expelled the darkness, to the One from whom we have turned away, to the Manifold, to the Super-heavenly, by whom we have understood the earthly. If we praise Him, it is because we are recognized by Him." Now this is piety. It is not only speculation, as the critics of Gnosticism have said. This is really religion. And there are many people today who would like to renew gnostic religion as their own daily expression of their religious experience; and not because of the fantastic speculation, but because of the real piety in it, Gnosticism was a very great danger for Christianity, because if Christian theology had succumbed to this temptation, the individual character of Christianity would have been lost. The unique ground of the person Jesus would have become meaningless. The Old Testament would have disappeared, and with it the historical picture of the Christ. All this has been avoided by those men whom we call the anti-gnostic Fathers, the Fathers who were fighting against Gnosticism and who threw it out of the Church. 

Now there are a few minutes and I would like to see how difficult, especially the first part of the lectures, were. Perhaps you have questions.

Q. I think the Logos doctrine greatly resembles the gnostic doctrine of the aeons. They are both emanations from God. Is there any real distinction between them?

A. That is a very good question. The distinction is the following: In the Logos Christology, as it was developed further on, we have the emphasis on the absoluteness of this aeon, which is Christ. Perhaps I can give you a great help for the understanding of the struggle between Arius and Athanasius, to which we come later on. What Arius actually did was to make the Christ, the heavenly Logos, into one of the aeons; while the Church decided that whatever one may think about aeons, or transcendent powers of being, the Logos is above them. .. If we did not have one of the Divine principles in which the innermost heart of God is expressed, then our salvation would not be a complete salvation. But what you said is very well said: these powers of being are like the Logos, hypostasized, hypostasized in the bathos, the abyss, the depth of the Divine Life. There, everything is in and is born out of it. It is the birthplace of all aeons. But now the Church limited the aeons to two: the Logos and the Spirit. And everything else, whether it was called an aeon or not, was not of equal rank. This was the development of the Trinitarian doctrine of God.

Last time we finished with the description of that great movement called Gnosticism and which, more exactly, should be regarded as the wave of religious syncretism running from the East to the West, existing in many groups and forms and entering also Christianity. I gave you some of their main ideas. In opposition to – and partly also in acceptance of – the Gnostic ideas, the first great Christian theologians developed their systems: Irenaeus, Tertullian and Hippolytus. The defense against attacks from outside was made in terms of the Logos doctrine. But now some of the spirit of the world which was conquered by Christianity, entered Christianity itself. The fight now had to be waged against a Christianized paganism. But such a fight is never simply a negation: it is always reception, also. The result of this partial rejection, and partial reception, of the generally religious mood of that time is what we call "early Catholicism." The people with whom we now have to deal are important because they represent early Catholicism, expressing these ideas which grew out of the acceptance and rejection of the pagan religious movement of that time.

In order to do so, they accepted the Logos doctrine created by the Apologists, but they now brought it constructively – and not only apologetically – into a framework of Bible and tradition. In doing so they partly deprived it of its dangerous implications, one of them of course being the possibility of relapse into polytheism – tri-theism or duo-theism. It is the greatness of these people, Irenaeus and Tertullian, that they saw these dangers, used the Logos doctrine, and developed constructively the theological ideas in relationship to the religious movements of their time.

The religiously greatest of the three men I named is Irenaeus, who more than most of the people of his time, understood the spirit of Paul. You will recall that I said that already in the Apostolic Fathers, John and Matthew and the "catholic letters" were effective, but that Paul was not very much effective for that time any more. Now a man came – Irenaeus – who again had a feeling for what Paul's theology meant for the Christian Church. But it was not so much the doctrine with which Paul fought against Judaism – the doctrine of justification through faith by grace – but it was more the center of Paul's own teaching, namely, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which was important for Irenaeus.

In some ways Irenaeus was nearer to the Protestant ideas of Christianity than most of early Catholicism. Nevertheless he was the father of early Catholicism and ultimately not a Protestant, insofar as this side of Paul – which I like to call the "corrective side" of Paul, namely the doctrine of justification by faith – was not in the center even of Irenaeus.

The other man who belongs to the Anti-Gnostic Fathers is Tertullian. He is the master of Latin rhetoric. He is the creator of the Latin church terminology. He had a juristic mind, although he was not a jurist himself. His was a very aggressive temperament and a great character. He understood the primacy of faith and the paradox of Christianity, but he was not artificially primitive: he accepted at the same time the Stoic philosophy, and with it the idea that the human soul is by nature Christian – anima naturaliter christiana. And he accepted the Logos doctrine of the Apologists, because he was not only accepting the paradox of Christianity, but was at the same time a sharp rational mind and didn't believe that Greek philosophy could surpass Christianity in rational sharpness and clarity.

The third man was Hippolytus, who was a scholarly man more than the other two, and who continued the polemics against/Gnostic movement in exegetic works and church-historical works. His refutation of the heresies is already history, more than the life-and-death struggle as in Irenaeus and Tertullian.

So we have these three men, who saw the situation of the early Church. It's important for Protestants to see how early most fundamentals of the Roman system were already present in the third century.

The problem of the period, as posited by the Gnostics, was in the realm of authority: the question whether the holy scriptures were decisive, or the secret teachings of the Gnostics. The Gnostic teachers said that Jesus, for instance in the forty days after His resurrection when He was supposed to be together with His disciples, had given them secret insights, and these insights came to the Gnostic theologians and formed the character of Gnostic philosophy and theology. Now against this the Anti-Gnostic Fathers first of all had to establish a doctrine of the Scripture. The Holy Scripture is given by the Logos through the Divine Spirit. Therefore, it's necessary to fix the canon, and this problem now arose. You see, all these things – and you will find that in my whole lecture – are not created by people who were sitting in their studios and were thinking about the problem, e. g., "Now what about the Bible?: What belongs to it and what doesn't?" But it was done by people who felt that the very foundations of the Church were threatened by the intrusion of secret traditions which asserted quite different things from what the Biblical writings said. So the decision of the Church as to what shall and what shall not belong to the canon, was a part of the life-and-death struggle with Gnosticism, and can be understood only from there. And this is so with all the statements of the early Church. We have an example in our own time: The restatement of the Lutheran confessions in modern form by the German synods was not a matter of conferences of theologians who were interested in restating the old confessions in a little bit revised form – that was tried, and without any effect or success – but it was done exactly as in the ancient Church: In the moment in which the so-called German Christians – namely the Nazis, who in many respects had similarities to the Gnostic movements – entered the Christian churches; and now the Christian Church had to state formulas of resistance. It was that resistance movement which the Germans could and did put up: namely, resistance of the churches against the intrusion of a pagan, half-gnostic philosophy into Christianity. It is in this way that you must think of the development of Christian dogma. Don't think of it in terms of professorial studies, as sometimes the theology of the Ecumenical Movement seems to develop... (The danger to the ecumenical movement) is not so much from the Communist side – they are on the outside – as it is if, for instance, a struggle develops between two halves of the Western world, the European and the Anglo-Saxon, where from the one or the other side, the attempt will be made to identify Christianity with, let us say, the American ways of life, as understood by some leaders of the present-day Congress.

Now if this happens, then there would be a real situation of life-and-death struggle: Christianity would have to fight for its very existence. This is what I mean with the serious and realistic character of the theological , development of the early Church, and also with the fixation of the canon.

They said the present period is poor in Spirit, and therefore we must always return to the classical period. The Apostolic period is the classical period of Christianity, and what has been written at that time is valid for all times. – We shall see later that this statement was not always acknowledged by Christian theology, but here it was for the first time really fixed. Therefore something really new cannot be canonic. This was one of the reasons why we have in the Biblical literature so many books which go under Apostolic names, although they were written in the post-Apostolic period. But that which is canonic, is canonic in an absolute sense, even in the letters of the text. Here Christianity simply followed the legalistic interpretation of the Law in Judaism where every Hebrew letter of the Old Testament text has an open and a hidden meaning, and is absolutely inspired. But this was not enough – as it never was, either in Protestantism or in any other people in which the Bible was made the ultimate norm..–..because the Bible must be interpreted. And the Gnostics interpreted the Scriptures differently from the official Church. Another principle therefore must enter: TRADITION. The tradition was identified with the regula, the rule of faith. When this happens, not the Bible but the rule of faith becomes decisive, exactly as the creeds of the Reformation 50 years and later ,after the Reformation, are the decisive canon for theological teaching, and not the Bible.

The rule of faith was also called the canon of truth, and it is true because it comes from the Apostles. It is traditio apostolica, apostolic tradition, which is mediated through the presbyters or bishops. This however, is still too much. There are many elements in the tradition, ethical and dogmatic, so it must be concentrated in one creedal form, and the summing up of the Bible in the rule of faith and the rule of faith in the creed, was made in connection with baptism, the main sacrament of that time. The confession of baptism is the creed.

This, of course, presupposes that the bishops who are responsible for the rule of faith and its summary, the creed, have the gift of truth. Why do they have it? Because they are the successors of the apostles. Here you have the clear expression of the episcopalian doctrine of apostolic succession.

The apostolic succession is most visible in the Roman church, which according to the anti-Gnostic Fathers, to Irenaeus and Tertullian, is founded by Peter and Paul. Irenaeus says about this church: "To this church all nations must come, because of its greater principality, the church in which the Apostolic tradition has been always preserved." Now please imagine: This is not a statement of the early 1870's but of the third century.

The unity of the Church everywhere, is based on the tradition of the baptismal creed, which is guaranteed by the apostolic succession. Therefore, Irenaeus demands obedience to the presbyters of whom he says they "have the succession from the Apostles. " In this way the episcopate became the dogmatic guarantee of the saving truth.

So we have the Bible, the tradition, the rule of faith, the creed, the bishops: they all together are a system of guarantees, a very impressive system created in the fight against the Gnostics. And what we can be astonished about is how early all this happened.

Now against this a reaction took place. I want to deal with this before I go on with an elaboration of the doctrines of the anti-Gnostic Fathers. It was a reaction of the Spirit against the order. This reaction was represented by a man called MONTANUS, and his group the Montanists. This reaction was very serious, so much so that one of the two greatest anti-Gnostic theologians, Tertullian, himself became a Montanist. And it is important for us because Montanistic reactions against the ecclesiastical fixation of Christianity go on through all of Church history So the fact that this group was not very successful historically doesn't mean that it was not very important from the point of view of Christian theology.

This group had two ideas: the Spirit, and the end. The Spirit was suppressed by the organization of the Church, and the fear of Spiritual movements because of the Gnostic claims to have the Spirit. It was denied that. prophets necessarily have an ecstatic character. A churchman of that time wrote a pamphlet about the fact that it is unnecessary that a prophet speak in ecstasy. The Church couldn't understand the prophetic Spirit any more. It was afraid of it. And understandably, because in the name of the Spirit all kinds of disruptive elements came into the Church.

The other idea is that of the end. You remember that I said that already the Apostolic Fathers, and even already Paul, to a certain extent, started to establish themselves in this world, after the expectation of Jesus and the apostles that the end was very near and would come in their generation, was disappointed. Now this disappointment led to great difficulties and to the necessity of creating a worldly church, a church which is able to live in the world. Against this also, continuously in Church history, reactions set in. But they experienced what the earliest Christians experienced: the end they expected did not come. So the Montanists had to do the same as the church did: to establish themselves. And in the moment they established themselves, they also became a church. But it was a church in which much of the sectarian types of the churches of the Reformation and the later sects, was anticipated – namely , a strict discipline. They believe that they represent the period of the Paraclete, after the period of the Father and the Son. And this is always something the sectarian revolutionary movements in the Church claims: that they represent the period of the Spirit.

But then it always happens – even to the Quakers it happened, after their first ecstatic period – that if you want to fix the content of what the Spirit has taught them, it is of extreme poverty; it is nothing new, in comparison with the Biblical message, and what is new is usually a more or less rational moralism. This happened to George Fox in his later development, and to his followers, and happens to all ecstatic sects: in the second generation they become rational, moralistic, legalistic, and the ecstatic element is gone, and not much comes out in terms of creativity as we have it in the classical period of apostolic Christianity.

They fixed these poor contents in new books and in the idea of a prophetic succession, which of course is self-contradictory because succession is an organizational principle and prophecy is an anti-organizational principle, and the attempt to bring them together was unsuccessful and always will be unsuccessful.

Now the Christian Church excluded Montanism; it conquered it. But such victories are always losses. Let's see the four ways in which this loss is visible:

1) The canon was victorious against the possibility of new revelations. – The solution of the Fourth Gospel that there are new insights, which of course are under the criticism of the Christ, was at least reduced in meaning and power.

2) The traditional hierarchy was confirmed against the prophetic spirit. – This was a very serious thing because since that time the prophetic spirit was more or less excluded from the Church and always had to flee in sectarian movements. Most of the so-called sectarian movements, ever since the defeat of Montanism; are movements into which the prophetic spirit fled because it couldn't find a place in the Church.

3) Eschatology became less interesting than it was in the Apostolic age. – Establishment was much more important, and the expectation of the end was reduced to an appeal to every individual that his end can come at any moment – which is how you usually handle it in your preaching. But the idea of an end of history was not important any more since that time.

4) The disciplinary strictness of the Montanists was lost, and a growing laxity took place in the Church. – Here again something happened which has happened all through Church history again and again, that new, small groups with disciplinary strictness arose, were regarded with great suspicion by the church, and developed themselves into larger churches only to lose the disciplinary power in themselves.

So you can say the result of the Montanist struggles was that traditional theology and above all its safeguards, were victorious against any danger, and that the conservative establishment of the Church was victorious against any eschatological radicalism and expectation. These two consequences are there, and now we must ask: What was taught in the framework of these very strict safeguards given by the anti-Gnostic Fathers of the early Catholic church?

There is first one point which is obvious if you think of it as I said in connection with the Gnostics, namely the contrast between the father-God and the savior-God. One called the Gnostic theory blasphemia creatoris, the blasphemy of the creator-God. Now such blasphemy of the creator-God is something which should be kept in mind by all neo-orthodox theologians of today. There is much Gnostic Marcionism in them, much dualistic blasphemy of the creator-God. They put the savior-God so much over the creator-God that, although they never fall into a real heresy about it, they implicitly blaspheme the Divine creation by identifying it actually with the sinful state of reality.. Against all this – of today and of the past – people like Irenaeus said that God is one, and there is no duality in Him; law and Gospel, creation and salvation, are derived from the same God.

This God is known to us not speculatively but existentially. He expresses this: "Without God, you cannot know God." God is never an object. But in all knowledge, He is He who knows, in us and through us. Only He can know Himself, and we may participate in His knowledge of Himself, but He is not an object whom we can know from outside. According to His greatness, His absoluteness, His unconditional character, God is unknown. According to His love, in which He comes to us, He is known. Therefore in order to know God, you must be within God, you must participate in Him. You never can look at Him as an object outside of yourselves. This God has created the world out of nothing. This phrase "out of nothing" is not a story about. the way in which God has created, but is a protective concept which in itself is only negatively meaningful, that. there was no presupposed resisting matter out of which God created the world – as we have it in paganism. This is the meaning of this doctrine. God has created the world "out of nothing" means God was not dependent on a matter which, (as the Greek matter, against the Demiurge), resisted the form which the Demiurge, the world-builder, wanted to impose on it. This is not Christian. The Christian idea is that everything is created directly by God, without a resisting matter; He is the cause of everything. His purpose, the immanent telos of reality, is the salvation of man. Therefore the result is: the creation is good, and the creator-God is the savior-God: they are not two. If you know a little of Church history and of our present situation, you will see immediately that these ideas are not old-fashioned problems of the past, but are very modern problems. In Puritanism, religious or secular, there is much blasphemy of the creator-God. We should always realize that that this blasphemy of the creator-God is always based on the confusion of created goodness with the distortion of creation. You only need to think of the sexual problems to know what I mean.

Now this one God is a trius, a trinity. The word trinitas appears first in Tertullian – since God, although one, was never alone. Irenaeus: "There is always with Him the word and the wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, through which He has made everything freely and spontaneously." Here we still have the motives of the transcendent trinity, of the trinity in God. God is always a living God, and therefore He is never alone, never a dead identity with Himself. He has always with Himself His word and His wisdom, symbols for His Spiritual life, His self-manifestation and His self-actualization.'" It would be good if we sometimes went back to people like Irenaeus, to look into the motives of those doctrines such as the Trinity, which have become holy pieces to be adored on the altar and to be used in liturgical formulas, and never understood that they shall really say something about God as living, and make understandable the presence of the Divine as a living, creative ground.

According to Irenaeus, these three are one God, because they have one dunamis, power of being, essence, potentiality – you can use all these words. (Potentiality and dynamics are the Latin and Greek words, respectively; "power of being" is perhaps the most exact translation.)

Tertullian speaks of the one Divine substance which develops in the triadic economy, i.e., "building up"; the Divinity builds itself up eternally in a unity. Any polytheistic interpretation of the Trinity is sharply rejected. On the other hand, God is established as a living God and not as dead identity. Thus una substantia, tres personnae , asTertullian calls it, who used the formula first, and which ever since has been used. Man of course, contrary to Gnosticism, is created good. He is fallen by his own freedom. Man who is immortal by nature was supposed to be immortal through obedience to God, remaining in Paradise and participating in the food of the gods, in the tree of life. But he lost this power by disobedience to God. So it must be regained. Immortality – I said this already in connection with Justin and Ignatius – is not a natural quality but is something which must be given, out of the realm of the eternal: namely, the Divine. There is no other way to get it. Sin is spiritual as well as carnal. Adam has lost the possible similitudo (similitude) with God, namely immortality, but he never has lost the natural image, because the natural image makes him man. This is Irenaeus' famous distinction between similitudo and imago. These two words are used in the Vulgate translation of the first verses of Genesis, that God made man in His similitude, in His image. This repetitious sentence is translated in two ways. This is long before the Vulgate and Irenaeus, who makes something theological out of it, which you cannot do from the Hebrew, which has only one word. But the interpretation is theologically very interesting. The one is the natural image of God, which every man has: man as man, man as rational being, man as able to have relationship to God, man as finite. . . is the image of God. Similitudo is a possible development of man, namely, becoming similar to God. And the main point in the similarity with God is eternal life, because that's what God has and if somebody gets this, then he overcomes his natural mortality and participates in the eternal life in terms of a gift of God. Again, I say, that if we had a Church council deciding between the traditional idea of the immortality of the soul -- so popular especially in this country -- and my own position that this is non-Christian and not even genuinely Platonic, then I think if we could call Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus to decide which of us were heretic, I think they would decide for me, and against those of you who would defend the natural immortality of the soul. The one is classical theology; the other is a popular remnant of the theology of the Enlightenment, where the three ideas of God (in terms of a moral ideal), of freedom (in terms of a possible moral decision), and of immortality (as a guarantee in terms of moral progress) were in the center of rational theology. This was not Christian, but more or less misunderstood Platonism, and it is something which is still much more powerful than any Christian eschatological idea in the popular religious feeling of this country. And I emphasize this so much because it has so many other consequences theologically.

We began the discussion of the Anti-Gnostic Fathers, Irenaeus and Tertullian, and I emphasized that the main point was the doctrine of the creator-God (put forth) against the creator-God in Gnosticism, namely, the separation of the creator from the saviour.

The history of salvation is described in three or four covenants. The first covenant is that which is given with creation, the natural law, which is ultimately the law of love and which is innate in man. Everybody has this natural law within himself. Secondly, the law re-stated, after it has faded away when man lost his immediate innocent participation in it. The third stage, again, is law, but now law reestablished in Christ, after Judaism distorted the law of Sinai. It's always the same law, it's always ultimately the law of love, it's always that which is innate in man by nature. God doesn't give arbitrary commandments, but he restates those commandments which are identical with man's essential nature, and which therefore are valid under all circumstances. This doctrine is very important and we must keep it in mind.

Then in Tertullian, insofar as he was a Montanist, we have a fourth covenant, the covenant with the Paraclete, the Divine Spirit, which gives the new law at the end of the days. This means the history of salvation was understood as the education of mankind in terms of a law. This was a very powerful system of thought. It made it possible to understand why the Old Testament belongs to the Christian Bible, why philosophy belongs to Christianity: they all are stages in the one history of salvation; they are not negated by the revelation in Christ, but confirmed. This should never be forgotten in Christian theology, that the problem of dualism was solved in terms of a history of salvation in different covenants. One can say that it is the Biblical idea of kairos, the "right time." At any time the revelation must do something special. There is not only one revelation. There is revelation adapted to the situation first that of Paradise; then that of the elected nation; then that of the followers of Christ; and, sometimes, that of the Divine Spirit. There is, in all cases, a different kairos, a different right time. Such a kind of thinking liberates Christianity immediately from a narrowness in which its own revelation is declared to be the only one, and it is not seen in the context of the history of revelation, and which finally leads in Marcion as today, partly at least, in the Barthian school to an isolation of revelation over against the whole history of mankind.

Now Christologically, Irenaeus, for instance, says: "The invisible of the Son is the Father; the visible of the Father is the Son." And this is eternally so. There is always something which potentially is visible in God or we would perhaps better say "manifest" in God and there is something which remains as mystery and abyss in God. These are the two sides which symbolically speaking are distinguished as Father and Son. Eternally the Son is the visible of the Father and the Father is the invisible of the Son, but it becomes manifest in the personal appearance of Jesus as the Christ. The Anti-Gnostic Fathers, because they had to do with Christian polytheistic tendencies, emphasized more the monotheistic element in Christianity than it was emphasized by the Apologists, whose discovery of the Logos doctrine brought them into some dangerous approximation to polytheistic ,or tri-theistic ,elements at least (if the Spirit is treated in the same way in which the Logos is treated.

In the line of thought leading from John to Ignatius to Irenaeus, the Logos is not so much a lesser hypostasis, a lesser form or power of being in God, but is much more God himself as revealer, as his self-manifestation. Irenaeus calls salvation anakephalaiosis, or recapitulatio, recapitulation, pointing to Ephesians I: All things in heaven and earth alike should be gathered up in Christ. Irenaeus constructs the idea of the history of salvation in connection with these words of Ephesians. For Irenaeus it means that the development which was broken in Adam namely the similitudo or immortality is taken up again by Christ and is fulfilled in him. In him the new mankind has started, that which mankind was supposed to become, namely a decided and tested new reality: this, mankind has become in Christ, after Adam had not been able to bring it about. But it's not only mankind which finds its fulfillment in the appearance of the Christ, but it is the whole cosmos. But in order to do this, Christ had to participate in that nature which broke away from this straight development, namely, in the nature of Adam. To fulfill it, he had to participate in it. So he has become the beginning of the living, as Adam has been the beginning of the dead. Adam is fulfilled in Christ, which means that Christ is the essential man, the man Adam was essentially, and should become but did not become. That which Adam i. e., mankind as a whole, seen essentially has not reached but from which mankind has broken away, that is now the work of the Christ: to actualize this in himself. Adam was not fulfilled in the beginning; he could not have borne fulfillment, as Irenaeus says; he lived in childish innocence. Now here we have a profound doctrine of a (let me call it) transcendent humanism, a humanism which says that Christ is the fulfillment of essential man, namely of the Adamic nature, but that this fulfillment was necessary because it didn't occur in a straight way a break occurred, and this break in Adam, who fell away from what he essentially was supposed to become, was fulfilled in Christ. The childish innocence of Adam of course has been lost, but now the man who is tested and decided can become what he was supposed to become, namely fully human, and he can become so because we can participate in this full humanity as it has appeared in Christ. And don't forget that this always includes eternal life. It means similitude with God with respect to participation in infinity. That's what Christ does, and that's what we can do too.

I always am surprised, when I go into these matters, how much better the old Christian theology was than the popular theology which developed in the 19th century how much profounder, how much more adequate to the paradox of Christianity without becoming irrationalistic or nonsential or absurd. It never did. Of course, there were absurd elements on the borderline, on the edge, with respect to miracles, etc. But the central position was as profound as possible, namely an understanding of Christ not as an accidental event or as a transmutation of a highest being, but as fulfilled or essential humanity, and therefore always related to Adam, I. e., to man's essential being, and to what Adam did when he broke away from himself his fallen state.

In this context, Tertullian gave the fundamental formula for the Trinity and Christology. He used a skillful juristic language which became decisive for all the future. It entered the Roman Catholic creeds which were written of course in Latin and had the power of the right word, which also has its kairos and the words of Tertullian had their "right time" in which they could "hit" and express what was going on. "Let us preserve the mystery of the Divine economy which disposes the unity into trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, three not in essence but in grade; not in substance but in form. " In these words we have for the first time the word trinitas. Tertullian introduced it into the ecclesiastical language. He also speaks of the unity in the trinity, denying any form of tri-theistic tendencies. Instead of that he speaks of "economy," a very important word in all ancient Christian theology. Today it is the method of producing the means of life; but economy is derived from oikos, meaning house; thus, building a house in this case, building God's full life itself. God develops Himself eternally in Himself, and builds up His manifestation in periods of history. It is "economy," building in a living and dynamic way the Trinity in historical manifestation. But this Trinity does not mean there are different essences; there is one Divine essence. If you translate "essence" by power of 'being, then you have what these people meant. There is one Divine power of being and each of the "economic" manifestations of the power of being participates in the full power of being. God has eternity, the ratio (reason), the logos in Himself. It is an inner word. And this is of course the characteristic of spiritual existence. If you say God is Spirit, you must also say He is trinitarian, namely He has the inner word within Himself, and has the unity with His self-objectivation. It proceeds from God, like the beam of the sun proceeds from the sun. This happens in the moment of creation. In this moment the Son becomes another one, a second person, and then a third person. But when Tertullian uses these words, we must not be misled by words, from the very beginning of our more difficult analyses which will inescapably come in the next weeks, concerning the Trinitarian and Christological problems. The words "substance" or "essence" mean power of being; the Divine power of being is in all of them. ... And "persona" is not our "'person"; "persons" are you and I; each of you is a person for himself. We are persons because we are able to reason, to decide, to be responsible, etc. This concept of person was neither applied to God this, not at all..,-nor was it applied even to the three hypostases in God, although the word "person" was applied not to God but to the Father, the Son and the Spirit. What did this word mean? Prosopon is "face," "countenance," or persona, the mask of the actor through which a special character is acted out. So we have three faces, three countenances, three characteristic expressions of the Divine, in the process of the Divine self-explication.

These are the classical formulas of a Trinitarian monotheism, which uses these formulas often, even in Tertullian probably, to cover philosophical implications with which he didn't want to deal. But the Greeks wanted to deal with the implications they were philosophers and so they tried to interpret what the real meaning of these words is. But let me repeat: persona is never applied to God before the 19th century; He never was called person. Secondly, in all classical theology, the term persona is applied to the three faces, or countenances, or self-manifestations of God: God as abyss, or Father; God as form, or Logos; God as dynamics, or Spirit. But this immediately shows that persona in this sense does not mean the juristic or ethical personality which it means today, but it means the independent self-manifestation of God, the countenance, or if you want, the mask, but not mask in order to veil something, but to reveal something, namely a special character.

Now I hope these interpretations have at least given you a little shock, if you run ahead without thinking about the (meaning of "person", in the phrase "God is personal," and "I cannot pray to a personal God", etc... Don't say it so easily. . . .) . . . .

It is not only true with respect to the idea of God, especially Trinity, that Tertullian gave fundamental formulas; he did it also with respect to Christology. "We see a double essence, not confused but united in one person, in God and the man Jesus." Now in such a statement we have the formula of the doctrine of the two natures or powers of being in the one person, namely Christ. This smooth formula of Tertullian, the juristic mind, covers centuries of problems which came out after the formula was found. But his formula prevailed over against everything which followed. Here again we must be clear about the words here persona is meant as one individual face or characteristic being of personal character namely Jesus. And in this person two different powers of being are united, namely the power of being which we call Divine and that which we call human. Each of these powers is dependent; none of them is confused with the other; it has its own standing nevertheless they are united in the unity of a person. If we ask how is this possible, then we are in the later discussions to come.

The question whether the incarnation is a metamorphosis that God becomes man or the acceptance of a human essence: Tertullian decides for the second, because he is certain, as were most of the theologian s, that God is ultimately unchangeable, and that the two powers of being must be preserved. Jesus as man is not a transformed God, but he is a real man, he is true man, and therefore can be true God also. He is not a mixture. If the Logos were transfigured or transformed into something else, then He would have changed His nature, but the Logos remains Logos in the man Jesus. So he decides much more in the line of adopting of a human nature by the Logos, instead of a mythological transmutation idea.

The saving power, according to Irenaeus, is the Divine Spirit who dwells in the Church and renews the members out of what is old, into the newness in Christ. He gives them life (zoe) and light (phos) He gives them the new reality. This is God's work in man, which is accepted by faith. Therefore no law is needed, since we love God and the neighbor. This is the Pauline element, but it is not strong enough to overcome the anti-Pauline elements. Finally, the New Being is mystical-ethical. It is in this sense the highest form of early Catholicism, but it is not Protestantism, where the renewal is by justification through faith.

Irenaeus thinks of the process of salvation in terms of a mystical regeneration into immortality. Against this, Tertullian speaks of a wholesome discipline as the content of the Christian life. He speaks of a process of education by the law, and the reality of obedience to it is eternal life. Here we have the Roman who is a jurist and likes the law, and at the same time the ascetic pietist, who became a Montanist. We have in Irenaeus mystical participation; and in Tertullian subjection to the law: the two sides of early Catholicism, the two sides which were always effective. The second was decisive, before the Protestant break. But the Protestant break denied also the Irenaean form and returned to the one side of Paul, namely justification by faith. So we have always similar problems arising as early as that. We have the relationship to Christ more spiritual mystical participation, more legal by accepting Him as the new law. And these two sides are going on also in Protestantism.

In Tertullian we have the Roman Catholic form of Jewish legalism. The relation to God is legal. Christianity is merely the new law. Christianity returns to the religion of the law but is prevented from becoming simply another Jewish system of laws and rules by the sacramental salvation. Therefore one can say: "the evangelion, the Gospel, is our special law." Trespassing has the consequence that guilt is produced and punishments demanded. "But if we do His will, He will make Himself our debtor. Then we gain merits. "

There are two classes of demands: precepts and counsels. In this way every man can acquire a treasury of holiness in which he returns to Christ what Christ has given him. The virtue of the Christian is crowned. The sacrifice of asceticism and martyrdom moves God to do good to us. "In the measure in which you don't spare yourselves, in this measure, believe me, God will spare you." This of course has a lot of Roman Catholic ideas. This was at the end of the second century. We have now already the difference of precepts for everybody, and counsels for the monks; we have already the idea of Christ as the new law. Roman Catholicism came quickly, and the reason for this is that Roman Catholicism was the form in which Christianity could be received including all the Roman and Greek forms of thinking and living.

Baptism is still the most important sacrament. It removes past sins. It has two meanings here again we come deeply into Roman Catholic ideas. The one is the washing away of the sins, and the other is the reception of the Divine Spirit a negative and a positive element. This of course presupposed the baptismal confession of the creed; it presupposed the consciousness of one's sins and the certainty of the Savior.

Characteristic for baptism are the following activities:

1) One lays the hand on the baptized, and gives him sacred oil, the medium which makes the reception of the Spirit possible.

2) One refutes the Devil, with all his pomp and angels. One leaves the demonic sphere. You must remember how important this way; the New Testament is full of the idea that Christianity has overcome the demonically ruled world. Therefore the refutation of the Devil is something which was extremely important: it meant really the end of participation in paganism. And it was not simply a moralistic formula; it went much deeper: it was the breaking of the religious neurosis which is paganism, the religious limitation to polytheistic limits, to demons, in other words. They could be thrown out. I remember from my own confirmation in Germany that, as a 14-year old child, this was the formula we had to say: I reject the Devil and all its pomp, etc... For us at that time this was some kind of romantic, dark and mysterious feeling about powers from which one goes away definitively. It was not what it was for a pagan who went over from a world which was really ruled by strong demonic powers: into a world of love. But it still was something. The symbol of the Devil was still alive even at that time.

3) The third element in baptism is the unity of forgiveness and regeneration, i.e., the pagan existence has come to an end; the Christian existence begins. In this moment the preparatory stage has come to an end and those who are baptised are called the telaioi, the perfect ones, those who have reached the telos, the inner aim, of the introduction into the Church, the inner aim of man's existence itself; and the universal aim: to be fulfilled in what one's own being demands.

With respect to the theory of baptism, the Anti-Gnostic Fathers said that the Spirit is united with the water as it was in the Gnostic mysteries. The Spirit and this was easy especially for Tertullian as a Stoic is so to speak a material force in the water. This force some physically extinguishes the former sins and gives, physically, the Spirit. Here we have contradictory statements, but these statements were made. It is the famous "materialism" of Tertullian, who thought in these terms. This was very important because it made infant baptism possible. If the water is the saving power, then the child can be saved as much as the adult.

Now it was not without hesitation that Tertullian accepted this doctrine, but Christianity had to accept it in the moment in which one ceased to baptize individuals called out of all paganism, and baptized all nations. Then you cannot exclude the children. But if you include the children, then you must have a completely objective theory, because children are not subjects who can decide. And this is what people of that time saw, and what Luther and the Reformers saw therefore the strong emphasis on baptism in order to make it possible for everybody to participate in it.

The Lord's Supper is for Irenaeus the physical mediation of immortality; the union of heavenly and Divine elements take place. Participation in it is continuous reincarnation.

Now these ideas are the Roman church, and they are ideas which became extremely influential in the long run, and have finally conquered all other ideas. The Catholic church was ready about the year 300, I. e., it needed only a very short time to be brought into fulfillment because all the motives were ready, they were ready in paganism, and paganism couldn't receive Christianity without these elements. Therefore we shall not say that Protestantism is the restatement of the early centuries. It simply is not. The Catholic motives were very strong from the very beginning. And this is one of the reasons why the " middle way" of the Anglican church, which in itself would be an ideal solution for the split of the churches, doesn't work because the so-called agreement of the first 500 years is certainly an agreement of that period, but it is by no means with the principles of the Reformation. Therefore if someone says let's unite by going back to the development, let us say, from Irenaeus to Dionysius the Areopagite, then I would say you can do that, but you had better become a Catholic, because Protestantism simply cannot do that. And in everything I said today, you have a lot of such elements which Protestantism simply cannot accept especially in the doctrine of the Church, of the authorities, of the sacraments; not so much with respect to Trinity and Christology, although the implications are present there also.

The end of Greek philosophy is a state in which philosophy has become religion, and religion mystical philosophy. When now many philosophers became Christians, they could use a philosophy which was already half religious. When you hear about the relationship of philosophy and theology, which is often discussed in these rooms here around, then you must not forget that this is not the kind of philosophy which is taught by empiricists, logical positivists, naturalists, etc., as it is done today. But philosophy in the period of the Bible was in itself a religious attitude. It was not simply a discussing of elements, but it was something which had in itself fundamental decisions which had mystical-religious character. This is the reason why Christianity had to deal with philosophy at that time, not only as a nice pastime for intellectually gifted people to whom we leave that pastime, but it was another religion. The name of this religion was Neo-Platonism. In Neo- Platonism, Platonic ideas and also Stoic and Aristotelian ideas were brought together in a system which was philosophical and religious at the same time. Neo-Platonism and the development towards it, expressed the longing of the ancient world for a new religion. It expressed the dissolution of all special religions and it expressed at the same time the catastrophe of autonomous reason, the impossibility of reason to create by itself a new content of life. Therefore these philosophers became mystics, and as mystics, they tried to create under imperial protection (Julian the Apostate) a new religion (ca. 250). In doing so, they had to clash with Christianity. Now I come to that point where Christianity had not only to do with general philosophical tradition in Greece we discussed this already in the Apologists and in Irenaeus and Tertullian -- but Christianity was the rival religion with a philosophical religion, with a philosophy where the beginning and the end is religious. This is what Neo-Platonism is. With this, and the way in which the great Alexandrian theologians, Clement and Origen, put this into reality and used the philosophical religion of the Neo-Platonists to express Christianity, we will deal more fully next week.