In Part 1 we saw that God has revealed himself generally and specially, culminating in Christ. For Hilary of Poitiers, the Resurrection of Christ “transfigured everything.”

As an example, Hilary notes that in his encounter with the resurrected Jesus the apostle Thomas confessed “My Lord and my God!” His understanding of Jesus was “transfigured.” He wasn’t just standing in the presence of a godly human being but was standing before God Himself.

Dr. Wilken writes that “The terms used by Thomas, Lord and God, are significant, and they allow Hilary to drive his point home. ‘Lord’ and ‘God’ are the terms that occur in the Sh’ma, yet here they are used not of God the creator of the world and king of the universe, but of Christ. Because of the Resurrection Thomas recognized that the one he knew, who had lived among them, was not just an extraordinary human being but the living God. ‘No one except God is able to rise from death to life by its own power,’ writes Hilary. But his argument runs deeper. He wishes to say not only that the Resurrection reveals something about Christ to his disciples, namely, that he is God; his more penetrating observation is that the Resurrection caused them to think about God differently. Once Jesus was raised, writes Hilary, Thomas ‘understood the whole mystery of faith,” for ‘now,‘ that is, in light of the Resurrection, Thomas was able to confess Christ as God ‘without abandoning his devotion to the one God.’  After the Resurrection he could continue to recite the Sh’ma because he had begun to conceive of the oneness of God differently. Thomas’ confession ‘my Lord and my God’ was not the ‘acknowledgement of a second God, nor a betrayal of the unity of the divine nature’: it was a recognition that God was not a ‘solitary God’ or a ‘lonely God.’ God is one, says Hilary, but not alone.”

God’s ordered self-disclosure, known as the economy, “allowed human beings a glimpse of the inner life of God. This fundamental insight drove Christian thinking about God. In a striking comment on Colossians 1:19, ‘In [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,’ Origen of Alexandria had said that through God’s revelation in Christ we became ‘spectators’ of the ‘depth of God.'” “… But it was Hilary… who expressed most succinctly why the historical events of Christ’s life, in particular the Resurrection, had altered the conditions under which reason worked. Thinking about God could no longer be carried on independently of what had taken place in the evangelical history. What others had left unspoken he stated explicitly: after Christ’s Resurrection God’s unity had to be conceived differently. Though one, Hilary affirmed, God was not a solitary being and in some mysterious way the life of one God was communal.”  [Wilken, Spirit of Early Christian Thought, pp. 91-93]

Some thoughts on application:

— Do I read the Scriptures asking God to reveal Himself anew, reading God’s Word with “receptivity, in openness to what is revealed and the willingness to accept what is given?”

— When confronted by the risen Christ one does not say, “How interesting,” but “My Lord and my God!”   Am I ever caught up in worship from the wonder of the mystery of the Resurrection, or do I merely think “how interesting”?

— Lent begins next week (March 5, 2014).  During this preparation for Easter, ask the Holy Spirit to expand your mind and your heart as you contemplate the Incarnation and Resurrection of the Son of God:

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”  (Phil 2:5-11)

Sources:

“Christianity is the true worship and service of the true God, humankind’s Creator and Redeemer. It is a religion that rests on revelation: nobody would know the truth about God, or be able to relate to him in a personal way, had not God first acted to make himself known.” – Packer, Concise Theology, p.3

“In the beginning, God….”   “And God said….”   “In the beginning was the Word….” So open Genesis and John’s gospel with reminders that “God is always previous.” Our knowledge of God is always preceded by God’s desire and actions to make Himself known.

Theologians distinguish two types of revelation: “general revelation” that God has chosen to make known about His existence, character and moral law through creation to all humanity, and “special revelation” that God addressed to specific people as found in the Old and New Testaments. (See more in Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, 7E.) General revelation is not adequate for salvation — observing the beauty of a golf course or a rainbow won’t get a person to heaven; we can only know about salvation through Jesus Christ through God’s special revelation:

“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.” (Heb 1:1-3)

What did God reveal about himself with the coming of Christ? This was a question that engaged the mind and heart of Hilary of Poitiers.   “…Hilary believed that God can be known only as God ‘has made himself known to us.’ The knowledge of God begins in receptivity, in openness to what is revealed and the willingness to accept what is given.” [Wilken, Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. 88]

Note the movements of God’s general and special revelation in Hilary:  “In his search for God Hilary first knew God through the beauty and order of creation, but only after he had come to know Christ did he realize that ‘God was in the beginning with God.'”   This was an “Aha! moment” for Hilary and we are richer for it.

Robert Wilken explains “… The knowledge of the Triune God is grounded in Christ’s coming in the flesh, what the early church called the economy.  The Greek term, meaning order or arrangement, in theological discourse signified God’s ordered self-disclosure in the biblical history reaching back to creation and culminating in Christ.”

“Hilary’s book on the Trinity is thus an exercise in trying to understand the nature of God who is known in Christ. It is through the flesh of Christ that the soul is able to draw near to God and know ‘the divine mystery.’ The one God can be known through the things of creation, but it is only through the economy that one knows God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All early Christian thinkers agreed on this point, but Hilary stands out because he not only appeals to the economy in his discussion of the nature of God, but also shows that the Resurrection is the defining event in the economy.

“The first Christians, Hilary observes, were observant Jews who every morning recited the Sh’ma, the ancient prayer of the Jewish people: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’ (Deut 6:4). As faithful Jews the apostles believed that God is one. Because this is so, as the Sh’ma bears witness, what, asks Hilary, are we to make of Thomas’s confession: ‘My Lord and my God’? How could Thomas have confessed Jesus, a human being, as ‘Lord’ and ‘God,’ and at the same time continued to pray the Sh’ma? The Sh’ma clearly affirms belief in one God, yet Thomas addresses Christ as God.  According to the gospels, says Hilary, Thomas had often heard Jesus say things such as ‘I and the Father are one’ and ‘All things that the Father has are mine.’  Yet during Christ’s lifetime these words apparently made little impact on him.  It was only when Thomas knew the resurrected Christ that he grasped the meaning of what Jesus said earlier.

“This is a precious passage. Hilary envisions a time at the very beginning of Christianity when Jesus’s disciples were still observing Jewish traditions yet following Christ. During Christ’s lifetime his followers did not grasp fully who he was. Even though some of his sayings imply he had a unique relation to God, and he performed miracles and revealed his heavenly glory to his most intimate followers at his Transfiguration on the mount, his disciples did not have eyes to see who he was. They had sound theological reasons for their opacity. They knew by heart the words of the Sh’ma, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord.’ Hence Hilary asks the question…’How could a faithful Jew who had recited the Sh’ma since childhood, whose prayers were addressed to God the king of the universe, address Christ as God or Son of God, as the earliest Christians did? Hilary’s answer is that the Resurrection of Christ transfigured everything. When Jesus came and stood among the disciples and put his finger in his side, Thomas said, “My Lord and my God!’ When confronted by the risen Christ one does not say, “How interesting,” but “My Lord and my God!”  [Ibid, pp 89-91] (emphasis mine)

[continued]

Sources:

Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. Leicester [u.a.: Inter-Varsity Press [u.a.], 1994.

Early church history tells stories of debates long and hard over “correct belief,” some spanning centuries and some marred by conflict.   Sometimes the discussions focused on a single word, or, in the case of understanding the Trinity, a single letter, what historian Edward Gibbon called a “furious contest” over a dipthong.

The question turned on whether the Son was of “like [similar] substance” –homoiousion – or of the “same substance” – homoousion – with the Father — similar Greek words differentiated by an iota.   While the discussions may have resembled a game of Trivial Pursuit, the consequences were anything by trivial.

As Wilken points out, the iota “signified a genuine, not contrived, difference of over a matter of great moment, and the adoption of ‘the same substance with the Father’ instead of ‘like substance with the Father’ [made] a lasting difference in the church’s life and faith.  By enshrining this formula in the creed of the council of Nicaea the church definitely confirmed its belief that Christ was fully God, and not an exceptional human being.”  This was to lead to further questions, as we will see, but absence of a single character made a huge difference in the orthodoxy we take for granted today.

“As early as the second century, Celsus, the critic of Christianity, had belittled Christians because they were divided into competing sects with divergent views.  He was speaking of the division of orthodox Christians and Gnostics.  In response, Origen made the eminently reasonable point that it was hardly a charge against Christianity that Christians disagreed with other Christians.  Differences, he pointed out, not just on “small  and trivial things” but about “the most important matters” were, as any philosopher would recognize, a mark of intellectual seriousness.”  [Wilken, Robert Louis. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. pp 110-111.]

“Let your steadfast love come to me, O Lord, your salvation according to your promise; then I shall have an answer for him who taunts me, for I trust in your word.”  (Ps 119:41-42)