Cappadocian Fathers

So the divide that is now standard in Trinitarian thought, that doesn't come until later.

And it comes by some guys called the Cappadocian fathers, who are going to be writing in the 370s, which is going to directly inform the second ecumenical council, which is going to lock in the modeling that is now standard of the three hypostasis in one usia.

It didn't exist originally.

Man, like our Christian brothers and sisters like to remind us, if understanding the Trinity is the only way to heaven, I think we're all screwed.

In a Pew Research study, they found that only 17% of Christians that they asked the questions to properly identify the Trinity, only 17% of them were able to do so.

Yeah, it's a tough road.

So how did it develop? The reason it developed is because the Cappadocian fathers that I'm mentioning, they take a Neoplatonic cosmology and then they use it for their own purposes.

So what I've brought up here is the Neoplatonic three hypostases the one, intellect and soul, tohen, nus, suke, those are all from Neoplatonism.

And this doctrine is called the monarchia to patros, the monarchy of the father.

It's often associated with the Eastern patristic tradition with the Cappadocian fathers, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and all that sort of Trinitarian theology that comes in that tradition.

But it's not actually an Eastern peculiarity.

It is the universal faith of Christianity.

The Trinitarian correction is gentler and deeper and has the possibility of repentance and restoration.

It's the call of a father to his son to remember who he is.

I want to add a word here about the Cappadocian fathers because I owe them a great deal personally.

And I think the modern English speaking Christian has often missed how foundational they are.

No, I did what any normal parent of a seven-year-old would do.

I sat her down and walked her through an in-depth theological, historical conversation around the Trinity, right? We started in Genesis, worked our way through the Jewish Shema, talked about the divine name, the Council of Nicaea, the Cappadocian Fathers, like just basic normal bedtime stuff that you would probably do, right? No, I'm kidding.

I didn't do that.

I said, babe, sort of, I'm kidding.

That's actually a later development.

When you read the Patristics and specifically the Cappadocian Fathers, Central to that would be Gregory of Nanzianzus.

They never understood the Trinity in terms of God.

Rather, God is the father.

But anyways, who are some of the Christians that kind of peddled this that you have – that have helped you to understand this doctrine or this idea?

Well, what I would recommend people do is to look into John Bear's two-volume work on – I think it's called Searching for the Nicene Doctrine of the Trinity.

And he does a very good job of outlining the early church history of the – Debates and formulations of the Trinity And the most earliest understanding Of the Trinity Specifically Amongst the Cappadocian fathers Is this view I'm talking about Gregory of Nanzianzus formulated the Trinity in the exact same way that I'm talking about.

This is before Augusta, right? So we already had church fathers and Christian thinkers understanding the Trinity within and situated within the monarchy.

We've already met one of them, Gregory of Nyssa, but there was also his brother, Basil of Caesarea, and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus.

Together they're known as the Cappadocian Fathers, and they're some of the most important theologians in Christian history, and they all have a deep apophatic streak.

Basil of Caesarea drew a distinction between God's essence and his energies.

He argued that God's essence, what he actually is, is unknowable.

This brings us finally to the most famous apophatic theologian, who ironically, and in true apophatic fashion, is anonymous to us.

Though he wrote under the pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite, an obscure figure from the New Testament, and scholars today call him Pseudo-Dionysius.

Writing around the year 500, the apophatic tradition was already old and well-established because of the Cappadocian fathers.

But Pseudo-Dionysius is the first to deploy the technical vocabulary apophatic versus cataphatic for Christian theology, borrowing the vocabulary from the Athenian Neoplatonist Proclus.

But you will get the same line of argumentation in Basil and Gregory Notzianzus in a shorter format for the Cappadocian model of the Trinity, which is Constantinople I's official dogmatic stance.

Now, the issues, though, are not just, well, what do the Cappadocians mean and can we harmonize that with Christianity? Roman Catholicism, because Roman Catholicism will state that it believes all kinds of stuff.

So it will affirm, yeah, we believe, uh, Cappadocians and we believe Aquinas and we believe Augustine and we believe, so they'll sort of have this umbrella approach.

But the problem with the umbrella approach is that the Cappadocians are very specific.

And by the time you get to Aquinas, you're going to have things like the, uh, uh, equating of nature in person, which is a fundamental denial of, uh, what is it? Basil it's called basil letter 38, right? It's actually believed to be Nyssa's letter 38.

And the premise of the letter, of course, is the fundamental distinction between nature and person in the Trinity.

I don't even know who that would be.

But I mean, Dr.

So there are the...

These three theologians are called the Cappadocian Fathers.

Gregory of Nyssa, Basil were brothers, and then their friend, Gregory of Nazianzus.

Well, Macrina, the older sister of the first two, was actually, should be mentioned, you know, should be the Cappadocian parents-

Mm-hmm.

And but she did it in such a a, a, a gracious way that anybody who is in that situation where their philosophy is kind of, uh, making it difficult for them to accept the Christian faith can find, uh, s- a, a good resource there.

If the Cappadocian fathers are important as everybody says they are, which they are, uh, Macrina certainly deserves her place and her, her role in, in all of that.

And then I guess I would also mention, um, you know, someone more recently.

Today we're going to be tracing one of the most consequential developments in the history of Christian thought.

How the understanding of Jesus moved from the New Testament's picture of a subordinate human Messiah who was exalted by the one God, who by the way is the Father alone, to the full Trinitarian language of one divine essence in three co-equal, co-eternal persons that was articulated by the Cappadocian fathers in the middle of the 4th century.

We're going to follow some of the best critical historical scholarship, drawing on figures like James Dunn, R.P.C. Hansen, Larry Hurtado, and others, while remaining attentive to the primary texts themselves.

Along the way, we will note the decisive moment when Christian thinkers began deliberately adopting and adapting Platonic philosophy.

Athanasius spent much of his career defending the full deity of the sun, arguing that only if the sun is truly God can he deify humanity.

The decisive clarification came in the middle of the 4th century, long after the Council of Nicaea.

And this took place with three Cappadocian fathers.

Their names were Basil, his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil's brother Gregory of Nyssa.